Vacation Would Work If I Didn't Have to Relax

I’m not good company on vacations, at least for a couple of days. Trying to relax somewhere else other than home feels a lot like trying to bite my own elbow – it’s uncomfortable and I look like an idiot. After a couple of days on vacation getting into the flow of no plans, no goals, and no chores, I start making plans, setting goals and doing chores. Pretty soon, I’m doing the same things I did at home with an extra hour thrown in for a new time zone.

One thing I’ve found that does relax me is watching others relax, especially around a pool.  It’s kind of like watching tater tots come to a slow crisp in a toaster oven, and who doesn’t like tater tots?

On my second day of vacation, having situated myself by the pool, I heard an unfamiliar, but loud word bounce off the pool deck and looked up to see a middle-aged lady who had just spilt her beach bag full of ablutionary items. I imagined her name to be Gisela and by the sound of her foreign deleted expletives, probably German. Most of her forty-two items that spilled out on the tiled deck were uncomfortably near me, namely a European fashion magazine and a tube of sunscreen, SPF 326, that made me question Germany’s numerical system and whether they get a tan from the same sun we do.  

Scanning the pool, I then turned my attention to a middle-aged man named Mr. Holder, who had ordered a tangerine-infused protein shake at the bar. After picking it up he made two complete laps around the pool, as if the drink had boosted his self-confidence, then plopped down to cool his little feet at the edge of the pool. This had all the makings of the perfect tourist picture – except that Mr. Holder also took periodic slurps from a tube coming out an apparatus he carried on his back. From a conversation I overheard, his backpack manufactured water from the air using energy generated by tiny amounts of electricity we humans produce in the “molecular exchange of our positive and negative ions.”

As he rose to his swollen little sunbaked feet, I felt compelled to help Mr. Holder balance his mechanized pack and he again began a circuitous route around the pool, selling his invention to mostly attractive females, describing his “Ionic Blast” as “a liquid landmark,” and handing out pamphlets that were made from the pulp of sweet potatoes. His sales tactics were only partially successful since the tube going into his mouth slurred his speech, making his sales pitch less than believable, and setting him up as a person who had just come from the orthodontist’s office. At one point, he stopped to lean against a wall for support, and appeared sweaty, bloated, and in need of a quick hit off the ionic blaster himself. This gave me an opportunity to move to another recliner, passing through some light green vapor rising out of Mr. Holder’s patented pack.

A pool length away, an exhausted pink-haired mother, Bernadette, tried to catnap while simultaneously moving her baby’s stroller back and forth, a motion that was slowly putting her to sleep but was doing nothing for her baby, who had most of a bowl of oatmeal in her hair. To give the appearance of being awake while rocking her baby to sleep, Bernadette had tightly wedged her arm into her reclining chair for support. However, as she began to slowly relax and drift off to sleep, her fingers slid deeper into her own unkept and oatmeal filled hair, pulling it just enough to cause her to stir slightly, not much, but just enough to hinder her from any deeper slumber. This cycle repeated itself again and again, and I watched Bernadette’s face become increasingly agitated each time she nodded off again and tugged her hair. In fact, she fell asleep some twenty-seven times, each time a little deeper, each time contorting her face in utter agony and self-torture, before she woke again.

I then realized that lack of sleep with moms is probably a national crisis, whether on vacation or not, and I took a contemplative moment to pray for mothers everywhere, after which I moved again to another pool spot. I thought I had found a nicer area that required less empathy on my part, but a lifeguard turned on the Fantasia Fountain, an assemblage of colorful water tubes and sprays, one of which misfired and arched across four lanes of the pool to hit Gisela directly in the small of her back.

 I cannot describe the noise that came out of her accented German mouth except to say that it reminded me of one of those sirens on a foreign police car, the ones that sound like your dryer time has expired at the laundry mat. I could only lower my sunglasses and stare at Gisela who had succeeded once again in stringing together a flock of guttural expletives, as if the very same dryer I mentioned earlier was slowing spinning down to complete its cycle.

By this time, Bernadette’s baby awakened with such a start that Bernadette, who had finally fallen asleep herself, lurched forward and tore a vast chunk of her pink hair out of her head, and stopped for the first time in hours from rocking her baby. The next day, parenthetically, I saw her on the beach with a cast on her arm. She had shaved the other side of her head to match the portion she had retched out the day before and was now rocking her baby with the other arm.

While this all sounds like beach heaven, there were other more natural forces at work nearby that seem to balance out the tourist action.  As is common in Florida, every part of something manmade is also surrounded by a lush array of flora and fauna. Water capillaries flow in and out of the inland waterway that are lined with fruit trees, and the thick undergrowth is teaming with lizards, snakes, and waterfowl of all sorts. As it happens, our resort is just a stone’s throw from such a wooded area where a pair of ospreys have nested for years. These white and black striped harriers are not hawks or eagles, but are in a class all by themselves, and have the remarkable ability to hover over the ocean until they spy a meal, then dive straight down to grab it with their razor-sharp talons. We watch them in fascination as they make dozens of trips every day, fish still squirming in their claws, back to their nests to feed their young. 

What happened next depicts the miserable efforts we humans have made in environmental conservation, as when a splash pad at a pool would be capable of frightening an osprey flying over, but that is what exactly what happened. With its breakfast catch in tow, our osprey, distracted by the arching water coming out of the pool gun and by Bernadette’s ear-piercing scream, dropped its fish like a missile from seventy-five feet, straight down. The mullet’s nosedive was a surreal thing to watch, I must admit, and as the fish flew unimpeded, and I was reminded of Rene’ Magritte’s painting of men floating through the sky with umbrellas. However, my trance was broken by a sudden gust of wind that caused the mullet to flatten out and hit the water with a sickening belly smack, becoming the first fish of its kind to do so in a salt-water pool in resort history.

As I watched, the osprey dove instantly down after its catch and Mr. Holder ran for cover. With his awkward Ionic Blaster on his back, he ran like we all do when we have waited too long to go to the restroom and must improvise in ridiculous ways just to make it. As a result, Mr. Holder tripped and fell into the pool and because his backpack was now fully charged with human ions, he received quite the electric shock, much the same as one would get in the winter from shuffling around on shag carpeting. In any case, he seemed from my vantage point to go through an embarrassing set of jerks and face contortions. The lifeguard on duty dove in to save him from his own ionic exchange, but made the mistake of grabbing Mr. Holder and lost control of his bladder as the electricity transferred to him and passed out his weakest link.

By the time I had reached my room, “Buoys and Gulls,” the resort’s newsletter, had been printed and was being delivered under every door. A footnote at the bottom read:

“Our pool is closed for the rest of the day for hygienic reasons. Our regularly scheduled coin-diving contest for today has also been postponed indefinitely while an officer from Fish and Wildlife Management monitors the rescue of a mullet from a hovering osprey. Parents are advised to keep children under ten pounds out of the area. We are sorry for the inconvenience. In lieu of the coin contest, we are offering at no cost to you, spa facials from a visiting German cosmetic specialist, and free samples of positive ionic water with an oatmeal cookie at the front desk. Have a nice day.”

The newsletter didn’t seem to bother me at all. I sat down on the couch and for the first time all day felt relaxed just sitting in my room, and I turned on the TV to watch a couple of hours of Shark Week like I do at home. Room service was on their way up with a bowl of piping hot tater tots, and after all, who doesn’t like tater tots?

Even Fish Have to Have a Fish Story

Of the top ten things I wanted in a new house, a pond was not one of them. When we decided to move to our present house, the pond we inherited was a murky-algae-puddle that I envisioned as a future patio. As we began tackling projects, we moved the pond work to the bottom of the priority list, seeking a way to keep it going temporarily until I could hire a bulldozer to fill it in with dirt.

Now, some twenty years later, the pond is still there, a working ecosystem – a labor of love but at times a lot more labor than love. We’ve got snails and fish and turtles and snakes and over on my neighbor’s roof there is a blue heron that looks like an old man that’s bent over, waiting to swoop in for a free fish dinner.  And then there is our odd couple, Maude and Claude Mallard. They are all part of the eco-Blunder-household, working parts that find me tinkering out by the pond all the time, fine tuning the system.

Still, taking care of a body of water, even a small one like our four-thousand-gallon puddle, inevitably involves letting the rules of Mother Nature dictate most of the decisions and leaving a lot of wiggle room for her to change her mind. Circulation, fertilizing the lily pads and every other small change can set off a chain of unlikely events. One year our pond was beset by hundreds of dragon flies. Conditions must have been just right for their eggs to mature, resulting in two of our koi growing six inches that summer, no doubt feasting on the dragon insects that are rich in microproteins, probably tasting a lot like steak to the bottom-feeding fish.

When we first moved in, I found that our murky puddle was being filtered by a sump pump that pumped only a tiny trickle of water. In fact, if the wind was blowing in the right direction, I could smell the pond sludge from our backdoor. Being swamped by new house projects, the pond was my last concern, so I quickly changed out the pump and forgot about it until the next morning. When I walked out to see if there had been any change, I looked down into solid orange water. Yep, that’s right… orange!  I was horrified. Was this some chemical spill? Should I notify the Center for Disease Control? Was this another Chernobyl? I ran back to the house to call the World Health Organization and hose myself down with Dawn dishwashing liquid, all the while yelling to my wife to call 9ll.  

“You’re never going to believe what’s happening to the pond. It’s a nightmare!” I yelled.

Together, we ran out and stood on the pond’s edge, awestruck at the sight of the orange glop that had surfaced overnight. In my head, I thought we were going to have to move again, maybe to a trailer home or a condo, but my wife, ever the voice of reason, was observing a different phenomenon. She noticed the water wasn’t just orange, but a vibrating orange.

“I think that water is moving,” she announced, not a hint of panic in her voice.

I peered intently down, trying not to breathe what I thought was swamp gas off some hazardous scum. The orange water was undulating back and forth like an Etch-A-Sketch, rippling first one way and then the next. Then…YIKES! A pair of beady eyes poked out, and a mouth came up gasping for air.

“FISH! We have fish here!” I said excitedly.  Yes, those eyes were attached to one nosy goldfish who hadn’t seen a human since the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979! Then, two more fish broke the surface, then a bunch, and as we knelt to look closer, we realized layers and layers of goldfish were plastered together vying for space, perhaps hundreds of them stacked on top of one another in their confined space.

Our pond, it appeared, was the holding tank for every shape and size of goldfish in Pet Smart’s inventory, both nationally and probably globally. Apparently, they had been breeding nonstop for so many years that they had bred themselves into an orange solid, climbing on top of each other for oxygen in a bubbling pond caldron. Several Koi surfaced also, and laid on top of the goldfish, sunbathing for a moment, mostly because there was nowhere else to go.

For a moment, we thought of opening the world’s first Orange-Only Aquatic Center, where customers could purchase tickets for the chance to immerse their arm in solid goldfish, a tactile experience we could sell as spiritually and physically healing. We talked briefly about this, my wife and I, and realized that, since Goat Yoga had gone by the wayside recently, people across our nation could find a new and unusual escape here, one that would be trendy yet bring them hope in a fallen world. Yes, we agreed, and we would call it “Take-a-Trance Goldfish Healing Center for the Restless.” Patients would be able to thrust one of their arms into this mass of solid orange fish and succumb to the strange new healing powers of wall-to-wall fish. At the same time, they would have poems read to them that use the word orange repeatedly, poems that would never rhyme, and these same patients would feel that they were somehow better off than before they enrolled in the program, and they would leave feeling connected to the world again, even though they would be giving off a slight orange glow.

