Lighting a Torch in the Land of Zoysia: Part Two

Last week I expounded on the virtues of the invasive and thick grass my father called The Zoysia. In his quest to become the first person in our hometown to have bragging rights to a zoysia lawn, he had gone out of his way to sew a magnificent crop that was spreading across the neighborhood like no tomorrow.

It was mid-November, and my father had given my brother and I a box of matches and directed us to our front lawn to set fire to the grass to aid in its germination come Spring. Dad considering himself a towering figure in grass experimentation, and around our dinner table, we heard his name mentioned in the same sentence with other great agrarians like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom apparently signed the lesser-known Declaration of Agricultural Independence, a document neither my brother nor I could find in our World Book Encyclopedia. In the front lawn, however, we knew him as just Dad, that guy who knew how to develop a dependable grass fire.

My brother, being five years older, was always the first out the door with his box of matches to get first dibs on the most visible spots in the yard. He favored the areas closest to the street where he could proudly show off his pyro-skills and propensity for controlling brush fires to his girlfriend Nancy in the event she walked by. His logic, I now believe, was the bigger the fire, the more likely Nancy would see our yard from a distance and waltz over to fan the flames of flirtation. Looking back on it now, it was a beautiful allegory for the picture of true passion, one built with intensity, heat and a deep love for all things that remind us of teen-age fires.

In the meantime, while chaperoning Gary’s love and our circles of flaming zoysia, my Dad used his time productively by practicing his golf swing, crushing line drives across our front yard as if he was the legendary Sam Sneed. His chip shots were equally effective, and planting a pitchfork topped with a dishtowel, he took aim for the pin on some imaginary 9th Hole green.

“Fire in the hole!” Dad yelled as another wiffle ball flew off his club. “Hey, watch it there, boys! Looks like you got a creeper going up the fence post!” And just to make his point, he adjusted his swing and pulled a shot slightly to the left that curve around my brother’s head and hit the burning fence post. Aided by the Santa Anna winds from California and his left-handed swing, wiffle balls were flying everywhere as our zoysia bonfires moved a little quicker than anticipated.

“Dad, can I try a shot?” I yelled across the smoke.

“No, you can’t,” Gary interrupted, “I’m older and if anyone gets…”

“Boys, that’s enough! Watch your fires! Let’s keep the heat on! Gary, get that post under control please,” and taking out another whiffle ball chunked it another across the yard. “Maybe when the lawn is done, we can take some practice swings! Watch it, Jeff. Looks like your foot is smoking.”

Up and down our street other curb fires of raked leaves were popping up like apples in a barrel reducing our street to a one lane corridor of greyish-purple smoke confusion. Miss Crenshaw had made some progress with the Council on Civil Defense, helping to pass an ordinance that allowed even-numbered houses to burn on even days and odd-numbered houses on the odd. Unfortunately, the new law went largely unnoticed by the men who were unwilling to acknowledge that their leaf-burning powers had been usurped by a woman. Along our street, as the sound of crips leaves and sticks ignited, men stood stoic with their rakes, like a living painting of American Gothic. It was emblematic of the stalwart character of the American male who would not abandon his post and not give quarter until the last leaf pile was burned to the ground.

And so it was, normal law-abiding citizens became proud pyromaniacs competing to see who could build the tallest inferno. Smoking leaves turned our street into one long tunnel of smoke, Cars and delivery trucks coming through had to weave in and out or back up and go another way as fathers waved them off with rakes and shovels. Our lawn, of course, was slowly baking into a blackened crisp, and our family seemed united as a team, burning towards one common goal.

Neighbors had noticed that even Miss Crenshaw seemed happier, and one Saturday, in a kind of celebration of her even-odd day ordinance, she invited the thirty-plus member of the Civil Defense Committee to her house for herbal tea, decorated her sitting porch out front with swirling black crape paper, and set the folding tables out with ashtrays and matching paper plates. As members weaved their Cadillacs up our street in an out of curb fires, they found their way to Miss Crenshaw’s decorated house, got out and strode like proud peacocks up to the front porch, where they stopped momentarily to put out their Pall Mall cigarettes.

All across town the sound of sirens could be heard, as firetrucks raced to put out spreading leaf fires or hose down a child that felt too warm. Through our smoky yard, we looked up to see Engine 99 round the corner to our street. The fire chief was a recent patient of my dad’s and called down to him as the truck slowed.

“Hey Doc! How ya doing?” Sgt. Brooks said, leaning out from his cab perch.

“Mr. Brooks! What brings you over this way?” Dad answered as he walked over.

“Nothing much, just another fire in the line of duty. Like I always say, ‘One man’s leaf fire is another man’s hot dog stand!’” rearing back in laughter. “Say, Doc! Whatever plumbing of mine you fixed in your office the other day sure helped! I’m almost back to normal.”

“Oh good! Keep drinking the water!” Dad urged.

“Ohhhh yea,” Brooks yelled down, “Plenty of that right back here in Engine 99!” A large billow of smoke suddenly rolled past, and their relaxed conversation drifted towards urgency and urinary incontinence.

On Gary’s side of the yard, a smoke screen had given him the chance to grab dad’s driver, a club my dad had named Big Bertha and sneak in a couple of drives. He had spotted Nancy walking pretty as a picture up the sidewalk, coughing and occasionally hacking, giving Gary a perfect chance to score a few points.

Teeing up his first ball, his first hit was a complete whiff, sending only a few sparks in the air. On his second ball, he smacked a ball that gained altitude through the neighbor’s carport and rolled gingerly up to Nancy’s feet with a bit of underspin to spare. His tactic had worked.

Nancy looked up and their eyes locked. If adolescence could be bottled, this is what it would have look like. They both froze, sending each other a series of flirtatious waves that appeared as if they were trying to scratch their heads instead. Inspired by her affirmation and skirt blowing in the smoky Santa Anna winds, Gary picked up another whiffle ball, held it straight out like an offering it to Nancy, and teed it up like a pro.

Gary’s drive launched as if shot from a Howitzer. For a moment he and Big Bertha had bonded in pure athleticism. What came off his club however was not a whiffle ball, but a chunk of flaming zoysia the size of a small welcome mat. The look on Nancy’s face changed in slow motion from pure and wholesome in-loveness to outright terror as the flaming chunk of zoysia flew overhead onto Miss Crenshaw’s porch and every mouth of every fireman, including my dad, who had climbed on board to chat, fell wide open.

