Wherever You Spam, There You Are

I lost my cell phone yesterday, something that happens so often I’m beginning to wonder whether I should change my medication. I see men who wear holsters for their cells so they’re never far away. That seems like a good answer for men who still have hopes of becoming a cowboy, riding bucking broncos and roping steers, but I’ve been to several rodeos and seen men thrown off horses like a wet rag. So, I’m passing on the holsters. I’d rather lose mine than see myself stomped by one of those two-thousand-pound bulls. No, I don’t think a holster’s my thing.

So, when I lost my cell, the last thing I thought to do was the first thing I should have done, which is to call the phone. Instead, being a creature of habit, I resorted to ranting and raving, blaming others, and opening every drawer in the house to find it. Even with a post graduate degree, it took me fifteen minutes to remember that I could call it on our home line, which I promptly did and found it ringing under a pile of magazines.

Problem solved, right? Yes, except for one minor detail. My cellphone was scrolling the words SPAM RISK on the screen.

Now, mind you, this is a call I made to myself. I thought, WHAT?! How can I be a spam risk to myself? Up until then, I always thought the function of being notified of spam was to let me know there is someone suspicious calling, but I never thought in a million years that person would be… me!

As I stared at the screen and tried to digest the part of my character that is like spam, I realized a couple of very important things about life, little spam nuggets if you will. First, no matter how hard you try, the spam of life will find you. In other words, wherever you spam, there you are. Secondly, and this fact may be difficult for many of you listeners to swallow – we are, in fact, our own worst spam. We bring it on ourselves. We create the conditions for spam to spam us. We are living breathing, walking, talking spam magnets.

By the way, for those of you who like the latest catch phrase, I’ve combined spam and enemy into one word, spameny, or the condition of being your own worst (spam) enemy.

Yes, we are. In fact, according to my phone, I am a constant spameny to myself, and when I say, “my phone,” it is a sad commentary that in today’s culture, our phones have become the final answer, the last word, the final image we look at before we go to beddy-bye and the first one we see in the morning.  Sad America, but it’s true.

Naturally, since the range of human behaviors are so sweeping, so prevalent in so many variations, the act of spamming oneself most likely will be picked up under the umbrella of mental health and psychological research, eventually surfacing on the news cycle, and very possibly as a college major at Harvard. I’m imagining highly respected journals on behavioral research such as Psychology Today carrying articles about people who are at a spam risk to themselves, complete with double blind studies and hundreds of documented cases. Behavioral psychologists from around the globe, fascinated by spameny habits, will meet at international conferences to debate the ethics and dangers of societal spamming.

As history tells us, most of these conventions will be held in Oslo, Norway, home of the Nobel Prize. There, brilliant scientists, neurobehavioralists and brainsmatologists will gather in a hotel lobby next to kiosks with life-size cardboard cut-outs of self-spammers and they will counsel guests who are at a spam risk to themselves. Jokes will begin to circulate, jokes that begin, “Did you hear the joke about the guy who spammed…,” and knock-knock name cards will be placed on every table setting at the ceremonial awards dinner. Waiters wearing glistening uniforms that glow in the dark, like a ringing cell phone, will present the attending guests with narwhal d’oeuvres, and beverages will have mini-icebergs floating in them to help with any inflammation.   

A brilliant industrial psychologist with a goatee by the name of Odør Kænoruier-Rafsnörhadden, having spent the first two days of the conference cold plunging in an ionized wooden tub made of Norwegian cedar, will come up for air on a cognitive frigid high, and coin a new term for the new spam-yourself condition. As a result of his research, his picture will be on the cover of the 100th issue of Psychology Today, standing with a gold medal around his neck, and a commemorative T-shirt that says “Roses are red, violets are blue, I spammed myself, and so did I.” Standing proudly there for his cover shoot will be all seven members of his Kænoruier-Rafsnörhadden’s family, along with a distant uncle who repaired their gutters one icey winter.

Unfortunately, Odør’s ground-breaking article, when it was released a month later, was nineteen pages of boring flow charts and statistical diagrams. A picture of Odør’s third child, a boy named Roar, was mistakenly printed over the fold, contorting him in such a way that he appeared to have only one eye. This printing error distracted readers away from the central spam point, the long-awaited new term that Odør had come up with, which was  impaired cognitive autospam defiency. As a result, Odør’s research was poo-pooed by the psychological community, and the term had to be scrapped, resulting in all twenty-seven thousand copies being pulled from newsstands worldwide.

I know. That is a lot of newsstands, isn’t it?

Still, for those of you who have also spammed yourself, Odør’s article is still available at Norwegian yard sales and on the black web, and provides evidence that cell phones pose a threat to the general sanity of the human race, and may be contributing to most other problems as well, such as floating islands in the ocean made of discarded phones, and schools of fish that swim around them and watch Finding Nemo all day long. Sad America, it may be true.

For those of you who want to see an abbreviated version of Odør’s article, you might take a look at the insert to a later issue, volume IVXXIII, where clinical research was carried out on chimpanzees who would receive spam calls from one another and have to determine, independent of satellite intervention, whether to pick up the call or let the call go through to voice mail.  That’s a tough decision for a chimp that may have only began using their opposable thumb for a week ago.