As you can imagine, that idea fizzling out rather quickly and my wife and I opted instead to grab our nearby bucket, where we scooped goldfish out by the dozens and hauled them off to release them in a two acre lake on the grounds of a local State Hospital, where they could recover from years of staring at each face to face as if paralyzed in Jell-O. It wasn’t unusual for us to get a bucket of thirty of them at a time, some of them bearing markings that were downright scary, markings that could only be produced by a species constantly breeding uninhibited in close quarters. One of the goldfish spots bore a slight resemblance to the face of Vladimir Putin, and after releasing it in its new home, we believe Vladimir began inhabiting the darkest, coldest part of his new lake home, but we couldn’t be sure.

It was some ten years later, on a cold but sunny day in early March that my wife and I took a walk around the park grounds. As we rounded the lake, we passed the small inlet where we had released our excess of goldfish many years before. Three leviathans rose slowly to the surface. Immediately, my wife and I knew that what was inching towards us were three of our former abandoned goldfish, now grown to exceptional proportions. This is a true fish story, we thought. Like an armada of orange submarines, they drifted towards us, staring at us with an air of contempt – long gazes that seemed slightly socialistic and distant. There was a kind of revenge in their eyes though, and my wife and I found ourselves backing away, realizing that it would be only a few more years before these monsters were eight or ten feet long and would be crawling on land to steal small children out of the arms of their parents and dragging them down into the deep.

We backed away without making eye contact and thought about rolling ourselves up into tiny human balls for protection, but we knew in some primordial way, that the goldfish submarines were still looking at us. They were still moving towards us as if to say, “Take us back home where we began. We would rather be big fish in a small pond. Please, please, take us home, back to the pond,” they seem to say.

But we turned and left them there, not wanting to relive our guilt of moving them out from years before. It would be too much for us to take, too much guilt from the past. And let’s face it, bonding again or trying to form a new relationship with us was not going to be humanly possible for them either.

Returning home, we gradually were able to bring our own fish population down to a respectable number, around twenty highly harmonious fish, who, like the Amish, work harmoniously together as a pond unit to turn what was previously fish scum into a congenial and supportive goldfish school.

As beautiful as our pond is, I have only recently learned how to sit quietly and take in the abundant life my pond attracts and enjoy it. When we go out there now, we talk to the fish and ask them questions like, “How was your day?” and “What are hope and dreams for tomorrow? We stay away from questions like “What’s on your bucket list?” and “Are there any fish you don’t see eye to eye with?” We are very careful about question like that, given their unstable background, and the fish stories they no doubt have heard circulating below the surface in our pond.

Coming Down Hard on the High C

Our piano held a prominent place in our house when I was a kid, directly on the left when you entered the front door. It was not considered a piece of furniture or a piece of equipment, or some toy to be tinkered with, and thus held a respected and unique position. When one entered our house the sheen off our piano’s deep red wood tones were immediately apparent, evidence of its solidity and strength for the twenty-three years we lived there. It was still there, immovable, when I returned home from college for Easter and spring break to find that my parents had sold the house and moved without telling me.

“This is a fine welcome,” I said to myself, irritated. I was still fiddling with the locked front door when a smallish lady with her Pekinese dog answered the door and ask if she could help me.

“I’m sorry,” I said,” I thought I lived here, but the door was locked. Uh, I mean I used to live here with my family. Are my…parents here?”

“No, they are not. Are you Jeff?” She asked, as her dog looked at me sideways.

“Yes, I am,” I answered, stepping inside, eyeing the piano.  “I thought I lived here, but…”

“No,” she interrupted, “your family moved recently, but your mom said to call them when you got in and they’d come pick you up.  I see you’re looking at the piano. It’s a beauty isn’t it? It was too heavy to move, so your parents gave it to me. I don’t play of course, but I hear you do,” she added.

“Well, I used to,” I said, dialing my parents. “I haven’t played in years… Mom? Hello…this is Jeff, I’m home, at our house. Yes, the one we all used to live in. I’m standing right next to a lady in our house and our piano. She is the owner? Oh. I see. Ok. Ok. Can you come and pick me up?”

There was a long hesitation, as if she might be discussing the options with my father, but instead told me to sit down and practice the piano until she could come and get me. There was a click, then dial tone, and I stood there, in my own space, perplexed and speechless. In only a few minutes, I had been denied the entrance to my home, found out that my parents had moved without telling me, and who were now suggesting that I would not have a ride to my new home unless I sat down and practiced a piano that belonged to a lady I’d never seen before.

Normally, when I returned home from college on break, I was greeted with hugs and questions about college life, followed by more questions about my academic performance, followed by a continuous bombardment of home cooked meals. Now, I was home for Spring Break, home for the Easter holiday, a treasured holiday where our family dressed to the nines for the Easter service, listened enthusiastically to Handel’s Messiah at church, then return home to feast on rotisserie herb chicken, broccoli casserole and hot rolls made from scratch by my grandmother.

I stood in the foyer of my former home, those Easter memories wafting through my brain. I thought I could still smell Lemon Pledge everywhere and clean bed sheets and thought that my hard work at college qualified me for a week where I could sleep until noon and not have a care in the world. My only responsibility would be to hug my parents occasionally, say hello to my brother or sister if we happened to be in the same room, and get myself to the Easter service on Sunday where I would witness my father singing the final chorus to Handel’s Messiah breathtakingly off-tune and then hold the last note for a good forty five seconds, red-faced, until it looked like he might have a hemorrhagic embolism.  This was the college break I was looking forward to – rest and rejuvenation. Easter, and all its power, was in the air.

I remembered all of this because I was standing in the foyer with my hand resting on that Bridgestone piano, the one my parents had now given outright to a lady that held her dog like it was an extension of her body. My hand however, was a real extension, and knowing its dutiful place, had some intrinsic muscle memory associated with this piano, of its history and from taking piano lessons every Friday continuously for ten agonizing years. Rain or shine, sick or dying, I was always there on the piano bench after school for my half hour lesson with my piano teacher, Miss Conduit, the same lady who played the coliseum size pipe organ at our church, a massive instrument so sensitive that a team of acoustical scientists had to be flown in to tune it every year from Beoluth University in Dusseldorf, Germany.

And as if this huge instrument was not enough for ushering in the Easter service, Miss Conduit would require my brother and I practice Handel’s Messiah, a simpler version of course, for several months leading up to Easter Sunday, when we each would be required to perform an agonizing rendition of it again, after the church service.

As God’s providence would have it one year, Miss Conduit, who always sat on the right of us, decided it was time for us to learn how to cross one hand over the other to play notes, a concept that seemed to us to have wonderful athletic appeal. Where piano lessons before had been more like a chore, we now had this fantastic new maneuver to make what we called the crossover, and could look forward to ending this years’ rerun of Handel’s Messiah at home with a dramatic toss of one arm over the other, almost like a forward lateral in football, followed by the drop of one finger, down , down, down like a lead weight and hit that final messianic note, right in front of Miss Conduit. 

I thought life had really made a turn for the better when the crossover came along, but my brother was not impressed. It was going to take a lot more that a toss of one arm over the other for him to get excited about a piano lesson, so one day, snappish after practicing the same song for months and looking for other options, Gary opened the back panel of the piano to reveal a long row of hammers that made all the piano notes, and taped one of our plastic toy army men to the hammer of the last high C. At the moment of the glorious one-armed crossover, when one note would resound and carry with it all the weight and drama deserving of such an Easter finale, a dull and lifeless thuuuuud would be heard instead, which would have the effect of flattening the entire masterpiece and render it into a pitiful and miserable termination.   

And so it happened that Good Friday, the final piano lesson before Easter, my brother sat down next to Miss Conduit, playing Handel’s Messiah with a flurry never seen before or since in our household, moving his fingers up and down the piano keys with holy athleticism. My brother built up his final crescendo, dramatically crossing his arm over to hit the final key, that High C above all C’s, which he hit confidently and hard, as if he really meant it. Instead of piercing the house with energy and verve, the note sounded like a man in an upstairs apartment who suddenly had fallen face down on his couch and died right there. It was all over rather quietly and abruptly with little significance whatsoever. The much-anticipated note, after the rise and fall of Gary’s arm, and two months of continuous practice, could not be attempted again. No. There was not going to be a second cross over, no going back with Handel’s Messiah, no do-over. The song was over, finished. And so it was too with the veritable life our piano.

It was three days later, when one of our pet mice escaped, and my father lifted up the piano’s back panel and discovered there a small green Army man taped to one of the hammer keys, ready to throw a hand grenade. At full stretch, the little soldier was only about two inches tall, but he had brought Easter to its knees in our house, and ended the respectable history of our piano, and caused the removal of any feelings that my parents had towards this beast of an instrument forming the bulwark of our home décor.

As I stood looking across the keys, having no home myself, I could still imagine my fingers moving along the keyboard and Miss Conduit next to me at the piano, correcting my poor posture. I wondered if the Army man was still in there hiding or had asked God for forgiveness for his inexcusable and unwarranted attack on our piano.

I came to my senses when the phone rang, and the new owner, this shrinking lady with the Pekinese dog handed me the receiver. It was my mother on the phone, saying that she was on her way to pick me up. I knew she’d ask me if I’d sat down at the piano and played anything – perhaps even a bit of Handel’s Messiah. I’d have to tell her no, of course, but that there was one note, a very high note I still remembered, one Easter, a long time ago.

Deep, Deep Down in a Crawdad Hole

On a windy Thursday we took a sort-of field trip to Angel Mounds State Historic with our grandson Cash to see what the one hundred plus acres might reveal. We call these nature outings, “Watcha-walks” because when we are out in nature someone’s always asking, “Watcha find?”

In the wide-open spaces surrounding the ancient Indian mounds, Cash kicks up his heels and sprints, letting out pent-up energy from a day in the classroom. He is a kid who wants to please his teachers, and that pressure can translate to a head of steam when he runs. Snack in hand, he races me along a higher mowed pathway that border the mushy ground and patches of dark green bulrush. He is leaving his knowledge from school in the dust – not trying to write on the lines anymore.

We crossed a long metal bridge over a wetland area and he disappeared to look for tadpoles down by the bank, and I heard him talking to himself about their legs popping out and webbed toes. Immersing his hand in the deep puddles of cold water, he watches the minnows rush back and forth, some stopping to nibble, but most are nervous and flit away. He watched them for a long minute and a few pass through his fingers without fear. A vain attempt to grab one and his Nike shoe slides down the slippery bank and leaves an oddly familiar commercial swoosh in the sludge. Now he was just a kid with a pair of mud-caked shoes, not a kid being fashionable. He’s been baptized by mud now, those deep-red remnants of southern Indiana clay and silt too, built up from the Ohio River that flooded these lowlands for a thousand years. In its heyday, this farmland sustained up to a thousand Mississippian Indians, Mound Indians, who farmed the enriched soil, then mysteriously vanished.