Lighting a Torch in the Land of Zoysia

As we cross over to Indian Summer, I smell a lot of smoke in the air and see firepits dotting backyard patios up and down my street. They fill our neck of the woods with the smell of charred wood and dropped s’mores caramelizing in the coals.

If I’m up early and make a coffee run before traffic gets crazy, I can peek between properties and notice that the campfires are surrounded by overturned lawn chairs and scattered Styrofoam cups half filled with hot chocolate gone cold. These backyard scenes give evidence of whole families who fell sound asleep right where they were sitting, having succumbed to smokey-thick air the night before. Waking abruptly hours later in pitch dark, they can see their breath, and look down to find parts of grilled hotdogs burning holes through their new plaid shackets.

Quietly, the adults wake each other, but leave their children sleeping, and then wander like some ancient herd of bison back to the warmth and safety of the reservation, where they fall flat onto the nearest couch. I believe this global migration by the Pit-fire People is one of the great unsolved mysteries of science, one that still baffles urban anthropologists and hot dog venders.

Along the back side of our property, I also drag out our portable firepit and sit comfortably, too near it. As my clothes absorb the smoke and ash, memories of burning leaves in the street when that practice was legal are revived from the deep recesses of my brain. When it was legal, the burning piles could be spotted on every street as neighborhood fathers and sons raked their leaves straight from the yard to the fire heap. And in those brisk days between October and November, our parents never worried about us getting too cold when they sent us out to play:

“Mom, I’m headed down to Randy’s!” I’d announce.

“Are you dressed warm enough? It’s cold out there. Do you need gloves?” Mom would ask, looking cautiously down at me.

“No, I’ll be ok. The Fredricks’s have a leaf fire one block over. I can stop there if I get cold.”

“That’s right, I forgot,” mom would say, then add, “Oh, and there’s another one down two blocks at the Greyson’s if you need to stop again.”

And then she’d give me a firm but loving push out the back door, knowing she had good neighbors who could be depended on for a warm and snuggly street fire.

I knew that fall had arrived because our yard turned creamy white, the sign that our special brand of grass, zoysia, was ready for cultivation. The Cold War had raised fears in my father, motivating him to plant an indestructible type of grass that could withstand any possible attack. Being a physician, my dad was also inspired because he was convinced this hardy cultivar was resistant to a variety of ailments such as a leaky gut, scurvy, athlete’s foot, sneezing and Imposter Syndrome. Suddenly, with surgical precision, rolls of abrasive Zoysia were delivered to our yard and stitched together.

The fact that zoysia was disease resistance also meant that it grew at an unstoppable rate, sending out hundreds of invasive feelers that looked like scary centipedes from some cheesy horror movie. Inching along like a heat rash, those feelers spread quicky, dispatching new fingers that eventually transformed our neighbors’ beautiful Bluegrass lawns into patterned, white zoysia islands.

Miss Lowenbach, a retired neighbor lady formerly employed by the city to chair the Civil Defense Unit did some research on zoysia and brought my father a picture of a runner in Australia that had grown under four lanes of highway and popped up back up on the other side. I don’t know anything that can cross four lanes of highway and live to tell about it, let alone do it underground, but Miss Lowenbach’s photo was enough for her to suggest that zoysia might pose a real threat to her yard and to the safety of the city in general, if not the entire continent of Australia.

This new information only served to reinforce my father’s passion for his wonder-grass, The Zoysia, as he called it. To show off the grass’ toughness my father could often be seen out in the front yard practicing his golf swing and taking out huge chunks of the zoysia, which would often travel further than the wiffle balls. Back and forth he walked across the yard to fetch the upended patches, then carry them back to the spot he had assaulted with his golf club. HIs savage practice of breaking up chunks of earth with his pitching wedge, which would be the sure death of any other grass, had no effect on the zoysia. None whatsoever. It was so hardy it could have grown in mid-flight, and probably did grow, as the yard seemed to be bursting at the seams with layer upon layer of healthy, luscious grass.

“How do you keep your lawn looking so healthy?” A passersby would ask. Taking an extra-long backswing for effect, my father would stop mid-swing and point his nine-iron straight to the ground.

“Isn’t it great! It’s Zoysia! The Zoysia!” he would cheer as if he’d won a lottery.

I found the basket of wiffle balls in the garage and noticed they had begun to grow tiny green hairs, taking on a greenish cast as the zoysia began to colonize. As luck would have it, my discovery came just prior to a deadline on a science project, and I took one of the wiffle balls to class to explain how our earth looked from outer space, green and distant and pocked with green wiffle holes from meteor strikes.

In the background however, sweat poured off me as I leaned into the job of mowing through what felt like was a shag carpet of Venus fly traps. I dispelled any thoughts that mowing the grass was cruel and unusual punishment, knowing my efforts would soon be paying off. With fall around the corner, my father would soon be involving us in his dethatching and aeration schedule, which to me simply meant he would allow my brother and I to set fire to the front yard, unsupervised. I now believe that my father, being a urologist, thought of this process in medical terms, and that our garden hose, like part of our urinary system, could be employed at any moment to relieve any fires that got out of control.

One calls into question the sanity of a parent that would allow his children to light matches will-nilly, and in this case, in full public view of his neighbors. It is possible that dad believed that burning the white zoysia, like a forest fire, would regenerate enough new centipede feelers that he could open a zoysia farm someday and let the super grass sell itself.

Nonetheless, a yard full of zoysia had given my father an unhealthy confidence, an overly aerated ego resistant to any type of local gossip. Zoysia had slowly gained that kind of power over him. It wasn’t anything any of us noticed right away, mind you, like a smelly shirt that had hung over a chair for too long. No, this was more subtle than that, an imperceptible change that took over him just as the zoysia began to turn white in the fall, demarcating the borders of our yard as an area of prestige and status.

At six years old I knew of course that fire was dangerous and had probably experienced a burn or two myself. But never mind that, our father had waived any safety lectures about fires, and happy to see us so excited, handed my brother and I our very own unopened box of matches. As we ran out the door into the Land of Zoysia, similar to the Land of Goshen, we did the 1960’s version of a high-five, which was to light a match on our way out.