Research aside, I don’t care for the idea of being a spam risk to myself. I’ve always thought of myself in quite different terms, with qualities not associated with spam or risk. I believe I could handle one or the other, spam or risk, but honestly, when those words are put together, well for me, it seems over the spam top, like carrying around three or four spare tires in your car in case they all blow at the same time. It’s too much.  

And thus, when my phone decided without my input that I was a spam risk, I kind of took it personally. I thought of a lot of things in my own spamocious personality, things I’ve never talked about with anyone, that would be very cellular if someone outside my own phone, knew about them. For example, the other day when my granddaughter wasn’t looking, I ate three or four of her chicken nuggets. I had this kind of pit in my stomach that a cell tower might have picked up on this distasteful habit of stealing food off my grand-daughter’s plate when she isn’t looking. Will that put me on a national spameny list? If it does, it makes me sad because I love my granddaughter so much and wouldn’t want a chicken nugget to spoil our relationship.

This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. I lie in bed and stare out my window, the clouds scattering across a rising moon. Sweat brakes out on my forehead, and I begin to see impaired cognitive autospam defiency floating across the billowy mantle of my brain. I am wondering why I am paying hard earned money for this cell phone that has so much against me, a device that has it in for me, whose purpose, in essence, is to embarrass myself over my own phone. It seems like I could do that just as easily by going out the front door of my house with two different kinds of socks on, or in most cases, just by going out my front door. Sad America, it’s true.

Since I have been discovered by my phone, revealed so to speak, I have a litany of mistakes I’ve decided to air publicly at some point just to clear the spam air. Doing it here and now, however, would put this podcast at risk of becoming a nineteen-page research paper like the one Odør Kænoruier-Rafsnörhadden wrote. What I really want to do is call a friend for support, but there’s the risk that I, Mr. Spam Risk, will scroll across their phone. Of course, by the time they call me back, I will have misplaced my phone again and will have to call it to find it ringing under an old Norwegian issue of Psychology Today.

Sad America, it is true.

Too Many Stinkin' Jeffs

It's early in the morning and I can hear a motorcycle revving its engine, racing down a local avenue at breakneck speed. The entire landscape of our fair city, from bulbs to redbuds are coming alive, proving that, like motorcycles out for their first test run, acceleration is the true mark of spring. Dogs are barking, lawn mowers are getting their mojo on, and gosh darn it, our lovey-dovey duck friends, Maude and Claude, have returned to waddle around our porch pretending they don’t know us. Maybe there are too many ducks out there…

By the way, for those of you who are regular followers of Knee Deep, I write about Maude and Claude every year and although I can’t be sure it is the same pair, I’m sure Claude murmured something like “there’s just too many stinkin’ Jeffs out there!” as I pulled out of my driveway the other day. Very suspicious, wouldn’t you say?

Out there on the road, I come face to face with motorcycles everywhere. It’s not quite warm enough for them to be out in my opinion, but bikers are diehards and love the feel of that blacktop passing under their boots. Not long ago, when one of those Harley guys, probably a Jeff, pulled up next to me and vroomed his engine. I spit my hot coffee out all over my clean white t-shirt and my radio switched to heavy metal. Yikes!  Too many stinkin’ Jeffs out there!

 I tried to ride a motorcycle a couple of times, but my attempts didn’t end so well. I understand the clutch and the shifting, but on a motorcycle – not so much. In the back of my head, I think I still hear my father’s voice telling me if he ever caught me on a motorcycle he’d tan my hide. He’d had seen one too many accidents in the emergency room as a physician, and he didn’t want one of his kids to be one of them.

I should have listened to him, but youth, they say, is wasted on the young. On a short getaway last summer to a Cincinnati Reds game, my wife and I noticed the green motor scooters – sort of pay-as-you-go Ubers – that are plopped along the sidewalks and streets.

Let’s try one!” I said, grabbing the handlebars. “We can zip around downtown and see everything in fifteen minutes!”

Downloading a frustrating GO! app, we fired up our Uber-and-Under scooters and began to weave around benches, beeping the horns that sounded, well, kind of like an angry duck now that I come to think about it.  My wife’s scooter skills quickly went from rookie to decent. I wasn’t progressing quite as fast, and had some points taken off when I attempted to fly over a speed bump. Turns out scooters do not like being air born, and mine sputtered a couple of times and shut down, eating up nine minutes of my Visa bill on the next billing cycle.

Shortly, we decided it would be cool to zip down to a municipal park slash botanical refuge, a gorgeously designed park laden with paths, perfect for a scooter couple who want to sight-see in a botanical kind of way.  About thirty-nine and a half feet in, our urban puddlehoppers made a butt-ugly noise and croaked on the spot, turned off by an invisible GPS barrier just inside the garden. That left us pushing our scooters back out to the street, past a sign made of recycled beehives that read, NO SCOOTERS! And underneath it, in small print – you got it – it read, “Just too many stinkin’ Jeffs out there!”

Now, as the sun stays up longer each day and we begin to spend time in our own botanical garden here at home, we pull up our wild violets and yank out the crabby grass so that our annuals have a chance to take root. Robins hover within a few feet of where I’m working, ready to swoop in as soon as I leave to pick out their choice of worms and bugs.