I looked down at Cash from my post on the bridge and thought I saw a hologram of another boy next to him on the bank, crouched and making swirls in the water with a stick. Maybe it was a Shawnee or Hopewell, poking fun of Cash when he slipped, like we did as kids when a friend did something foolish.  It was only an outline of a boy, though, and faded into the background of the camel-colored fields. I walked down to give my grandson a hand up the steep bank. I think he knew it was time for one of grandpa’s Ted-talks.

“See these little mountains here in the dirt?” I point to a scattering of yellow clay chimneys.  Like awkward pinch pots from a first graders, they are the work of crayfish, or crawdads, that sometimes burrow down as far as three feet and methodically haul up mud to build their narrow, fragile stacks.

“Oh yea, I know what those are. Those are holes for snakes,” Cash answers, “and they’ll eat you alive. We better run!” He is seven now, the age where everything turns to a monster attack, usually from Planet Eyeball.

“Hold up,” I say, “they aren’t snake holes. They are made by crabs. Each of these stacks is where a crawdad lives,” I tell him. In the summer, when the water is warmer, he and I will return and I’ll tackle my trust issues by sticking my arm down the hole and bring one up for Cash to see. Crawdads have a mean pinch, not enough to draw blood, but pack enough pain to let you know they aren’t happy about being drug out of their home. Cash will want to hold it – he is curious, and fearless with animals, the result of feeling giraffe’s tongues at the zoo and corralling flies to his Venus fly traps at home. We may have a field biologist in our family future.

If Cash doesn’t mind the pinch, his research might bring him back to this same spot in the future with a camera and a clipboard, where he will record data about a crab’s behavior. There’s not much known about fresh water “mudbugs,” as crawdads are sometimes referred to. In a hundred years, the crawdads may be the only ones left farming here, if we humans are not more careful; now they are part of the substrata ecology – burrowing, mounding and adding to the most fertile farmland, according to some farmers, in the entire Midwest.

In college, I took a break from studying some weekends to backpack off campus, illegally camping in a forest, Spangler Park, some twenty miles outside of town. At the time I had a dog, an Irish Setter, which meant I had to live off campus, but my camping excursions afforded my dog the chance to run like a wild Banshee through the woods, sometimes all night long if I let him. Even in the middle of the night, his nose was working overtime, scaring doves out of their comfy roosts, and stirring up the deer who had settled for the night in their hovels. During the day, my friend Jim and I hunted in the creeks for crayfish, boiled and ate them, but they were sandy and tasted too much like farm runoff. I don’t mind trying new kinds of food, but crayfish, even when we boiled them, still had the aftertaste of cow manure, and after the first few, we said no thank you.

Among the rocky creeks where we waded, my dog hunted the crawdads too, and like a typical setter, struck a perfect point – feathered tail sticking straight back like an iron rod, one foot up and the characteristic focused stare.  The crawdads then used its defensive tail swipe that propelled it backwards. Fooled, my dog would snap at the water to catch one, but the crawdad darted undetected, the other way, under his legs, and then let the current carry it away. “There it is!” I’d yell, but humans are the only creature that can follow a pointing finger to a target. My dog certainly couldn’t and stood looking at my finger as if it were a treat. Meanwhile, the crawdad was backing itself into a hidden crevice, claws ready to snatch up a passing water bug.

Back on campus, another buddy of mine had a pet hermit crab as a pet he kept under a light on his desk. If someone found a dead fly or roach, they’d take a study break and stop by Bill’s room to entice the creepy looking crab to come out of its shell and eat. I think Bill talked to the crab late at night when everyone else on the hallway had gone to bed, when long hours of studying for law school had smudged his glasses and the words in the thick textbooks began to blur together. Two hermits they were, one human and one a crustacean, both living under the same desk light, both detaching themselves in the isolation of dark and quiet all-nighters. Occasionally, Bill would come out of his room and stand in the hallway to smoke, flicking the ashes into his own hand, then retreat again into his intellectual man-shell.

Cash and I have graduated from the squishy pond bank and he climbs up to meet me. With very little rain this Spring, we can head out across the more solid earth to one of the Indian mounds jutting up out of nowhere, like a grass volcano. At its heyday, when a thousand Indians farmed here in community, they might have escaped to the top of the mounds as the Ohio crept forward or gone up to perform a ritual dance. No one is really sure. Or, they may have run up to the top just for the view, like us.

Most of us separate that sort of spiritual climbing from our other needs, the one where we eat, sleep, work and commune with one another. But the line between nature and spirit wasn’t so blurred here for the Indians because survival was closely tied to the next rainfall or flood, or the appearance of a deer. Nature, being ever-present, was the god of these Mound Indians. It provided some solace perhaps, that their lives would be filled with what the earth and the sky and the lakes would send them next.

“Let’s race,” Cash yells, and takes off through a wide swath of Spring grass. I keep up with him for a while, but I’ve done this race before and winning isn’t that fun for me now, not like it is for him, and he easily outdistances me. There are thorny brambles and stubborn shrubs that can rip through your skin and leave you with hundreds of tiny scratches, so we pick our way up carefully, a hundred feet up, to the top of the mound and look far out to patches of forest casting their late day shadows our way. We are hoping to see a deer come out for dinner, but if there is one there, it is hiding on the edge, between the tree pillars as it feeds on the soft new shoots of tender field grass.

When I look out there across the expanses, I see history, but Cash only sees the present. To him, this is just another playground, a place to imagine a make-believe war. My backpack is filled with findings of our Watcha-walk, the rocks and sticks he plans to use if we are suddenly under attack. He’ll lay them out on the kitchen table for his brother to see when he gets home, and to repeat the Ted-talk to his dad and mom, the one he seemed so bored with, about what lies at these ancient Indian mounds.

He will spread everything out on the kitchen table, the dirt clods and the leaf skeletons he found, and have a story to tell about each one. He will describe them to his parents as different kinds of weapons, and to a seven-year-old, anything can become an imaginary weapon. Then dinner will be served and placed down between the objects he found, and Cash will mention that while he was on top of the tallest mound, he could squint and see a sliver of the Ohio River drifting by, and that he got to the top of the mound first and saw everything out there before anyone else did. He’ll tell them he saw the ancient Indians coming out of the forest and that they waved at him from a distance and one of the children left him a secret letter with his name on it.

“It’s a great view up there, Mom,” Cash said with delight, “Really it is.” And looking back now at my time with him, I’d have to agree.

It's a Great Life, Dad, But the Jury's Still Out

Maybe some of you remember an old movie called Money Pit. In it, Tom Hanks and his new bride try to restore a hopelessly dilapidated home. Succumbing to one construction disaster after another, Hanks carries buckets of water up a makeshift staircase so that he can escape his problems in the luxury of a warm bath. As he pours the last bucket of hot water into the porcelain tub, the foundation of the rotted-wood floor gives way, and the bathtub makes a disastrous descent to the floor below, shattering and dumping water everywhere. It is a sublime moment for Hanks as he carefully looks over the gaping hole. He begins quietly to whimper quietly at first, a whimper that turns into a long wail, then turns into a desperate, out-of-control laugh as he realizes the house is truly hopeless.

Like in this scene with Hanks, there are times in life that leave us feeling like laughing and crying at the same time, and frozen in a tsunami of sentiments on the emotional scale. Such was the case recently when I opened a letter, addressed to my father, calling him to report for jury duty. He is one hundred and one years old.

I felt like I was being hit with a bucket of cold water. I burst out laughing, then let out a wail in anguish. I couldn’t decide whether the letter was a slightly off-color dad joke or serious request for my father to become a part of our judicial system, and I made an undefinable noise in my throat that sounded like I was choking on a piece of raw meat. I think I may have pulled a muscle in my throat, I’m not sure, but my windpipe had never tried to laugh and cry at the same time.

Looking at the jury duty request, a thousand questions raced through my mind. Over the span of the last century, even though he was a urologist, I have come to know my father as one of the last renaissance men, able to converse freely on just about any subject. If selected for a jury, I wondered – would he try to reorganize the entire judicial system, taking on all the roles? Would he insist on playing the part of the trial lawyer, the judge, the entire jury and even possibly the criminal? I fear my father’s selection and integration into the courts might very well be the end of justice as we know it in this country and the speed bump in my throat was swelling by the minute.

I have a lot of images of my father that have accumulated over the years, images of him in any number of roles and characters, but none of them look like a century-old juror sitting in a courtroom listening to opening arguments on a twelve-person jury. I have an image of him in uniform in Korea, holding a rifle. Being that my father never killed an ant, that is a very frightening picture. I have an old-tattered picture of him leaning against a 1960 red convertible Thunderbird, which is scary also, because he totaled it running into a pilon taking a shortcut through a stadium parking lot. And who can forget that very awkward photograph of him in Egypt sitting backwards on a camel while my mother sat facing him? In real life, that is not a picture my parents should have shared with us, but there it is.

Peacefully making myself a cup of detox tea, I sat myself down like a good parent does and thought about how to handle this elderly situation. On so many levels, I could make a clean case for removing him from his jury duty duties, but then I felt, being the somewhat excessive person I am, to let Dad weigh in on the questionnaire himself, so I drove out to the nursing home to begin my interview. 

“Dad,” I began, sitting across from him, “guess what? You’ve been selected to serve on jury duty!”

“Whose JUDY? Judy who? I don’t know any Judy. Is she a nurse here? Tell her I need a shower! And I’m out of Q-tips.”

“NO, Dad, JURY, not Judy. You’ve been selected to serve on a JURRRRY,” I repeated.

“Ohhhhhhh, jury. JURY?! I can’t do that today. I’m too busy. I’ve got Dog Bingo at nine, then I take a nap before lunch, and then I have to be in the front room by one o’clock for Pilates with Penelope. I’ll just have time for my medicine before Happy Hour, where I’m giving a short talk on urinary retention.

Oh,” I said, “that should be interesting. How many have signed up for that special grouping?”

“POOPING?” He looked down at me with furrowed eyebrows. “No. We don’t use that word in urology. We have other terms for relieving yourself.”

“Dad, you don’t have to serve if you can’t,” I explained.  

“Serve on jury duty? What have I done this time?” He snapped back.

“Dad, you are fine, you haven’t committed any crime…uh… wait a second. Dad, have you committed a crime you haven’t told me about?”

“I’M INNOCENT!” He suddenly yelped. He rose out of his wheelchair, abruptly raising both arms in celebration, as if he had just won a shuffleboard contest. That was a lot of unnecessary excitement, not altogether appropriate, I thought, but I was relieved to hear that he hadn’t done anything outrageous, and I reset my sights on going over some of the jury questions with him. Nine hours later, although Dad’s candidacy for serving was not looking super strong, he still retained the possibility of becoming a juror. In his favor, he was alive, that was clear, and secondly, he had been able to stay awake through the twenty-seven questions on the form, answering most of them in less than an hour.  Most importantly, Dad did not yell at me when I banged his bed with the gavel, I bought off Amazon Prime, the kind the judge would be using in the courtroom. I wanted Dad to get accustomed to any sudden noises if the Judge banged his gavel and demanded order in the courtroom.

“Only a couple more questions, Dad,” I said, “These are ones the lawyers are going to be paying special attention to, so listen carefully. Are you ready?” I asked looking at him.

He moved his wheelchair in tight to listen. I began to read him a wordy, open-ended question, that boiled down to this: Dr. Bender, “As we select out jury, would you care to tell us a little about yourself and anything else you feel would give us an idea of who you really are?