“Out you go!” Dad would laugh, “Have fun! Don’t let any grass grow under your feet!”

The world was our oyster. We had our fire, and we had our zoysia, and the lawn was ripe for incineration.

Bewitching the Zinnias

Since the year 2003 when we moved into our present house, I have planted tons of zinnias on a horizontal berm across the front of our yard. I drive the local garden shops crazy in the spring buying up every Orange Profusion Zinnia I can get my hands on, a purchase that pays great dividends now as fall ochres and tans take the upper hand and chilly weather rolls in.

I don’t like putting my garden to rest – not at all. It’s not the work involved that gets to me but knowing that I will need to lean into the faith that it’ll all come right back up in the Spring, and that takes some mental acrobatics on my part. I hold onto the quote that we are to plant with tears but harvest with joy, meaning for me that my little slice of the earth will soon be taking a needed rest.

I can tell you within a day or two when the first frost will hit, a time my Zinnias say goodbye and turn to spongy, drooping globes. Even though I hear evidence that our weather patterns are making drastic changes, and that our coastlines are liquifying into the sea, I can tell you without hesitation that our first frost will be within a day either side of Halloween. Every year, like clockwork, with a deviance of less than .02378 minus pi over nineteen, the bewitching phenomena of the beautiful burnt orange palette of Zinnias outside my front porch will inhale the seven o’clock rising sun one last time, gasp through a shiny layer of frost on their petals, fall over on each other as a mushy brown casserole.

That visual really describes more about how I feel on the inside when colors fade around the garden. When I was a child and feeling sickly, I would ask my mom to check my “tempchur,” pronounced as one syllable. Here at our doorstep, there is no thermometer needed. The frost will be there come Halloween, maybe not a hard frost, but a frost nonetheless and the death of my zinnias will set the mood for all the little minions dressed up as Despicable Me’s or Me-mes who come tripping up our walkway weighted down with candy sacks bigger than Felonious Gru.

It's not the dead zinnias that will scare them however, but the shifting alliances daylight has with early evening shadows that grow longer and thinner as the winter solstice nears. Our circadian rhythms are shifting too, seemingly flowing backwards inside our bodies like some kind of sap from a tree. Down, down, down they go until our endocrine system asks the rest of our pieces-parts what is going on. Recalling that 1930’s fighter of evil, “only the Shadow knows,” who outwits spirits searching in vain for their earthly home, and inevitably are sent back to their hellish infernos.

If all that sound spooky, imagine you are a Trick or Treater walking up a driveway to a ranch style house. It’s 1966 and you are dressed in your Lone Ranger outfit, ready to scream “Hi-O Silver, Away!” when your dear neighbors, the Benders, open their door to greet you…

You are seven years old and barely able to see into their small foyer, and although you thought you had heard strange sounds out on the street as you turned to go up their driveway, long haunted chords coming from a cathedral organ hit you full-on as the door swings slowly open. But no one opened the door. The eerie fullness of atonal chords fills the darkness within, as if coming from a funeral high on a hill. These are not chords from a song but chords that are being held down longer than they should be, echoing through the walls of some forgotten mansion They sweep through the screen door, parting your bangs ever so slightly as if on a breeze and push silently past you like a Spector.

But there is no breeze. The night outside is moonless, still. It’s only you and your friend because it is 1966. Your parents stayed at home. Mom is wrapping up dinner, and dad has settled into his favorite armchair to watch Walter Cronkite and the nightly news. And now, you are wishing you’d stayed at home…

“Mom, Dad, Stan is here. We’re leaving to go now! Bye!”

“Bye!” they yell back, not looking up, and then Dad adds, “Don’t cut through the Standring’s yard, he’ll come after you with a rake! Oh, Good Lord! I’ll have to answer to that in the morning!” Mom is calling to you too, reminding you to say thank-you when they put candy in your sack.

It doesn’t matter. Their instructions are lost on the slamming door. You and Stan are long gone, racing away to fill your plastic pumpkin lanterns. Hi-O Silver Away! There were shortcuts to be had and treats to be harvested from as many neighbors as possible. The first stop, past the zinnias and up through the corridor of a dark carport, was the Bender’s front door, a stop where candy was given out by the bucket full, and jawbreakers that last almost a week.

And just as you reach for the door, it opens with a sickening screech, slowly as if it might come unhinged. You step back when no one appears to greet you. How did that door open? One candle wildly flickers in a corner and the outline of a figure comes into focus. There, sitting high upon the organ bench is the silhouetted figure of Gary, the oldest Bender son, cloaked in black, bent over, his fingers held down to the keys.

But you don’t know that hunchbacked figure. You are overcome by the penetrating and discordant notes that shut down your other senses. You strain against the night that smells of old cat hair and acrid, molding leaves piles in the corner of the porch, the smell of those who never sleep in the underworld. It is Fright you see and Dread you hear, urging you to turn and flee, but you have succumbed to their hypnotic effect and cannot budge.

No one has come to the door, and you take a quick glance towards your buddy Stan for some kind of reassurance. Is this really happening? But Stan has disappeared. You feel your chest beating through your mail order Lone Ranger cowboy shirt with the shiny, albacore buttons. You begin to utter “Trick or…” but every other part of you says RUN! RUN FOR IT! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!

In the background you are aware of a low and deepening moan, like a chain dragging up the basement stairs, as the face of the figure, a vampire, slowly turns to stare at you. The candlelight catches a glint off his sharpened teeth, his grin widening with the resonance of the pipe organ. It is my brother, staring at you. And that moan you heard? It has now swelled into a contemptuous laugh stored up from centuries of being forced to rake leaves in the fall. The vampire, my brother, is playing the only organ note he knows after nine years of private lessons, one frosty note from his perch of death, the Bender’s haunted foyer.

And you, the tiny waif who thought everyone would swoon over your cuteness and clever costumed despicableness, who thought your coffers of candy would be full by midnight, can only stand there, frozen stiff as a pine board, and stare back at the Transylvanian performer, the organ Meister. It is Cold Himself delivering a deathly laugh from his frosty fortress and holding down a dissonant chord long enough to terrify every trickster that chanced upon this moonless night and scare off every single zinnia that was still holding on for dear life, just beyond the porch.