Every time I see a robin lurking nearby, I remember some oddball research that was done to figure out how they find a worm. Do you think robins feel the worm underneath or hear it moving under their feet? Turns out, scientists have done all kinds of experiments, from blindfolding to playing recordings of worms digging to see what the robins would do. I don’t know how in the world one would record an earthworm digging, but apparently earthworms are pretty rowdy when they get to diggin’. I’m thinking they are tossing back tequila shots down there, but as it turns out there’s another theory that hit pay dirt. If you watch a robin hunting for a worm, they turn their heads to one side and stare until a worm pops its fat head up, and then, hello snack-time! I’m putting in annuals, minding my own business, while a bunch of one-eyed robins are waiting to go in for the kill!

My neighbors ask me why I don’t grow some veggies, but I’m more of a decorative gardener than a farmer gardener. People will tell me there is nothing to it, and they are right of course, as it would be ultra easy for me to plop some tomato plants in and reap the harvest. I get that, and I’m envious when folks roll out the farm fresh. So in honor of Newcastle Australia, I decided on a clever compromise a couple of years back and planted a red honeysuckle, something pretty but also sweet I could nibble on if the mood struck me. Each year, with a little training, that honeysuckle plant etches out another section of our fence, spurting out dozens of blooms throughout the season and flowering our yard with the smell of red, whatever smell that is.

Since the beginning of time, which was three years ago, I’ve taught my grandchildren how to gently pull the stamin through the tube for that one drop of sweet nectar. You would think by the looks on their faces they were eating ice cream as they capture those glistening drops, one after another. Right now, we have about forty-five thousand blooms along our fence, enough to sell on the honeysuckle black market, if there was such a thing. Extracting the nectar one day, I thought it might be fun to eat the whole flower and pretend I was a vegetable gardener. I loped off a half dozen red flowers, lazily chewing my way towards some imaginary honeysuckle high. About mid-swallow, it occurred to me that I might be poisoning myself, a possibility that hadn’t occurred to me before. I ran inside to google whether honeysuckle flowers can kill you, but on a whim, changed my mind in lieu of a little fun with my wife:

“I’m feeling a bit flushed,” I told her, “and I don’t feel so hot. Do I look red to you?”

“What do you mean, red? There’s red and then there is fever red,” she answered.

“Like bright red,” I said.

“Why? What happened to you?” she asked.

“Well, I was eating some of the honeysuckle nectar off the vine and decided to eat some flowers too – about a dozen of them. Then I realized they might be poisonous and I could be dying,” I said, panicky.

“In my opinion, you could use the sweetness, but…”

“…no serious, do I look like I’m swelling? Am I bloated? I think I’m starting to  (cough, cough) wheeze. And my eyes scratch (cough, cough),” I added.

“You mean itch, not scratch, don’t you?” she said, yawning and stared at me, like one of those robins with one eye.

I went back outside, took a big whiff of those powerful negative ions in the air. There may be too many stinkin’ Jeffs out there, but too much Springtime or honeysuckle wasn’t going to change that. A motorcycle was accelerating down the highway. Maude and Claude were making out in my yard, and I knew there were earthworms digging ferociously underneath me.

Our Toad Never Made the Cut on Animal Kingdom

I saw a mosquito on my porch yesterday, flitting about up in a corner of my porch where it thought I couldn’t see it. It was the mother of all mosquitoes, a huge one that probably laid all the mosquito eggs this side of the Mississippi Delta. My first thought was, oh no, no, no. you don’t. You are not going to fly in here a couple of months early, all fashionable with your blood-sucking bite and ruin this gorgeous Spring morning. No siree Bob. Mr. Mosquito, you got to go.

It was always this kind of unexpectedly warm day that made a special formula kick in for me when I was a kid, the one I had made up to survive until the end of the school year. First, I knew that I could get through March because there was Spring break. I could do this, I told myself. Then I knew that April had Easter weekend in it, which would be an easy month because teachers went to church, met Jesus again, and came back to school giving us easy assignments like, “make a leaf collection,” or “write a poem about your mother.”

By the time they returned to their old personalities, it was May Day, basically a fun day on  the playground, and then after that there was only two weeks until the end of school. Those days were filled with tests that didn’t count for anything and afternoons spent in the hallway because of a tornado drill, or a tornado warning, or watching movies about tornados. In other words, I told myself school was a wash basically from March on.

Once my special formula kicked in, I began to think about nothing but summer things, which meant I thought about nothing but my favorite thing about summer – going to camp. For six weeks every summer from the time I was seven, my parents, God love them, shipped me off in a duffle bag to Wisconsin to live in a cabin with three other scary boys who looked like they’d been on a Navy SEAL team. Buzz haircuts, camo clothes, assassin-type pocketknives and 200-watt flashlights that could bring in a helicopter at a thousand paces. It didn’t matter. I loved camp. My cabin mates may be put in a strangle hold in my sleep but camp for me was the bomb.

We did all the normal things one thinks of at camp – the swimming, the hiking, the cook-outs, the over nights, building totem pole, telling ghost stories and all that, but there was also a lot down time in the course of six weeks, times when we sat around trying to figure out what to do with ourselves.

So, when we’d bored of comic books and playing crazy eights, we found easy entertainment in any number of insects that had made themselves at home in our cabin, bugs like horseflies and daddy long legs and June bugs. Because we were situated near a lake, the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, so there was a ton of them around also. While to an adult it wouldn’t seem like an insect would make a very good distraction, we were not adults. We were devious, slightly demented boys, a few Navy SEALs trying to find ways to outdo each other on any given day.