When I looked over at my dad, I watched his face change from a wry smile to stern stare, and back again. He was looking out the window in his room, to the courtyard of the nursing home, but he was looking at a passing history –

–to a time when he was bathing his younger brother, who died of MS when he was fourteen, and a place in history where crowds of panicking people stormed bank doors as the stock market crashed in ’29. His was a face that had seen the images of thousands of Jews trapped in Nazi concentration camps. My dad had that history in his wrinkled brow, each wrinkle carved from a difficult, lonely stint somewhere in the Pacific during the Korean Conflict. He was still out there, I could see, as he recounted his life for a young lawyer, or a youthful judge, who might know the law backwards and forwards, but had not lived through the Cuban missile crisis, or Watergate or done surgery out of a MASH unit. Those would be flashing through my father’s head, but there would be more memories too in this life, of a father too who saw his oldest son get hit in the side of the head with a hardball and go down in the dirt unconscious, or the pride he felt as his daughter graduated from Nursing school, or the words of the 23rd Psalm, which he prayed with my mother every night before they went to bed. Then, there was always worry and concern raising three kids – how we’d all turn out while he was trying to hold down a medical practice at three different hospitals, and for God’s sake how his middle son would ever succeed if he couldn’t remember to take the garbage out every night.

All that history was there, a century of it, in every word and every expression on his face, and although the jury was still out, the stories he could go on and on about would certainly fill a courtroom.

“Dad. Dad. Hello, are you there?” I asked, but he was still there in every expression on his face, completely there, and had been, for a hundred plus years. He had answered all the questions, and although his answers may not qualify him for a seat on a jury, they reserved him a seat somewhere even better, an honorary seat at the head of the table of history and a life well served.

Scanning the Horizon for Mr. Tally

Around the Knee Deep household, we’ve been on a health kick of sorts, re-investigating certain dishes, testing our palettes with new veggies and fruits, and generally replacing some of the foods in our frig with the hale and heartier versions. To make sure we know what we are really purchasing, we take a magnifying glass with us to the grocery store so we can read the fine print on the labels more carefully. I also like to use the magnifying glass to focus a beam of sunlight on a package of organic microwavable popcorn and heat it up so that I have something to snack on as I’m shopping.

During one of my recent magnifying sessions, I was silently approached by one of those slick inventory robots named Tally that scoot down the grocery aisles pretending they don’t see you. I think this android was a male because it bumped into me, which is what us guys do when they say hello. Women, on the other hand, tend to hug each other, reach out a hand and say, “How are you?” like they really mean it. Us guys, we bump each other, then try to recover by shaking hands. A lot of my guy friends shake my hand with a grip that feels like my fingers are going to snap in half. I think they really care for me, but it’s hard to tell when I’m wincing in pain.

Anyway, my Roboto visitor was only slightly more polite, sliding carefully away from me, then staring off into some vague personal cyberspace, a never-never land of algorithms and router droppings. Not able to make eye contact, its empty gaze and plastic grin made me anxious. I’d rather have one of my male friends put my hand in a vice grip than to get a stare with no social cues.

Nonetheless, I kindly offered Mr. Tallymaker robot some of my piping hot popcorn, thinking kindness matters, but in an election year, kindness has taken on a political overtone, and what is offering popcorn to one robotothon, may be just an excuse for them to call the manager and report a snack attack. (I think this was a reminder to me, and maybe to all of us, to shy away from eating microwaved foods when a robot is nearby – they are terribly jealous of microwaves and see them as boxy and old-fashioned). At that moment I could only think of dealing with this shifty Robby-Botta-Botta as I would a child, so I pulled up an episode of Blippi as a diversion on my phone and turned away.

I returned to checking out the labels on packages and cans, paying particular attention to that first item that indicates most of the contents inside – very vital information when you are trying to eat healthier. By the way, if the label lists mono-futamothyilate first on your soup label, you know you could also use the soup to rinse out your sump pump, hose down your garage floor, and maybe even bait for some late-night crawdad hunting.

Labels on fruits and vegetables are self-explanatory. If you buy a Gala or an Envy apple for example, the only ingredient should be “apple.” If you find anything else written on the label like corn starch or monosodium glutamate, I would be very suspicious that the free roaming inventory specialist, Mr. Tall Tinker Toy, might be the culprit. My conspiracy theory is that these androids are trying to change the names of common food items, starting with simple ones like apples. In the next ten years, I believe apple labels will have a thirty-digit security password requiring a minimum of two capital letters, five non-sequential numbers, an asterisk, an obelisk, and some Sanskrit thrown in for good measure.

Let’s be honest though, trying to make healthy choices is hard work in so many ways. Many food labels are crammed full of ingredients, all in such small print it makes my contact lenses want to dive out of their eye sockets. When there are too many items to list, a consumer can call a 800 number and request a list of the rest of the contents. It’ll come to you on a multi-lingual flyer that offers a free steak dinner at the Transfat Cafeteria, or a cruise on the Gluten Sea, your choice. The good thing about the cruise is that you get all the healthy salmon and king crab you can possibly eat, and maybe a bonus bottle of Dye #4. The bad news is that while on the cruise you will be required to wear orange overalls that inflate in case you fall overboard as they film you reeling in The Deadliest Catch.

In my scrutiny of labels, I’ve noticed that the Eye-Robots skating around stay clear of certain items stocked on the shelves. I think they know something we don’t know, something creepy and forbidden. I wonder, for example, why I have never a robot in the toilet paper section. Why is that? Is it because toilet paper is too unseemly or uncouth for them? I think it is. For one thing, TP has more texture than Mr. Tally-Doo does, which makes the android look rather sickly and anemic by comparison. No one wants to stand next to someone that makes them look anemic. Second, and more importantly, I’ve noticed these Ironical-Robots tend to prey on single, isolated items on grocery shelves. Toilet paper, by contrast, is usually a bulk item, and there is power in those numbers, so robots stay away from them. It would be very embarrassing for a Robot-O-Butt-O-Bot to be taken out by a twenty-four pack of Charmin toilet paper, but I could see it happening. It would be tough to show your face in the break room and admit you’d been pushed around by a couple soft rolls of toilet paper.

Also, I’ve never, ever seen a robot anywhere near canned items with tiny animals inside, like jars of sardines. They steer clear of scanning that sort of thing, because, again, I think the robot knows something we don’t about them, like that the sardines are still alive in there, and that when we add them to our Caesar salad for flavor, and eat them, they are going to be revitalized in our stomach, and take a final lap around our digestive systems.

Only once did I see a Mr. Robbo-Cop-Robothon near a can of sardines. As it scanned the jars of sardines, it began shaking rather violently and a thin bead of panic-stricken smoke began to rise out of one of its metal plates. The sardines, packed in like only sardines can be, had all swam to the front of their respective jars, kind of like an oceanic movement, and engaged the robot in a massive staring contest, which they were winning with ease. Thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of beady sardine eyes came full force to the front of their jars as if one unified school, directing a focused beam of eyeball power towards Mr. I-Ain’t-Got-Chance-Boto-Robo-Guy. I felt the power of the sardine force, I tell you, and I don’t even believe in this kind of thing.

Thinking I might be witnessing something that could go viral, I began videoing it all on my phone while nonchalantly chucking down a handful of freshly popped organic microwaveable popcorn.

Thankfully, that must have alerted the robot’s inventory mode to kick back in gear as it began to count each kernel of corn I was eating. I could see that Boto-Roboman was breaking free of the sardine hypnosis it was trapped in and it stopped shaking and came slowly back on-line. Numbers began flashing on the Tally-Guy dashcam, labels were being scanned again, complicated as they are, and customers all around me relaxed as the sardine scare subsided. I sincerely believe the shoppers around me were reading the labels with renewed interest and comprehension as a general sense of robotic well-being returned to the grocery atmosphere.   

As I began to walk away, I felt something and I can’t be sure, but I think Mr. Inventory-Roboto nudged my elbow. Was it trying to tell me something about profit shares or the gross national product? No. I think Tally-My-Tally was trying to thank me for saving it from what would surely have been a catastrophic sardine incident. Yes, maybe it did want some of my popcorn. But I think what I felt was a Bro-bump like only a Roboto-Botothon can give. As I turned to say goodbye, it was sliding away, slowly moonwalking to the rhythm of its four hundred blinking LED lights.

“Did you see that?” I asked out loud, looking around for another shopper. But there was no one around, nothing but sardines, perfectly packed with other mysterious ingredients and water, I believe, from the Gluten Sea.

By the Waterfall of Psalm 23

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; he leads me besides the still waters. He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a fable before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; my cup runs over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Psalm 23 

As overnight temperatures dropped well below freezing, a thin layer of ice formed on the tiny pond in our back yard. I walked out to turn on the waterfall and stood waiting for the water to spill out and run over the tempered and glassy sheet. The frozen roof of ice cracks and moans, shifting under the weight, then finally buckles under a layer of water spreading and reaching across the pond. The old hard shell of protection must fall away to new living water and disperse itself with the flow and movement forward. Change is here but not easy, and different can be good in its offering of freshness and vitality. I am reminded of my ability to change also, to be resilient in the midst of this shifting water, that I can be flexible and shed the harder layers of my protective shell.

As the sun courses over my pond the frozen pieces break away to form a beautiful, complex puzzle of miniature icebergs. They melt and crack, recycling into the pond, adjusting, moving and seek new paths between the cobblers and stones.

In our prayer group, we have been studying Psalm 23, a song, a poem, of enduring hope and assurance by David, then a shepherd. It is not a long passage but fulfills the promise of God’s message to each one of us, that he is here with us for the long haul, from the moment we take our first breath until the moment we take our last and leave our bodies behind. The author David was in his early teens and must have written the verses to this psalm when he felt a sense of overwhelming peace and thanksgiving in the arid surroundings where he dwelled. He was a shepherd, his house was the desert, and in tending to his sheep, calling each one by name, he reveled in the totality of his natural surroundings, then poetically put his thoughts to verse. While resting in the green pastures and meandering brooks, out of the reach of the harshness of the desert sun, his flock grazed and rested too – some eating and renewing their energy, some perhaps reposed in the shade of a pond’s tall willows.

When night came, when the safety of his flock might be in jeopardy, stars from the heavens winked at David as he listened for signs of danger. There was always the risk of his sheep wandering off into the night or wild animals attacking the herd. He had to be alert to prideful lions who were known to prowl like thieves and slip in for a kill. All night he stood vigil for signs of their stealthy approaches, anticipating the morning where he would see God’s face in the rising sun that cast a brilliant light upon the valley of the shadow of death. Then, feeling its warmth against his robe, he could lay down his rod and staff for a moment and rest in the confidence that he was taken care of, that he need not fear evil, that all of his sheep were safe and that he would be protected when nightfall inevitably came again.

The 23rd Psalm is often recited at funerals to give hope and peace to those who are grieving. As we listen to the verse quoted throughout our lives, we are reminded that God restores us deep down, on a soulful level. Water will always flow down to the deepest point it can find, like God does, and then, when it pools and becomes still, it begins to seek another level further on. It washes out the grime and dirt as it moves. Like David who listened for his Father’s voice in the darkness of the desert, we are assured that God’s provision and peace will find its rightful resting place in our souls, restore and fill the icy holes of our heart, then spill over with the grace of new and flowing, clear and clean water. It is the same water that we all drink and can offer in turn to those that are hurting or injured or sick or lonely or tired, or lost. Our psalm for them is the same one that it is for ourselves because we have all been all of those things at one time or another.