As Vast and Blue as the Day Before

Throughout the week, as we watch another war unfold, our anxiety about peace in the Middle East and around the world comes to a slow boil. We know from science that a frog will sit in water that is slowly heating up without jumping out of the pan because they don’t notice the small increments of temperature change, but we don’t have to do that. We can move out of our frying pan of funk, take a few deep breaths and notice that the sky is still blue.

Breaths. Breeeeeethes. Or breathings? What is the plural of more than one breath, anyway? Just saying it that makes me want to do more of them. I don’t need to wear a colorful wrist band to remind me that my higher calling could simply be to calm down and take a breath. As my grandmother us to say when things got over-heated: “Let’s not make a federal case out of this!” and after living through five wars, she had mastered the art of breathing easy.

A couple of weeks back, a longtime friend of mine returned home to visit, and we also had a chance to take a breath and catch up on all the news that’s fit to print. The speed and intensity of our conversation would rival one of those commercial you hear where a professional fast talker says every word on an allergy medication bottle in five seconds, except that our conversation lasted into the wee hours of the morning. My friend, Woody, has lived in Switzerland for most of his adult life, landing there partly from his propensity for language but also because of a spirited love for travel and adventure. We were best buddies in school but bonded through a life-changing adventure trip out west, where we battled through our coming-of-age hardships. The mountaineering school we signed up for took us into country that was both dangerously rough and breathtakingly gorgeous, shaking us to the bone and echoing through our personal landscapes long after the trip had ended.

Back in the day when we thought we had the world by its tail, we found a small ad in a magazine for a wilderness school in Lander, Wyoming. Within a couple of weeks, and with a lot of begging and pressure on our respective parents, Woody and I were enrolled in a blandly described “Adventure Course” in the Wind River Range, an area Hemingway himself described as “damn lovely country,” second, he said, only to Africa in its beauty. His endorsement seemed to be enough for our parents to sign the checks and waivers to National Outdoor Leadership School, described in the small print as a survival school. We sold them on the idea that our education would be expanded by leaps and bounds, not knowing of course that many of those leaps would be made above 13,000 feet.

Let me pause at this point to say that it is only through the grace of God that I was saved from my own brand of dull-witted decisions in the wilds of Wyoming, and I would add that during my two-month course in the mountains, there was never a time that I didn’t expect to chop off my own hand with an axe or be trampled under the hooves of a mule deer.

That fear would begin at the outset with the plane ride out to Lander, Wyoming. The airline, still in existence today, lived up to its Frontier name, a label that describes the most primitive kind of plane, one designed in the Renaissance and powered by a wind-up rubber band that uncoiled within the first few minutes after take-off. If opportunity is the mother of invention, then this ride gave us the opportunity of a lifetime – to glide over the Grand Canyon uninhibited by the sound of the any working motor and ride solely on the thermals like an eagle. As our airplane sputtered down into Lander International, I had a feeling that my life, once reflective and shiny like a sheet of tinfoil, was about to be unveiled before me as a wrinkled mess.

At NOLS headquarters, we began organizing everything we needed to begin our journey, crowding everything from sleeping to cooking gear into what soon became a sixty-pound pack. When our instructor came along and dumped it all out on the ground and told us to start over, we got the message. Toothpaste went to the wayside for baking soda. Extra underwear was needless when one pair could be washed in a mountain stream. Item by item, we whittled down our loads and learned that to travel wise was to travel light. It was lesson in both humility and how to live simply, but also a reminder that a mountain tolerates dirty underwear a lot more than dead weight in a backpack.

Even when I make a purchase to this day, the voice of Skip Shoutis, my wilderness instructor, still rings through: Do you really need this? Do you have something like it already that will do the same thing? I haven’t always lived up to that notion of frugal and spartan living, but being forced to dump the extras redirected my vision towards the stunning scenery – white studded peaks of snow and rolling glacier valleys – a hallmark postcard view everywhere I looked. What mattered so much didn’t matter with views like that, and I forgot about all worldly events like Vida Blue’s fastball in the World Series or the Watergate debacle back home. As Woody and I would agree many years later, those lessons we learned at NOLS right out of the gate brought about a paradigm shift in our spoiled middle-class lives.

The first five-mile hike on day one seemed easy enough until the trail turned into a balancing act across three miles of solid boulder fields. At the end of the day, eating my burnt baked potato before falling exhausted into my sleeping bag, I neglected a cardinal NOLS rule, a policy of LEAVE NO TRACE, and left my tin foil in an open fire pit. On the second day, after negotiating a five-hundred-foot cliff and arriving at our next site, I was met by my instructor who handed me the torn other half of my tinfoil and told me to hike back to the previous site, retrieve the other half and then catch up to my hiking group by the end of the day.

When I stumbled into the new camp the next day nearing what I thought was my own certain death, the instructor held his piece of foil up to match my retrieved piece. Only then was I allowed to pitch camp with the others, get something to eat and go to bed knowing that taking care of the Wind Rivers was gospel at NOLS. That’s the kind of gospel that would be part of me forever. I’m convinced our best lessons are learned through difficulty, the lessons to travel light, pick up after ourselves, and enjoy the scenery around us as we go. We are a miserable lot, we humans, but we learn best not through our wins and victories but though the torn pieces of foil we leave at the bottom of the mountain, the ones that eventually find their mate at the top again.

A few short years later, I signed up for a canoe-for-credit college course in the Adirondacks, a two-week class in biology, geology and ecology all rolled up in a sleeping bag. A week in, I failed at another die hard NOLS rule, the one about always boiling my eating utensil after every meal and ended up with a bad case of the trots, which hit me like a vengeance about half-way up a mountain. Feverish, dehydrated and not thinking straight, it was another fellow hiker, a young man who also had been through NOLS training in Wyoming, who herded me back to camp along a precarious ten-mile trail. He did it alone, without help, because he had pounded the trails out in the Wind Rivers like me, knew how the outdoors worked, and understood the serious business of survival. Lucky for me, because I wouldn’t have made it without his skill set marching relentlessly in front of me.

Before my friend Woody left that night from our home, long after we both had dissected our collective experiences in the Wind River Range, we sat reveling and in wonder over how we ever survived such a grueling wilderness experience.

