Ten Tidings I Bring to You and Your Kin

Whether whipping up homemade eggnog or hanging some mistletoe, family traditions revive our Christmas spirit every year and put a little jingle in our snow boots. In our family we’ve noticed that what began as an after-thought now has become a regular staple during the holidays and set the tone for the “most wonderful time of the year.” While they may be called rituals by some and indulgences by others, our Christmas traditions help us to keep things light and take our minds off our worldly stresses.

I got the snow shovel out for this podcast and dug up a few of my all-time favorite Christmas traditions. These ten tidings are doozies! For a few of them, you’re going to need some outright pluck and daring because, admittedly, most of them are attention seeking and narcissistic. And, if I was honest, the world could probably do without any of them, but what’s the fun in that?

We are to be reminded that Christmas is supposed to bring out the child in us. After all, Christmas is about a child, Jesus, who came into the world pure as snow, and taught us all about a truth, one that could help us start fresh every day. The challenges Joseph and Mary faced as parents back in the day was serious stuff, but what gladness they must have felt knowing that on that shivery night of their son’s birth, the whole earth was sleeping under a new clean blanket of grace and hope.

If Jesus was five years old and knocked on my door this Christmas morning, I think he might come in and have some fun with the Ten Tidings I’m offering you here, and would no doubt have a few of his own. Here we go…

TIDING #1: If you have a message on your phone, or land line, change the message to a Christmas verse that you make up. My singing leaves a lot to be desired, and I generally ruin Christmas songs as soon as I open my mouth, but my off-tune singing can be funny. See what you think. Call my number, (812) 479-8264 and listen to the message. It may make you cringe…or put a Christmas song in your heart for the day. Your choice.

TIDING #2: Make huge pancakes on Christmas morning. They will be hilarious when you put them on someone’s plate. When I was camping one summer in Wyoming, we made pancakes as big as a frying pan and challenged each other to try to flip them over in one fell swoop. Pancakes are one of those versatile foods that will make you smile like a happy face. I like to put fake candy fried eggs in the middle of mine, or fig newtons in the batter, then add copious amounts of whip cream on top. Bring it on, then serve them up as if you are dead serious about pancakes!

TIDING #3: The very best present you can give anyone during the holiday season is your good cheer. Bundle up at night and spread tons of joy around by loading up your car with kids and singing Christmas carols at the top of your lungs. Roll down your windows, let the cold hit you in the face, and open the throttle on that stereo! It’s time to bring out that private shower voice you’ve been hiding all these years and rock your neighborhood!

TIDING #4: Order a set of matching Christmas pajamas for everyone in your family and go to Starbucks together for a late evening hot chocolate. There’s something magical, possibly weird, about a family dressing in the same outfit and walking into a coffee shop. It looks like they just finished the curtain call in some sort of theatrical play. So, ask for a double helping of those tiny marshmallows in your pj’s. If you get some awkward stares, become theatrical and belt out a dramatic line like, “God Bless Us Everyone!”

TIDING #5: This is one of my all-time favorites. Buy a couple of dozen fake snowballs and have a strategically planned snowball fight in your house on Christmas morning. We have done it every year for ages and every year something gets broken, or someone gets hit in the face with a snowball. Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt. It’s like getting hit with a large cotton ball.

TIDING #6: I couldn’t make a list without including something from my favorite Christmas movie, Elf. Try this: Get everyone in front of the big screen and in slow motion, play the snowball fight Elf has with a gang of bullies in Central Park. Just when Buddy is about to make that incredible throw and nail the fleeing bully, pause the TV and have everyone put their post-it on the TV with the name of a bully written down on it. When you hit play and Elf lets that snowball fly, have everyone scream "TAKE THAT, YOU COTTON-HEADED NIMMYMUGGIN!"

TIDING #7: Give a cherry pit pack to someone. This is without a doubt the best gift I have ever given. People love them. A cherry pit pack is a small cloth pillow filled with cherry pits that you can nuke in the microwave. The oil in the cherry pits stay warm for at least an hour and is so comforting you’ll feel like you are in a Norwegian spa. I began using mine to warm the bottom of my bed in the winter. My feet love it.

TIDING #8: Wear an oversized Christmas band aid on your forehead with holly or bells on it, and when people ask what happened tell them you ran into a reindeer. If they laugh, pull out a Christmas band aid and give it to their kid. They’ll feel healed immediately. (You can even order ones that look like strips of bacon).

TIDING #9: Remember this line? “‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house…” When you read that classic holiday poem, change one of the lines and see if anyone catches it. When I was a kid, my dad used to say, “Away to the window, I flew like a flash, tore open the shutters and threw out the trash.” We lay there in bed and knew that when Dad delivered that line it would be wrong, but we laughed every time he said it, and couldn’t wait to hear it again, and again.

TIDING #10: Make a Grinch Pie with one of your kids! Here’s what you do. Go to the grocery store and buy twenty dollars of the most disgusting food items you can find. Look for items like pig knuckles, canned tongues, or green slime Jell-O. There’s plenty of revolting items to choose from so just make it up as you go along. When I make a Grinch pie with my grandsons, we always throw in a dirty sock and add some yard debris, but that’s just us. Then for the coup’ de grace, dump the gloppy mixture into a pie crust, and present it to someone you don’t like, but really like a lot. As they try to thank you, give them a real present, and watch their Grinch heart grow three times bigger, just like Dr. Suess said it would.

As you go dashing through the snow this season, remember, there’s a child in all of us just waiting to come in and get warm. So is Jesus. He is waiting outside in the snow hoping someone hears Him knocking at the door. He is serious about his role as God’s son but has also come to show us great “tidings of comfort and joy.” Open the door! Invite him in for a colossal pancake and give one of my ten tidings a try. It’ll just be us family, and a new baby named Jesus.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Big Wheels Keep on Turning

As some early signs of winter set in, our yard could be mistaken for a small mammal petting zoo. We have already had one dusting of snow, but in our yard, it’s raining squirrels. At any one time, dozens of them rush around as if it's Black Friday, pushing and shoving, barking at each other for the last discounted acorn on the shelf. These rodents have a heyday tearing up the landscape, so I trap them and cart them off to the Candy Cane Forest where they can look furry and cute and strip the bark off woodland trees to their hearts delight.

After releasing one such varmint, I was headed back home when a horizontal streak of lightning flashed by me. The wind chill was only twenty-four but sliding into the lane ahead of me was a man...yes…a motorized wheelchair. Shirtless! And helmetless! Who was this wheelchaired superhero? Had I missed the checkered flag? From what I could tell, he was in a race with himself and winning, taking the pole position, head lowered, leaning forward in the First Annual Lunatic 500.

While I often stare as drivers across the city violate traffic laws willy-nilly, here was a half-naked wheelchaired man with no fear and no apparent knowledge of the speed limit. Watching his devil-be-damned attitude, I had to wonder how he ended up in the wheelchair in the first place. Was he running from the law? Was he late to a wedding? Was he one of those daredevils that drives into a tornado while the rest of us are driving away from them? Most importantly, had I missed an email designating me as the pace car? I had to know.

But I was too slow. As smoke poured off his big wheels, Morgan Freeman’s iconic line from Shawshank Redemption came over me: “You either get busy living or get busy dying.” From what I could tell, Flash was making a bee line towards death if he didn’t either slow down or get some clothes on.

Normally, my pervading thought would be empathy and compassion for the wheelchair bound, but I didn’t feel compassion at all. I had horrible PTSD from an experience in a car, when, on the Fourth of July, a formation of Blue Angels approached me over a country hill and almost caused my airbags to deploy. (By the way, my family was riding with me and was only saved by diving out of the car into a cornfield).