When we dwell on God’s peace, reciting Psalm 23 that David wrote, we risk believing that God is there and listening to us. We walk out onto what we may think is some thin spiritual ice, wondering if God is listening, thinking that he is fragile and breakable, and that we must be out of our minds for believing he can hold us up. What am I doing here on my knees praying, we may ask? Why am I looking for strength and guidance and safety on such thin ice and brittle terrain? But as we pray the words of Psalm 23, our veneer melts away and is replaced by a peace that passes all understanding, and we begin to feel, just as David did, that goodness and mercy will surely follow us, just as it followed him out in the desert when he was herding his sheep, protecting them against enemies and leading them to the next watering hole.

During the weeks following my brother’s death, my mother was visited by a hawk every day. While it may have been hunting for the smaller birds near her birdfeeder, my mother had never seen a hawk anywhere near her property before that time. Being that my brother Gary loved nothing more than to be outside in the thick of nature, my mother was reassured by the statuesque form of the hawk who sometimes perched for an hour as if a sentinel guard, reassuring her of God’s presence and protecting her in her sorrow and grief. While God was nowhere to be found in the flesh, the hawk floated above with the provision of an Almighty presence over the landscape of her soul.

In our family, we have come to be reminded that God is with us, there, leading us besides still water when we are in the sudden presence of a hawk. While this may sound secular and “new age” to many Christians who may see the appearance of a hawk as nothing more than a chance meeting or questionable theology, my mother knew her Maker intimately, and knew the difference between a hawk and God, and recognized how God’s beauty is both revealed in nature and inspired by it in equal measure. We are to be reminded that it is God who made all creatures and has sovereign control over their whereabouts, and just as he helped David herd his sheep, he shepherds us and restores our souls, all in the same breath.

The scenery that David saw every day as a shepherd surely inspired many of the Psalms he wrote, including the 23rd, which contains descriptive imagery of a lush and verdant landscape, reminders of the nature God created for our benefit to enjoy. It was also part of a daily landscape that solidified David’s confidence in a perfect Father who would always be circling nearby – watching and comforting. It is interesting that David uses Psalm 22 and Psalm 24 as bookends to Psalm 23, describing Christ’s crucifixion on the one side and then telling us how he is coming for us on the other. In the middle, Psalm 23, which is where we live now, he is caring for us and offering us the still waters of his peace and restoration. Finally, in our pain and suffering, David indicates in Psalm 24 that Christ is coming for us where we will rest forever in His pasture of lovingkindness.  Crucifixion, caring, and then, His coming.

Surely, our cup runneth over.

Half Pints and Short Stacks

Back when milk was delivered to doorsteps in glass containers, pints and quarts were common vocabulary around the house. My buddies thought I was about half of a pint tall, so that became my nick name – Half Pint.

I didn’t mind them calling me that name. We all played together, lived on the same block, and had moms that called us when they wanted us to come home. My friends had nick names too, and all of our names together made us a kind of a club. There was a kid we called French Fry in the Club. He always had some food in his mouth, or gum, or someone else’s food, and was the first in the cafeteria line at lunch. We didn’t bother him about that because we each had our own quirks too. French Fry’s father worked at the gas station, and he helped his dad pump gas, but he spent most of the time by a vending machine. That’s where I always found him when we pulled in to get gas.

It's odd but our club didn’t have a club name. It’s hard to come up with a name for a club when you don’t have anything special about it other than having nicknames. We just called it The Club, and we stuck together like glue.

At home, because I was Half Pint, we had a foot stool in every room because everyone got tired of me asking them to get stuff down from places that were too high for me to reach. My father used to say that being short was an advantage because I was the last one to get hit when it rained. People laughed every time he said that, even if it was the hundredth time, but I got tired of the same joke.

I knew my role though, and my role was to be small. That was my job and it was what I did the best. As long as I didn’t try to be bigger, I was fine. I was to be small and do the things only small kids could do like be the last one to get hit when it rained.  

I could also roll myself up like a tiny ball and crawl under the sink to hide between the waste can and the dirty pipes. In that compartment I sat on things that had missed the wastebasket, like parts of food and smelly, wadded up napkins and that had been back there a while. Sometimes, back there, I began to feel taller and bigger and older and ready to be bigger if I got a chance. Back there, I was just a half size small, half a person playing hide and seek from those looking for me. The longer it took someone to find me, the more I believed I was just half of a whole, not worth finding but a perfect fit in that little space between the pipes and the trash.  

Mind you, the nick names in our special club came easy. We didn’t write essays or poems about them in school or tell our parents about them at the dinner table. We never thought about the names we gave each other or had a club meeting to vote on what they should be. They just evolved slowly, like a pie in the oven does. If you were lucky enough to get a nick name and be in the club, you knew you had friends you could count on, who’d also been back with the trash and felt about as little as I did sometimes. These were not kids who were going to make fun of you when the tide turned in a ball game. They wouldn’t try to steal your pocketknife when you played Mumbley Peg. My club friends, my half friends with names that were less-than, wouldn’t do that.

Not too long ago, a new kid joined our class. She was littler than me, and sat down at the Lego table, and told me how her father had taken her to breakfast that morning at the IHOP on National Pancake Day. She said on that day, everyone got a free short stack of pancakes.

“What’s a short stack?” I asked her as we sat down building Legos before the first bell.

“It’s like a stack of really small pancakes,” she said.

I had never heard of that, so I asked, “Is there anything wrong with the pancakes?”

“What do you mean, ‘wrong’?” She asked.

“Like…are they burnt or too done?” I inquired.

A few of her yellow Legos wouldn’t snap together and she had a sour look on her face.

“No, they are just small pancakes,” she said plainly.

“I’m in a club,” I said, “We all have nicknames we call each other.”

 “What is your name?” She asked.

 “Half-Pint,” I said, “Because I’m small. What yours?”

“Jordan, but my friends just call me Jordy. I guess we kind of have a club too,” she said. “You could be in our club with my friends if you wanted.”

“Do I need new nickname?” I asked.

“No, not really, just your own name,” she answered with a smile that came across the table.

She handed me the Legos and asked, “Can you get these to work?”

“Sure,” I said, and with a slight turn, the pieces snapped together.

“Oooo!! You’re good!” Jordy said, “I think I’ll call you Mr. Lego.”

The first bell rang. We jumped up to take our seats while the teacher took attendance. I had a new nickname and a new club, and I had made a new friend on National Pancake Day, where everyone, big or small, got a free short stack.

A Case of the Tale Wagging the Service Dog

First, I want to say from the outset that I like dogs.  I like them quite a bit. Other than the fact that I’ve been bitten three times, I believe dogs hold the key to a higher calling and help us get to some kind of transcendent existence. Not too long ago, for instance, when all the Tesla’s in the United States were grounded because of a national recall on their batteries, dogs were still out there on the road, making their way from one fire hydrant to the next. Dogs are resilient and dependable that way, and perhaps hold the key to the future of all Tesla’s who long for a companion when they are stranded. I know this because I had an Irish Setter through most of my teens and twenties, and I was closer to that dog than I was to most of the humans I knew at the time, including my parents, who I now believe thought of me more like another pet than a working member of our family.

However, when I think about our changing dog-filled world, I can’t ever remember plopping my dog down next to someone I didn’t know while they ate dinner or bringing them with me to church. We accepted dogs then like we would an uncle or an aunt we had to feed now and then when they came over, or perhaps a neighbor who came over to borrow a shovel. We didn’t count on them to get us through a room that had too many people in it or jet that was passing over us at thirty thousand feet. When I had my tonsils out for example, there was no dog present to help me. I had ice cream for that, and a dog would have not been of service during that time. For the next several weeks while my throat healed, ice cream did the trick and I never expected any pet to come in and rub my back or hand me more baby aspirin.

Still, and this is where things get serious, I am hard pressed to go anywhere lately where I don’t bump into a person who doesn’t have a dog tucked in their tote bag, sometimes masquerading it as a service dog. I understand that many of these dogs are providing a legitimate need, such as relief from PTSD or diabetes, for which their service is invaluable, but many are not providing any service at all except to provide the owner with an accessory that seems to elevate their social status. Unfortunately, with these animals being attached to the hip of their owner for long periods of time, the owner’s appearance has slowly changed to take on the look and expressions of their pet. We have seen this ourselves, haven’t we? Perhaps this quality of mimicking the look of your dog might be of some value or service later in providing a measure of comfort to the owner, like it does for identical twins who always know when the other twin is nearby.  Myself, I would love to have a look-alike, even if it was my pet, to send out in the world now and then when my hair didn’t look quite right or I hadn’t shaved. My twin dog could do go out for me..  

Nonetheless, when a dog jumped up next to me the other day as I did my business (financial, not the other) at a teller window, I wondered where the service in “service dog” was, and where, in the name of all things canine, was the owner? Suddenly, making a transaction at the teller window, I had a flashback of a time when I witnessed circus dogs who could count, even multiply and divide and do simple quadratic equations.  Was this service-teller-dog a math genius and secretly trained to read my routing number? Was it going to use it to buy a new heated pet-bed, or a lifetime subscription to Dogue magazine? Furthermore, where was the credit union’s Paw Patrol when you needed it?

Shortly thereafter, my dog acumen peaked again when a “service” dog boldly sniffed my 2% cottage cheese at the grocery store. My goodness, I’m all about lending a helping hand, but a helping nose? Uh, not so much. Usually, when I need someone to sniff my cottage cheese, I ask an older lady that has been around the aisles a few times. They can smell bad cheese a mile away. I was additionally concerned when the pooch spent a lot of time sniffing the tiny, printed area where the fat content was listed. I know these dogs are very intuitive, so I thought maybe the pooch was warning me that my cholesterol was too high or hinting that I should lose a little around the beltline.

“Is this bad for me?” I asked the service dog, “What is that? It is? Should I put it back on the shelf? Come on boy, you can tell me, do you know of a better, healthier brand of cottage cheese, huh buddy, do you?”

Momentarily, I listened for the dog’s response and reconsidered my purchase. The owner was nowhere within earshot. I desperately wanted to continue my discussion, vet the dog along more serious subjects than just cheese, and ask him a few questions about my anxiety on planes or my fears of my neighbor who has a strange resemblance to Lurch on the Addams Family, but suddenly the service dog scampered off as dogs are want to do, to a lady giving out free samples of Vienna sausages in aisle number four.

I took a breath. With this upsurge in public dogism, I began to get concerned about dogs being man’s best friend.  In less than twenty-four hours, I had had two encounters with “service dogs,” whose owners were nowhere within calling distance should they suddenly feel hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, like the rest of us. service.  That’s when I decided to call a friend of mine at the zoo, an animal expert to check on how they handle service dog attendance and behavior.

“Well,” the young lady representative answered, “By law, service dogs are allowed, but we don’t recommend owners walk their dogs past the Big Cat or Gorilla House.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“It seems to stir those animals up – a lot. Animals in zoos are used to a routine, and the presence of a dog can be upsetting. They see the dog as a threat to their regular daily habits.”

