Yuletide Aisle Dis-Ease

The holiday season is creeping up on us like the second hand in a scary movie. No one hears the ticking sound until the camera zeroes in on the gothic metal clock on the wall and the last few seconds tick off in slow motion. Will we make it out of the holiday Twilight Zone before the clock strikes twelve?

I can answer that with one word, Jane. NO. We won’t make it. We will reschedule our schedules and retime our timing until we are exhausted from rearranging our arrangements. We’ll convince ourselves we can go about our regular business and add three extra layers of life on top of everything else and still make our self-imposed deadlines. It won’t be easy, and it won’t look pretty, but we will succeed, at some point, in overdosing on obligations, guilt, and sugar plums dancing in our heads.

I have one piece of advice about the holidays to share before you get revved up with your seven swans a-swimming, and before you realize that there is a month-long holiday season that is beginning to hover ominously. If you heed my advice, you may make it through this month with some sanity, and it pertains to a little-known but often felt ailment called Yuletide Aisle Dis-Ease. This is an affliction you won’t be able to find in any medical book, a condition that has an especially strong presence when you are running in and out of stores and crossing off items on your shopping list.

Here is the set-up. You’ve made a quick dash into the grocery to pick up some banana nut bread for a coffee breakfast you volunteered for. That big scary second hand on the Hitchclock  is ticking, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK (like that), in your head because your day has already been pressure packed with a to-do list a mile long. You enter the store, grab a cart and hose it down with antiseptic lotion, round the corner and sideswipe someone you haven’t seen in at least ten years.

Jane, I can tell you in one word if this is going to end well. NO.

The problem here is timing. When you run into an old friend at the beginning of your race though the store, it is like trying to stop for a yield sign. You were prepared to yield, but not to stop. In fact, you can’t stop. The yield sign isn’t meant for stopping and neither are grocery stores. But all injuries aside from the near cart pile-up, you exchange low impact hugs as well as buckets of inessential information. Both of you are talking simultaneously, as if you both just stepped out of an airplane together and have only 42 death defying seconds to get every word out.

This is when you must stop, grab a breath, and get a grip on yourself. You need a strategy. You must face the reality that you are going to run into this same person in almost every aisle after you say your goodbyes, because they are on the same holiday grocery aisle skydiving freefall as you are. Like you, they are also running late, feeling pressured, and will be trying to beat you to the next aisle so they don’t have to run into you again and have to think of a new way to say the things that were already said when you both stood catching up on the last decade of relational silence three minutes ago.

The ground is coming up fast on this fall. Jane, this is very dangerous territory, so breathe, get a grip on yourself, think ahead and follow this critical rule.

 Don’t ever use up your best goodbye in Aisle One.

You are going to need those witty sound bites again in the next aisle. Remember: Every aisle in that store holds the potential of another possible encounter with this same person, which will be even more conversationally awkward if you already used up your best goodbye. For example, don’t say: “Goodbye. It was great to see you. Let’s have coffee sometime when things slow down. I’ll text you my number. Ok, now. Take Care. Yes, love you too! Have a great holiday! Bye!”

Instead, just say, “See ya in the next aisle,” and peel out.

If you don’t, everything from this point on just gets worse. If you run into them again, which you will, you’ll be picking out something embarrassing like a tube of head lice shampoo, or hemorrhoidal cream. They won’t be able to talk about that of course, and since you already talked about everything under the sun in Aisle Three, their only recourse is to look down at their shoes and shuffle their feet around in circles as if they lost something down there. What other options do they have?

That’s the MOMENT! That moment is when you know you have Yuletide Aisle Dis-Ease, and there isn’t anything you can do about it. It’s the lockjaw of social encounters. You already have used up your best goodbye. You have shown your sweet holiday side. You’ve used up any reserves of Christmas spirit, all on this one person. Your shopping trip is now stuck in an irretrievable time warp right before your eyes. There is one second left on the Hitchclock. In your head you are thinking of abandoning your cart right there in Aisle Ten and getting your banana bread tomorrow. And you ARE wishing you had head lice instead of this Aisle Dis-Ease.

Say yes to planning ahead! YES! Save those nimble goodbyes until Aisle 4 or 5. Save them! Have a few in your pocket ready like the pull chord on a parachute. They will soften your fall during this holiday season when life gets insanely busy and long-lost friends who said they’d call but never did pop up suddenly like cardboard cutouts of Buddy the Elf. And when they do, don’t say “Son of a Nutcracker! Is that you?”

That’s the one you save for the deli section.

What You Bring to the Table This Thanksgiving

As family members buzz across the country to join their relatives and our country grinds to a crawl with Thanksgiving festivities, I’ve been asking people what long-standing traditions they practice as they gather around the table, perhaps something that had been passed down generation to generation and has now become part of their family rituals. One friend of mine told me that every year her family makes homemade noodles together and then puts them on top of their mashed potatoes at mealtime. I could make an argument for placing those two items in separate areas on my plate, but that is what defines tradition in their family. It’s part of this uniquely American gala called Thanksgiving, a time to rekindle what brings our nearest and dearest closer together, and in one case that means realizing that if noodles and mashed potatoes can get along on a plate for a couple of hours, everyone else can too. But also, I think it’s a time to exhibiting our gratefulness by revisiting our best table manners as we sit across from each other, thankful for all the blessings that have come our way in the past year.

If you were taking a course on table manners, and there was a final exam, it would be held on this holiday, Thanksgiving Day. While pencil and paper would not be present, passing the course would depend not on how well you crammed the night before, but how well you included the basic social graces your parents taught you, those simple rules of etiquette that score a lot of points on the final report at dinnertime. I won’t say I flunked the manners course as I was growing up, but my score wasn’t anything to brag about either.

One year, my brother and I decided to stage a contest at the table. We thought it would be fun to create volcanoes with our mashed potatoes, fill them up with gravy, carefully constructing a system of channels that allow the gravy to slowly leak out like lava onto the villages we had constructed with our other food. This would of course fall into the category of playing with our food, but we thought it was worth the risk to watch a natural disaster unfold on our dinner plate.  As our game progressed and the gravy ran off into the landscape of our meal, the winner, whose volcanic ash reached the edge first and would yell out, “Please evacuate immediately! Grab your children and run for your lives!”

That attempt at establishing a yearly Bender volcano tradition died a quick death, followed by a moment of silence, and the loss of our TV privileges for the rest of our lives or until we turned twelve, whichever came first.

All seriousness aside, I was fortunate as a kid to have a grandmother living with us, and she loved to cook year-round, but especially at Thanksgiving. In fact, I still have all of her newspaper clippings and hand-written recipe cards stored in a huge plastic box for every kind of dish under the sun, most of which included a couple of sticks of butter in the list of ingredients. And as if adding a couple of pounds of butter weren’t enough, it was common practice at our table to have more butter readily available on the table and a chunk of it on your plate as backup in case you experienced a butter-low and bottomed out during the meal. Under those circumstances, and given what we know now about cholesterol, I don’t know how my grandmother lived to be ninety-four. There is some evidence that she didn’t, but actually died several times before from butter overdoses, once at 37 and once at 72, but was revived both times using a now antiquated technique referred to as marginal compressions.

Obviously, our family threw out the healthy eating rulebook when Thanksgiving rolled around and while it sounds cheesy, I believe our parents balanced out all that thick cooking with equal amounts of laughter and love, and naturally, large portions of manners. The reminders to behave at the table were often summed up in old-fashioned sayings, sayings that made little sense to me at the time, such as “If you wear a hat at the table, you’ll die in a stable.” Every time I heard that, I visualized a horrible accident where I fell off a haystack in a horse stable and impaled myself on a pitchfork, only to find myself looking up at my grandmother, who simply looked down at me and said, “I tried to tell you but you had to learn the hard way, didn’t you?”

Respectfully, many of those old rules for civility still hold court with my family today as we sit down for the meal and let those etiquette tips whisper in our ears.  And notice I didn’t say “plopped down for the meal.”  It seems that current tradition supports the notion of landing on your dinner seat as if tossed from an airplane, which would fall into the category of skydiving, not table manners. In order of succession, we were not allowed to sit down at all until my father, the breadwinner, was seated and after that, the women. That sitting order is a lost art now, falling by the wayside into a set of forgotten mores that made eating a civilized activity, where knives, for instance, were balanced across the back of the plate after each use, and not laid back down on the placemat between bites.

While a more rickety construction of cultural changes have bent many of the old rules on table decorum, I’m now glad for the mandatory class I enrolled in every time I came to the table and waited before taking my first bite until my father picked up his silverware. While I did not always adhere to all of the regulations, good manners created a language of gratefulness and were a silent way of recognizing all the goodness that was laid out before us. It meant that civility would rule, meaning that no one would have the power to turn the dinner gathering into some kind of big-time wrestling match where etiquette was thrown clear of the ring for a cheap laugh.

As I was on the receiving end of the teaching, mealtime could at times seem very stiff and formal, a lot of hoopla over nothing. Both my mother and father did a lot of correcting and redirecting that ultimately developed an appreciation in me for what it takes to bring a meal to the table. While I didn’t like being told nine times to get my elbows off the table, chew with my mouth closed, and put my napkin on my lap, over time I began to understand that if someone was taking time to do the grocery shopping, prepare the food and present it, the very least I could do was to bring my best manners to the table and leave any slovenly habits I’d developed somewhere else.

Perhaps you are part of a Thanksgiving meal that looks more like a Viking reunion – where licking your fingers is normal, and huge bites of turkey are stabbed as if it the turkey was still alive. Perhaps the blessing at your home, if said at all, sounds like “Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat.” However, by the time the sweat equity of cooking had poured itself into the marathon of overnight baking and broiling it was expected that we kids would try a bite of each type of food even if we didn’t like it, and not expect any seconds on our favorite dish until everyone had their first helping.