Here, I realized I was witnessing a man who laughed in the face of dangerous adventures. Volcanic potholes? Laughable! Construction hazards? Ridiculous! Semi-trucks? Watch out! Shortly after I spotted him again, bright red from windburn, he roared through a double row of moving cars with a huge smile on his face, made a raised “defiant fist” to a texting driver, and then blasted into an intersection bringing a herd of hybrid cars to a complete and silent halt.

This was not a man who played the victim. There was no sad story here, and no one looking for pity. This guy had his Big Wheels, he had his moxie. He had come out of nowhere like a meteor from interstellar space, burning up our limited atmosphere on a historic path to fulfill his destiny. His earth knew no bounds, and as far as he was concerned, well, “Houston, we don’t have a problem here.”

After I pulled over to take my anxiety medicine, I observed him deftly shank a sudden wheelie next to a telephone pole, stopping only inches from a pedestrian WALK button, which he punched so hard it stopped all cable service in the surrounding area for at least a couple of hours. When I’m walking about town, I can never get one of those buttons to work for me, but after watching him, I think I can now! All you have to do is hit it as if you want to kill it, and that red button WILL STOP TRAFFIC!

Now, before the signal turned green, he took off again on two wheels as if on a wild mustang. On a pole connected to his wheelchair, a tall yellow caution flag waved furiously, signaling that he was ready to jump back in the fray and possibly a national news cycle. Something moved me deep inside, and I had a strange feeling I was in a scene of Braveheart, as if my own courage had laid dormant for years. If my sunroof had been opened, I might have stood up and recited the Pledge of Allegiance or sang God Bless America. Instead, I broke into a spontaneous applause, one handed of course, while keeping my other hand free to give him an encouraging thumbs up.

But he never saw me. He was on a mission. This was a man on a high-speed race with adrenaline, who rounded corners on two wheels, and who wasn’t going to let a fast ride on a cold day be waisted because his shirt was still in the dryer! We’ve all seen this guy. We know him and we move aside when we see him coming. Why? Because we are making room for the turbo-lane he’s creating for himself out there in Braveheart. He’s fearless. He’s seen Shawshank Redemption and heard the line, and he is getting busy living.

Hello Darkness, My Pumpkin Friend

As most of you know by now, my relationship with the pumpkin family has walked a tenuous line over the years. Last year, after an interview with Mr. Pumpkin (see Nov 12 and Nov 20 blogposts), where he passionately defended gourds across the nation, I thought I had heard the end of him. Then last week, a piece of pie I was eating succumbed to Pie-librium, tipped precariously over, and through a random sequence of events, caused the accidental stabbing of a nearby napkin holder. I tried to leave the diner quietly, knowing pumpkins are a temperamental lot. I tried; I really did try.

However, late into the night, when my inner beasts awaken and spirits trinkle down the floorboards of our house, I heard an abrupt THU-wump! at our front door. Slipping out of bed in bewilderment, I caught a contentious whiff in the air. In the flicker of the streetlight outside, I saw a hooded figure drop an unmarked envelope through our mail slot. Then, the figure vanished into the shadows, and all was quiet.

But a damp, earthy atmosphere filled our foyer. It was an odor that had a jarring effect on my memory. There was something bland but contentious…something Cucurbitaceae in the air, and I felt a marrow chill race up my spine. Carefully, I opened the following letter:

Photo by Kimi Albertson on Unsplash

Dear Mr. Blunder:

Remember me? I remember you…I know where you live. I follow your podcast, and last week’s disturbed me…grated me. You have once again insulted the Pumpkin Nation and raked our good nature across the pumpkin patch by introducing the absurd notion that our balance, our very temperament, is determined by an ancient math formula.

To suggest that a fake formula called “Pie-librium,” was the cause of your accident while eating a piece of pumpkin pie and resulted in the stabbing of a nearby napkin holder with your fork, was a fibrous insult to pumpkins everywhere. Tipping over on our crust! HA! May I remind you that the triangular shape of pumpkin pie is one of the most stable of all forms found in nature? That tipping of your piece of pie and blaming it on pumpkins? JACK-O-LANTERN’S YOUR UNCLE! That one’s on you, and you, alone. Your story was nothing more than pulp fiction, and I for one refuse to sit by and let you darken our fine heritage.

You may or may not be aware that Indiana, your fair state, is the second largest pumpkin producer in the United States, with some 118 million pounds of pumpkin processed every year. Even as I write this letter, the entire gross tonnage of pumpkins across Indiana are lining up, soldiering together on porches, for the upcoming Thanksgiving season. We are not tipped over as you suggested, or in any way losing our balance. There are a few of us who have cut out our tops to spite our carved faces, but in general I speak for all gourds in defiant opposition to your theory of shifting equilibrium, your boneheaded mathematical equation for “Pie-librium.” We can sit proud on any plate, proud of our mushy and unremarkable taste that always blends with, but doesn’t stand out during, a Thanksgiving dinner. Our national slogan, “Stable on the Table,” marches forth.

We have heard your podcast Mr. Blunder. We have your number and it is not P/E or any other formula. Let this letter be a warning to you. As President of the Indiana Chapter for the Development and Homogenization of Pumpkins, I can assure you that any more fibrous material slung in our direction will be carved, squashed and pureed. We will ripen and march on Washington if we must and demand that the word “equilibrium” be edited out of all Thanksgiving dinner conversations and ground up in the food processor of the English language. We will march – the entire pumpkin nation, including my close cousins – the watermelon, celery, gourds, and zucchini. You want numbers? You want math? How about 975 species?! There’s some math for you, and it is US! WE ARE PUMPKIN NATION.

Signed,
Mr. Pumpkin

His letter fell from my limp hands. Past lyrics from an old Paul Simon song drifted through my head: “Hello Darkness, my pumpkin friend, I’ve come to talk with you again...” and I was scared. How would I sleep at night knowing my very digestive tract might take a beating this Thanksgiving from the Pumpkin Nation? How would I get past my fears of candle-lit, stalking pumpkins?

And then, as the streetlight flickered through my foyer and shed its warm light across his letter, I notice something. Maybe in was nothing, I don’t know. It was hardly noticeable, but there in Mr. Pumpkin’s organic signature was a blotch, a spattering, a spill, and an odor that jogged my memory. I hesitated, but then brought the letter close to my nose, and smelled something familiar. It was…nutmeg, maybe a touch of cinnamon, or tarragon, and a carbohydrate daze crept over me. I felt sleepy again and safe, at least for another year.

Staying Ahead of the Carve

One day not too long ago, having suffered through what can only be described as a series of unreasonable challenges, I decided to grab a coffee and collect myself. I would not necessarily describe my day as combative, but it was close, and came to a head with an uncivil disturbance – my neighbor blowing all his fall leaves down the city’s sewer drain. At a local coffee house, just to shake off my disbelief, I ordered my drink with a piece of pumpkin pie, sort of a last nod to Fall and the slow demise of municipal plumbing.

I rely on pumpkins when life gets dicey. I find comfort in the fact that they are not exactly round, ready to roll around, but slightly oblong in form, and always look ready to settle down where they are, even during my turbulent times. Frankly though, I’m not sure what happens to pumpkin after it goes in my mouth, due to its featureless consistency. I have neither a memory of chewing it or swallowing it once it goes in the pie hole, but it has an anesthetic effect on me. I can only guess pumpkin goes down the same way my neighbor blows his leaves down the sewer, disappearing down a vast hole, mindlessly, with no evidence that it was ever part of the fall landscape.

That afternoon, exchanging sips of coffee with the nothingness of my pumpkin pie bites, I felt its creaminess absorb all my worries. Like a friend who has no opinions on anything, my pie sat there looking interested, but never said one thing, and I fell into a kind of pumpkin haze. A tiny smile perked up in the corner of my mouth, giving birth to hope, and pumpkin peace. For a moment, I even imagined my law-breaking neighbor floating gently over our city, lifted by his Honda 350 leaf blower. The table where I sat was wobbly with uneven legs, and my seat was an horribly uncomfortable, a hybrid stool of some sort, but never mind. I had my balance, my coffee and a piece of neutral pumpkin pie.