I think what began with a series of experiments on horseflies, for example, grew out of a revenge we felt for the huge red whelps they left in the small of our backs when they bit us – even through a t-shirt. We had no compassion for horseflies whatsoever. They were good for sticking a hook when we went fishing, but that was about it.

I think the next part of the story, the part where we extracted our revenge on horseflies, can be partly blamed on something one of us saw on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, a show narrated by Walt Disney, who managed to equate everything in the animal kingdom to insurance, an amazing feat when you consider the animal kingdom has little need for  any kind of insurance.

 I believe what aired in early June was an episode on amphibians, toads to be exact, and shortly inot the program, after Walt had explained Mutual of Omaha’s relationship with amphibians, there was footage of a toad snatching  a fly right out of midair, all in slow motion, which was new for TV at the time.

“Did you know,” one of my cabin mates began,  “that toads have tongues that are three feet long?! Yea, I saw one shoot out of a toad and grab a fly in slow motion on Wild Kingdom!”

“Three feet? No Way!” I blurted out, “I’ll get the toad, you guys get the fly! This is going to be great!” And off I went to the forest to find an amphibian, our hero in this story.

Back in the cabin, I plopped the toad down on our desk table, and the guys gathered around.

“Wait!  I said, “how are we going to keep the horsefly from flying away?”

Oh, that’s easy,” my friend Scott said, and, holding the fly between two of his fingers, quickly tore off its wings and placed the hapless horsefly down in front of the toad. With razor eyes that scanned its next meal, the toad sat motionless. The fly, on the other hand, actually looked kinda pale. I remember at that point hearing a slight ga-lump, similar to the sound a drop of water that hit you on your forehead. I think that was the moment when the three-foot tongue came out… but honestly, none of us ever saw  the tongue. One second the fly was there, the next second it was gone.

We four boys just stared at each other.

“Did you see anything? I asked the others.

“Nope, maybe we did something wrong,” Scott said, “Let’s try another fly.”

Rounding up a couple more horseflies, we quicky learned that a toad will only eat about seven happy meals before it runs out of steam, and we still hadn’t seen anything the infamous tongue from Wild Kingdom. We even rounded up a new toad and other choices like a June bug, an earthworm which was kind of dumb I thought, a daddy log legs, and alas, the catch of the day, a real live hornet.

Now this was going to be interesting, we thought. Like a Marvel comic. The Hornet versus the Toad.

Carefully removing the wings using tweezers, Scott placed it down in front of the toad.

What happened next can only be described as one of the grossest things I’ve ever witnessed, and mind you I was raised by a urologist, so I’ve seen a few gross things. The hornet disappeared and then gradually, we saw the long slimy worm-like blob of the toad’s tongue peel out of its mouth, a long pinkish roll of flesh like on TV, about three feet long. It kept coming and coming and untwirling across the table, and there buzzing at the very end of it, on the tip, was the hornet, stuck, yes, but driving its stinger in with a vengeance.

I don’t remember anything else except all of us running out of our cabin to get as many of our buddies to come and see this marvel of nature, the abominable spectacle of an unraveled toad’s tongue.  Sadly, by the time we had returned, the toad and the hornet had disappeared, presumably back out to the woods, leaving us with nothing more that a puddle of slime on our table.

Yet, in the back of my mind, I could hear the great Walt Disney speaking:

“In the Wild Kingdom, animals like the amphibious toad can never predict where their next meal is coming from. Here at Mutual of Omaha, we are here for you when resources like horseflies and hornets are scarce and times get tough.”

Then, I heard Walt Disney introduce a special insurance rate, one for toads, and one for hornet and… maybe even life insurance for that first mosquito that appears out on our porch, too early for its own good, sometime in March.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Killed a Moose in My Living Room

If you were raised around parents who thought the television was the beginning of the end of the world, you probably have an inner voice that put limits on your consumption of the shows, movies and series that are offered up. Nowadays, surrounded by any number of clever devices mimicking the television, we are only a stone’s throw away from yet another simulcast, videocast or telecast.  We offer up excuses, but a couple of minutes of something that catches our eye on the tube can quickly magnify into an entire afternoon.

Here at the Flounder residence, we reserve our screen time for an hour after dinner, around eight, when my wife and I converge in our basement, turn off our lovely world and turn on the TV. My wife calls this den our Honeymoon Suite. I call it the Den of Equality, but either way, one or the other of us is usually nodding off, bored with the choice we’ve made. And don’t say it’s because we are old and tired because that will ruin the entire Honeymoon atmosphere. Truth is, most of what’s on the boob tube is either too violent for or honestly, just more noise. 

Like most couples who watch TV together, we are often suckered into some show that looked good on the trailer, but for some reason quickly turned into three kinds of awful we would just as soon forget. For example, we occasionally will pick a perfectly nice mystery, one that looks like it has a clever detective, some cool twists, and maybe a humorous angle. Five minutes in, the crime scene will show too much detail, and then the detective starts picking at someone’s bodywith his ball point pen. Why would a detective look inside a lethal wound with a ballpoint pen? Don’t they have anything more specialized, like disposable tweezers or tongs? That’s it, my wife and I say, we ain’t doing it. So, we begin switching to other options, filing past this show or that one, trying out best to agree on one that won’t give us nightmares. 