Did I like being corrected? No, but I see the pay off now as I mourn the loss of decency, replaced by people on their phones, reaching across the table for more food, and chasing their food around their plate with a knife as if it were dirt on a construction site. It makes me wonder how digestible their actions are when the meal is over and they go out into the world.

Manners, when we decide to bring them to the table, become the social glue that holds those tasty Thanksgiving casseroles together and demonstrate our gratefulness, good fortune and good bounty. As we lay our napkins on our laps and wait our turn for the favorite dish to come around the table, we avoid mocking the hard work that went into all the preparations. No doubt, you’ll get enough food this Thanksgiving, but your social graces and good manners will instill a silent but powerful message to those seated next to you of what thankfulness looks like and perhaps even establish some new traditions that will last longer than just one meal.

And one more thing…I would love to hear what table manner your parents instilled in you that held you in good stead as a grown-up. Send those gems to me and I’ll share them with my listeners next week on Knee Deep. There are some funny ones out there, and some that are written in stone, but regardless, send me the details! Until then, Happy Thanksgiving to you, my gracious fans, and I promise you this year, I’m going to refrain from making that mashed potato volcano. I don’t want to have to evacuate our family when the gravy spills over and overtakes the sweet potatoes.

Either Way You Slice It

I must admit I have been so confused about the identity of the pumpkin that over the years I have both extolled its great qualities one minute, then lambasted its merits the next. Listeners that have been privy to my stories about pumpkins, have been witness to the times when the leader of the Pumpkin Nation, Mr. Pumpkin, has railed on me for what he has called, “the ruthless and insensitive slurring of the pumpkin family, which is rooted in long-standing moral fiber and of course, high-quality topsoil.”

While I have not heard from Mr. Pumpkin in two years, I have a sneaking suspicion he is still angry at me due to my comments about his inadequate taste. This time of year, I am particularly sensitive. I believe Mr. Pumpkin has positioned his carved cousins everywhere I go, particularly on porches, where they can spy on me, and monitor my every move. Messages are then sent to him using a rarely used font called Gurmuhki Sandham Bold, a cryptic font that can only be decoded by pumpkin decoders at Pumpkin Headquarters.

Lest you listeners are taking all this lightly, let me remind you that this pumpkin family of Cucurbitaceous includes some 965 members that, if lined up next to each other, would circle planet Earth nine times, no small feat for a mushy carbohydrate that still hasn’t quite decided whether it is a fruit or a vegetable. Infrared satellite imaging has indicated an interconnection of family roots just below the earth’s surface, creating an intercontinental pumpkin communication system far exceeding anything scientists thought possible. From that system, a vast population of some 150 million pumpkins are produced and carved each year in our country, or one pumpkin for every two and half people. That half person, a tragic mathematical anomaly, would explain why so many pumpkins are never fully carved, and remain half-finished carved pumpkins with just one eye, or a half-carved mouth that has just a few teeth. I would mention some of the other deformities, but I run the risk of having my phone tapped or being followed in the produce section when I shop for melons.

The first time I became aware of the power of Pumpkin Nation was when my car broke down in Checker Saddle, Montana and I had to stay a night at Annie’s Brickyard Truck Stop, a motel and diner which according to a nearby billboard, had the best pumpkin pie east or west of the Continental Divide. For those of you who are geographically challenged, the Continental Divide is a boundary that divides North America’s river systems, with each side eventually emptying into separate seas. Reportedly, if a raindrop fell on the west side of the divide, for instance, it would end up in the Pacific Ocean. I don’t personally know how it would do that without stopping in Las Vegas to see Elvis, but that is the theory. Rain falling on the other side, however, flows east, stopping to flood an intersection near our home every time there is a downpour, and then eventually flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.

Interestingly, Annie’s Truckstop Diner was built squarely on the Continental Divide, which means that there naturally will be some interesting encounters with customers, and pumpkins there. While taking their seat on a stool at the bar, these patrons order a piece of Annie’s pumpkin pie, the most neutral tasting of all pies, and after taking their first bite, become anesthetized to any strong feelings about anything one way or the other. The service is not that great, really, and the view from the diner is not that scenic either, but the blandness of Annie’s pumpkin pie makes up for all that. Customers who come in wound tighter than a Swiss clock, step on the Continental Divide, have a piece of pie, and detach from their rough and tumble world.

Picture, for example, if you will, a piece of pie being served to an elderly couple who just stumbled into Annie’s. They are exhausted from traveling in their rented RV, and their partials hurt from sucking on too much hard candy. They dovetail into their booth, and begin eating their soft pumpkin slice, looking more and more relaxed as if they just entered a jacuzzi, floating in bubbles and ready to take on the next leg of their trip, a grueling nine-hour marathon to the flats of Iowa. It’s the pie of course that does that, but it is also the idea that while they were eating the world’s most mushy and agreeable desert, they were enjoying it while sitting on the continental divide, with no worries about falling off the mental deep end either way.

Apparently, people like that come in from across the nation all the time at Annie’s, knowing that the pumpkin pie has not been baked with any commitment towards either side of the line, or on behalf of one ocean or another. Folks that normally could not stand to even look at each other – are perfectly content to pull up a stool and order a piece of completely objective and uncomplicated pumpkin pie, pie that does not stand out in any way by taste or form or consistency and have conversations free of histrionics or drama. These people are in the middle of a carb high, a euphoric pumpkin haze that was documented by Cucumberly Ross in her landmark book, The Five Stages of Pumpkin Recovery.

So well-known is the diner’s reputation that Annie’s was recently offered up as a negotiating location after a recent statewide teacher strike. Both parties arrived, ate their pie and ironed out their differences in forty-five minutes.  The state agreed to put in more dry erase boards and give teachers Christmas Eve and Christmas day off. On their side of the Continental Divide, teachers agreed not to be so cranky when a child raised his hand for the fourteenth time, and both parties wiped the pumpkin pie off their lips with napkins that had a capital A printed on them, shook hands, and walked out laughing, telling jokes about how back in the day schools had only one fire drill per year.

Can you see now how a stop at the diner for a piece of pumpkin pie held this kind of magic? One day early last Spring, a biker couple sped into the diner’s gravel lot in a cloud of flying dust, came to an abrupt halt, and began making snarly comments to one another even before they walked through the diner door and let the unbiased nature of the Annie’s pie work its miracle. A sudden rainstorm came up, unusual for the area, and somehow, although the details aren’t clear, the angry bikers were washed down separate sides of the Continental Divide, eventually being carried to separate oceans to cool off. When they made their way back to Checker Saddle and to Annie’s again, calmer temperaments prevailed and they allowed themselves to eat the tasteless and uninspiring pie first before they spoke another word to each other.

Annie herself commemorated their decision by framing a picture of them sharing a piece, a picture that hold a proud spot back in the kitchen behind the oven. The Divide, coupled with the pumpkin pie, has that effect on people who use their words sparingly and eat first before spouting off opinions about how this or that ought to be or should be and could be, and give each other the what-for and why-not and Bob’s-your-uncle, and so forth and so on ad infinitum. Burst of anger just are not necessary when you sit at the capitol of stability – Annie’s Truckstop – with a plate of overly palatable pumpkin pie.

Be that as it may, I recently have had to confront my whole belief system on pumpkins, and although it has taken some time to come around, I have come to believe that pumpkin pie does have distinguishing merits beyond just its affable, monotonous nature. Recently a photograph came into my possession which shows me at the age of five, gorging myself on a canned version of pumpkin. It appears as if very little of the dish made it into my mouth, which I took as evidence that I had an eating disorder of some kind, yet I must admit that seeing myself at such a young age, vulnerable yet unmannerly, covered with orangey-brown crusty pie goop…well…frankly, I was flooded with emotions. Clearly, I had stuffed back a lot of pumplings, short for pumpkin feelings, over the years, that I am only now coming to grips with.

So, many years later, leaning back in my booth there in Checker Saddle, Montana with my triangular desert, I thought of Mr. Pumpkin, an old adversary, and hoped he was doing well. I had not heard from this leader of the Pumpkin Nation, as I said before, in almost two years and I had been very careful not to say anything negative about him. I had assumed he and his constituency – the gourds, melons, and zucchini – had moved on to bigger pastures, that he had forgiven me for references I had made on previous podcasts about pumpkin spice, pumpkin candles, pumpkin mathematical formulas, and one comment in particular, a slam about talk show hosts that wore puffy pumpkin sweatshirts.

Looking through the local newspaper, The Innocuous Herald, I read that both presidential candidates had bypassed Checker Saddle on their campaign trail, and therefore missed an opportunity to eat some pumpkin nothingness at the last stop you can make for miles in this part of Montana. They both could have sat for hours, and not only found nothing to argue about, but they would have left the diner with a new continence, an orange glow, as if they have been worshiping in a pumpkin field all day, praying for the future ripening of the next generation of pumpkins.

“Have time for a piece of pie?” Annie would have said to them, as they entered the diner.

“Time? Pie? Oh, well, gosh, yes, we do. I’ve heard it’s very, very good here,” they both would have answered as they sat down in a booth.

Then there’d be a misty warmth, not dominating, but a delicate, trickling waft that might smell of nutmeg. Its omnipotence would drift upwards, not to the left or right, but straight up, because at Annie’s Truckstop, this most blasé desert, inert pumpkin pie was being baked in the oven. Annie would then serve them each a piece, and their plates would slide silently across the table, uncommitted, neither east nor west, but directly on the continental divide.

Happy 102nd and Climbing, Dad!