My first two bites went down like cake, without effort, but as I unceremoniously sliced into the third bite with my fork, the equilibrium of my pie triangle shifted ever so slightly towards the crust, causing what was left of my pie wedge to tip up, vertical, on the plate. This rarely happens with other pies that I eat, but pumpkin is so homogenized, that any interruption of its specific gravity, any deviation in the slicing process becomes the perfect culinary storm. I had upset the pumpkin scale somehow and I would pay the price.

The thought of my pumpkin, that most uninteresting of all foods, misbehaving in such a detached manner shocked me. I had always assumed that the lightly oily bottom of the crust would be a kind of glue that would stabilize the rest of the wedge. I sat dumfounded in fact, unaware that as my pie shifted, it had caused the table to also shift to its three good legs, causing my plate to begin a perilous slide off the edge of the table. What was meant to be a frantic grab for my pie plate with my free hand instead became an incompetent mishit on the upturned fork which fired off my table as if released from a medieval catapult, then impaled itself in the napkin holder next to me. Incredibly, the elderly couple seated nearby, apparently in a pumpkin haze themselves, didn’t look up at all! My fork was vibrating only inches from their pie, and they didn’t budge!

I realized right then that I had upset one of the most precious laws of physics, The Law of Pie-librium, that is, the square of pumpkin pie stability, represented by P/E is inversely proportionate to its neutrality, represented by our mental state. The formula, which you remember from college, appears as:

P/E ∞ 1/☺︎

This immutable law, being one of the hallmarks of pumpkin neutrality, is best left alone, not altered in any way, even when you are eating. I did have a fleeting moment when I entertained the idea that had my piece of pumpkin pie been less consistent, more bumply, or fruity, or weighty, that perhaps I would have been able to eat it without incident. But then, that is just not the bland and unimaginative nature of pumpkins. So…I shook off that notion, got up off my defective stool and left quietly, out of respect for the indecisiveness of all pumpkins everywhere. One cannot change the immutable laws of nature and pumpkins, and wisdom, in the end, prevails. You either eat your pumpkin in tranquility or live long enough to see yourself become the formula.

When Orange Comes Knocking

No color in the rainbow invades our existence with such totality as orange does at Halloween. Other holidays parade multiple colors around, mixing and matching them according to whatever trends are hot, but ask someone what color they think of at Halloween and orange will be the undisputed, and solitary champion.

Poets tend to stay away from using orange because no word in the English language rhymes with it. There are some close fits – slant rhymes they are called – words like “twinge” or “cringe,” but even a first grader will tell you those words don’t really rhyme with orange. Revolutionaries and trick or treaters will argue that the word “storage” come close to matching the polished sound of orange, but they are wrong. Storage is missing the soft “n” that allows the syllables in orange to move smoothly up to your doorstep and ring the bell without you knowing it.

I challenge you to try to practice saying it once or twice right now. Go ahead, say “orange.” Orange. Orange. You must admit, the phonetics are very pleasant and so smooth that a kind of peace comes over you when you say it. During your pronunciation, you may have found yourself wanting to lean over and kiss your spouse, and say something comforting like, “Hey, I’m headed to bed now, my love. Orange.” Then, your husband or wife might look up and say, “I’ll be along shortly, dear. Orange you too.”

This one word, this warm color extraordinaire, seems so affable, that it’s difficult to imagine it not rhyming with something, but it doesn’t. Occasionally we have all felt a bit of empathy for the single life that orange is living and hope that an urban poet will coin a new word that orange can have a rhyming relationship with. Perhaps it will be a word like “kneephorange” and will emerge out of an ancient Aesop’s Fable and make its way back into popular use. Unfortunately, orange stands out there alone right now, unable find a home in any current poem, leaving us wondering whether there may be something sinister lurking in its past, something we are not supposed to know.

According to Google, there is one word, sporange, which rhymes with orange. Sporange is an archaic botanical term for a sac where spores are made and refers to asexual reproduction in ferns. But using sporange in polite company this time of year, would be rude simply because everyone would think you meant to say orange. They’d wonder why you aren’t using orange on a regular basis when it is the essential word of this season. Why are you using sporange right now and not supplementing the spirit of fall with the real essence, the sentry guardian of the entire Fall season…orange!?

Last week I received a package I’d been waiting for, a set of Micro-Talkies which allow me to eavesdrop in on conversation anywhere in the continental United States, excluding Hawaii and Alaska. You, my loyal listeners, may think that my device is a phony just because it came when I sent in 1000 box tops of plain cottage cheese labels.

It was shaky reception at best, but amazingly, I was able to pick up on some very disturbing sporange gossip out of Plainston, Oklahoma. AS we listen in, Bernice, who runs the knick-knack shop by the ice cream parlor in Plainston, sits down for coffee with her long-time friend, Gladys. They are meeting to talk over the goings-on, like they always do, on the last Thursday of the month before Halloween.

“I just love your sporange pumpkin sweater!” Bernice begins, grabbing Glady’s arm to feel the fabric. It is so soft and cute as a button! Where’d you get it?”

“Oh, go on!” Bernice flusters, “You know I saw that in a display window at the Center for Ferns with a Cause. Imagine the luck! They were running a special on sporanges, and I says to myself, I says, ‘Bernice, that sporange sweater has your name written all over it.’”

“O honey, it’s a must have!” Gladys exclaims, gulping her tea.

“We been supporting the Sporange Botanical Center for years,” Bernice interrupts. “They do so much good for the community.”

“Yes, they do. You know my late husband Wilbur, God rest his soul, played the tuba for their annual fund raiser Spores Galore.”

And that’s when the static kicked in and my Micro-Talkies lost connection to Bernice and Gladys. For a moment as their voices faded, I thought I heard Wilbur’s tuba in the background, and it had an eerie ring to it, a deep howl of abandonment and loneliness. I envisioned Bernice and Gladys, sitting at a counter in a barely lit café on the side of Plainston where the streetlights barely flicker. They were looking nowhere, not even at each other, sipping their sporange tea as if posed in the nightmarish Edward Hopper painting, Nighthawks.

I took off my headsets, placed them aside, and drew a long deep breath. I thought I heard my own heartbeat … and tried to calm down. I remembered it was, after all, just a word we use at Halloween. Why would anything want to rhyme with it?

Orange. Orange.

One Tough Cookie

Last night, before Angel got out of her car, she looked around the warehouse parking lot. She didn’t want anyone to see her bungy-cording her door shut before going in to her second job stocking inventory. She slid over the front seat and exited out her back car door, then viewed the dark lot again. It’s not that she cared if her car was stolen, but for now, the bungie cord was an easy fix, easier than catching a bus. Stepping out in the drizzle, her pace quickened, and she called her sister.

“Hey, I’m headed into work. Are you home?”

Her sister Keilee, sits alone at a worn kitchen table, picking through her third night of Ramen noodles.

“Yea, I’m here. Did you hear anything back from mom? What’s this pile of clothes in the corner?”

“I know. So, I’ll get those to the laundry before I go to work tomorrow. Just leave ‘em there, they’re all dirty. No, no, nothing from mom,” Angel hesitates then enters the back entrance to work and grabs her punch card. Her shift goes from ten to six, with two twenty-minute breaks for a coke, the restroom, and time for a few texts.

“Don’t worry, she’ll call when she needs something,” then adding, “just don’t answer, and don’t answer the door either ‘til I see you in the morning.”