And I don’t know what it is, but no matter how hard we try to find something we can both live with, somehow we always end up back on the same episode of the British Bake-Off. It’s the oddest thing, but suddenly there we are, right in there with the torts and pastries again. I swear, that show must have its own satellite orbiting earth because our TV goes right to it every time.How does that happen? Are we idiots? The same episode! It’s the one where the girl who looks slightly like Alice the housekeeper on the Brady Bunch has made a three-tiered Halloween cookie house out of something I never heard of called frangipane which caught fire when one of the judges tore off the chimney and ate it. I mean, it is fun to watch a couple of times, but not over and over again. Once you’ve seen a judge on a cooking show catch fire, you’re ready for something more substantial. So, off we go again, trekking through channels and aps, sort of cussing under our breaths, blaming each other for the other’s technical ineptitude, until one of us goes upstairs to refresh our yogurt. 

Recently, however, I stumbled upon a show that has us sitting on the end of our honeymoon couch. I found season eleven of Alone, the Arctic Circle, and it’s a doosey. I know for many of you this is old news, you’ve already seen it, you’ve been Alone fans for years and so forth, but this season of Alone takes us on survival in one of the most remote and harsh environments in the world, vast areas of frigidness, eons of glacial seas where temperatures drop to fifty below zero, and daylight last only a few hours a day. As most of you know, when you agree to go out on one of these Alone expeditions, every part of your mental and physical prowess is called on to survive the extreme conditions. For the last contestant standing, there is a half-million-dollar prize waiting; for the rest, their quest is often filled with tedious days of isolation and homesickness that wears them down and eventually makes them give up and go home. It is at that point, when a contestant cannot go on any further that they reach for their walkie-talkie and “tap out.” 

So far, as we watch this show, my wife and I have not been able to get through five minutes each night without hitting the pause button, and not because someone is picking through remnants of an animal carcass with a ball point pen. Truth is, we know we could not survive one day out there ourselves without having some life-threatening accident or mental breakdown. Full disclosure, we are the people you know that cannot find which end of a sleeping bag your feet go into. We are the couple that used 220 matches to light a Coleman stove, then drove to the nearest town for breakfast, so you can imagine anything more challenging on Alone would be just plain comical if we were there. 

Still and all, we do have some skills. We are really good at sitting in our honeymoon suite in our pajamas watching one contestant after another dropped off by helicopter in the upper reaches of Canada, somewhere between Russia and the North Pole. That is about as far as it goes though, and if it were me being dropped off, I would immediately jump out and break both ankles at which point I would be the first contestant to ever tap out in less than five minutes. 

Not these contestants. No-siree, Bob. They couldn’t wait to be dropped off in the middle of nowhere. When that happened, some of them actually did a little dance, a little skip-to-my-Lou, as if they’d already won the contest money! When I saw this I thought, settle down buddy, you’re frittering away calories here, calories you’re gonna wish you had later when all your squirrel meat is gone. 

However, when one of the survivalists was dropped out of the helicopter, he immediately sunk four inches straight down into a muddy riverbank and got stuck. Right off the bat, he couldn’t move, but it didn’t seem to bother him one little bit.

“Oh, what do you know, ” he said looking down, “I’m stuck and look there…there are wolf tracks here, and looks like there were, let’s see, yup, that’s a pack of thirteen of ‘em. Wow, they are running too. Wait, wait, no, no, they turned around right there, about five feet from where I’m stuck.”

If that were me, I know I’d be on my walkie-talkie.

“Yes, hello. Is this the pilot?” I’d say, crying, “It is? Oh, thank the Good Lord. This is Jeff Blunder and…yes, I know you just dropped me off. Is anything wrong? Wrong? Well, yes, you could say so. I’m tapping out. Yes, I knew you just dropped me off. And can you get back here kinda fast? I’m hearing a lot of what sounds like howling wolves nearby.”

Of course, as my wife and I continued to watch, Alone got even more interesting. Mr. Stuck- in -the-Mud continued, “Well, would you lookey der I see some fresh grizzly tracks right der with dapack of der wolves, yes I do, and would yuz look at that there, she’s got her little baby cub  withher.” 

At which time I turned to my wife and said, “Oh happy day, isn’t that special. Mamma grizzly with her grizzly baby, along with the largest pack of wolves ever recorded in North America.”

And notice here how my attitude has changed. Where once I was in deep awe and respect of these outdoorsman, and now I’ve taken on a sarcastic tone, kind of too-bad-for -you Mr. Canada.

“I love this,” I tell my wife using my new-found tone, “this is so outdoorsy, so natural. If. Was there maybe I’d get a selfie with all the wolves and grizzlies as they rip me from limb to limb, and we could put that in our family album for the grandkids. Then they’d have some memories of me out there on the outer peninsula, like part of the stylish jacket I got at the Eddie Bauer Outlet Store.”

You might remember in past episodes I described how I got my head caught in a sink, fell over my grocery cart, and caught my hair on fire while going the bathroom. If I cannot get through a day without almost killing myself in a civilized setting doing normal activities, I  know I wouldn’t last five minutes in a land that has never seen the footprints of another human. 