“Do the zoo animals pace or growl more when they see a service dog?” I asked.

“Yes, they do. And they sometimes they…well…”

I could tell she was hesitating, that there might be a delicate nature to this discussion…

“…urinate directly on the service dog or owner,” she finally said.

“Oh, that would definitely dampen the atmosphere on a zoo trip,” I said. “So, let me get this straight. The gorilla goes potty through its cage, clear across the safety zone and then onto a person and their service dog?”

“It happens more often than you might think. They urinate to mark their territory, and when they feel threatened.”

“So…,” I began again but being a public servant, she had more to tell me. Innocently, I had entered an infomercial on zoo ethics, animal behavior, and urology all rolled up into one.

“Then,” she continued, “the dog will often urinate back or start to bark and then the owner will get mad because his service dog’s being violated, which is, again, against state law. Now we’ve got a territorial battle going on, and a legal issue, with full on barking and beating of chests. The gorilla gets more fired up, maybe sends out a couple more squirts, maybe starts gesturing with some sign language it learned in captivity and runs around diving off the bars and ropes. The situation can escalate quite quickly. We can hear it all over the zoo – quite disruptive, I might add.

“Oh man,” I said. I had not exactly bargained for this conversation. I just wanted to know, with some assurance, that my future trips to the zoo would include more animals, and less service, more wildness, and less domestication. I mean, after all, I thought, I can see a dog anytime, anywhere. I don’t have to go to the zoo for that. If I want to see a dog, I’ll just look around for a stalled Tesla, and I’ll probably find one.

She continued, “It can be a problem, for sure. Obviously, we are all about our animals here, and of course we want to honor and respect diversity, but some of the service dogs don’t even look like dogs. I would put them closer to the reptile house, or even in with the marsupials, but we aren’t allowed to ask for their papers, or any certification.”

“Really? How do they look?” I asked. First impressions mean a lot.

“Ok, so, we had a lady come in the other day with one of those small miniature Pug dog varieties, you know the ones with the faces that are kind of, well, squashed in where you can’t really tell which end is the front and which is the back. Actually, they resemble another rare animal, the Banderscoot from South America, but anyway, I asked the lady if her dog was a service dog, because to me it seemed too small to be of any service but turns out it was.

The owner had a disorder where she only acknowledges her left side, nothing on the right, so I knew how she was going to vote this fall, but anyway, the disorder permitted her to carry the dog around everywhere she went. Nicest lady you ever met, calm as a summer’s night. But her little service dog? Not so much. It was a nervous wreck, shaking like a leaf, like it had been through some kind of intense aroma therapy. Probably thought it was going to end up a meal here in the zoo, I don’t know. Maybe the lady felt better having the dog there, but the dog seemed like it was going through its own private hell, kind of like a mouse at a cat conference, you know?”

I silently pondered her words. My entire concept of a zoo was going out the window. Still, my curiosity was peaked.

“Yea, I can see that,” I said politely. “So, what did you do about that? Did you ask the lady to leave? Or mention how nervous the dog looks, or give the dog a valium or what?”

“No, I offered her the services of our pet day care center,” the curator said, rather nonchalantly, “where her dog could relax with other dogs in the care of a loving service person.  

“A service person?” I asked again. “I didn’t know such a thing existed. Are there both kids and pets in this service dog service center?”

“Yes, there are. We do occasionally put kids and service dogs together, but normally we have a separate space for kids, right next to our petting zoo.

“So, let me get this straight. You have a petting zoo, a day care for kids and a day care for service animals.”

“That is correct, but it’s a thin line sometimes. Last week one of our employees wasn’t thinking straight and threw a bucket of veggies over the fence for the petting animals. The kids at the day care thought it was snack time and reached through the fence, thinking it was their snack time. The service animals, thinking the children were in some kind of harm, went military on them.”

What do you mean, like a feeding frenzy?” I asked, staring to put a stick of gum in my mouth, then thought better of it.

“Well, yea. The service dogs weren’t having it. They are there for service you know, the good of the cause, Semper Fi and all. They weren’t going to just sit by and watch the kids get their snacky-poos taken by a bunch of petting zoo animals, so a couple of them went on the attack, and pulled a couple of gerbils through the wire and ate them. Right on the spot.

“Yikes, I’m not a gerbil fan, but that seems a bit harsh.”    

“Can you imagine the chaos? I think any number of state and federal regulations were broken too. One minute you’re just a little kid eating the carrot somebody threw to you, and the next minute you’re watching a harrowing episode of Wild Kingdom in living color right in front of you. No Marlin Perkins either. It was nightmare.”

“Were they all ok?” I asked, on the edge of my seat. I loved Wild Kingdom as a kid.

“Oh gosh, no. We had to bring in a pet psychologist. The Yoga goats weren’t right for a year. The gerbils that did survive also needed counseling for a while, and I believe finally underwent some kind of physical therapy in one of those little miniature Ferris wheels.”

“It’s a zoo out there,” I added.

“It is, and we all need to do our part,” she added rather quietly. I was nodding in agreement, and she was too – I could feel it – on the other end of the phone. Somewhere in the zoo, off in the distance, l could hear one of the big cats roaring for help, but my zoo friend and expert heard me open my cottage cheese container, the 2% kind, which was completely covered with small, pointy teeth marks. 

In the End He Died the Way He Wanted, Talking

While talking to my daughter last week, she made the comment that I could talk to a doorknob. Her remark hung out there for a long second while I sorted out some details about her inheritance, but then finally concluded that her opinion was worth some scrutiny. 

On the playing field of life, doorknobs rank rather low in my book, falling somewhere between drywall and doormats, but certainly no higher than caulk. While it is true that we could not get by (the door) without them, no one ever said their doorknob was the first thing they’d if they had to escape a burning building. Now that I think of it though, moving quickly towards a doorknob in that scenario might not be a bad idea. 

Still, I think the doorknob remark of my daughter’s was reaching a bit. 

In the Blunder household, I counted some fourteen doorknobs altogether, including the ones on the front and back of each door, with each one having a slightly different patina of fingerprints and residue of hand sanitizer but there is no known evidence, audio or otherwise, that would suggest I have had a conversation with any of them. We do have one pocket door I talk to a lot because it wasn’t installed correctly from the get-go and doesn’t lock very well. I’ve tried to chit-chat with the door latch – mostly conservative comments given that it is an election year – nothing offensive in these uncertain times, in the hopes I can become the change I want to see in the world, but apparently my skill of conversing with doorknobs doesn’t extend to latches in pocket doors. 

And even though I’m entering my golden years, I believe I’ve still got time to change my daughter’s image of me, rather than the current one of me sitting on a stool, face to face with a doorknob jabbering away a mile a minute.  I want my core family to have some good things to say about me when I leave. I want them to be able to sprinkle the earth with my wise sayings and repeat the stories about my charitable giving and bravery. 

“Yes, he was an amazing man,” I imagine my family saying, “he once battled a school of piranhas singlehandedly while towing a raft loaded with children up the Amazon. We don’t know how he found the strength, but we think that he had a special gift from God. To be able to grip the rope with his teeth and swim that raft…well…it’s nothing short of amazing. Oh, and also, he could talk to a doorknob. I mean, if there was a doorknob anywhere nearby, Jeff was talking to it.” 

Hand-colored etching by Jeff Bender

I’m just not sure how I feel about that kind of legacy. At the time, when the doorknob comment fell out of my daughter’s mouth like a brick, it was kind of a conversation stopper, a revolutionary way of getting my attention. And it worked. I thought for a brief second it might be a compliment about my friendliness, but there was no context for it at the time it was said. Boom, there it was. My daughter simply floated it out there while we were talking about healthy foods to eat, so I’m not quite sure how doorknobs and my socialness ended up together in the same conversation. Normally, when the subject of doorknobs comes up, it is not because of health foods, but because someone has locked themselves in a gas station bathroom and can’t get out without screaming. Even then, the subject of doorknobs is rarely brought up by the medics who are giving mouth to mouth or applying those electric fibrillation pads. 

By the way, there were any number of foods brought up in that conversation – beets for example – which I have a very tenuous relationship with. I did not know they can turn your urine red, so that at one point in my life many years ago I had a lot of tests done at considerable expense only to find out that my worries were unfounded.  This is probably too much information, but I tell it to show how difficult it is to mix doorknobs into the subject of health foods, no matter how talented a conversationalist I might be. 

In fact when I think of the subject of doorknobs and how many there are in the world, whether they have been installed correctly, how well they contribute to the Feng shui of a surrounding area, how history has picoted on their existence, I can’t imagine ever, EVER, bringing one up with any health food, specifically the ones we were discussing, namely seaweed, edamame salads, and turmeric. 

Doorknobs fall, I realize now, under the general category of mostly nothing, and are usually responsible for exchanges between people who have gone badly off-topic. 

I don’t have the courage to ask my daughter what her comment meant. It could mean a lot of good things, but if it doesn’t, and she hesitates or falters when she tries to dig herself out of the ditch she has dug for herself, I’m going to feel that on some level I have failed as a parent, and that I will be remembered as the father who had many grand and glorious qualities, but who could, in the end, only be counted on to talk to doorknobs. This is what I imagine she will say when I go to meet my Maker: 

“…yes, my dad was a stalwart citizen, caring and doting father. Our dearly departed, Jeff, was sensitive and kind, good with children, and generous with his family. However, he did talk to doorknobs. Yes, he did. I know it comes as quite a shock to those of you in attendance, but we felt that now is the time to reveal his secret life, a life of wanton disregard, wholesale ignorance and communication failures. By the way, Kleenex are being passed around right now – No, not those, that stuff is seaweed, which you are welcome to try. 

But, yes, Jeff was a talker, and not just that, he talked to doorknobs, not just occasionally, but incessantly, his entire life. There was the one in the spare bathroom he particularly liked to talk to, and we have an actual transcript of a Jeff-Talk uploaded on the Doorknob Channel so you can see for yourself. It’s horrible, we know, to find this out now, too late to do anything about it. Maybe we could have helped him if we would have known sooner. It’s an absolute shock really, but someone has to set the record straight, lay it all out there, get a handle on things so to speak and let history be the judge. 

Do not weep for him. NO! Jeff would not have wanted that. He would want you to hold your heads up and be proud and know that his place in heaven will not be hampered by any entrance above that he cannot talk to. He would want you to believe there is no doorknob that is beyond his grasp. He will meet that Great Door In the Sky, yes he will, and turn that knob, maybe twice, and if it doesn’t work, he will talk to it until it does, YES he will! He will get through that precious access, that gate and prevail! He may first have to introduce himself to it, chit-chat for a couple of hours like he did to all the doorknobs on Earth, ease the redemptive tension, but he will triumph and have victory over that final doorknob. We know this about him, so there’s no chance he might turn the knob and be put off. Even as I speak, he is talking the ear off that Great Emancipating Doorknob right now, reunited in endless conversation for an eternity with the One-Who-Made-All-Doorknobs.” 

That statement will be read by my daughter. She will begin with a discussion of beets and by taking small sips of highly nitrogenated spring water while throwing back some vitamin D, and then she will reveal that I had discussions, some of them rather deep, with doorknobs. After her touching eulogy, as those in attendance approach her and reach out to hold her hand, they will tell her how sorry they are for her loss. There will be tears, but tears of hope as she offers them a small doorknob magnet as a commemorative keepsake with her hand and a small bag of mixed nuts with her other. Then, honoring my last and final request, all the doorknobs will be removed from the funeral parlor, and she will be forced to talk with every last person in attendance and I am certain she will be able to do that for hours on end.