The young sisters struggle to make ends meet, and cross paths between jobs in their weary apartment at the end of a narrow unpainted hall, where the fire extinguisher has been ripped out from the wall. The metal numbers on their door fell off long ago, and even the outline is unclear. Keilee flips through the third loan bill stamped OVERDUE in red. The college loan money for that one was in the bank before their mom withdrew all of it, left, and went on a partying binge on the Treasure Chest Casino Boat two months ago. Her college prospects died, and now the sisters work to pay off their mom’s selfish weekend.

Today, Angel makes my vanilla latte. I never have to tell her what I want. She is alert, smiling and sprinkles on the right amount of nutmeg every time. She has been blindsided by someone she thought had her back, but she is trying to wear it with a smile.

“I started a second job,” Angel begins again, busy stirring.

“Oh. What are you doing there?”

“I’m stocking groceries,” she adds. “I don’t really sleep. But it’s paying off our loan, so it’s money.”

I venture deeper, “What is it you are paying off, exactly?”

She doesn’t stop the mixer. I can see the corners of her mouth begin to quiver, and she looks down to hide the hurt on her face. “My mom isn’t a very nice person.”

There is a long pause. I wonder if I’m asking too many questions.

“It’s my birthday today,” she says feigning happiness, then turns to hand me my drink.

“Oh really? Happy Birthday!”

I catch her glance but it’s an uneasy one. I know she is holding back the pain of having trusted her mother who stole her tuition from her, and the portal of hope that a college future brings.

“Are you doing anything special?” I ask.

“Not really, just working. Maybe spend a few minutes with my sister before clocking back in.”

“Let me buy you a latte!” I offer.

“No thank you.”

“Oh, come on,” I insist. “How about an oatmeal raisin cookie? Because it’s your birthday!

“No, really, I’m good, really, but thanks.”

I start to joke with her about being a year older and wiser, but she didn’t hear me. She was already on the other side of the counter, on the other side of older and wiser, taking someone else’s drink order. She’s gritting out her birthday today and floating on double shifts that don’t allow for stops and celebrations. It’s only Monday, but she is already tired, pushing buttons on blenders, cleaning up dishes in a sink that is always running, and then mixing in more of tired.

Today is not a birthday to remember. For Angel, it is a day she’ll want to put aside until her memory of this day fades, like the numbers on her apartment door, and new ones appear. Today, she has no candles or cake, just a heavy loan to pay off, and the difficult reminder that life is sometimes painful.

The rejections we get, the ones we didn’t see coming, can hurt us enough that we quiver the next time we put our trust in someone again. I walked away, latte in hand, thinking of a few buried hurts of my own, but behind me I heard a voice come through, Angel’s, that was putting her own suffering away for a while.

“Hey,” she says, “I hope I’m not too late but…well… I think I’ll have that cookie."

On the Causeway Towards Mercy

As I watched the path of Hurricane Ian wreck devastation on the Florida and South Carolina coasts, the stories became more and more difficult to hear. While we all can relate to loss at some level, rising sea water goes to a level most of us cannot fathom. There are thousands who have lost all their earthly belongings and are homeless without utilities or clean water. Others have lost their family members to lethal floodwaters and storm surges. When I see the pictures and videos, my check to the hurricane relief fund for batteries and blankets seems piddly and will only provide a temporary emotional band aid for lost loved ones and memories.

Many years ago, when I lived in Florida and had to evacuate for hurricanes, I tried to escape north along traffic lanes clogged with thousands of cars, inching along north to safety, emphasis on inching. I didn’t know what I would return to, or whether my house would be spared. What I remember most was the panic I felt stuck in the middle of the causeway across the Choctawhatchee Bay on Highway 331 to the mainland. It was bumper to bumper traffic and water was lapping across the two-lane and under my car, but I couldn’t move forward or back. At that point the loss of my home and my belongings paled in comparison to the real possibility that I might have to abandon my car and begin running for land.

We have been in our present home nearly twenty years now. The subject of moving comes up occasionally, but I feel sick inside if talk turns serious. I made all the handles on our hallway drawers and cupboards by hand and steam-bent a piece of wooden molding to wrap around the folding table I built in our laundry room. Outside in the garden, it’s taken five years to train a crape myrtle to vine up an old tree stump and bloom around a birdhouse my grandson and I built together. These and a myriad of other improvements have given our house a rich story, chronicled by the arthritis that seeps into my hands to remind me that my story is personal, but not to hold on to these earthly belongings too tightly.

A year ago, I wrote a piece about the mammoth black gum in our back yard that was slowly dying. It formed a magnificent arching umbrella over our entire backyard, sending out invitations to a menagerie of animals from foxes to pileated woodpeckers. Last week it was cut down limb by limb, an agonizing process to watch. I had visions, magical ones, that by morning a new tree would be back, no doubt stirred from a storybook that was read to me long ago. It was not to be.

I wrote this over a year ago regarding the loss of our gum and the impending empty space:

“We are left to accept this fact about our tree: that all living things perish at some point, and to embrace the mystery of this death event as part of life’s cycle.”

Birds now bypass our yard for another landing spot. In turn, Ian’s power reminds me of how little I really have control over, and how nature’s unbridled strength is an example of how much the Almighty has control over. The mighty hands that formed all of nature to begin with preside over its destructiveness as well as its rebirth. A recent sermon I heard encourages us to count three of God’s mercies for every two things we grumble about. There, in the path of the hurricanes of our bellyaching we will discover we cannot fall behind or be left behind with God’s mercies always a step ahead of us.

During the removal of our gum tree, thousand-pound limbs were lifted over our house, but none fell _on_ our house. Ten men cut and dragged one hundred years of growth down our driveway, but not one of those men was injured, nor any of our landscaping maligned. When the stump was ground down our fears that some insect infestation slowly killed our tree were unfounded and we realized our tree had simply died in its sleep, the most humane of all ways to go and was the gum’s way of saying goodbye.

The question that arises about loss is how do we say goodbye while there is still time, while we are still together?

We do so by saying things like, I love you, I’m sorry, and I admire you. We ask each other questions like these: May I hold you? What can I do for you? Where does it hurt? The mercy we need from our losses is in the time we have now, before the loss occurs, to say what really matters in the present. We find mercy in our time together, our prayers together, and our lives together. Events like Hurricane Ian are teaching us that lesson again, a lesson that cannot be replaced by piled boxes in our garages, a caramel Macchiato, or the china gathering dust in our mother’s armoire.

Allan Redpath, British pastor and author said this “There is no circumstances, no trouble, no testing, that can ever touch me until it has gone past God and past Christ, right through to me. If it has come that far, it has come with great purpose.”

I know people who have been exceedingly generous in sending relief to hurricane victims through their donations, supplies and time. Perhaps though, as we indulge ourselves eating corndogs at our local Fall Festival, we can extend, with heads bowed, extra mercies to Florida, and at least for a moment extend our prayers to a place we’ve all been, to a place where loss created a tidal surge in our heart, and sucked the life out of us, and nothing mattered more than God’s grace and mercy.

Footloose and Fancy Free

Lately, my grandson Carter has taken to wearing his shoes backwards. This is not some disability or stubborn mindset by a child who is oppositional.

“Carter, you’ve got your shoes are on the wrong feet,” I point out to him as we were about to leave the house.

“I like them that way, Popeye,” he replied, and that was the end of that conversation.

I have to admire his assertiveness. He is learning early that life is a series of choices. Currently, his feet are the spokesperson for those decisions and growing independence. The backwards shoes are an amusing reminder that he is just a little boy figuring out how his feet work, and that he thinks out of the box like his grandpa Popeye. But when I watch him walk it looks like he’s moving in two different directions at the same time and may split down the middle at any moment. Wouldn’t it be better to have two left feet? In my way of thinking, at least you’d be going somewhere.