In the wee hours of the morning last Tuesday, we learned of our country’s new president, and although there were still a few states left to weigh in, all the hoopla of rallies, and slogans and posters was fading into the background of new leadership. As it happened, my adrenaline was  burning like a newly lit birthday candle as my own father, leader of our family, turned 102 years old the day after the election. He had seen 18 different presidents come and go in his over one hundred years, and although he couldn’t remember what any of them had done with their four or eight years in office, he did mention the time President Regan’s dog, an Irish Setter named Peggy, squatted on the White House lawn to do her business. As a urologist, my dad noticed things like that. Well, Happy 102nd Birthday Dad, and welcome everyone else to Knee Deep, episode 83. I’m reprinting an essay I wrote about him several years ago when he turned one hundred, an essay that gives credence to his role as a soldier, a father, a grandfather and now a great, great grandfather and one I think is worth republishing given the historic nature of this week in our country. For more stories and glories, visit IG @authorjeffbender or go to my website at jeffmbender.com. This episode is dedicated to all the loyal and brave leaders of our government who keep us safe and allow me to have the freedom to even have this podcast. Thanks, and Happy Birthday Dad!

When I was in college, I went to hear a speaker named Tom Hayden, a political activist. Hayden was thought of as kind of a kook at the time, speaking about the blunders of the Nixon administration, and against America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. He made a comment during his lecture I did not expect to hear from a man who had spent his life rebelling, and the comment stuck with me ever since. In describing a demonstration where he and other protesters were surrounded by American tanks that had their muzzles pointed down at their sit-in, he came to grips with his own anger and realized he didn’t like himself very much.

I’m paraphrasing here, but in essence Hayden said this: “Many of you sitting out there can’t stand your parents. You don’t like who they are and what they stand for. I can tell you, that day when I was looking down the barrel of a tank, I realized that whatever I was so angry about wasn’t my parents’ problem. I was my problem, and if I didn’t learn to forgive my father or mother, I would never learn to like myself, because in the end, we are all the products of our parents, and the sooner we come to the end of who they are and start looking at who we are, the sooner we can start making a difference.”

That was the moment I realized I didn’t like my father very much either, or myself.

If we are smart, we go through life keeping the best of what we have learned from our parnets and not dwell on our own mistakes. Those of us who choose to ignore our errors, however, risks dragging our anger into the future for the next generation to deal with. Our blunders, when ignored, are dumped in the corner like so much dirty laundry and left there stinking until they unwearable.

How do we learn from our past and let go of it at the same time? We do so by taking time to look both backwards at the things our parents taught us, and forward at the same time, like Tom Hayden did. At some point, a healthier world must do the same thing, that is, look in both directions to accurately see where it is going. If we can take that stance, of looking at ourselves in the middle, and press forward, we will be able to take responsible for cutting off the dangerous cycles of the past, reload the washing machine of history so to speak, and try a more thorough rinse cycle on ourselves.

We may begin with a dangerous assumption that our independence and courage will fix the world, but if we are taking a close look at our parents and who they are, we learn that our interdependence, relying on each other, makes the world better. We can try to live without looking at our shadow, but inevitably, as we stand motionless, we will realize we have become one dimensional without it, with no history of the darkness or the light that got us here. It is our history that marks our past – is the best and the worst of what we have done thus far – and it is best to pay attention to it before we too are looking at a tank looking back at us.

I have only seen my father cry one time, and that was after the funeral of his mother. I have no doubt that my father wanted to cry when one of his patients died during surgery, or when he was alone, serving out his military stint in Korea, but other than that one time, I have never witnessed his tears. When I was very young, I once ask my grandmother why my dad never cried. Her answer, which made a strong impact on me, is that he didn’t have time to cry.

 From that answer, it would be a mistake to think that he led a charmed life, that throughout his lifetime, there was not much cause to cry. His history tells a different story. Before Dad was ten years old, he had lost his only brother to muscular dystrophy, a fact that may have established his resolve to become a doctor. My father also watched the early passing of his mother from the fog of a tragic mental illness, and he tried to love his distant and dismissive father who held everyone at arm’s length. My dad was also deeply saddened when Gary, his oldest son, died at fifty from a sudden heart attack and left him with a burden of guilt both as a doctor and a father. Many times, I’m sure, he has held himself responsible for not securing a healthy future for Gary, but I have not seen my dad cry.

In the story of how my dad conducted himself, I do not see a man that was so callous that he could not cry, but, like those of his generation, a man that had seen so much pain that the outpouring of emotions were not a luxury he could allow himself. When President Kennedy stated, “It is not what your country can do for you, it is what you can do for your country,” my father was already looking forward to a place where our best history was in front of us, and trusting those inalienable rights spoken of in America’s declaration. His was not from a generation that whined and cried. It was a generation whose survival would not come by way of spilt milk as the world became unhinged by ruthless dictators, diseases, and great depressions. Men did not cry together as much as they pulled together, they did not fuss as much as they held on, and they did not crusade as much as they went into combat.

My dad was a witness to the loss of personal freedoms in the hopelessness and hollowed eyes of North Korean prisoners indoctrinated to believe that human life is completely expendable and worthless. Framed in his study is a written statement, conveying the distressing nature of communist ideology:

“As an American doctor serving in Korea my assignment has been serving Communist prisoners of war for many months and giving medical support. In spite of the hazardous nature of this work, the task proved to be the most revealing experience of my life. I have been able to work in intimate contact with an enslaved people who are the products of a communist dictatorship providing for me a vivid contrast with our democratic ideology.

One notices that propaganda had so entwined their minds in the roots of suspicion and antipathy that many refused medical care and died or suffered severe complications even when they could see all about them the compatriot lives that had been saved by the skill and sincerity of Americans.

Justice was wielded through kangaroo courts. Prisoners who showed disobedience, dissention or the slightest suggestion of reluctance to accept the Communist doctrine or purposes, were often bludgeoned or stabbed to death by their leaders.

The attitude toward others was rebellious and aggressive; cooperativeness was replaced by unreasonable demands. Agreements were made to be slyly violated. These men lived in an atmosphere of mutual distrust, with the curse of fear as the chief instigation for their actions.

Their only God was their leader, their only religion Communism. One noted a complete loss of individualism; These people could no longer think for themselves. They became automatons, puppets to be easily moved into destructive or suicidal actions by the capricious strings of their leaders. So immune to the slavery had they become, that is separated from their leaders their spirits withered like a leaf separated from it stem.

As the months passed, I came to realize that in the past I had accepted American citizenship with smug naivete; but that in the future I would regard it with the deepest respect and humility. I had learned by sharp contrast that the preservation of individual character and integrity and respect was a most cherished possession of Americans. Freedom of worship of a God and religion of our choice is a unique privilege not enjoyed by the enslaved peoples of the world. I had learned that justice according to the whims of a dictator or excited mob results in death; that “justice for all” is a percept only of a free nation. I had learned that government structures built on sophistries, fear, and guile result in personal degradation and the ultimate results border on slavery.

And finally, I had learned that our ultimate happiness as Americans was a function of valuable heritages of freedom and justice and inviolate respect for individual human dignity. I am proud and thankful for my American citizenship.”

When dad wrote that in 1952, he did not know his future. If any of us make it to one hundred years old, like he has, it may be because we don’t give ourselves the luxury of crying when the proverbial barrel of a tank is pointed at us. In our longest season, when our own sun is sinking, the one where our lives cast the longest shadow, we will be able to stand firm as my dad did and know the difference between right and wrong, between evil and good, between adversity and triumph. We will be forward looking, as my dad has been his last one hundred intrepid years, and not give in when darkness is the easier path to take. Rather, we will walk forward as he did, in the light of a brighter future, with an “inviolate respect,” the same one that determined my father’s legacy, and then know that it can be our legacy also.

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are!

 “I am out with lanterns looking for myself.” – Emily Dickinson

Ever since my grandkids were old enough to fill a diaper, I’ve been getting to know them better by practicing a little ritual with them. It starts with the simple notion that as humans we have a natural desire to be recognized and acknowledged. Even as grown adults, as we play our own version of the game of hide and seek, we eventually want someone to look under the proverbial bed and find us. We crave are own space but we also have the innate desire to be around other people, and more importantly, to be verified and confirmed for who we are. We can be an island for a short amount of time, but as we were reminded of so vividly during Covid, our fierce independence brought out some deleterious mental side effects. So, this business of being near one another is a push-pull phenomenon. We need our own areas, our “personal space,” but we also don’t want to feel that we are alone either.

Growing up with two other siblings, when noise reached fever pitch and tempers were short around the house, one of my parents could be heard bellowing, “Can we have some peace and quiet around here!” Hearing that voice of authority, all three of us kids would get quiet and slink away, usually outside to play basketball until dinner time. Funny thing about that slinking, though. Inside the house, one of our parents began missing our company. I know they did, because we could look through the windows and see our mom and dad talking and gesturing, kind of intensely, and not really looking like they were enjoying their precious peace and quiet. It seemed, at least from our perspective, that they were the ones who were being loud and temperamental.

And guess what happened? In short order, at least one but usually both of them would come outside with us, those little hellions that only moments before had been the cause of the crises.  Dad would dive into the basketball game, which we had only just started when we saw them start to come outside, and my mom would walk amongst us passing out carrot sticks. I never understood the carrot thing, but apparently, she had learned through an issue of Better Homes and Gardens that carrots provide a wonderful re-bonding experience for families who are experiencing stress.

And so it was. We all had rejoined the family game. Where before we had gone hiding, each of us had shown our ID at the door of the family unit and found our way back into the show.

Earlier, I mentioned a ritual I have with our two grandsons, where I teach them what it looks like for me to recognize who they are. It begins when I appear at their door and anticipate that hug that all grandparents love. expect a hug. However, that doesn’t always pan out the way I would like.