I Found Myself Under "Befuddle" In My Address Book

For about a month now I’ve been doing some research about local concrete companies to get some bids on a new driveway at our residence. I know about as much about concrete as the man on the moon. I do know that I stuck my hand in a newly laid and perfectly smooth concrete pad in our backyard when I was a kid, sparking the wrath of the returning concrete workers the next morning, and anyone who ever tried to dribble a basketball in that area for the next ten years.  But it was worth it. 

In my search for the right concrete company, the first place I looked was in an antiquated small black address book I have kept for most of my adult life. For the history buffs out there, you might be interested to know that the first address book was invented in 1630. It was at that time the infamous pirate, Skully Blackfog, better known as just Skulls, began to keep a log in a bound sharkskin volume strung together with clam cartilage. Inside, Skulls, as he was known to his crew, kept a detailed list of specialists who could treat him with his stomach issues, as he had survived mainly on whale tongue and whiskey during his stint at a pirate. 

However, Skulls also was an insufferable insomniac, tossing and turning through the night because of the incessant repetition of waves rolling under his ship, a droning white noise that others on deck found rather comforting and reassuring after a hard day of pillaging and plundering. (Worth noting: British civilians actually wore conch shells on their ears during the day so they could experience the sound of the sea all day long). Out at sea however, the crispy Captain couldn’t sleep at all, and that led to a lot of irritable mornings where he angrily threw crew members overboard, and slapped parrots off the shoulder of anyone who got too close. 

Let’s face it, no one likes a pirate that got up on the wrong side of the hammock. At the urging of his crew, Skulls began a world-wide search for sleep potions, entering each one into his handy dandy sharkskin address book. Believe it or not, Skulls died in his sleep, donating his address book to International Museum of Sleep Deprivation, where it rests to this day next to his hammock. I read all about him late one night when I couldn’t sleep myself and was led down a rabbit hole google search for Pirates who also did concrete work on the side. 

And it hit me! Why wasn’t I looking in my very own book instead of this confound computer? My address book has contacts in it from the last thirty-five years! I blasted out of bed like cannon fodder, (just to keep the metaphor consistent), exploded into the galley (that’s kitchen in pirate language), excited to have an encyclopedic source for concrete at my very disposal (not translatable). 

As the drama unfolded, literally, I flipped to the C’s but found nothing there that began with the letter C – not concrete companies, or even one cement contact. The only references I found were words that were related in some far-fetched way. For example, I had the phone number for a guy named Plebus Tanks who I used to play tennis with twenty years ago. He was rather lousy at tennis, an otherwise upstanding citizen, but a man nonetheless who regularly cheated at tennis, so I put him in the C’s for Cheater. Down a couple of spaces was Frank’s Plumbing, a plumbing service I liked very much because the owner himself once slithered like an army man through our spider-infested crawl space to locate our leaking pipe. He crawled, so I found him there too, in the C’s, not under F for Frank’s or P for Plumbing. 

As I began to leaf through more pages searching the high seas for the elusive Abominable Concrete Man, I realized that most of the people I had listed had little or nothing to do with the letter they should be filed under! The contacts I had acquired over the years were scattered about like so much driftwood on the open seas and left to be washed tither and yon throughout the alphabet of my book.  Simply put, there was no organizational system at all that I could see – no order and no logic. On the bright side, the book would make a brilliant model as an uncrackable code of some kind during wartime should the need arise, perhaps by the CIA or NORAD, but otherwise it was totally useless. On a typical day here at home, here’s what finding someone in my address book sounds like: 

“Honey, remember that gutter person we used a couple of years ago?” I started.

You mean the guy that was afraid of heights? She asked.

“Yea that one,” I say. “What was his name, do you remember?”

Well, look in your black book under G!” My wife quickly added.

“I did, but he wasn’t there, not in the G’s.”

“Well, look under L for ladders,” she suggested.

“Nope,” I say flipping through, “he’s not there either.”

“How about look under…mmm… what is it when you have a fear of heights? Acrophobia? Yes, try that!”

“Nope. He’s not under the A’s,” I reply. “Wait a minute wasn’t he the one who said he played the xylophone in the high school marching band?”

“Yes!!” we both say in unison, and then I immediately turned to X’s, where, sure enough, our Gutter Man is right there, with his name sticking out like a sore thumb. How could I be so dumb – of course Gutter would be under X!

Never again I thought! Never, would I put so much stock in the order of names, their respective association with a letter! What I had learned is that my black book was not an address book at all or a book with phone numbers either. This was a book of puzzles, and senseless connections, a volume of mysterious relationships that would only be useful if I was not looking for anything at all. Trying to use it as a reference book is very similar to the kind of aimless meandering I do when I hunt for seashells on the beach. In that state, I’m not really interested in finding anything. I’m just out for a stroll on the address book of life, smelling the ocean waves, maybe waving at perfect strangers as they pass by under the pages of my fingers, not wanting any close contact of course, and hoping a megalodon tooth from ten thousand years ago will wash up at my feet, and then wash back out with the next foamy wave of thought. 

It was then that I remembered the most famous of all pirate sayings, the phrase that everyone goes to when they think of those criminals of the high seas and that is this: “ARRrrrrrr Matey!” Everyone knows that phrase, it’s like a bad joke when you talk about pirates, but we say it anyway. But is it, I wondered? Maybe what Skully Blackfog, that most infamous of pirates meant when he said “ARRrrr” was in fact just plain “R”, as in the letter R! 

Inspired, as if I had just been hit by a cannon shot across my forehead bow, I excitedly turned to the letter R in my black address book and found just what I had been looking for all along!

There, right there, as the first entry, under the letter R was the word Rough Sea Cement Company, contractor. I closed my address book, put my conch shells over my ears and went back to bed listening to the calming sounds of concrete being poured, and dreaming of a brand-new cement driveway. 

I Wish All My Friends Knew Each Other

Right now my life and the inch of frost on my windows seems to be stuck trying to survive our frigid cold that is colder than cold, slap my possum Grandaddy Slappy cold.

Ovens, it appears, are part of a homeowners’ trial by fire that, like our souls, constantly require sanctification. Perhaps ovens are a great metaphor for that inner work we tend to do in the winter months when the sound of the traffic in our heads is finally muffled by stocking caps, puff jackets and gloves.  We become more patient and let the casserole do its thing, melting the layers together until the buzzer goes off and the recipe we have been hoping for is ready for consumption. Then, our souls are ready for the dish that God has been baking for us behind closed doors. He is our comfort food in winters that sometimes seem barren, and oppressive.

I watched a bit of news about the Iowa caucus this week, but the polar vortex in my head couldn’t help but swirl around the story I once heard about a confused man who was told that temperatures were rapidly dropping to two degrees but he went outside and couldn’t find either one of them. In exasperation, he went off into the forest searching, turning over rocks and climbing trees to find those two degrees. Finally, he returned home, disappointed, and remarked that he would just have to wait until more degrees arrived.

Well, we are all looking for something, right? In our searching we often work so hard to find that magic medicine, we might be better off with what is right in front of us, even if it is a couple of degrees off!

Frozen days notwithstanding, I’ve been taking in some new thoughts this last week from one of my very favorite authors, Garrison Keillor.  His book Serenity at Seventy, Gaiety at Eighty, sounds like a book on aging, but it is much, much more. So, when tickets of Prairie Home Companion came available, we took a road trip down to Nashville to hear Mr. Keillor speak at the Ryman Auditorium about his beloved imaginary hometown in Minnesota, Lake Wobegon, a community he invented and built single-handedly and has been telling us about for forty years on NPR. As Garrison began in his typical, it’s-been-a-quiet-week-in-Lake-Wobegon kind of way, we were transported to his rural town where the stop lights meant stop and green lights meant go. Mr. Keillor’s buttery voice and peaceful rhythm made me long for that kind of town too, and as he spoke, I noticed fewer and fewer folks texting or checking for a notification about an overdue library book. We listeners settled down into the town ourselves because we knew that in Garrison’s Lake Wobegon, there is never a need to keep up with anything, that words like relevancy or authentic or intentional aren’t applicable there, and after a forty-year narrative, still runs on a strong cup of coffee with no cream or sugar or relevancy or any of that stuff. Just black, thank you.

Yes, there are some occasional sleepers that slip through Garrison’s monologue. After all, relevance seems to be the catch word for anything worth giving your time to these days. Nothing passes the litmus test anymore without RELEVANCE! A story has to be connected, sound real, BE AUTHENTIC! Oh, and don’t forget intentional! Those all-important words still tried to slip in through the back door of Keillor’s town, but they didn’t get very far. Down at the town’s local tavern, The Sidetrack Tap, a modern remote-controlled digital juke box was dollied in but was carted out the same day because it partially covered the faded picture of Lake Wobegon’s first Mayor, a man who stopped being Mayor one Spring to put in a soybean crop for his friend Mr. Lundquist who had fallen and broken his leg and couldn’t drive his combine.

Rather than leave the stories of Lake Wobegon at intermission, Garrison asked all 1200 people in attendance, many of whom looked a lot like Winston Churchill, to stand and sing with him, so we did, and he directed us to sing hymn after hymn like one massive “Lutheran” choir. Religion, Lines-In-the-Sand, and Bitterness, those great menaces to mankind, found wars to fight elsewhere and feeling out of place, got up and walked out of the building. Goodwill and Charity and Felicity came in to take their seats, politely squeezed past standing, singing people, who reached out to them with a steady hand to help them keep their balance and usher them to their seats.

I’ve mentioned before in previous podcasts that our family, in all its history, has never been able to sing one single solitary note in tune, but here, singing songs shoulder to shoulder that I had learned in Sunday School, I sang out with a kind of reckless abandon, as if I had been handpicked to be in this choir, and had as much right to sing as anyone else. Notes came out of my mouth that I had never heard before, low Mesopotamia harmonies from ancestors I never knew I had, whose ancient resonating voices were suddenly sincere and honest and true. They came through me and my wife, who cannot sing either, and we held hands and looked at each other as if it was our wedding day, and we were going to be able to make it through another day, perhaps even a year without wishing the other person would hang up the wet dishrag lying in the sink.

We sang and sang, one hymn after another and wished all our friends knew each other and that they were standing there with us, singing and being still, and perhaps holding each other’s hands. I have never been to a church service like that before, except at a funeral, where it was too late to be standing next to the one that passed away. Yes, it felt like everyone knew each other, that we’d just been sitting together around a table, all of us, only hours before, eating burgoo soup with saltines, using cloth napkins and spreading real butter on the white bread, maybe putting a little sugar on top because out last cholesterol test was passable.