“Woody,” I began, “I’ve been meaning to ask you this for a long time, but were you ever scared when you were out in the Wind Rivers?” “Only every day!” he blurted.

And yet, we both managed, as two scared spitless boys in the middle of nowhere, to step out of our tents every morning, breeeeeath in some still mountain air and look up at a pristine sky that was as vast and blue as the day before.

Making Way for Other Toys

Every now and then when the wind howls and the howdies come in, I am inspired to write a poem from something I see out there in the urban jungle. Poems are hybrids of both song and speech, the distillation and ablution of thoughts. The word itself comes from the Greek poiein, or to create. My mother had a veritable library of worn and dog-eared poetry books in the den, because her mother read poems to her and fostered a passion for verse and composition. Back in the days before the radio or television, my grandmother played a game with her brother and sister, a kind of rock-paper-scissors of poetry recitation. They called this intellectual exercise poem wars, and it involved reeling off long passages of Longfellow or Chaucer until a mistake was made and another person had to pick up the line and continue reciting.

Standing up and reciting poetry is almost a lost art now, but every now and then you’ll find someone who can reel off a line or two or perhaps a whole poem from something they had to memorize back in school, and there’s still a few teachers out there who believe in the magical rhythm and cadence of a classic poem recited. My father, now 101, bursts out spontaneously, even inappropriately, at dinner with lines from In Flanders Fields, a poem written at the end of WWI by Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae.

Take up your quarrel with the foe
To you from failing hand we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields

When I am riding in the car with my grandsons we often speak in ridiculous rhymes, which boil down to a kind of madness where we use words that don’t exist or use noises that should not be used in polite society. Not too long ago we played a song for my grandson while we were out running errands, a folk favorite by Peter, Paul and Mary called “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Normally, when we listen, we would have made up funny lyrics and substitute new words to make the song take on a silly tone, but Cash latched onto the line that little Jackie Paper was growing up and discovering more “mature” dragons to play with. I could tell he was saddened by the thought of a dragon being left behind with no one to play with, and he scolded me for adding in what he thought were lyrics that muddled the purpose of the song.

In Cash’s mind, he sensed there was something reverent and tender about Jackie’s relationship with the character of Puff, this magic dragon, and about all relationships. Listening to the lyrics was perhaps helping Cash bridge that delicate chasm between his six years and his next level, seven and eight, when dragons and elves and gnomes “make way for other toys.”

Poems take license to transcend those kinds of endearing moments, to use our language in ways that our prose is not well suited. Events and people that might be difficult to present in a sentence have the freedom to be twisted or buckled so that one is left, not with mere facts, but a familiar feeling or memory. It’s the smell of your grandfather’s bomber jacket that has been in the attic for years. It’s the déjà vu’ you get when you drive past the house you grew up in. How do you write about those experiences such that you feel your grandfather standing next to you, or you see yourself playing Kick-the-Can in the front yard again? A poem might do that. A few simple lines, one powerful word, and you are back there again, moving backwards along a timeline you never thought you’d see again, one that you thought had moved away to another town.

I hope you’ll welcome this poem I have written. To describe it is to only say that the lady I write about, Carol, is a lady you may have seen walking through Evansville, my hometown. She seems resilient enough, but our town has left her in a rubble of changes that, as you may observe in your own city, are not so good. They are the cracks in our sidewalks, clouds of bus exhaust, and dank forgotten seats in run-down theatres of people sitting alone and walking home unnoticed. We might be waiting at an intersection one day and meet this same lady, Carol, and she might have the face of someone we once passed on the street, someone oddly familiar we met in this poem…

Always Carol

Under the weight of her tangled gray hair
Always Carol walks alone bent and spent,
lugging a concrete bag with discounted fruit
and a few necessaries chained to her shoes.
She shuffles along like Always Carol always does,
towards home where tall weeds and memories sit gathering dust in volumes
until 2:15 when the omni-bus screams down JFK BLVD
exhausting fumes that fill her debility coat
and backfire into her loaf of white bread.

Grocery store, then back
Side walking back home,
watching crack after crack pass beneath her
a slow demarcation called Invalid’s Path
for those who are not valid anymore.
That is the scope of her day.

She sits waiting with her warm bottled water,
for the November metro and rides the angled avenue with Lee Harvey
to watch a free vintage movie at the recently reopened Book Depository
Always Carol sits waiting at 12:30, looking for her bus, killing time,
waiting and waiting,
and becomes the solitary assassin of age.

In the middle of the theatre where Always Carol always sits
she is invisible.
Yet, the MGM lion spots her and stares her down,
roaring first one way and then the next
Always Carol watches that proud, tired beast yawn one more time,
then drops off the screen to fall asleep next to her,
dreaming of donated popcorn.

The movie is coming to a theatre near you:
America, We Love You So Much
subtitled Land of the Free and Home of the Grave,
a film where an issue of Kleenex Monthly and white peonies are delivered
every National Disability Independence Day
by motorcade
in stacked cartons stamped only “THE LONELY.”

Afterwards, the credits will drop her off like dead weight,
on a grassy knoll
where she cannot die any faster
But Always Carol with the bent and buckled neck
prefers a good mystery that twists and turns,
near her half green house
with half a street number
and a life just shy of
History and Elm.

A Frog and a Leap of Faith

At dusk, our neighbors take their dogs out for the last time, then scanning their yard, step in to draw their curtains closed for the night.

Day is done, gone the sun, from the lakes, from the hills, from the sky, all is well, safely rest, God is nigh.

Over by our pond, the sound of a bellowing frog replaces the hustle of day, filling in the deepening dark spaces that will soon be unconditional twilight. For many years we thought those sounds were made by bullfrogs announcing they were single, until we found one floating belly up and got a good look at it. It was not a bullfrog at all, but a tiger frog with vividly striped legs strong enough to propel them like a cannon. If we are stealthy, we can catch them lined up on the rocks warming themselves against the cooler air, transferring the last of the sun’s heat through their exotic looking skin. One step too close or too fast and BA-LOOOP! – they are airborne with a loud chirp, as if they were a spring-loaded toy, jumping into the safe cover of lily pads.