Let’s say I’ve just walked in the door to their house and the kids are wild and crazy, running around like a herd of wildebeests on the African Plains of Instability. After a while, when they sort of burn themselves out, they wander over to me, and begin explaining everything that’s happened lately, including their latest toilet habits or when they tried to eat their cereal out of the dogfood dish.

They are still basically uncontrollably excited as kids are want to be, and it’s obvious that I’m not going to get that hug, which is a horrible thing for a grandpa. At this time, according to my ritual, I do nothing and say nothing but stand there, looking out into space as if they don’t exist at all in my world. I take that position because I know a secret about my grandkids. I know that eventually they will not be able to cope with not being recognized, that my lack of attention will eventually drive them batty. This is where things get interesting.

At this time, I simply look over to my wife or to their mother and ask, “Have you seen Cash or Carter? I haven’t seen them anywhere. The Cash and Carter I know always give me a hug. Hmmm,” I say, “I wonder what happened to them?”

Well, you can imagine what happens next… They come in for that hug like a couple of F-14’s on a mission from God. I mean, it works every time. Admittedly, it took a few times to get them trained, a couple of visits ignoring them, a few blank stares and so forth, but they did eventually learn that until they hugged me, nothing else much was going to happen. They began to recognize me to be the hugger I knew they could become. And the significance, I think, of what has become kind of a game in our family, is that now when I arrive at their house and begin with “Do I know you?”, they come right to me like wildebeests at a watering hole.

In her book How to Disappear, Akiko Busch describes in beautiful soliloquy the need for invisibility in our modern world where networking and wireless dialogue has made it almost impossible to be lost. Throughout her book she intimates that where once we could safely retreat and eventually be safely found, we now find it almost impossible to be invisible even for a short while. She follows that it is important for humans to have the capacity, and more importantly the freedom, to both be there and not be there.

Reading Busch’s chapter on imaginary friends, I had the sudden recollection of my childhood companion and protector, Davy Crockett. Perhaps it was the popular TV series that inspired me, but I had long conversations with the “king of the wild frontier” as I set out down the street with my play-rifle and coonskin hat, loaded for bear. Like most kids who have an imaginary friend in tow, I used both voices in my neighborhood excursions – “the me voice” and “the Davy voice.” Unknown boundaries that could never be tamed in my own unfinished mind, were not so scary when my frontier companion, Davy, could be sent out ahead to scout the unknown, then report back to me. He was unquestionably loyal, fearless and adaptable to every “treacherous” adventure.

Who are the people that recognize us then? That depends on what your priorities are. If we continue our most important relationships by including ourselves in what author Jack Kerouac described as the “mad swirl of everything to come,” we run the risk of not being recognized by anyone after a while, or at least not available. They will see us only as a function of the activity we are involved in or perhaps only see us as their imaginary friend. However, if we come out from under the covers of our game of hide and seek and allow ourselves to be discovered, and in effect take off our Davy Crockett hat, we immediately can be recognized say, “It’s me! I’m here!”

Do I know you? It is not exactly what we want to be asked as we are greeted by those we love, because it cuts to the heart of whether what they are seeing is the truth, the real McCoy, or some imaginary friend that is our temporary stand-in. While you may think that I am manipulating my grandsons into hugging me, that this is only pretend game, their hug tells me all I need to know about who they really are at the core. They may be running around with underwear on their heads or eating cereal out of a dogfood dish, but I get a chance, if only for a moment, to recognize them for who they really are ­­– loving, caring, and empathetic. After that, I don’t care what they do, I know where to go, and who I’m going to find when I ask for them again.

One Big Happy Swarm

Here in my hometown, cooler temps and hints of Fall were followed by the effects of driving rain from Hurricane Helene. While I am thankful for that moisture here that converted the cracked earth in my garden back to soil again, the news cycle lately has been more than just heavy. And so, before jumping into this blog, I want to dedicate this podcast to the millions of people trying to recover from the damages of the hurricane in the southeastern parts of our country. Would you join me for a moment of prayer for those who have lost family members or been displaced from their homes?

Father in Heaven, we come to you always grateful that we have a God that is bigger than any crisis or storm. We are grateful that we can approach you simply by calling your name and knowing with confidence that your lovingkindness is always available and ready to answer our petitions for help. Father, we pray for all those caught in the fray of Helene, that you would restore their hope and that they would turn to you for assurance and know that the trials they are facing are not too big for you. We know you have deep compassion for their sorrows, so help them come to you in the difficult days ahead and find renewed energy. Bless them with the much-needed supplies for their families. Thank you, Heavenly Father, that you hear these cries for help and that you are ready to wrap your loving arms around them during this crisis. In Jesus name we pray, Amen.

Well, as the humbling pictures from the south continue to fill up our screens, we also have a country that is embroiled in the election of a new president which has been a storm in and of itself. Additionally, we have a Middle East war that has ramped up into a worldwide crisis.  So, as I began to write this week, I began to wonder whether anything I had to say would be worthy of putting out there that would either give credence to the grim destruction I was seeing on the news or somehow, lessen it. Is there a part of you, like me, that would like to stick your head in the sand and stop the scroll? In a world where it seems like chaos reigns, I sometimes give in to the helplessness of it all and then buy into the lie that there is nothing I can really do about any of it.

“Well,” a friend of mine once answered, as I sat obsessing about my problems, “I guess the devil has you right where he wants you.”

“Whaddamean?” I stammered.

But I knew what he meant, and it was true.

We cannot rise if we do not stand. We can easily forget what we are capable of with God and relinquish our armor without a fight. Instead, we plant ourselves at the mercy of the enemy who loves nothing more than to watch our world burn in chaos. In other words, we can give up before we start, and allowed the king of hate to move into our hearts. Folks, that ain’t good.

There is no doubt that it is heart breaking to watch thousands of our countrymen bearing the weight of a storm surge. Then, across the globe, as we witness missiles lighting up the Israeli sky, knowing they will be returned with twice the force, our fears go internal as nations pick sides and square off. Those fears, if we are not careful, can become a picture that is more about us playing the victim than one about helping those victims. We do not need to stumble around in chaos and confusion.  There is always something we can do when our efforts might seem insignificant, even if it is just a change of attitude.  

Perhaps during this time when the world seems to be going mad, you can close your eyes and revisit a part of last summer …when you were being dunked with huge buckets of water at a theme park, or maybe watching your grandson hit his first home run or were smelling your favorite meal being grilled out back on the porch. All those things were in the mix for me over the last few months, reminders that the best predictors of the future are what has happened in the past. If you close your eyes and picture your favorite memory, it can lift you to a better place, to a promising microclimate of hope instead of a desert of victimhood.

My memory begins just outside my back window where there was a buzzing, swirling whirlwind. In a roundish berm I built, I watched droves of bumblebees flying all over the place as they gather nectar. In that area, I angled three huge sandstone rocks near each other so they could gather the sun’s heat all day and radiate in inwards. Even during the winter, as plant life goes dormant, the rocks emanate enough heat during the day to turn the area into a small canyon that acts as a thermal pocket during the night.  Plants that would normally wither during the winter do not succumb as easily to the ice and snow or the thawing and heaving of the soil. It is an oasis for the eyes, in some dreary months when we’ve all had our fill of the grey and gray.

Last summer, however, that same area becomes a hotbed for a tough annual called gomphrena, a workhorse that produces blooms all summer, and thrives in one-hundred-degree temps when other annuals are wilting under the heat. By late summer they are three feet tall, bulbous and trying to outreach other in their head-to-head race to the sun.  When a fellow gardener visited me last July, we stopped to marvel the sea of bumblebees swarming over my miniature canyon filled with those giant purple flowers of gomphrena globosa.  

“Did you know you can pet bumblebees?” she asked.

“What? Pet them? You are joking aren’t you?” I asked, incredulous.

Before answering, she had already stepped into the tall mound of purple flowers and was surrounded by bumblebees. They were momentarily startled by her presence, performing fly-bys and barrel rolls, but each eventually settling down on their own flower top.

“You have to go slow,” she said as she reached in, “they are very social, not like other bees. If you’re careful you can rub their backs.”

Gently, she reached in towards a particularly porky bee and put her finger on the yellow and black striped body, stroking it magically for a few seconds before pulling back.

“See? They don’t seem to mind as long as you don’t move too quickly.”

 Now it was my turn to get my moxie going. Although my hand was not quite as steady as hers, I slowly leaned forward, and found the tiny fuzzy back of a bumblebee, letting my finger caress it while trying to ignore the ones that were wildly buzzing from flower to flower around me. In spite of the thought that I may need an EpiPen at any moment, it was exhilarating to connect with something that could zap me with instant pain. It was an even better experience when I shared it, with permission from their mother, with my grandsons. They too, were able to pet their own bumblebee before summer ended, and become, not paralyzed with fear, but part of the one big happy swarm.  

In these days when our country is ramped up with mega-doses of drama, including the political kind, you may be looking for some moments of lightness, levity, and laughter. I found mine in the smallest of places, on the back of a bumblebee, but even so, it lifted me into another realm where fear was a bystander and where wonder and delight and the joy of being alive had a chance to catch a buzz.

I didn’t think I had much to say this week. I was deep in the middle of the rockets flying, the pundits screaming and the catastrophic pictures from the south. However, on a very hot day last summer, I found some bliss in a petting a bumblebee and making it part of my own warm and fuzzy. I didn’t like the frenzy of crisscrossing flight patterns around me, and the thought of a painful sting didn’t do much for me either, but in stepping into the flower bed and beyond my fears, I found I was stepping away from my worries and the world’s madness. I found a bunch of bumblebees that were willing to work with me, and for a brief moment they let me in to their flower patch unimpeded. I was trying to pet them, and they were giving me their own kind of a pat on the back. In the middle of our shared world, the bees and I were going about our business, both looking, as I think we all are, for the same thing – some of that sweet, sweet nectar that is still out there.