Yet, it is strange what happens to you in your comfy pajamas under the security of a warm blanket and a back massager. I, who cannot open a pocketknife without a screwdriver, am making comments out loud, freely making cracks and giving my expert opinion about everything these participants are doing. Where once I held had the utmost respect for these guys, rather suddenly, I have become, over the course of exactly two episodes, an expert in outdoor survival.  

“Oh, no, look at Mr. Canada,” I’ll say. “He’s out there fishing. What a big mistake! Why is he out fishing now? I would’ve built my shelter before getting that gill net in the river. And look at those storm clouds building in the west. Mr. Canada is gonna get hammered, and that fish net needs to be in deeper water.”

“Rookies,” my wife answers, sipping Tea from her Yeti, covered in an electric blanket, then sitting up: “Hey, I thought I heard something upstairs. Shhhh! Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” I reply.

“Did you hear a noise upstairs?”

“No,” I say, “It’s probably just the neighbor.”

“Did you lock all the doors before you came down?”  

“Can’t remember,” I answer, but I’ll go upstairs and check.”

But really, I know I’m not coming back down to watch anymore of Alone. I’m pretty sure I heard a helicopter off in the distance, and I’m going to tap out. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dixie Cups and the Pale Green Jar

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A week ago, my grandson Carter had his tonsils removed and since then his throat’s been like sandpaper. He’s enduring the temporary discomfort of swallowing, and even worse for him, the elimination from his diet of his favorite snack food, Russet potato chips. For the person who may not be up on potato chip culture, Russets are the burnt chips that didn’t make the cut with the other golden ones that came down the factory line. However, they’re too scratchy for a tender throat, and Carter is learning that he may have to take a pass if he wants his throat to heal.

When I had my tonsils out at the ripe old age of seven, I was told I could eat as much ice cream as I wanted. For a child, hearing that was like winning the nutritional lottery, and developed in me a deep transcendent, almost devotional love of ice cream. The memories of it’s cool and soothing consistency sliding past my absent tonsils still touches off a sensory holiday in my throat. Just to take full advantage of the situation, I insisted on eating it out of a glass bowl with a plastic spoon, and when you have surgery at seven years old, you get your way on things like that.

As the time for my surgery approached, my mother and father had a talk with me about what I could expect. My mom was a nurse, and my father was a surgeon, so there was plenty of medical information they could impart, probably too much. For example, my father used the word “extricate,” instead of “take out,” to describe the process of removing my little helpless tonsils and adenoids. I heard the word “extricate” as “extra cake,” which was the perfect partner for ice cream, and likewise, I misconstrued the word adenoids for asteroid, like the ones circling the home of my favorite cartoon family, the Jetsons. Anticipating ice cream and cake, and endless hours of cartoons, the upcoming removal of my tonsils really didn’t sound bad at all.

Be that as it may, I took in every word of the lecture, including how my tonsils serve to soak up bacterium, and why they are a culture for the germination of all kinds of diseases. As my parents went further and further into detail, I began to cower in the corner of the couch with my stuffed chipmunk, Alvin, a character from another favorite cartoon of mine, The Chipmunks.

Now, I began to worry for the first time about how my body works, specifically the parts that were going to be removed, my tonsils and my adenoids, and I worried the surgeon might take out my tongue also if he hadn’t slept very well the night before. As I was a rather imaginative kid, I also wondered whether I could see the diseases and germs growing in my adenoids, and whether they would look anything like the asteroids I’d seen on the Jetsons.

Being that my father was a surgeon and had a few privileges the rest of us don’t have at a hospital, I asked him if the doctor slicing out my tonsils out could save them for me so I could inspect them for myself. So, good to his word, my dad came home shortly after my surgery with my tonsils in a pale green laboratory jar.

“Had lunch with you doctor today,” he said, “and as requested, here they are, your tonsils!”

I turned the jar around slowly in my hand, looking for any signs of scurvy or rickets, then finally said, “They look like my big toes.”

Yet, the oval pink globs were nothing like I expected. For one, they were floating, and secondly, they came complete with blood vessels and flesh parts still connected, as if they could be reattached in my throat should I decide I wanted to have them put back in.

As a side bar here, I realize that graphic descriptions of the human body are disgusting to most adults. Yet, one must realize I was being raised by parents in the medical field, which made the use of anatomical details perfectly fair game. For example, it wasn’t unusual around our house to have a few kidney stones on the shelf as conversation pieces, or a pair of forceps and a couple of retractors on the dinner table, maybe a few urine samples on slides under a microscope in case we got tired of looking at cartoons.

And so, as I sat and stared at most of my throat floating in the jar, eating a bowl of ice cream I immediately thought of how cool it would be to take them to school for Show and Tell. Yes sir, I thought, I’ll take my tonsil to school, oh yes I will, get up in front of my entire class with my authentic hoarse voice and tell how I was put to sleep counting backwards from seventeen, for no reason I could think of, looking up at a man with a mask on and the next minute I was wide awake with a nurse handing me a bowl of vanilla ice cream!

As luck would have it, my healing and return to school fell right before the Thanksgiving break, a time when teachers were desperate for anything that might keep kids interested and occupied, a time when kids were tired of pilgrim worksheets, and making scarecrows out of paper plates and colorful pipe cleaners.