That day I had captured a baby frog while trimming some nearby bushes and set it up for safe keeping until my grandson could come over and see it for himself. The container condo I put together for the frog wasn’t too extravagant. He had no cable or sectional seating, just a few rocks and a small jacuzzi of pond water, but he seemed well enough for a short stay. When Cash arrived, he had no fear of cradling the tiger frog, but wanted to keep it as a pet as kids are want to do with animals they find outside. We knew the end of that charming story and told him he had to let it go – back to its pond home where it would be most content.

Watching Cash let it go reminded me that we really don’t own anything for very long, especially those gifts we are given from nature. Certainly, it was a lesson for Cash that holding onto a frog too tightly would be selfish, and that Mother Nature, the parent in charge, would be a more secure place for his baby frog even if the future of the murky pond was uncertain.

Recently, we took a similar spontaneous leap into a hometown icon, a small and somewhat rundown mid-century burger joint called Zesto. Many people might characterize this combo grill and ice cream parlor by saying it is not in the best part of town, meaning that it might be unsafe or perhaps at times unhinged. Houses in the surrounding area are a bit ramshackle, and many of the windows are boarded up with sheets of graffiti-painted plywood.

With the world leaving all of us looking warily over our shoulders, I eyed the parking lot with some trepidation when we stopped by for a vanilla cone. I was underestimating how good that ice cream was going to taste, a social concept scientists call “forecasting errors.” Two wobbly picnic tables looked like they’d gone through many coats of bright blue paint, and inside, ingredients were stacked in piles up against the windows, but we were soon awash in conversation with folks who were hospitable, welcoming and real.

One such couple, clad in motorcycle jackets and sporting head to toe tattoos, passed by our table on their way out. Like us, they were trying to keep up with their melting cones. Ice cream, as it turns out, is a lot like nature. You pretty much have to slurp it up while you are in the moment. It lasts, yes, but it is always in a state of shifting fluidity and flux. I caught the biker’s eye as he walked by and feeling kind of like the frog I had captured earlier, risked jumping into his biker world.

“How’s your day going?” I asked.

“Not bad,” the giant in leather answered back, “How ‘bout y’all?”

“Good,” I answered nervously, but inside I was wondering if he might hold me upside down by my ankles and shake out all my loose change. As my wife slipped under the table, I continued.

“What is favorite go-to dish here, what do you like? Do you go for the grease or the cones, or breakfast or…?”

“Everything’s good, I love it all,” he interrupted, but his gal was quick to pipe in.

“We don’t need any of it. Look at us!” she added, and leaning back, made that that circular, weight gain gesture around her beltline.

And there we were, rather suddenly, the four us around a picnic table, talking like old friends, immersed in subjects like our health, our families, and yes, even our dreams. We were looking at our world in the Zesto place, where ice cream and burgers became our leveling field that might piece together our problems. My idea of what safety meant was beginning to relax and I began to let go of some false security, the part of myself that would wither and die if I held onto it too tightly.

As we talked, I had a flashback to a book I had read called The Nature Fix, by Florence Williams where she explained how our brains let go of our novelties after a while, like ice cream, and turn to something deeper, “flying on pure intuition.” That place is life-affirming and sustaining, but actually going there requires taking a risk. It asks us to venture into an unknown wilderness, a place like Zesto. Williams ascertains that we sometimes need to go into those woods to get ourselves out of the woods.

I spoke again first.

“I know I don’t know you guys very well, but in your quietest moments, what do you worry about the most?” I was looking from the bottom up now, and not as nervous.

“For me,” the biker started, “I worry about the whole…” and he waved his arms out, as if he was trying to wrap them around our planet. His face looked out to the sky as he spoke and his eyes were becoming watery. For a moment I thought I might have to drive him home, but then I remembered…I don’t know how to ride a motorcycle.

That is when his girlfriend came to the rescue.

“For me,” she said, then paused. “It’s mental health, yea, there’s some problems there.”

We all stopped for a second with a quiet nod. We knew it was the same anywhere you go. All of us hurt somewhere, and we all worry about the future of the world. Inside us are hearts hoping for some kind of healing, and for a safe place to land when we have to jump back into the pond.

I offered to pray for them, and as I did, I couldn’t quite bring myself to reach out and grab their hands. I couldn’t take them home with me. They weren’t mine to keep and neither were their problems, but there was still a song to be sung at twilight. The day was done, gone the sun. Zesto was left in a puff of their motorcycle smoke.

All was well, safely rest, God is nigh.

Ducking Behind Our Sushi

This is going to be one of those episodes you either love or hate, because the topic is sushi. I realize there are hard core sushi fans out there who could eat those little seaweed nuggets all day long and go back for a second plank. To these folks, sushis are encapsulated in texture, patterned like a spring meadow – a graceful world unto themselves – a magical multicolored elixir for life laying gently across a cedar board.

Saying I don’t care for them around our house, or “I’d like to use these in a miniature frisbee golf tournament” is a kind of blasphemy, and when I do, I run the risk of awakening the domestic Kraken and being slapped multiple times with chop sticks by those who purport to love me the most.

However, and here it is, those dinky circles of tightly woven bites seem to me like a kind of Zen meditation wrapped in rice paste, a snack you eat while sitting cross-legged in a rock garden during a counseling session. I am a fan of counseling, so it’s not about mental health, and I have a rock garden, so it’s not about rocks. I just can’t take the thought of the two of them together, rocks and counseling all bundled up in kelp.

The one time I tried sushi I could not help but notice the Chinese Zodiac paper place mat underneath, the one that represents every year as an animal. I became anxious wondering whether I was in a year other than the one I was actually living in, particularly in regard to the checks I’d recently written. Should I have been using the date line at the top to write the Year of the Rooster, or God forbid, the Year of the Rat? I can tell you there is not enough room on my checks to write “Year of the Dragon,” and my bank isn’t going to issue me special checks to accommodate a foreign calendar that is completely different than the one used by the rest of the known world.

Even if I could get passed the Chinese year, I still cringe thinking of eating sushi made with octopus’ eyeballs and smoked prawn that feels like it’s trying to transcend my own spirituality, or duck in behind my own faith, and leave me as some animal form like a cockroach. It’s just a lot of spirituality for me to handle, and frankly, it scares me to death. I’m a lot more comfortable with other, less devoted round foods, like a Wallace and Gromit Oreo cookie. Maybe a bit of whip cream straight down the old gizzard to top it off. That eases a lot of humble tension for me.