Like all funny habits, Carter’s insistence on not having a dominant foot, may put him the unique category of being amphibious, meaning he’ll be equally at home kicking a soccer ball underwater as he is on land. I don’t think there’s many marathons in his future, but he may be very good at several up-and-coming sports still in the developing stages.

Since the Olympics create about five new sports every two years, by the time Carter is twenty, his inclination to walk in two directions at the same time will put him in a prime position for an event I’m calling the “Bi-Shoe-Along.” This sport, which will require little practice and even less concentration, will be an international multi-tasking phenomenon. Competing athletes, knowing what it feels like to have the shoe on the other foot, will exhibit incredible empathy for their fellow athletes, and will, during the event encourage each other to put that best foot forward. These athletes will have their Nikes or New Balance walking shoes custom-made to fit the wrong foot, making the stock value of those companies sore to new heights.

Without getting too technical, the Bi-Shoe-Along will require participants to take two steps forward followed by three steps back continually until, after a hundred steps, they’ll finish in the same spot they started, all the while wearing their shoes on the wrong feet. I have some reservations about the future of this sport, but I think Carter may grows out of his odd shoe habit before the Bi-Shoe-Along catches on.

I recently gave the Bi-Shoe-Along a try, but soon was so confused by walking first one direction and then the other I forgot where I was and had to call for my wife for help. By the time I had gone twenty steps forward and back, the pain in my arches had gone to the next level and my face was twitching uncontrollably like it did when I ate my first Brussel sprout. At the fifty-step mark, my brain was so confused that I began having a Fibonacci flashback to high school math class where I was asked to find the next number in a seemingly random sequence of numbers like 5…362…9,801, and so on until infinity.

As I finish this essay, I sit on the couch next to my grandson watching his favorite character on TV, Blippi, who is on a spiritual walkabout with an Australian child. I notice Carter’s toes are pointed in the right direction, and he seems perfectly happy. I, on the other hand, have an ice pack on both feet and believe I have caused irreparable damage to my arches.

Please subscribe to my podcast, Knee Deep, which airs this week. New episodes will be posted weekly as well, so join me and we’ll wade in together!

Unsinkable Ron

One of my very favorite things to do is pray for someone I don’t know, right on the spot. It’s challenging and gives me the feeling that no matter what else happens during the day, I have done something good for one person. You might think praying for someone without being asked is awkward, and it can be, but I’ve never had anyone say no to my offer.

The first person I ever prayed for off the cuff was a plumber named Ron who arrived at 6:30 in my art room to flush out a paint and glue-encrusted sink. My principal had already raked me over the coals about the clog, and given me a lecture about classroom management, the corporation’s mission, and the price of beans in China. At the end of that diatribe, her rigid hand came up from behind her desk to reveal what had already been pulled from the pipes, a large gooey bundle of pencils, over which she added, “Next time this happens, you’ll pay.”

When I returned to the art room, I was nervous about how the repairs were going, but busied myself preparing the room for a day of teaching middle school. While making small talk with Ron about ornery middle schoolers who pour Elmer’s glue down a pipe, Ron quietly opened up about his impending divorce. He continued to fill in the details of his life, and I saw a man broken by the loss of a wife and family, and the hopelessness of a life clogged up like the sink he was repairing. We had something in common and I was urged to pray for him. What would be his reaction I thought? I bowed my head, leaned into some awkward words, and tried to express the love that God promises. I knew it was there, but I didn’t know if Ron would put down his wrenches and pray or use one of them on me.

When I finished and looked up, a somewhat bewildered Ron thanked me and immediately went back to work. I was way too busy to think about my prayer, and too afraid to ask him more about his desperation. His plumbing called, my students were needy, his tools were clanking, and my hands were busy. But… God heard that prayer and came roaring into Ron’s heart like a freight train that day.

I could say that there are a lot of sinks out there that need attention. I could say that there’s a lot of gunk stunk in those sinks that water’s having a tough time moving through. What Ron and I didn’t know was the powerful way God would take a simple prayer and use it to rebuild him from the ground up, rid him of his vacant pipe dreams and hopelessness and fill him with good news and a new purpose.

Clogged sink? Yep, a year later I did it again, and Ron the Plumber had to be called back in to fix the sink. Ron looked like a new man though, and this time we were wading into the problem together. His life wasn’t perfect, but he had gotten through his divorce, had his kids living with him, and was wielding those plumbing tools like a medieval boss. His plumbing fixtures were allowing new life to flow. He was re-tooled, re-synced, re-glued and renewed. And then, after telling me about his year, he offered to pray for _me_ that day.

And man did I need it. The principal called me in later to show me the glob that had been pulled out of the sink again, but now I saw the gunk my students had shoved down those pipes, not as a mess but an opportunity. Without that clog, I would never have met Ron. And as my principal tossed the mixture of glue and broken paint brushes into the trash, I reached down and pulled them out, and later used that clump as the final touch in a work of my art, shown in the blog, called Jonathon’s Lunch Tray. It was a blessing all around.

If you run across a Ron in your life, even if he’s not a plumber, try this simple prayer:

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this beautiful day you’ve given us. Thank you that you have a plan for our life. I want to take a moment and lift up Ron who I just met and ask that you cover him in your love today. Let your presence be known in his life, as he serves others. Thank you for putting us together to pray, and help our day be fruitful all day long. In Jesus name we pray, AMEN!

We're in this Myotonic Mess Together

I have had one mixed up week. When I stop to think about it, the week was like a collage that needs some fine tuning. The weekend is here, and I’m still arranging the pieces to bring some order out of it all. I chose the swatches of color and texture, but there’s a few that found their way into the collage on their own, and several that will have to be recycled into another week, another piece. And dang it, I really wanted to knock your socks off with a fantastic blog that would add to your story, but honestly what you’ll read here doesn’t have a good frame around it yet.

First, my wife and I took our grandson out to eat last Sunday, and crossed a dangerous threshold when, in the middle of a large Sprite, my grandson emitted an enormous belch the size of North Dakota. As the restaurant around us went dead quiet, even my grandson slunk down in the booth to escape. I listened for some compassionate or sheltering sound, perhaps a noise to buffer the deafening silence but there wasn’t even a clinking fork to be heard. Nothing screened us from those stares, and even though we corrected our grandson on his manners, a mirror was held up to my wife and me. In fact, our shame was so palpable even the Spotify playing overhead switched itself off. Five minutes later, when I had the courage to resurface from under the table, I felt I was halfway between heaven and hell, with a mark on my head that said EMBARRASSMENT.

On a positive note, my father of almost one hundred years old changed rooms at his nursing home this week. Even though he only moved one floor down, changes come hard during this last season of his life. I’ve heard that moving is one of the top three worries for an adult, right behind death and public speaking. Of the three, most of us, including my dad, would choose the move. In his new room, he’ll be right across the hall from the laundry room, and since my washer at home is older than he is, I plan to do my laundry there while Dad distracts the staff. I can’t wait to send my yard shoes through the tough stain cycle and push a couple of the new buttons we don’t have at home.

The third loose end that I want to share with you, kind of clear up if you will, is the “newsworthy” video showing Hawaiian goats fainting when put under too much stress. I would say these YouTubes took the internet by storm, except that when you watch one the videos of these goats keeling over, they ain’t stormin’ nuttin’. One minute they are running around the barnyard more limber than a yoga instructor, the next thing you know, they stiffen up and fall over, out cold in the dirt. I’m perturbed by the attention these myotonic goats are getting because I’ve been stiff for the last five years and nothing about that picture ever went viral. If it had, you can be sure I’d be calling you and we’d all go myotonic together, by golly. Give me a break! Man o’man.