The Unremarkable Diet of Dora Hubbard: Part Two

We tend to move our lives in imperceptible ways, a tad to the left then back to the right again, until we notice we may have not made any real progress at all. Dora, our protagonist of last week’s episode, also felt her life was going in circles. Then she heard the voice of Dr. Adcock, a scientist being interviewed on Progressive Nebraska Radio about IBS’s, ignorant-based calories relentlessly entering our bodies, useless sources of energy that mess with us mind, body and spirit.  Dora’s life was about to change, as Dora tries to get her question in front of expert Dr. Adcock and unlock the secrets of her unremarkable, ignorant-based diet.

Sitting at her kitchen table, Dora stared at her computer screen, and as she began to type her first words to Dr. Adcock, an overwhelming sense of sadness overtook her.  While she had tried every self-help course and diet plan imaginable, even a cabbage and water plan for a month, she could not shake the feeling that there was something wrong with her physique and constitution. It was like a physical cloud of shame hanging over her, like a nasty spell that she could not shake. The thought that there may be some mysterious unhealthy force at work in her own body was driving her to get her question aired on Progressive Nebraska Radio with Dr. Adcock. She began to type.

Dear Dr. Adcock:

I was driving home from work today when I heard your interview on PNR. I almost had to pull over when I realized that all of the shame, I’ve been carrying all these years about my body could be a result of some mysterious and needless energy source, the Ignorant-based calories you mentioned last week. I am desperate to find myself again and to get some control over my life, and I believe your research may hold the key for me. Out of respect for your time, I will go straight to my question: What is wrong with me? Do any of us have control over our lives, or are ignorant calories you referred to in you interview on the verge of defeating us all?

Yours truly,
Dora from Trendy-Mart

Dora’s stopped and looked at her message, and then, with a wish and a prayer, she hit the send key, closed her laptop, and headed to bed.  The rest was up to cyberspace.

The sun had barely etched through her window when she heard her phone vibrating across her bedside table.

“He..hello. Hello,” Dora answered.

“Hello, this is Progressive Nebraska Radio,” came the automated voice. Please press the pound key if your birthday is November 4, 2001.”

Dora had to think about it, but hurriedly fumbled for the pound key. She heard a click on the other end and thought she’d been disconnected.

“Miss Hubbard? May I speak to Miss Hubbard please,” came a female voice.

“This is me, I mean it is her. I’m Dora.”

“Miss Hubbard,” this is PNR, Progressive Nebraska Radio. We received your question late last night and Dr. Adcock would like to speak to you on our show today. Would you be ok with talking to her live…today?”

“Today? Really?” Dora said, jumping out of bed, “You mean Dr. Adcock took my question? Well, yes! Yes, I’ll talk!”

“We go on the air in three minutes, and we’ll call you back just before you go on the air with her, ok?”

“Three hours? Ok I’ll be ready…”

“No, no Miss Hubbard, three minutes. Can you take the call in three minutes? We’ll call you right back in three…”  and before Dora could even answer the station manager had hung up. Dora scrambled out of bed in a panic, starting her coffee, racing back across her apartment to throw on a pair of jean and t-shirt, but no sooner had she fluffed her hair, the phone was ringing again.

“And now our next caller,” she heard a radio voice say, “is a woman who wrote to us with an urgent question, one that addresses an issue of concern for our expert, Dr. Adcock, a pioneer in the study of ignorant-based caloric intake and sustenance research. Our caller today has a lifetime of struggling with some deep-seated shame about her body and is hoping Dr. Adcock may be able to turn things around for her. What do you think doctor?

“Yes, I read Dora’s pleas for help and indeed it sounds like there are some ignorant-base calories unaccounted for. Dora, Dora?” Dr. Adcock called out, “Are you on the line?”

“Ahem, hi, hello, this is Dora. Thank you for returning my email and for having me on your show today.”

“Well, welcome to PNR. Glad you could be with us. How are you doing right now?”

“Well, I haven’t had my coffee yet, but I’m ok.”

“I understand you listened to our last broadcast, and were hit with a startling realization,” said the doctor. “Can you tell us a bit more? How can I help you?”

“Uh, well. I was driving home, listening to you talk about these needless calories from bee stings and toothpaste backwash and realized that you may hold some answers for me. We’d just been talking at work…I work at the Trendy-Mart… about the calories in unlicked envelopes, and I suddenly realized I may be under the influence of those IBS’s you talked about.”

“Yes, yes, I understand, Dora, and you are not alone. But there is help. It sounds like you’ve tried about everything you can to get your weight under control, but somethings missing here I feel. Did I hear you say that you work at a discount store?”

“Uh, yes, I do,” Dora replied.

“I may be mistaken, but could it be possible that you are in contact with a lot of rather, not to be insulting, but rather untidy surroundings?”

“Oh, its filthy there,” Dora stated, with a disgusted tone, “I mean, the place needs to be hosed down.”

“Just as I thought. Dora, and I think I know your problem. You are getting your ignorant calories, hundreds of them each day from the ingesting of prehistoric micrometeor dust,” the doctor postulated.

“Meteor what?”  You mean like the space type? Are you saying I’m eating small meteors made of ancient dust?”

“Yes, in a manner of speaking, you are!”  

In her tiny apartment, Dora felt the urge to cough several times, and leaned over to put her air purifier on high.

“I thought asteroids were way out there in space?” Dora winced.

 “Yes,” the doctor continued, “but they break down into tiny bits and fall to earth over time and, well, Dora, and for all my listeners out there, new research has just been done involving the composition of common dust, and you know what we found?”

“I can’t imagine,” Dora excitedly answered.

“We found that the small particles that make up a common dust bunny are exactly the same as those found in meteorites, and in fact they are constantly entering our atmosphere in small chunks, building up in little piles.”

“Oh my,” Dora said, “Lately, they’ve been working me in Lawn and Garden, and I’ve noticed a ton of dust out there. Do you think…?”

“Dora, I don’t think, I know! You’ve been succumbing to a concentrated dusting of micrometeorites and all their traces minerals, especially, I suspect, palladium, one of the worst offenders of ignorant calories. Palladium in itself is not so bad, but it tends to weigh us down and makes us feel lethargic. Have you been feeling sluggish lately?”

“Well, I just got out of bed, but at work I don’t seem to have any energy…”

“…and do you feel the urge to shower all the time?”

“All the time, and I even rinse off at lunch time!”

“Well, there you go, Dora! I believe that you are a victim of meteor dusting, specifically palladium poisoning. You are being blasted with meteor dust, and your body is collecting it! I bet your IBS score has skyrocketed lately.”

“You mean I’m hoarding cosmic dust and carrying it around all day?” Dora exclaimed?

“Well, yes, in a matter of sp….”

“What do I do with all my palladium? Am I poisonous or contagious? How long do I have to live? Oh, no, no…Should I notify my next of kin or quit my job or give my cat to a friend?!”

Dora was whimpering now and heard the doctor’s voice fading away…

“Doctor?! Are you there?! Help me! I don’t want to die ignorant! I’m not a cosmic hoarder, really, I’m not. Help me please, help me…” Dora groaned.

She felt the gentle hand of Mr. Clemendorf on her shoulder, shaking her…

“Dora, Dora. You’re here, Dora, wake up. It’s me, Mr. Clemendorf. Dora?  Dora?”

“Wh..wh… what?” Dora said, sitting up to brush off her clothes. Have I been poisoned by a meteor?” Am I dead?”

“Dead?  But your pay is gonna be docked if you don’t wake up and get back to work. Break’s over.”

Mr. Clemendorf grabbed his Diet Coke dropping from the vending machine, turning back to Dora before he left. “Hey,” he said, “we’re switching you to Appliances this afternoon, so, let’s get out there, ok? Appliances! Let’s go!”  

Dora wiped her eyes and looked around, still trying to shake off the voice of Dr. Adcock. She wasn’t dying after all, not from envelopes, or bee stings or meteor dust. Suddenly she didn’t feel ignorant at all, but ready to tackle the afternoon. As she turned to clock back in, the late afternoon sun shone across the break room table revealing a thin layer of dust. Dora stopped for a moment to look, and then shook her head.

“Not my dust, not my problem,” she thought, grabbing her ID badge, “I’m in Appliances today.”

The Unremarkable Diet of Dora Hubbard

Dora was not exactly sure when she first noticed the uptick in unsealed envelopes arriving at her home. Maybe it was around the holidays when an unusual flurry of seasonal ads dropped through her mail slot. There on the worn linoleum she would stoop to pick up the loose assortment of insurance premiums, skin care samples, and an insert from a local grocery. It seemed there was always an endless trail of junk mail and lately, envelopes that had never been sealed. Unless it was the birthday card with fifty dollars in it from her aunt in Minnesota, the mail pile waiting for her was just another reminder of the drab life she led at a retail job that had long since run its course.

Still and all, today’s conversation with her co-workers had been an interesting ripple for Dora in a life of little variation. It started in the Trendy-Mart break room when their stodgy boss, Mr. Clamendorf marched through the door and did what he always did every other Friday – drop some change in the vending machine for a Diet Coke and throw their weekly checks across the lunch table with a trite warning to not spend it all in one place.  

His arrival brought an abrupt end to the lunch gossip, as Dora and her coworkers, Trudy and Bertha, stared across the table at the stark white envelopes holding their checks. For these three, it was money that was already spoken for before it hit the bank.

Sitting at the wobbly fold-out table, only the oscillating fan made the atmosphere in the break room tolerable. All three were thinking the same thing as they unfolded their pay stubs – this day couldn’t be over soon enough.

“It’s bad enough they tax you on everything but the kitchen sink…” the older Trudy snapped. “Oh, and look, aren’t I special, they did it to me again. Every flippin’ week,” she moaned, “This gets soooo old.”