My wife picked up a package of sushi the other day right after church. I wondered at the time whether there was something in the sermon, something small and circular and packed with seaweed that inspired her to bring sushi home with us. I heard the same sermon she did, and I can tell you there was not a word in there about what to eat for lunch, particularly anything about perfectly crafted cylindrical collages. Then I wondered whether there was something I had missed in the church message, perhaps something about sesame seeds or ginger, or using chopsticks as a martial arts weapon.

As we piled on the groceries at checkout, Cashier Lady, scanning the Saran-wrapped package of roly-poly sushi sliders, asked a probing question:

“What do you like about these things,” she asked my wife.

“Oh, I love sushi,” my wife was quick to answer, “they are soooo good. They’ve got a little of everything in them.”

The lady shot a glance to me to see if I was on board with all this. I just shook my head.

“I can’t do them,” I said, “everyone is the same size. It looks like a ration to me, like something already divided up. There’s no gravy or anything to go with them.”

“Oh, you gotta have the fixens,” piped in the Register Lady, “Oh yea, uh huh, it’s all about the fixens. Give me some corn bread, slather that puppy up with butter and jelly and I’m there. Home for supper, baby, that is my people food.”

“Well, I like sushi,” my wife continued, “because it’s filling but you don’t fill full when you eat it, like eating a salad. My husband likes the whole nine yards, a plate meal, chicken, the works."

“Oh, I’m with him,” Register Lady said, “Give me all that, the whole meal, and the gravy. I want that chicken and all the sides. And mashed potatoes. I’m with him.”

I was laughing hysterically, but I began to feel that the “I’m with him part” didn’t go over that well with my wife.

Our quiet ride home gave me some time to think about what I don’t like about sushi. Actually, the taste of sushi is a lot like nothing I’ve ever eaten, and by nothing, I mean it has no taste at all. Were those fellers faking it as chicken nuggets or hors d’oeuvre? Was there some ancient wisdom inside each one, like rings in a tree that foretold the day each one of us would meet our destiny? Was there something medicinal in that sticky-ish texture, the Elmer’s glue that holds them together? I used to eat Elmer’s Glue when I was a kid, and really, it wasn’t all that bad.

By sheer coincidence, we had just taken a hard right curve through a round-about when it hit me. The reason I don’t care for sushi was that every sushylite, singular for sushi, is exactly the same size and shape as the next one. Every single one with no variety. The freedom I always thought was a given, that is, the size of a bite of food I put in my mouth, had already been determined by a sushylite Sue Chef preparer-person, not me. I realized I needed to be making those kinds of decisions myself and take control of my own bites, my own sushi destiny, the master and commander of my sushylite ship.

It wasn’t always this way. On the radar screen of sushi history, a small blip determined the bite size of this now popular food form, a proportion we must all accept and use for the rest of our lives. There is no changing it, sushi size and shape is here to stay, and the truth behind it, as you are about to hear, is stranger than a bamboo shoot.

Some seventy-five years ago the now defunct Chinese province of X’ieeuuiiy, was drawn erroneously into the battle for the Fuaog Bay and sent the only ship in their fleet out to do battle with enemy naval forces. Blown to smithereens before the crew even had a chance to put down their centerboard, the four men on board clambered onto a wide-brimmed garden-hat and using only their wits and military rations, began a thousand-mile journey that is just now being made public. Forensic evidence taken from the contents of their stomachs now suggests they used toothpaste to form circles and filled the little donut-like shapes with bean bits, dried goat milk, and the random jellyfish tentacles they could gather overboard. Incredulous as it now seems, those adorable stomach remains of nutrition became, years later, the inspiration for what is now our modern-day sushi. Tragically, the city of X’ieeuuiiy disappeared from the map by a rare collapse of the earth which swallowed up all nineteen residents, a mix of both urban and rural flute carvers.

This is a true story, at least the one I tell myself late at night when I lie awake trying to imagine how sushi gained such worldly power.

Resisting my own short sightedness, and in effort to gain my rightful place and stature back in our family, I knew I had to test my theory. Were all sushylytes truly the same size?

I returned to the store, snuck up to the sushi counter and with one expert motion, slit open a package of California rolls, those artistic Lincoln log masterpieces. Incredibly, I came up with the same measurement for each one, down to the milli-sushi meter. I was doomed, and I could feel the pressure building in my brow. I wanted to be wrong, to be able to leave the store and believe that there was variety in McSushis but it was not to be. Before I could slice through another package in my desperate attempt to find one that was a different size, I heard a voice murmuring over my shoulder.

“You see any fried chicken in there? Any cornbread?" came the faint voice in my ear. “Remember, it’s all about the fixens, always the fixens.”

I turned around, and scanned the grocery horizon, but there was no one there. Maybe it was the Year of the Snake or worse, the Year of the Bat. Maybe… but I like to think it was the Year of the Whispering Cashier with All the Fixens, and I could live with that.

The Scream Heard 'Round the Table

For those of you not familiar with Jackson Pollock, he was one of the action painters of the mid-twentieth century, whose huge drip paintings appear as layers of unrestrained madness and explosions of color. Controversial at the time, and even to a certain extent today, Pollock’s works are now seen as crystallographic masterpieces, not as the colossal messes or “happy accidents,” that they were labelled at the time.

So, it was with some interest not too long ago, that a funny greeting card caught my eye. On the front was a picture of a mother in her splattered apron, spoon feeding her young son a bowl of dripping spaghetti. Under the picture of her son, who was covered in noodles and sauce, was the message, “Jackson Pollock’s Mother.”

The greeting card I had discovered seemed be a wry comment on the influences our parents have over us. The image on the greeting card must have stuck with me, because some years later I ran across another picture of a kid, this time a child advertising a brand of children’s clothing. Standing stiff with contempt, alone on the top of a hill, this child was screaming at the top of his lungs, obviously bristling with frustration. I immediately thought of the masterpiece, “The Scream,” by Edvard Munch, and had to wonder, whether this child was also inspired by his mother. Did Munch’s mother scream and yell at everyone from sunup to sundown? And, being constantly exposed to her outbursts of rage, was young Edvard later inspired to paint his masterpiece, that well-known ghostly figure covering his ears, frozen in the nightmare of a terrifying scream?