On the big day of Show and Tell, I kept my tonsils hidden in my lunch box, believing at the time that presenting a part of my body in a jar would be more dynamic if there was an element of surprise. Under my desk I had tonsil facts written out on index cards, and as I went over those, I tried not to pay any attention to the pigtailed girl showing and telling in front of me, Elke Der-Glekenhausen, who was talking in English and fake German, passing around various German desserts samples in dixie cups.

Und dis von,” she said, “is my favoreet. Das its ein Schokoladen Pfankuchen. It is so yummy, but in Germany they say schmackhaften! Und dis one ist ein ApfelStrudel, made from real Deutsche apfels my Großmutter sent over a month ago. Und dis one…und dis one… und dis one.” On and on and on she went, ad nauseum, little Miss Muffet, Fraulein Elke Der-Glekenhausen.

I didn’t think she’d ever quit, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many dixie cups in my life, then or since. Kids were taking three and four pfankuchens and strudel’s apiece and I was getting more and more nervous because I didn’t want to have wait another whole day before I got to present. So, I was trying to move her presentation along by passing my deutsche samples right over to Reggie, who I shared a desk with. He wore size large T-shirt, so he really didn’t need any extra desserts, but he was throwing them back as fast as I could hand them to him, as if he’d never eaten a square meal in his life. I thought my plan was working, but just as things looked like they might be winding down, Little Miss Muffet Elke began to sing! Loud! I couldn’t believe my ears!

Here I was, waiting patiently for my turn at Show and Tell, to show my unique anatomical abominations floating in a jar, had practice my speech, and copied notes on index cards, and found myself in the middle of a round of Edelweiss from the Sound of Music, the German version, which had just hit the movie screens that weekend.

“Edelweiss, Edelweiss, Jeden morgan Grüßt du mich, du mich, Edelweiss…” and then Elke, the Miss Muffet of Show and Tell, raised her hand like a conductor of a symphony and signaled others to sing along with her, and every kid in class began singing, softly at first, mostly because their mouths were full of various German desserts, but then fuller, and I looked over at Reggie with a Dixie cup raised in each hand and he was singing too, spitting out tiny crumbs of Kartufelln.

The whole scene hit a tender spot in me. Maybe I was malnourished, maybe I was still mildly depressed from my throat surgery, I’m not sure, but I took a bite of a Gesundheit frosted cookie, which melted on my tongue instantly and was better than any ice cream I had ever eaten. In fact, for the first time in two weeks, I felt no pain at all in my throat, and forgot all about telling anyone about the anatomy of a tonsil, how they soak up all the bacterium that pass down our throat. I began to hum along, and then sing quietly myself – strange, meaningless German words like danke and Heimlich Maneuver, lyrics that had no bearing on the song whatsoever, but German words that sounded very German with my husky, raspy, surgically impaired voice. The pale green jar I had in my lunch box that was poised to wow my audience on Show and Tell day, never made it out of my lunch box. Somehow, talking about my surgery didn’t seem appropriate right before Thanksgiving in a classroom full of Wunderkind whose stomachs were full of Spätzle und Schwartzwalder-kirschtorte from Deutschland. My tonsils would have to live to show another day.

Yet, they never did.

I found the green bottle stuffed away in an old box some forty seven years later and took them over to show my grandson just last week and we sat on the couch together, and I put my arm around him as I sang an incorrect version of Edelweiss, and he ate his fifth bowl of ice cream for the day while looking intently at the pale pink blobs that were still floating in formaldehyde.

Down by the Low and Cool

I walked out to the lower part of our property, along a pathway paved with fieldstone. There is cooler air around my ankles where the earth had been shaded all day by long blades of our monkey grass. This is the spreading kind, not the clump liriope, and it creates a flowing sea if left to wander freely. Only giant pavers have kept the pathway clear of this invasive plant, and I bend down to wave the trapped, cool air as if it were liquid, stirring the lacey spider webs that have sprung up overnight.

When I first planted the fifteen hundred bareroots throughout this section of my yard, a doubtful visitor laughed and asked me why I had planted rows of corn. The soil was rock hard and unforgiving but soon the rains of May sunk into the rhizomes, bringing up new blades everywhere. Like that tough soil, Adversity does not always take a shovel, but it is the very thing that builds our character.

After digging and digging, we know that the hard places in ourselves will stay that way until we face them with the right tools. We know that the difficult soil of our lives will stay only so long as necessary for God to accomplish what he will needs to in us. It may take a moment or a lifetime, but in the end, that area will become soft and pliable, and it will be easier for us to reap the hope we have planted.

 By the end of the first summer my backyard area was almost covered, and by the end of the next summer the area leading to my patio was thick with the tough, two-foot blades that would never have to be mowed again. It has taken a few seasons for the soil to become workable, but now I’m reaping the benefits. In late summer, the liriope produces dark purple seeds that smell like licorice if crushed. Gone is the groaning and pleading and bargaining with God for something better. This liriope, the not-corn of the unbeliever, is now swirling beautifully, moving, collaborating with a vortex of insects or a hawk that is watching from up in the pines. The roots are strong and spreading, and my field of lilyturf, as it is sometimes called, catches the slightest breeze that makes my garden seem like it is always moving.