Lastly, and probably the most exasperating piece of last week’s puzzle, because it’ll never be fixed, is my displeasure over my very favorite coffee shop. To be sure, I love their coffee so much I would work there for Splenda. Sadly, they have made so many changes that buying their coffee almost isn’t worth it, emphasis on almost. My biggest beef is their drive-through system, which is not a system at all but a series of interlocking exchanges, merges and off ramps similar to those you’d find in Chicago or possibly Henderson. I would rather have an MRI than try to negotiate the traffic jam that commonly ensues there. So, today I went inside to make my coffee, but the coffee countertop has been replaced by a twelve-foot reconstructed portion of the border wall between the US and Mexico. I finally decided to take my coffee in my own hands, go home, fire up my four-cupper and reset my day.

I’d love some feedback on how all your pieces collaged together this week. It would be fun see how they look next to each other in a piece I could write next week. By the way, I would ask that you not scold me too harshly about that restaurant incident. My grandson and I had a burping contest the day before that happened, so I’ve got some growing up to do.

Running Away, Back Home

Did you ever run away from home when you were a kid? At first, it seemed like a good idea, but it wasn’t long before going back sounded pretty good.

I have tried running away from home a couple of times. I must have gotten the idea from one of the rambunctious characters in Leave it to Beaver or My Three Sons. Such sitcoms of the 1960’s reflected the optimistic life of “Camelot” as Jackie Kennedy called it, following a half century of world wars and ruthless autocrats. If I was going to run away from my home and leave those people looking out for my best interest, it wasn’t going to be for very long.

My grandmother was part of the nuts and bolts of how our house was run growing up, literally the chief cook and bottle washer. I couldn’t imagine skipping one of her breakfasts, the same ones she had eaten growing up on her childhood farm in Virginia. As kids, we ate our fried mush in her separate kitchen while she told us stories of depression vagrants who sat outside her mother’s kitchen hoping for handouts on their way to nowhere. She described those lost, runaway men as sunken and hollow, but filled with gratitude when given something to eat, as if they’d been handed Christmas on a platter.

Although times were grave during the Great Depression, her mother, my great grandmother, always had enough baked potatoes in the coals to give to homeless men who waited by her back kitchen door. Always resourceful, she cut those potatoes in half, one half for eating and one for them to keep in their pocket to warm their hands for their journey. The stream of sullen men never stopped. They appeared and then went off into the fog. They were roaming the countryside, looking for any semblance of home in a homeless country, and a half-baked notion of hope in their pocket.

Despite what she had seen, my grandmother had endless optimism, and could see the brighter side of any coin toss. She was unfazed by hardship because she had walked through it, observed it and come out the other side. So, while we listened to some sad chapters of history, she let us be kids as long as possible and helped us see a world where Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn had the final say. When I announced that I was running away from home one Saturday, my grandmother was unruffled.

“Grandma, I’m running away from home.”

“Oh, okay,” she answered, looking up. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to live with the cowboys out west,” I replied putting my cap-gun in its holster.

“Well, I better make you a sandwich. You’re going to get hungry out there on the range rustling cattle and catching outlaws,” she said getting up from her sewing.

“No, Grandma,” I said quickly, “I don’t need a sandwich, I’ll be back before dinner.”

She helped me fill a bandanna with essential cowboy supplies like my matchbox cars, my Mickey badge, a package of fig newtons, a comic book, and a crayoned letter we both wrote to Wild Bill Hickock and his dog Skip. I tied the full pouch to a long stick, threw it over my shoulder, and went strolling off to the wooded lot two houses down where I settled into my new life on the range. The rumor is that I went back every fifteen minutes for something I needed, but I only remember twice, once for more fig newtons and once for a short break to watch Andy and Mayberry.

My grandmother had it right. She protected us from the horrors of what she had seen and had lived through herself but let me run away as long as I wanted. Grandmothers are wise like that.

Between Your Pew and Mine, Part 2

The process of finding Jesus as an adult is fraught with obstacles like busy schedules, egos, and worldly distractions. There are days I wonder whether I am walking the path, but I keep praying that my days will be fruitful. Talking about my faith around some people makes me nervous, as if the subject might bring up our differences and make us more divisive. In that conversation where you and I may not agree, I try to picture Jesus, relaxed but alert, standing back and smiling while we talk. He is ok with us disagreeing, but never ok with meanness or lies.

I have a feeling he was not as keen about Arthur’s pants being removed during a church sermon in my last episode. Arthur got too hot as you recall, having worn too many layers of clothing to church, and was stripping down while his grandfather dozed off. (History has not been kind to a few Bible characters who fell asleep when the Lord ask them to stay awake, but that’s another story).

There are any number of problems with this Arthur’s situation. Even if Arthur’s pants would have come off easily, which they didn’t, a church sanctuary is a holy place. An offbeat noise is expected now and then during church – someone drops their sunglasses, or has a coughing spell, that kind of thing. But it was going to be hard to get the holiness back as Arthur’s pant legs got stuck on his shoes initiating one of the greatest wardrobe malfunctions in history.

One could say this kind of jam is exactly what God uses to build our trust and help us make those spiritual leaps of faith. Leaping, however, wouldn’t have been in Arthur’s best interest under the circumstances, because G’pa suddenly came out of his winter hibernation to witness his grandson in a wrestling match with his pants… the pants carrying the upper hand so to speak.

With part of his brain still in deep REM, G’pa, the responsible adult here, blurted out a loud, non-denominational statement that coincided with a Bible verse being shown on the screen overhead from Colossians 3:8:

“But now, you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander and filthy language from your lips.”

Then, he grabbed his grandson by one of four pantlegs available and tackled Arthur to the floor to avoid detection, which created the maximum amount of detection possible during a sermon. Undeterred, Arthur took this to mean his G’pa wanted to wrestle and began a full-on tickling match where G’pa’s shoes were flung off to get to those particularly sensitive spots.

Can I just stop here and ask you, my reading audience, if there is anything about tickling an older person that sound like a good idea? To me, it sounds more like a felony. Even with someone younger, tickling will probably end with a light slap or curt rejection, but an oldster? I’m just saying.

Massachusetts Mutual advertisement, Norman Rockwell

Of course, quite a bit of attention had been drawn to the tickling skirmish, but there was nothing anyone could really do but look straight ahead with extra concentration. Eventually, Arthur and his grandfather sat upright in the pew, both fully clothed. I did note the offertory plate skipped their row that Sunday. I’m guessing the ushers did not want to confuse it with another church activity, the Annual Clothing Drive, where G’pa’s socks or Arthur’s pj’s risked being collected by mistake.

Thinking back, I can’t remember ever seeing a congregation leave a church so relieved, and happy. No one was laughing, but a lot of people couldn’t wait to get to their cars so they could laugh. Somewhere between the pious and the pj’s, Arthur had lost his pants, but everyone else had peeled off one of their heavy layers also.

Between Your Pew and Mine

I’ve gone to several churches in my life, coinciding with house moves, changes in our family, and the evolution of my own faith. While I was growing up God seemed like a confusing entity, and things about the Bible were often taught in an adult language, as if learning about God needed to involve a bit of confusion. The mystery of our Creator didn’t bother me, but the confusion bothered me a lot.

Massachusetts Mutual advertisement, Norman Rockwell

Getting ready for church was pandemonium around our house on Sunday mornings. My mom and dad were, shall we say, overly concerned about how we looked and how the family presented itself when we were marched through the sanctuary. Since most of the clothes for kids in the 1960’s were fifty percent polyester and fifty percent cactus, my whole body twitched and itched while I sat in the pew and tried to pay attention to material way over my pint-size head. If God was all powerful, I wondered, why hadn’t he invented a comfortable fabric for children to wear to his house?

After church, my brother and I snuck back into the sanctuary to play. One of our favorite games involved racing up and down the pews. By laying on our backs and reaching back to grab the next pew, we could pull ourselves along the linoleum floor, sliding all the way to the back door, where we would pop out, swing around, and slide back. Our game of racing ended one Sunday when my brother, in a bid for the pole position in the Little Pew 500, reached for the next pew and grabbed the ankle of an elderly lady quietly praying, perhaps for kids like us.