“What happened? The other two asked, looking up.

“They forgot my overtime… again,” Trudy snarled. “Now, I gotta walk all the way over to HR and have them write me another check for my overtime. It happens every paycheck. They know I worked the overtime – they know it, but they think that they can get away with it. The lady in there, you know, the one with the frizzled hair?”

“You talkin’ about fried Frieda?”

“Yea, that one,” said Trudy. “She always says, ‘Oh, did I forget your overtime again? I’m so sorry.’”

Dora tossed her check back across the table. “Look at this,” she said pointing at it, “they don’t even have the decency to seal the envelope. I mean, c’mon, have a little respect for our privacy. Close it up for crying out loud and seal it.”

“Right?” said Bertha, working on a bag of Doritos, “I think they leave the envelopes open on purpose. C’mon people, it’s not rocket science.”

“Respect, right?” added Trudy. I don’t want anyone looking at my check. Lick the envelope and close it up. Good Loooord!” added Trudy.

“Maybe they don’t want the calories from the seal. I heard there’s two to four calories on the seal of every envelope,” said Bertha.

“C’mon, really?” said Dora. “Two calories? You kidding me?”

“Right, like, who’s going to care about a couple of calories from licking an envelope?!” Trudy burst out. “I hate even touching the seal, like, it’s gross. I don’t want to touch where someone licked something, c’mon! My envelope, my space, y’know? Anyway, you can go to jail for foolin’ around with other people’s mail like that. You know my friend, Daphine? She called the police when a neighbor kept looking at her mail. She told the police if the neighbor touched her mail again, she was going federalo, like the FBI.

Bertha, who had been eating with her mouth open, said, “I don’t know about Daphine, but when I get an unopened letter, I like to lick them, seal ‘em, then reopen ’em again.”

Dora couldn’t believe her ears. “No, you don’t, c’mon!”

“Shut the back door!” Trudy wailed.

“Ohhh, yes I do! What if some handsome actor had licked that envelope that I resealed? It’s like kissing them in person. That’s the way I look at it – a chance for romance.”

“That’s crazy,” Trudy added, “and if I were you, I wouldn’t be tellin’ anyone that.”

“You are disgusting,” Dora piped in, “Seriously?  You re-lick them?  You certainly don’t need the calories.”

Bertha stood up and struck a sexy pose. “Excuse me? Look at this figure, will ya’? Who could resist this? When I get those unsealed envelopes in the mail, makes my day, like a sign from God – true love and new beginnings.”

Bertha taunted them by throwing her head back and pouring the rest of the Doritos down her throat. Shock statements were her go-to method for getting attention, but re-licking envelopes, even for her, was a bit over the top.

“Did you just say, true love? True love my fanny,” Trudy said. “Licking old envelopes is more like true disease.”

She turned to clock back in, and while Bertha followed, Dora was thinking of the unsealed mail waiting at home just inside her apartment door. She wanted to tell them about the increase in unsealed letters she’d been getting but didn’t want to stir the pot.

Yet, by the time Dora got off work and slid into the front seat of her beat-up Corolla, the envelope conversation had stood out as the highlight of her day, and as she merged onto the I-247 that curled around the city, Dora began to question a life where re-licking already licked envelopes took top billing. Seriously, she thought…what kind of demented person would even think about that kind of thing? Talking about it seemed crass, undignified, like talking about cutting toenails or clipping nose hairs.

She leaned over to turn on the radio, for distraction more than anything, catching the end of an interview on PNR, Progressive Nebraska Radio. A scientist with her doctorate in the cutting-edge field of Sustenance Science, Professor Adcock, was speaking about the finer points of her best-selling book titled Hard to Swallow. 

“… yes,” she spoke excitedly, “and what people in our country don’t understand is that we actually ingest all kinds of absurd things that add up to quite a few calories – without even knowing it.”

“So,” the interviewer interrupted, “let me get this right, Professor Adcock. You are talking about things we don’t eat or consume that add to our caloric intake? How can that be?”

“Yes, I am. You have to understand that the human species was designed for many ways to acquire energy. Eating, or as we like to call it, sustenance renewal, can come in many forms. We are exposed to these sources all the time, but we don’t think of them as part of our regular diet, because we don’t actually chew and swallow them.

“So, in your research, what odd things did you find that we take in? Can you give me an example?

Dora reached over to turn up the volume as a semi-truck suddenly roared past.

Well, let me first explain that these calories are not from the usual places. They sneak into our system from sources that aren’t considered food. We sustenance scientists call these sources IBS’s, or Ignorant-Based Sources.

“So, these IBS’s, what are some of them?” The interviewer asked. “Like right now I’m imagining eating an ignorant pizza with extra ignorant cheese.”

“No, no. We don’t know we are consuming them. It’s not like that at all. Take for instance a bee stings. The average American is stung once every two years, totaling 9 calories of venom each sting. Red ants, 3 calories, a rattlesnake, of course, quite a bit higher. In one of our field studies a research volunteer allowed herself to be stung by a swarm of deer flies. We calculated the resultant caloric intake, the IBS, to be somewhere between twenty and twenty-three calories, equivalent to one or two M and M’s.”

“Oh, uh, wow, deer flies,” the PNR interviewer said.

“So, you see, it starts to add up. A person goes out on what they think is a peaceful nature walk, gets bit a couple of times by a honeybee or insect of some sort. At night, they brush their teeth but forget to rinse properly and inadvertently swallow the backwash, which adds more calories, then hits the sleeping bag with virtually a full stomach. Their ignorant-based score skyrockets, and there you go.”

“They might as well have eaten the whole bag of M and M’s,” added the interviewer.

“Exactly. And in this country, our average IBS score is almost ten times that of any other free society,” added Professor Adcock. “Day after day we allow ourselves to take in calories that we are completely ignorant of, and that’s only the beginning. Of course, I give many more examples in my book, An Unremarkable Diet: The Hard to Swallow Truth of IBS:

Listening to the interview, Dora could hardly believe what she was hearing. Apparently, her friend Bertha’s caloric intake from re-licking envelopes fell right in line with the national average of over-the-top IBS scores. She was literally licking herself to an early death. In addition, Dora was convinced her own Ignorant Score was hitting the threshold of what was unhealthy. Come to think of it, she remembered a time in her childhood when an infestation of bedbugs in her home was mysteriously followed by weight gain. As she gripped the steering wheel, her palms began to get sweaty as a dietary epiphany came over her. It may have been rush-hour on the I-247, but Dora had to get control of her ignorant calories, and fast! She certainly didn’t want to be headed towards an early grave and buried in a grand piano like that enormous man in Ripples Believe It or Not.

In addition, a moral dilemma was on her hands. Should she tell Bertha and Trudy about this landmark research for dieting or keep it to herself? A pound is a pound, she thought, and if the IBS trend could be reversed, it could mean the start of a brand new, ignorant-free life, one that would include an inspiring diet with life-changing weight loss. Still, there was a part of her that desperately wanted to hold on to her secret so she could waltz into the break room knowing she would always be one or two calories ahead of her friends.

She pulled into her driveway and entered her apartment. There on the floor, sticking out like a sore thumb, was another unsealed envelope. Dora felt her life was on the threshold of change. A decision had to be made, and she could think of only one person who could help.

“Professor Adcock,” she said aloud.

She pitched her car keys in the bowl on the foyer table and went straight to her kitchen. Laptop in hand, she sat down to email the doctor, hoping to high heaven the scientist would take her question over the air on the next episode of Progressive Nebraska Radio. It was a long shot yes, but the threat of constantly ingesting ignorant, hidden calories had become more than just a break-room conversation with Trudy and Bertha – it had become Dora’s quest to get her life under control.

A bee sting here, some backwash there…perhaps Dr. Adcock would hear Dora’s survival cry for help and help her begin her new path towards wellness and an ignorance-free life. You’ll find out in Episode 2 of The Unremarkable Diet of Dora Hubbard.

Right Between the Eyes

I like to think of my podcast Knee Deep as filled with moments that take our minds off the Big Performance and put the attention on those serendipitous events that add grace to our lives.

Serendipity, by definition, can occur anywhere, anytime. I’m remembering a line from a song on an album in the 1970’s by Crosby, Stills and Nash titled Four Way Street which was recorded live. In the song called Right Between the Eyes, these harmonizing geniuses surprised even themselves by starting out on the exact same note. Given that the popular trio was known for the perfect melding of their voices, the error made the start of the song all the more obvious. As they hit the sang the same note, you could almost see the three musicians freeze up and stare at each other, as if to say, “How did that happen?” Finally, one of them broke the silence with this: “I would never (have) believed we could all have started out on the same note, but we did it.”

Dead silence ensued, then applause and laughter burst through, and the audience relaxed into a song list of what have now become classics. The perfect harmonies created by the trio was replaced by something so much better in that beginning– the charm and personality of three regular guys. Their silly mis-start set the tone for an album full of surprises that seem, each time one hears them, like they were written just for us. It is a beautiful thing when that happens – I think they call it art – when the free exploration of a craft reveals the supernatural skill of the artist and transports the listener or viewer through an imaginative journey. It is a journey where you never want to go home, and it can happen anywhere at any time, even without an artist of any kind, and, it just so happens I went on one of those journeys last week.

It started when a plastic grocery bag blew in from a recent storm and got caught in the top branch of a dead oak tree in our neighbor’s yard. When I first noticed it blowing around up there, I was mildly annoyed that a grocery bag was putting an ugly smear on my otherwise clear view of the sky. I was used to bags being caught in bushes and around signposts and the like, but this bag was waaaaaay up there and had overtaken the space that normally attracted birds of all kinds and had been a haven for a kind of metropolitan squirrel park.