So, at intermission I did not leave as I normally would have, because things were working so well from where I stood. I stood singing for the thirty minutes break at the risk of having a bladder spasm, to join with others in unison songs like I’ve Been Working on the Railroad, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and Nearer My God to Thee, and even the Beatles, I Saw her Standing There. At one point Keillor encouraged more bass voices and then more tenors to fill in, and a man behind us, who had been quiet all night, chimed in with a voice so deep and powerful I thought for a moment I was listening to a recording of a blue whale that had lost its way and had taken a left turn at the Cumberland River, and had swam upstream to join us in Nashville at the Ryman. The rich bellowing notes he added to the auditorium atmosphere so resonated off the hard wooden pews that people nearby reached for their hankies and made eye contact with their partners as if they really did love them. I felt the love myself, or maybe it was the vibrations from his notes that went through my skeletal system and right up my spine, and for a moment I thought I was getting an MRI, then realized I hadn’t had a physical for over a decade and made a mental note to myself to check my health insurance when I got home and see if it covered spinal irregularities.

No, I thought, that would not be authentic, not a true picture of who I am, and then began to worry that insurance might read my inquiry as irrelevant and would begin to send me intentional messages about co-pays and reminders about a donut hole that reappears every couple of months like a bad penny. All of this was going through my head, until about that time, when I hit the most melodic middle C right on cue and held it out there until it faded in beautifully with the choir, and held there a long, long time with all the women at the Ryman who were strong and the men who were all good looking, who brought the last verse of It Is Well With My Soul to a close in quiet, perfect pitch. Intermission was over. None of us had not gone anywhere, and nobody was looking around anymore for those two very cold, missing degrees.

Place in Oven, Bake at 350º for Twenty Years

 As 2023 filed past into the chronicles of history, I for one was glad it was over. The last year, in my opinion, had entirely too many dates that had a one, a two, or any combination of two-three in it. The month of January alone had 10 permutations, and we ended the year on 1-2,3-1,2-3, which made me feel like I needed to be on a dance floor doing the salsa.

 I don’t know about you, but as various combinations of twenty-three popped up last year, I had flashbacks of elementary school when a teacher got stuck on one subject for five or six months at a time and couldn’t seem to detach themselves and move on to a new subject. I like George Washington well enough, for example, and did not want to appear bored and unpatriotic, but hourly history lessons on our first president was an unhealthy loop to get stuck in, and eventually I begin to feel that a lot of the information I was being taught wasn’t that necessary for me to know in the first grade – like how many teeth the president had left in his mouth when he died. I recall at one point our teacher claiming, as we were scrutinizing every detail of Leutze’s famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware with magnifying glasses obtained from a grant from the National Endowment to the Arts, that Washington’s wife, Martha, was on the other side of the river waving to him with her latest version of the American flag. Shortly after trying to see her across the Delaware, I developed a nasty case of eye strain and have been wearing glasses ever since. Still, I believe in some odd way that it was worth it, as I later tested out of my first two years of Early American history in college.

 But 2023 is old news, goodbye to George until his birthday next month and hello to the fours, as in 2024. I have set my sights on some new goals unrelated to history or numerology, one of which prompts me to reveal a bit embarrassing information about our housekeeping practices here at home. Here it is: We have not cleaned our oven in over 20 years.

 I should say from the onset that we are not filthy people. We clean our toilets, we dust the top of door frames, and shake our rugs out in the Spring. My bills are organized in rows in a special cubby, and I prep all our veggies for our salads each week so they fit neatly in sealed containers. We are neat people. And organized. Even my art studio does not look like an artist works there as I carefully place my found objects on shelves based on how much damage they would cause if my grandkids grabbed them. But when it comes to our oven, we are complete and utter embarrassments. We cannot go back to that oven in its present state any longer. We must look ahead, bow our heads, and take that first and most difficult of steps, towards peace and the restoration of our oven to its original condition.

 That being said, we are faced with an oven interior that has at least a solid inch of crusty drips and blotches caked along the sides, with a particularly nasty looking black zone, care of an overfheated lasagna in 2012 that festered into an angry insurgency in the upper right corner. If I studied the interior of our oven for a few minutes, using my first-grade magnifying glass, I could probably name ten or twelve dishes other concoctions we baked in that uprising over the past fifteen years, and maybe a few confrontations going back even further.

 Even when we just crack the door, we open the door, our oven releases bits of dried sea anemones and gritty sand-like meteors which sprinkle out onto our wooden floor where they do a little salsa together in 2/3 time, and then collapse and call for help. At that point, we normally get out our little beige dustpan with the matching brush, sweep them up and sprinkle them back inside where they revive each other like miniature paramedics. You see, we do that because back in our youth we watched our grandmothers do the same thing, reheating leftovers, reviving injured scraps six or seven times, claiming that their concoction would taste better the second time around.

 “It’s history!” G’ma would point out. “All of those juices and spices have settled down deep in the bowels of the oven walls!” G’ma was prone to poetic devices. 

“Didn’t we have this last night, G,ma?” we’d complain quietly.

“Yes, we did, but your stomach doesn’t know that! So eat up boys! He only thinks to terrify by feints!’ which was a quote from Melville.

 Afterwards my grandmother cleaned the pots and pans with the same rag her grandmother had passed down to her, and her oven added one more layer to its illustrious cooking history.

And while I’m sure my grandmother broke at least a half dozen OSHA regulations, my artistic inclinations, my bent towards the creative, has caused me to revel in the variety of textures slowly accumulating there, later inspiring me to enroll in art school. Now, years later, I have fine-tuned our own oven to include areas of subtlety – fine air-brushed reticulations, fascinating surfaces and other culinary revolutions that are simply genius. Inside our oven, there is a wall to wall of fascinating surfaces, embattled revolutions that are certainly better than half of the etchings and lithographs I saw being developed in the art studio during my graduate school years.

 As fate would have it, we recently had a service guy come to fix our icemaker, situated next to our obstreperous oven, and while he was laying down on our floor inspecting, pushing buttons, and telling us how he jammed an ice pick through his hand last week on another job, I thought I would carefully ask him a few questions about oven hygiene.

“Have you ever gone into a house,” I started quietly, “that was so disgusting you were afraid to work there?”

“Oh, no, not really,” he replied quickly, “in this line of work you see just about everything, so nothing surprises me anymore. Could you hand me a ratchet, please. No, that’s a hammer, yea, that one, I think I see what the problem is here. Just needs a bit of tightening.”

I handed him the ratchet and waited.

“Well, “I’m not really seeing anything really wrong with your ice maker,” he continued, giving the ratchet a half turn, “probably just needed a little adjustment.”

 But as he backed out and began to stand up, he froze for an uncomfortably long and awkward second.

I can’t be sure, but I think his line of sight went through the splotched door of our oven where from my vantage point, I believe he caught sight of some charred spinach noodles with pale yellow gouda cheese drips from circa 2013, probably September if memory serves me. I cannot be sure, maybe it was 2014, but what happened next cemented my impression that he was shaken, really unnerved, by what he had glimpsed behind our oven door.

 Service Guy stood up abruptly, muffled a “We’ll bill you later,” and disappeared out our back door covering his mouth.  

By the sound of squealing tires, I am convinced that what he saw through the oven window was scary enough to render the benefit of lingering not worth the risk. We even tried to call the company to set up payment but were told that they had not seen hide nor hair of Service Guy in days, and that he had left no forwarding address and of course, no record of ever having been to our house. I felt bad for him, and I think my wife did too, although I haven’t seen her for a few days either.

My plan at this point is to book a vacation somewhere far away, turn the dial on the oven to the clean cycle before we leave, and then, wherever I land, watch TV in my hotel room in hopes that there is no breaking news about a house in Indiana that blew up, and is now under investigation for initiating an unspecified, slightly cheesy and burnt-smelling airborne virus into the upper atmosphere. I am fearful, for my family that our oven may be at fault, but fearful for humans everywhere, that it will be given an unfortunate name like C-oVen, and I will be sentenced to a life of cleaning kitchen appliances in prison until my parole, the next year of any numerical significance, 2345. 

Big Slappy Stew (A Christmas Recipe for Sixty-Two)

We Slappies are happy
We laugh with such ease
We chuckle and chortle
bellow, giggle and sneeze

As if we needed
an excuse to be happy
The holidays bring out
All the hoots in us Slappies!

In fact, we laugh ‘til we cry
and start in Slaptober
Then fall over backwards,
Take a breath and start over!

But around Christmas Eve
When our stomach start rumbling
We stop cracking jokes
get grumpy with grumbling

All the rib tickling howls
Makes us weak in our knees
Slap-Junie begins asking,
“Where’s the pot of stew please?”

Then out comes the kettle,
We know what to do
We fire up the burners!
To make Big Slappy Stew!

An old-printed recipe
In the mail does appear
from cold Baked Alaska
on Slap-Eskimo spears

We tear open the envelope
That’s yellowed with age,
We read the chicken scratch
all down the slap-page.

“Chop up slap-veggies
Add broth from a bottle
then boil and then simmer
Rev up to high throttle!

Cousin Slap-Porky
Who loves grisly fat
Drips grease on the mix
And a bit of slap that.

Why, even Slap-Big-Daddy,
Who rolls, never walks
Gets up and starts cooking
adding celery slap-stalks.

A weird meat from a can
Is dumped in with a plop
Bobbles and fizzes
Then sinks like a rock–

The soup begins boiling,
A lime greenish goo
Turns brown and reminds us
of Slap-baby’s slap-poo!

A cloud from the kettle
Fills the room up with steam
It clouds our slap-vision
tastes just like slap cream!

But something was missing
We’re not sure quite what
Something baffling and odd
Is wrong in our guts.

Then Great Grand-Mappy Slappy
Stepped up to the stove
With a long wooden spoon
And a bucket of cloves

We hold our slap breath
While she sips the thick broth
“It’s almost slap-ready!
Now my secret slap-sauce!”

“It’s made with bananas
and a porcupine nose
One ice cube that’s melted
And straw from scarecrows.”

Then, she did something magic
She untied her slap-shoe
Held it up by the laces
High above the Slap-stew!

Twice it went down
Once more for good measure
A sniffy nose whiffed the air
Belonging to Slap-Esther

Slap-Uncle Marzoli
Who flew in from Frazolis
Sipped a spoonful with cornbread,
And yelled “Marveoli!”

All the chunks in the kettle
Every drop and each batch
Got eaten that day
Went down the slap-hatch

Long lost cousins
no one knew from Slap-Dovers
flew in for dinner,
And flew out with leftovers!

We were stuffed with stew –
Our tummies were happy–
We started to giggle
And laugh like old Slappies!

Yes! We started very slow…
First a snicker, then louder
Then fell out of chairs,
Which was not even allowed-er

Well…Christmas returned
To all Slappies that year
With slap happy soup
And jolly good cheer

Great Grand-Mappy Slappy
Whose shoe was still wet
Reared back with a laugh
and said,

”Please don’t forget…

If your family gets cranky
Around Christmas time
Quits being silly and
Quits rhyming rhymes

Just crank up the stove
And take off your shoes
Bring the pot to a boil
and make Slappy Stew!”

You’ll smile and you’ll snort
With Slappy Tom-Foolery
Eat stew ‘til you can’t
Say words like charcuterie!

But the best part is your
good humor you know,
The real soup that is brewing
Is inside your slap-sole

You make it together,
It’s big Slappy Stew
It feeds sixty-three people
Maybe less, sixty-two!

The recipe? It’s simple–

You’ll need a banana
and a porcupine nose
One ice cube that’s melted
and straw from scarecrows.

You’ll need lots of laughter
To make Christmas Slap-stew
But don’t forget the love!
(And that old leather shoe).