That was a come-to-Jesus moment for at least two of us, not including the prayerful lady.

I’m often reminded of how receptive Jesus was when children came on the scene, and of the time he rebuked his disciples when they tried to shoo away some kids who were not as serious as his disciples thought they should be. I think Jesus wanted his twelve friends to recognize how important it is to protect our child-like faith wherever we can and admire that same freshness when we see it in children.

Fast forward to my adulthood when I entered church one Sunday to find a grandfather sitting with his grandson. I knew the grandfather because I had gone to school with his son, but I was unprepared for the “child-like freshness” I was about to witness.

Because of several church factors including high humidity and a particularly grueling sermon from Leviticus, the grandfather began nodding off, his head bobbing up and down like a carnival ride, signaling the advent of a long nap. The grandson, Arthur, began to get a bit too warm, having put on his church clothes over his pj’s he’d worn at G’pa’s sleep-over the night before. With G’pa falling asleep during the sermon, Arthur made the inspirational decision to take off his church pants to cool down and let off some steam…you know, get comfortable…kind of bring in the light, so to speak.

Sitting several pews behind, I began to witness an amazing exercise in physical acrobatics, which by themselves presented several challenges for Arthur. First, he had to be very quiet, less he woke his snoring G’pa, a former school principal. Next, he had to pull his pants off over his shoes because that seemed the quickest route to the personal freedom he was seeking. And finally, and most importantly, he had to do all of this while appearing as if he was not stripping down to the bare necessities in the middle of a Methodist worship service. (By the way, pant removal does not fall under the kind of fresh outlook Jesus was hoping for when he spoke about what we can learn from children and their innocence).

Next week…find out what happens when God calls G’pa to act, somewhere between your pew and mine. I think there is a Bible lesson here, but for now try to get Arthur’s dilemma out of your mind. You want to be clear-headed this Sunday when the humidity seeps in and the sermon gets a bit dry.

Longer by the Length

Today was a swim day for me – time to get in the pool and knock off some laps.

People often cringe when I tell them I’m a lap swimmer and comment about how boring it must be to go back and forth, repeating those same motions without a background playlist or video. While swimming laps _is_ routine, it’s the lack of stimulation and interruptions that allows me to hear the cues life is throwing at me, the ones that I’ve been ignoring. Underwater the quietness of the pool takes over, truths bubble forth, and my brain is cleaned out. Lumbering slowly along like a manatee, I breathe steadier and more even, and some of life’s rigidity dissolves in the slow lane for a moment of calm.

Most of what I know about swimming I learned during the Red Cross courses I took at camp on Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin. Every day during instructional swim I jumped off a dock into frigid cold water and did warm-up “bobs” until my heart recovered, and then yielded to the drills of my counselors until I was ready for the next level of instruction. I would never have guessed in a million years that swimming would later become my go-to sport, and that it would have a re-energizing influence as I age.

Nowadays, after I have finished my swim workout and head to the locker room, I am met by weightlifters, basketball players, and step fanatics. They look defeated and blotchy as if they have been bitten by a South American spider, and they are so tired they can barely get their water bottles up to their lips. They drop their workout clothes where they land and then leave them there until the janitor picks them up with Hazmat gloves and put them in the Lost-and-Found basket. Other men, too tired to make it to the shower, plop down on the end of a bench with a towel on their heads, mumbling locker words. After a couple of hours there, hungry and tired, they manage to limp off to the shower, where they stand comatose until the club closes, or until all the hot water runs out.

Sometimes I try to talk to those athletes, you know, start up some lighthearted small talk about the world, but frankly, I get the impression they wish I would just be quiet and go away. There is no oxygen left in their bodies for conversation, and underneath their sweaty towel, where their faces look as if they’ve been through a medieval battle, they are wishing they never had to return to the gym again. Occasionally one of them will look up and say, “well, I’m glad that’s over,” but their voice trails off at the end as they nod off for an afternoon nap.

I don’t get that kind of vibe from swimmers. Not at all. Lap swimmers come out of the pool looking like their grandmothers just cleaned them within an inch of their lives. They are refreshed and shiny creatures, carefree and almost weightless. Oddly enough, they are also about a foot longer than when they went in, as if each stroke reawakened some muscle group that went to sleep during puberty, as if the lack of gravity and the buoyancy of water completely changed how everything was put together in their bodies.

In fact, most swimmers don’t look like they have any connective tissue at all when they step out of a pool. Amorphous, loose, reborn, they move over the earth on a blue stream of pool gel, which escorts them like a salve throughout the rest of their day. Up top, their hair is slicked back like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, and we can tell by the way they use their walk that swimming laps has transported them to another more beautiful space, a land far, far away. Lap swimmers are, in fact, the inspiration for that final scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy says softly, “…and you were there, and you and you, and I love you all so very much, and I’m never, ever going to leave here again, because I’m home, I’m home Auntie Em, here in the swimming pool.”

Dorothy is there because being in a pool reminds her of when she was a kid. In fact, we all see ourselves in the middle of an old home movie saying, “Mom, watch this!” whereupon we hit the water with a square-on belly-flopper that doesn’t hurt at all because, well, it’s water for heaven’s sake! Our bodies are almost all water, so it’s water on water, no holds barred, Cowabunga Man, ain’t it great to be alive!

I took a break from swimming the other day to walk on the treadmill. I almost got run over by something akin to a construction sled bearing down hard on me like an Eskimo in the Winter Olympics. The sled pusher, being yelled at by a personal trainer, was grunting so loud I thought he might be a wild animal, and I watched as he pushed his sled across the finish line, exhale like a jetliner, flex his heavy artillery tattoo, then yell, “WHERE’S MY WATER?!”

I thought of telling him that a refreshing pool was right around the corner, but in my mind, I was escaping in the slow lane, somewhere between lap twenty-three and fifty-seven.

Boy in the Bubble, Part 2

We pick up the action from last week, where you’ll remember I was tunneling down into a neighbor’s yard to expose a magical “earth bubble” with the sole purpose of soothing my

end-of-summer boredom and of orbiting our planet should the yard bubble explode under me and hurtle me into the solar system. In the meantime, I had angered my neighbor who was bearing down on me hard on his lawn mower, and a gardener and his dog, one of whom was rabid. I was eight years old. Let’s pick up the action there, shall we?

As my long life and the whirling blade of a lawnmower passed over me, I took a huge gulp of oxygen, which included dirt and insect larvae, and ducked south for cover. I knew oxygen would come in handy should I find myself in the atmospheric void of one of Saturn rings or caught in a meteor storm. Actually, I remember that last breath quite vividly because it was promptly and unexpected sucked back out of me by the Toro lawnmower, a new bagging type that created a grass vacuum, and incidentally passed within an inch of my head. I was no sooner in the rear-view mirror, ready to take a giant leap out of my hole for mankind, than I had to duck back down to avoid a face-to-face meeting with the viscous teeth, numbering in the tens of thousands, of the Snarling Dog owned by Ancient Tool Man.

All my senses told me that these times were indeed the worst of times, and I was in the worst of trouble. Yet my fear, that illusive traitor, was blocked when off in the distance I picked up the voice of my grandmother, discharged like a drill sergeant, calling me home. My hearing, by the way, was one of the few bodily functions I still had operating at that moment.

You may be wondering how I could hear my grandmother given the layers of violence that surrounded me at that moment. However, scientific research, (or possibly the Nature Channel) has proven that kids, those tiny little creatures inhabiting Lawn Holes across our planet, can hear their grandmother’s voice from distances of up to twenty miles away. It is also important to note here that for me to not answer my grandmother when she called was tantamount to family treason, with no chance for parole or cartoons before I went to bed, whichever came first.