However, this bag was changing all that. It was just a vagrant traveler, a moocher, who had taken up residence without permission, and there was nothing short of a tree service that could do anything about it. Furthermore, looking up at the bag, I had the odd feeling that it was waving at me like one of those people who wave at you from like they know you, but don’t. When you get up close to them, you aren’t the person they thought you were.  Likewise, I knew the trash bag didn’t know me. I knew I wasn’t the person it thought I was, but it didn’t seem to matter. The bag kept waving at me anyway.

Each time I went out the back door, there it was again, flowing back and forth without a care in the world, flipping and flopping around like a kid in a trampoline factory. I knew that nothing short of a gale force wind was going to bring that bag down. And even when there was no perceptible wind at all, the grocery bag was still moving, catching the slightest puff of air and gracefully spinning and twirling, a plastic pirouetting danseur groc’eirre.

It was enough to make me sick. Somehow, in the back of my twisted and cynical mind, I believed that trash bags had no right to be that happy and free, like we are. In fact, I believe that plastic grocery bags had no rights at all, that they had only one place in our world which, by the way, certainly was not next door to me high up in a tree with the best view in the neighborhood. To my point, I believed that trash bags should be used and not seen, that their rightful place was either with other bags of their kind in the check-out line or hanging quietly under a sink waiting for any garbage that might be thrown their way.

And this is where things take a nasty turn. I had, without even knowing it, begun to believe that the placement of this carefree bag high up in a tree had been place there just to irritate me.

Now, having owned a sailboat most of my life, I had always relished being out in the wind and on the water. One would think then that I would have an appreciation for the natural display of nature’s forces and be captivated by watching the wind catch the insides of a little sack up in a tree and equate it with a little sailboat up there in the sky. Next, I would be able to imagine it on a beautiful tack across the aqua-green surface of a bucolic lake. One would think I would have that image etched in my mind like a postcard in a gift shop, and that I would be able to feel the sack fill up and revel in knowing that the vacuum, like in a real sailing experience, is created on the other side was making the sail-sack up moving as if it were truly sailing. It’s a physics thing all sailors understand and appreciate – that we are moved forward to fill a vacuum like miniature sailboats destined for some distant shore.

This image in turn conjures up a picture, doesn’t it, of me on a journey, one where I am taking out my own trash to my own trash can, that I then would be excited knowing that I could leave the back door and look up and be at peace knowing that this universal law of physics, like gravity and thermal vortexes, was still at work around me. One would think then that a warmth would come over me, and I would feel at peace with the world, and know that God was with me, omnipresent and steady, because I could look up and see one of those very laws at work in a grocery bag high up in a tree, and then I would return to the house as if I’d just returned from a prayer retreat, satisfied, sanctified, perhaps a bit holier, having then filled a small vacuum in my own life, and knowing nothing could change the irrevocable laws of our Master, and his invention, the grocery bag.

One would think that, yes, but it would not be true. I looked up at the bag each day as I went out and thought, “There it is again. It’s still there, that lousy, filthy piece of detritus, a grocery bag, blown in from nowhere, trying to be friendly with me and perhaps even happier and better off than me because it has no mortgage or a financial plan and doesn’t take cholesterol medicine or worry about when the warranty runs out on its television set. There it is, up there floating, a drifter, a freeloader without any responsibilities, and serving no real purpose other than filling a vacuum in a tree.

These thoughts had taken up an uncomfortable residence in my mind, and I thought of trying to knock the grocery bag down with a rock or a homemade javelin of some kind. I realized I couldn’t do that because we live next door to a hospital and my spear might land on the cardiac unit being wheeled into the emergency room for a patient who had just arrived and had consumed too much steak and beer on Labor Day weekend. This tubular patient needed an EKG, and not be able to get one because my spear, the one I had thrown at a plastic garbage bag blowing freely in the wind, an athletic launch that I could never repeat again, had missed the bag completely, gone right over it and right through the EKG machine, and disabling it.

I must have imagined in my mind the horrible screech of the javelin through a mobile cardiac unit that jarred me back to reality. I realized one plastic bag was holding some kind of power over me, over our neighborhood and the campus of the hospital. I remembered a time, back in the 1970’s, when three amazing singers from Crosby, Stills and Nash hit the same exact note mistakenly at the same time and botched the beginning of a live concert and that it was a mistake that shot the song to the top of the Pop music charts back in the day, and I thought of the lyrical, serendipitous beauty of that moment.

It could not have predicted or duplicated again, and I went back outside for another look at the skipping grocery bag up in the tree, and I brought up that very Crosby, Stills and Nash song on my phone, Right Between the Eyes, and looking up at my neighbor’s dead tree at the lowly plastic trash sack, and I heard the voice of the grocery sack voice that said, “I could never believe that I could have made it all the way up here, but I finally did it,” and I saw the grocery bag as a little child dancer in the sky who was happy and free, on stage pirouetting and spinning and spinning and twisting and loving every minute of it, and there was a live audience applauding her, the little grocery bag dancer up there, a little piece of beautiful, delicate trash on her way to stardom, who knew all the secrets of physics and the wind, and was moving about without a care in the world.

Balloon Boycott Possible in 2028 Olympics

And…speaking of Olympic medals, don’t you miss watching the Olympics on television at night? I have to admit, I felt kind of lost the night after they were over and I sat down to watch my usual hour of television in the evening. As I began flipping through the rather  shallow list of movies on Hulu and Netflix, I felt disappointed that the best athletes had all gone home and the excitement of world competition was over.

I really wanted to hear more stories of little kids who defied all odds to become an Olympic athlete– future gold winners – and then to watch their dreams come true as they overcame their hardships and became medalist.  In an age where photo finishes and thousandths of a second make a difference, these athletes had pursued a special kind of excellence, the kind that leaves you hopeful for that other race going on, the human race. So, before the Paris games fade completely from 2024, I want to reminisce for a moment about a past Olympics, the LA Olympics in 1984, when I simultaneously watched the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat all in one event, and the audience left feeling both inflated and deflated at the same time

I had boarded an Amtrak to Los Angeles with my father and my brother, a ten-day bro-trip where we were spectators to everything from windsurfing to water polo. One of the things we quickly discovered at the Olympic venues was that since we were watching the best athletes in the world, it really didn’t matter what event we witnessed or whether it was for a gold medal or last place. Each event was a fascinating cornucopia of new rules, new faces, disqualifications, spills and yes, examples of sheer determination that broke the boundaries of what humans can endure.

For example, before witnessing my first judo match I did not know that, at least in 1984, it was perfectly legal to strangle your opponent with their own judo robe. If a match found one opponent in the choke hold, they had a choice to either hit the mat and tap out or, as we later found out, do the honorable Judo thing and just pass out. Several of the wrestlers did, in fact, choose to do the honorable thing slowly drifted off into La-La Land as they were choked into submission.

When I witnessed this blacking out for the first time, I couldn’t believe it. When had the word honor by strangulation become associated with the Olympics?  Had I been thrown back to a Roman coliseum where gladiators fought to the death? Sitting next to me, my father was shocked as well. Having just retired from his medical practice, and seeing the Hippocratic Oath flash before his eyes, he jumped out of his seat and had to be restrained by my brother from racing to rescue the unconscious athlete. As it turned out, the wrestler soon regained consciousness and sat up, straightening out his white robe as if he’d just exited from a washing machine.

This is the Olympics, I thought! I’ve arrived! Anthems, flags, and cold-blooded strangulations!

More stubbornness ensued as we watched the US defeat the Russians in water polo, a match that left the water blood red and flooding the swimming pool arena with a small-scale version of the Cold War. At that time there were no underwater cameras to catch blatant fouls, and all sorts of unmentionable things happened under the pool surface.

At the semi-finals for men’s soccer, Yugoslavia played Italy, and I got another taste of the furor and passion that accompanies Olympic competitions. The soccer field was surrounded by armed policeman on horseback and there was a holding tank for unruly spectators that held an eerie presence at the far end of the Rose Bowl. When Yugoslavia scored the winning goal and won 2-1, the crowd erupted around me in a wild frenzy that bordered on mass hysteria. Huge Yugoslav women who could have been Olympic shot- putters and who had never shaved, picked me up and tossed me around like a wet noodle for reasons I’m still trying to figure out. I can only guess, but I believe they thought I was some kind of Olympic party favor, or perhaps it was my clean-shaven appearance that appealed to their carnal instincts – I’m not really sure.

Surviving that, the next stop on the docket was Dodger Stadium. When we settled into our seats for baseball, an exhibition sport that year, what ensued was more like a marathon, as Chinese Taipa battled South Korea in a 14 inning no hitter. That’s right! Fourteen innings for crying out loud! If you aren’t a baseball fan, just know that the game started at noon and ended nine hours later, with most of the 56,189 fans either asleep from boredom or under the influence. Two crack pitchers at the height of their Olympic pitching careers dueled like a couple of Marvel Avengers and continued to strike out one hapless batter after another as the game dragged on all afternoon and into the evening.

As the saying goes, the game was about as exciting as watching paint dry, and the only reason anyone stayed to watch was due to an incident that happened during the seventh inning stretch. As the traditional “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” begin to play and the mostly drunken audience stood up to sing, a celebration team on the infield cut loose fifty nautical balloons into the sky, each one a vibrant color, each representing a different Olympic nation. As we stood to stretch, we looked to the sky, beholding the spectrum of balloons bolt upward, glorious symbols of freedom. Cheers echoed through the palisades of Dodger Stadium, and we settled back down believing that the refreshing release of the huge balloons would be an inspiration for the ballplayers to slam some homers and get this baseball party started.