In the twinkling of an eye, the evening begins its slow shuffle to nighttime, like a child who doesn’t want to go to bed.

“Ahhhh mom, do I have to. Just ten more minutes. Pleeeeeeze! I promise I’ll go right to bed,” the child begs.

A few birds are making their last flight across the yard to roost where the neighborhood night- cats will not disturb them. All day those same birds have rushed back and forth with tiny twigs and colored cloth, bits of trash and a receipt from Birds Unlimited. They vie for a spot by the pond for one last drink, and nervously rinse off before bedding down in their own country, the land of Woop Woop, where all the nightbirds go. Last are the hard-diving chimney swifts, the remarkable Jedi riders of Indian Summer, who thread the sky and dive down with their Wheewwwwww-yooooo- whoooo, wheeeww-whyooo – devouring a thousand mosquitoes in an hour before vanishing into the black skyline.

One pair of starlings is still working on their home twenty feet off the ground, squeezed behind a motion-detector light. The nest was unreachable, the lone object in the middle of a brick wall, a perfect hideaway to raise a hungry, chirping brood that appeared some weeks later. Yet, the high perch didn’t stop Mr. Grey Cat from pacing back and forth like a thief every night after the baby birds were born. Each time he did, the motion light was tripped, and the baby birds rustled in their nest, slipping perilously close to the edge. The cat was hoping for despair to take over, but Mom and Dad Starling said no to the flashing light and covered it with more sticks. They were not going to let fear steal their baby chicks or their hope. Mr. Grey Cat would have to find another spotlight. 

Now, as the world quiets down and the sky takes one more snapshot at the horizon, the flight paths of birds are taken over by fireflies, those luminary, magical little bugs that don’t bite or bother, but appear like stars before the stars come out. Their light is described by scientists as a cold light, as it is initiated by a mysterious enzyme, but for us who long for love like a firefly, we can see more warmth than cold, even if that warmth flashes for a moment. They are the lanterns of hope that lead us to another light, another firefly, not far away.

As kids, we stood in our backyards, watching for their tiny lights to flicker. We stood watching and guessing where one might appear next and, because we didn’t know better, we used their little lights as rings for our girlfriends, but those little lanterns soon flickered out just as quickly as our crushes.

At this hour, the sounds of delivery trucks are gone, and so too is their loud repetitious back-up warnings. The trucks never use the bright, yellow-striped spaces that have been reserved for them, and strangely, we aren’t allowed to use them either. Yet, all day long, barrel-chested delivery men have been jumping out of those trucks, hitting the ground like storm troopers and yelling, “NO one can park here! This zone is saved!” 

Along the back of my property is a line of trees and maintenance crews trim them on their smoke breaks for something to do. There used to be twenty of those trees, full reaching, but now they have been whittled down to only several tall white pines. Those two trees stand vigil in their own unmarked space, are bullied and pushed around, trimmed to within an inch of their lives, but they still stand quiet and full in a space that is reserved for no one but them.

Through our front door I can see straight through into the back yard. I have opened that front door many times, and let the events of the world enter, and let hope escape right out the back. When I do that, my living room becomes full of busyness and nonsense, and my kitchen is crowded with hogwash and discord. Like the yellow-marked parking spaces, fear becomes a zone that is too loud and selfish. There is no room for anything else with fear – it can quickly push our quiet confidence further towards the back door.

It is so much better to let hope in first, through the front door where it can be greeted and have plenty of room to move around. Soon, every room is filled with laughter, and the grey cats have slunk away. It is a lesson we learn over and over again and it is this: Hope never crowds a room, it only makes room for more hope.

Hope becomes the parent starlings who bravely guards its young chicks. Hope erases the yellow lines that tell us no. It lets the cat out the back door, the thief that tried to mix in with the crowd, the killjoy. Hope becomes the firefly that looks for love and healing, and who among us does not want healing in all of our rooms? Who among us is letting the events in the front door and hope go right out the back? Is it the delivery man, the storm trooper who pounds the pavement, doesn’t use the space given to him, yet doesn’t allow anyone else to use it either? It is very easy to allow ourselves to hoard our goodness, and make it known to others that we have something they don’t. Yet that is not hope.

Soon, bedtime will follow behind the last church chimes I am hearing a couple of blocks away. They meet the sun going down and together they whisper, “day is done.” Listening to the chimes, I am reminded that our stay here on earth is brief, that I have used up one of my precious days again, and that I must retire inside for the night, and let “the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees and the moon up above” do the same.

My footsteps pass the chorus of liriope that sways in rhythm with all that is good. Back and forth the tall grass moves and swishes and masks my old-bone noises as I walk. I reach down and once again swirl the air that has been trapped down low by the hard pavers – down by the low and cool. Hope has been there all the time and hope always makes room for more hope.

I don’t have to feel like an outsider though, prodded and poked out of my good character. I don’t have to listen to someone who believes that corn is growing in my backyard. I do not have to fall prey to the grey cats and yellow lines. Hope, that enemy of fear, does not abandon any of us and is waiting just ahead, and stands in good company with the moms who are letting their children stay up for just a bit longer.

We can reach for hope, even if it is just a sliver, and let it follow us in the front door. It will keep the exhaust of a passing motorcycle out. Hope has that kind of power and fills us with fresh air every time. Inside and out, it is always there making room, down by the low and cool.