Fearing my grandmother over all other fears, I was just about to poke my head up again like a worm in a rainstorm, and run for my life, when I heard:

“SIT!”

and looked up to see my grandmother, all 4 foot seven of her, reigning command over all the earth, reference Genesis 1: 5 when as you remember from Sunday School, God divided the light from the darkness. In this case, Toro Man and Ancient Man divided themselves out of sight immediately, and Foaming Dog, being the only creature there obeying her command, was given a delicious crispy salted butterscotch macadamia nut oatmeal cookie, fresh out of my grandmother’s oven.

She handed me one too, patted the dog on the head, and holding my hand, escorted me through the meadow, bypassing Venus and Mercury, down a narrow brick path by our tool shed, where she met Ancient Man and gave him back his shovel and a warm cookie.

Summer was over, the sky was clear, school was nearly here, but there was nothing to fear at all.

Boy in the Bubble

Every year, late in the summer, an elephant enters the room for schoolkids. It’s a dreaded time when your summer is fading from view, being slowly eclipsed by the realization of the approach of another school year. For a kid, it is like watching your ice cream cone in slow motion fall on the hot pavement and melt away. Leagues are starting to dry up. Swim team is over. Yet summer is still here, hanging on until the last dog dies. It’s a hard time for kids. They are bored, retreating inside, sulking, but unable to speed up their inevitable pain and start the dang school year already.

I’m glad my parents did not try to bail me out of those moments of boredom with a last-ditch field trip to Pidgeon Creek, or with home movies of us as children running around in diapers. Either would have robbed my imagination of those moments where I had to get inventive and figure out what to do with my last few free moments before new spelling lists, times tables and the history of Colonial America consumed my waking hours.

I was in such a state late one summer, when in a fit of utter flatness, lethargy and discontentment, I decided to find out for myself whether the softer earth in the middle of my neighbor’s back yard was really there because of a giant air bubble rumored to be just under the surface. Twin brothers George and Wally Rickles had even backed up their claim by showing me how they could jump up and down on that spot with hardly any effort at all, as if the buried bubble just underneath them was propelling them upward.

“But if you take a shovel and dig down,” George pointed out, “and you hit that bubble, it’ll burst…”

“Yea, it’ll burst alright,” chimed in Wally, who was born 13 seconds after George and prone to repeating what his brother said.

“…and you’ll be spit right out into interstellar space. It’ll be like a volcano.”

…just like a volcano on TV,” piped in Wally, right on cue.

At the time, having watched all 75 episodes of the Jetsons a dozen times, I was quite familiar with interstellar space, and although I didn’t like the way the Jetson’s dog Astro ate metal scrapes, I was all in with the possibilities of a cosmic lifestyle.

One lunar rotation after my conversation with the Rickles twins, I climbed over the fence and borrowed my neighbor’s shovel. She was a gardener and left all her tools readily available throughout her yard, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, except for the two days when they all were carted off to be sharpened by an ancient-looking man in overalls who walked bent over up her driveway to gather them and then took about an hour to carry them back to his truck before he drove off. I offered to help him one year, but he threatened to turn me into a scarecrow, so I let well enough alone and went off to find my subterranean yard-bubble.

Once there, I furiously began to dig deeper and deeper, like a boss, pausing and waiting between jabs for the impending explosion I knew would jettison me over the neighborhood.

Since I was destined to fly into outer space, what would it matter if I went down a few more feet before blast off?

However, in my digging exuberance, I failed to notice Ancient Tool Man approaching, having come to claim the shovel I had “borrowed” from next door. This year, as an added attraction, he had brought his dog, a behemoth of a creature, who, coincidentally, was only let out of its cage at the local zoo once a year. (Reference: The Hounds of the Baskervilles).

It was then, as the rabid hound came bearing down on me, that going back to school didn’t seem all that bad, where observing how paramecium divide or learning how cambion is formed in a tree, in fact, looked absolutely thrilling.

I had only a second to pop my head up, jump up and make a run for it, until I noticed my neighbor, whose yard I had excavated without permission, suddenly appear in front of me moving at break-neck speed on his brand new three-speed Toro lawn mower. If it weren’t for the possibility of being decapitated, I might have done some early research for school regarding the underside of a lawnmower and all its movable parts. Instead I ducked down into my man hole and prayed the bubble wouldn’t release itself as the mower passed over me.

As both the maniac dog, Ancient Man and Toro descended on me…

PS. The end of this muse will be continued next week, as the end of summer, and the possibility of a radical new haircut for me come into full view. By the way, I might just stop here and mention that if you have bored kids and they are outside right now, you might take a gander out your window and check on them…

(Re)Calling All Grocery Carts!

I have a lot of adventures in grocery stores. That either means I’m preoccupied with food, or my life is redundantly boring. Or it could mean I need to consider a new title for my blog: The League of Extraordinary Refreshments, or Victuals of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Eatables. How about this one? A Day in the Life of a Guy from a City Where Compulsive Eaters Attack the Son of Armageddon, Part 2.

Ok, granted, that is stretching everyone’s gastrointestinal fortitude, but last week I had such a traumatic event at the grocery store that I’m implored to fill you in with its details.

Setting the stage here, I was having one of those mornings where everything was falling into place. My coffee tasted particularly refreshing, and as I headed out to pick up a few things at Schnucks, the traffic parted on my left and right to let me pass without pause, and lo and behold, I found the one shady spot to park, albeit slightly outside the borders of the store, but hey, one can’t be picky with temps soaring in the nineties, right?

All was smooth inside the grocery store also. Clerks were pleasant, the items I wanted were all in stock, (an anomaly in itself) and the smell of fresh kumquats wafted throughout the store. All was right and good in the world. At one point, I even entertained the thought that I was somehow ahead of life, leading the pack in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Rat Race of Life. With pep in my finger, I poked in my rewards points, put my half-cart in high gear, and positioned my cruise for the scenic route through the parking lot.

However, somewhere out in space, the wake of a comet began an undetectable series of events, a fractal if you will, a land between shadow and object, another dimension in the Twilight Zone of grocery store events. My grocery cart, now moving at a steady clip towards my car, stopped as if it had hit a brick wall and tipped completely over, spilling all the contents into the parking lot. If I had not been so busy balancing myself like a circus performer over the top of the cart, I would have noticed that every single item I had purchased had a rolling quotient far beyond the legal limit. In layman’s terms that meant that everything that I had bought was spilling uncontrollably somewhere out of reach, as if they were part of some supermarket prison break.

My first thought was that I had caught a wheel on a giant pothole, making the cart tip over. However, no matter how I tried to turn or move the cart, the wheels remained immobile, and it wasn’t until I looked down at the attached red box contraption that I realized a GPS had detected I was beyond the store’s perimeter, signaling the wheel to slam on the breaks.

And by the way, for the record, this was a full-on lock up, not a skidding or rolling stop with air bag deployment. The slow-motion re-play on the big screen would not be pretty: I was the crash test dummy flying over the cart headlong in a seven inning stretch hoping to snag an avocado clean out of mid-air.

To be fair, I have never entertained the idea of stealing a grocery cart or taking my groceries home by way of one. I am intrigued by the fact that someone could simply walk down the street in broad daylight, leisurely pushing their stolen item home. I have seen people do that, but until I researched it, I didn’t know stealing a cart was punishable by up to 90 days in jail, or that stolen carts are a multimillion-dollar problem for the retail industry.

I also learned that it wasn’t worth parking in the one shady spot in North America if it means my cart is going to eject me onto 150-degree pavement like Tom Cruise out of a F-14, then scramble under another vehicle to retrieve my prescriptions.

“Where am I?” Cruise asked after a similar ejection in the Top Gun sequel.

“EARTH,” came the answer from a young boy.

That’s not what the GPS on my grocery cart said.