However, as the balloons disappeared into the evening sky, one stubborn balloon, a renegade with no manners, floated back down into the stadium, and begun a leisurely circuitous trip around the infield, just out of reach of the maintenance team frantically running after it and trying to reel it in. Just as it looked like they might grab it, the balloon would rise again and hover at the top of the stadium Then, as the baseball players came back onto the field, the balloon would catch a downdraft that blew it out of its holding pattern and fall again. And each time this happened, the runaway balloon would be chased by a rowdy group of a mostly unauthorized, multi-international thugs trying to carry the balloon off as a souvenir.

And guess which nation was represented by this uncommitted, apolitical, unpledged balloon? Why, it was the United States, of course. Yes, it was our balloon up there wandering around like a lost child at a barn dance. Never mind that this baseball game, representing the quintessentially American sport, had already taxed the patience of the most diehard baseball fan, but now we had our own red, white and blue balloon essentially boycotting the game. Fortunately, a policeman shot the balloon down with a flare gun, and the most boring baseball game in history resumed, dying a slow death until the fourteenth inning, when a Japanese player hit a home run to end the game and put us all out of our misery.

After nine hours of watching the most incredible pitching duel in history, you would think the culminating crack of a baseball on a bat would have ignited the crowd but watching the American balloon float apathetically back and forth had exhausted any remaining enthusiasm in the stadium.  I believe I may have heard one singular applaud in the dugout, but the crowd, who were beginning to feel the effects of their hangover, emptied out of the stadium, irritable and grumbling about how Olympic baseball had failed to inspire them.  

I couldn’t help but feel, as we got up to leave, that the United States had failed on an international level, that the lone American balloon floating around Dodger Stadium that day should have been disqualified from any future balloon events on account of unsportsmanlike conduct. The misbehaving balloon that had floated about and had failed in its patriotic duty was an embarrassment to Americans, a kind of symbol for a whole lot of hot air, an inflated ego, and in my opinion, it’s behavior and attitude was just not befitting of the Olympic spirit.

I kept these thoughts to myself, however, as I shuffled out of the stadium. I could still smell a bit of leftover helium wafting through the air, an after-effect from the American balloon that had exploded and I was afraid that if I spoke, my voice would come out squeaky, perhaps an octave or two higher than normal, and a new athletic event would have to be added to the next Olympics, like the Squeaky Talkie-Walk, or maybe the Helium Pentathlon. How about Severe Weather Nautical Balloon Surfing?Yea, yea, that’s it. Surfers would be dropped from an airplane and surf through an obstacle course of nautical balloons. Oh, that would be amazing… (fading voice…)

Education May Come Down to the Last Potato

There is not a better day in all of summer than the first day after school is out.  The Saturday after the last day of the school year, I woke in my bedroom in a state of consciousness that subtly came over me.  There was no school today and not tomorrow. In fact, I didn’t have to be anywhere for three months. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling in a state of euphoria thinking to myself that I had never spent much time looking at my bedroom ceiling, and that compared to going to school, my ceiling was absolutely the most fascinating thing I had ever seen. In that open white space where cobwebs hid and vagueness took over, I mapped out my entire summer, a map that said, “Nothing to do, no place to be.”

“I could lay here all day long,” my summer voice said, “and be content to do absolutely nothing but memorize every single square inch of this ceiling.” That is how insanely happy I was to be out of school.

The day before, when the last bell for the year rang, the teachers did not stop us from screaming our head off as we ran out of the building because they were going to do the same thing just as soon as the buses pulled out of the parking lot. Our teachers, the all-knowing, all-seeing caretakers of our edumacation, had positioned themselves just inside the familiar barrier of their classroom doors as we flew down the halls and swung wide our double doors to freedom. I heard them wishing us well for the summer as we ran by, but underneath their pleasant smiles were the looks of utter exhaustion and fatigue.

And run we did. At the sound of the final bell, we stampeded down the school halls like a herd of African wildebeests on the Serengeti, kicking each other, making cattle grunts and tripping each other, step on the fallen, and yell “see you in the Fall” at the top of our lungs.

Until that final bell rang, the last few weeks of school seemed like pure torture. Everyone was going through the motions, making school look like school, but not putting any sincere effort or commitment into our work. By late April, the cafeteria had run out of food to serve for lunch and the lunch staff, in a last-ditch effort to appear as if food were plentiful, fed us nothing but potatoes that had been stacked in cold storage since Christmas. Even so, the stored boxes of potatoes had sprouted so many spuds that, when retrieved, looked like a bed of sea anemones that had been harvested from the bottom of the Caspian Sea and sold to America on the black market. They were horrible misconfigurations, poor excuses for food that, incidentally, would become the source for a future documentary on the mismanagement of the National Nutritional and Education Act of 1956, an act that Mamie Eisenhower had championed. The mini-series gave historical evidence that potatoes could not be trusted to a democracy and were more suited for underground movements. Championing the starchy plant in the series was the first lady’s great-great-grandfather who had a brief stint as a potato farmer during the Industrial Revolution when he tried to use potatoes as a source of fuel. He died homeless wearing a torn and tattered T-shirt whose logo read, “Taters for a Better America.”

 When I was in school, the decision to feed us nothing but those oblong starch muffins, mashed potatoes, for the last month of school came during a clandestine meeting of the local school board and was made knowing that feeding kids copious amounts of carbs was a natural way to induce sleep. Managing kid’s energy levels through diet was the key.  So, every day from April 1, like some tacky bad joke, our lunchtime plates were heaped with a massive pile of bleached white mashed potatoes, a warm and steamy substitute for melatonin.

During this same period, President Kennedy had mandated a national fitness program called The President’s Physical Fitness Club, so each day, by the time lunch rolled around, we had all exercised for four straight hours, doing continuous push-ups and the like to prepare us for a Russian invasion that would descend on our playground if their revolutionary rocket Sputnik misfired. So intense was the physical fitness program that from the moment attendance was taken in the morning, kids were required to launch into a routine of sit-ups, cardio lunges, and sprints around the school. We ran looking up into the sky in case the Russian satellite should began its descent onto American soil, stopping only to do calisthenics and patriotic cheers and of course, more push-ups and sit-ups.

By the time the bell rang for lunch four hours later, we were so ravenous with hunger that we would have chewed off our own arms if they had let us. There was no need to do that, thank goodness, because waiting for us under a bright yellow heat lamp in the cafeteria was a mountain of freshly prepared hot whipped potatoes with butter and they were generously spooned directly onto our metal trays as if they had been off-loaded from a dump truck.

Finding our place at tables of fifty kids, we were so hungry we never picked up a fork, but ate with our hands, shoving globs of mashed potatoes into our mouths. We ate freely off  each other’s trays as well to reinforce the democratic and cooperative atmosphere, and then raced back to get in line for a second helping. In fact, we were so hungry we did not even take our trays on the second trip but stood in line with cupped and open hands and let cafeteria workers served us a new heaping mound with industrial size spoons made by upperclassmen in shop class.   

“Oh, thank you so much, thank you, Miss Haggathorn,” we said to the Head Server. She always answered, “You are so welcome,” but now I think that she missed her calling as a jail warden, preferring this job of piling steaming hot potatoes into our hands and smiling demurely as the steam rose and burnt the skin off our tiny fleshy fingers. Later it was found that some of the hungrier children ate off small portions of their fingers thinking they were potatoes, because at that age, having only recently stopped sucking their thumbs, they could not tell the difference between the two textures. Some of those children had to be sent to the nurse for treatment, but the other students went straight to the gym after lunch for the culminating activity of the president’s fitness program, the much-heralded tug-o-war contest. Excitement, as much as could be mustered under the weight of a high carb meal, was mounting as a team consisting of the fittest students stood across from an imaginary Russian team made entirely of a janitorial staff of two.

Those who were not in the nurse’s station or part of the tug-o-war contest lined the wooden benches in the gym and watched the best of the President’s team grab the rope and pull with all their might. The rope barely moved either way for a long moment, but unfortunately, the mashed potatoes had already taken their toll and the students was soundly beaten and drug wholesale across the gym floor like a beached whale carcass.

It was a pitiful display of athleticism, of course, and only substantiated what was already a well-known fact, that we would never be able to beat the Russians during the calendar school year while potatoes were being served. (See David Orslaka’s Book, The Battle of Little Big Potato: The Military Genius of Chief Stands-With-A-Spoon). As the final kid was dragged across the winner’s line, the two janitors, dressed in mechanic’s coveralls, hooped and hollered as they did a victory lap pushing their cleaning carts in what was seen by teachers as unsportsmanlike conduct.

By then it was about 1:43, and with so many kids now sound asleep from the effects of eating a month’s supply of mashed potatoes, the teachers decided just to let them sleep it off. It was, after all, the last day of school, and parents would be arriving soon to pick up their children. I had cleverly found a spot to sleep under a gymnastic mat where I would not be bothered and therefore no one found me until well after 5:30, long after everyone else had left. I was in a deep slumber as they pulled off the gymnastic mat, in the deepest of rapid eye movements, softly whimpering to myself and twitching.

My parents pulled off the mat and woke me gently, spoon feeding me sips of black coffee from a thermos that had the president’s picture on it, and my mother waved peppermint candies under my nose to stimulate my frontal cortex, but when I could not stand up without wavering, my father had to carry me all the way out to the car in his arms. Later he told me I was whispering some gibberish about being attacked by an army of Russian potatoes.

Three days later, an article on the back pages of a Russian newspaper came to the forefront and reported that American children slept on the average of twenty-two and a half hours a day, and only rose to the smell of mashes potatoes wafting through the air. The article claimed that this was part of an American plot to thwart the Cold War, to bring some new warmth and détente to an otherwise viscous relationship between the two countries.

I’m not sure if that is true. I awakened the next day feeling, as I said earlier, perfectly happy, blissfully serene, staring at the creamy consistency of my off-white ceiling and thinking that it was the most beautiful space I had ever seen, and that I could stare at every square inch of it, or sleep, for the rest of the summer.

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.