Edvard Munch as a Child
Jeff Bender

Looking at the magazine ad of the screaming child, I also had to wonder if the child could be trapped inside a very loud upbringing, and unable to wiggle free of it, was trying to howl his way out into a better and quieter life. I knew I had to find a spot for him in my artwork, which resulted in the work included here, entitled “Edvard Munch as a Child.”

Growing up, neither my mother nor my father was the screaming type around our house. They didn’t hand-feed me bowls of sloppy tomato sauce either, but I know of the frustration and anxiety they had raising their three kids and juggling their careers. Their irritation with me at times must have looked a lot like Munch’s famous painting, (translated, “The Cry”) except the new version would have been the figures of both of my parents, holding back a silent but mounting scream. At times, I am sure they felt like that child themselves, alone on a hill, holding back an army of anxieties that were attacking their defenses. That is a sorry picture to paint of our family, but I was a handful and took them to the bursting point on occasion. It makes me wonder whether all of us grown-ups are a reflection of the silent vexations our parents were yelling inside but never showed us. Could these have passed down to us now and festered like tetchy blotches ready to break out in a rash of shouting?

In my work entitled Edvard Munch as a Child, one gets the feeling that there is a generational inertia around the screaming child in the center of the piece. Looking at it, you may feel that the noise, that outward energy coming out of the kid, is producing the whirling, swirling pink and black forces around the edges. The child may have held in that energy for too long, like we all do, and now he is letting it out, forcing it through the surrounding marks and color blemishes that are also trying to escape the mayhem. Isn’t that stiff kid at the top of the hill, little Edvard, screaming on behalf of all of us? Isn’t his temper tantrum the one you want to have, the one you’ve been holding onto? Do you find yourself feeling like him at times, stiff as a board, arms like two-by-fours, holding down some imaginary fort that is undefendable? Could you be a descendant of Teddy Roosevelt, charging up San Juan Hill, hoping there is a plate of spaghetti there waiting for you at the top? Huh? Is that you up there?! IS IT?!

This tantrum will, my artwork seems to suggest, burn itself out in the patches of colors and the casual and playful background of offhand marks and a pink tornado that picks up the loose debris of scribbles and deposits them around the child. Fortunately for us, the scream emanating from my artwork quickly collides with a lollipop tree whose soft, green cushion of leaves happily rustle, then muffle, then absorb the noise.

After all, it is futile to yell at a lollipop tree. A lot healthier, but futile.

But let’s admit, there is a power in throwing a tantrum, which is why kids do it. When we find ourselves in the midst of one of those anger storms, we can’t help but sit frozen, unable to unboil what is boiling over in irrationality. We are looking for ways out, a way to take that hill, for something to grip, for our own version of a lollipop tree that will cushion our own climb.

I remember a time when the inertia in our family spun out of control as we all sat down to eat dinner. I have no recollection of the day’s events, nor do I remember that family dinner as being different than any of the rest… except that, during the course of the meal my high-brow and bratty attitude surfaced, and I was walking on thin ice with my parents. Riding high and mighty, I thought it appropriate to disagree with my mother by telling her to shut up. This was not the usual type of conversation that was allowed in our family, mind you. And although I don’t remember the exact details, I do remember the sound of her hand across my face, a slap heard around the table, a slap that froze everything in a kind of silent madness.

If you are thinking, “I bet you never told your mom to shut up again,” you’d be right.

The family sat motionless inside a furious tornado swallowing up the atmosphere. My future artwork was there in the making. The screams were not audible, but they were in the air. It was then, in the midst of that emotional bomb, that my younger sister, having none of it, picked up her knife and fork and waving them in the air, sang out “Anything you can do better I can do better. I can do anything better than you!”

It was absurdity at its finest, a blistering strike against our nemesis, the blanket of tension, and we burst into a flood of both laughter and tears. Our anger had vented, little Edvard Munch had had his say, and his scream was over. We had escaped to the top of the hill and discovered our lollipop tree whose cushion of leaves, soft and green, rustled only slightly in the passing wind.

A TV By Any Other Name

For about twenty-seven and a half years now we have been watching TV on the smallest television set ever made. We bought the set at a View-O-Rama Outlet Mall, where we also picked up a year’s supply of baking soda, and some blue jeans that look like they were once worn by a sumo wrestler. Of all those bargain purchases, the baking soda turned out to be the wisest choice, but the jeans, not so much. They were soon relegated to yard work, then to cutoffs, then to an organization called Memes for Jeans.

The TV set stayed though and fit nicely into a cubby for our viewing pleasure. That went along well until we began the Grand Slam tennis events each season, particularly Wimbledon and the US Open. We squanted, a more painful version of the verb squint, at the tiny yellow dot, presumably a tennis ball, that moved back and forth across our set, and we vowed each tennis season to upgrade our television.

By the time those tournaments were over this year, we both had such bad cases of dry eye from squanting that our eye sockets were registered with the National Weather Service as one of the seven driest places in the continental United States. The other six locations were terrains that are often associated with Gila monsters, sand and sun-bleached animal skulls. By the way, I have tried to dowse my eyes with water to get some relief from my dry eye syndrome, but that involves me having a relationship with a sink, and as you know from a previous Knee Deep episode, sinks and I don’t get along very well.

So, my wife and I took the plunge, so to speak, and bought a bigger television set, a process that involved building a bigger cabinet to put it in, and any number of other complicated decorating decisions, some of which required marital counseling and a new education about flat screens, cable connections, ethernets, and serial numbers longer than your hand. Every day for the last two months, from the time I got up until I went to bed, I was faced with dumping some old school knowledge about TV’s and wrap my dehydrated eyes and brain around a purchase that involved a new set of technical advancements, satellite signal capabilities, and someone at the cable company who likes to repeat the phrase, “your call is very important to us.”

I can say without equivocation, that changing our TV set has been one of toughest things I have ever gone through.

I don’t like anything about the upgrading process, but to start with, I especially don’t like the term “flat screen.” At all. I wanted to get that right out in the open before we go any further. I do like the word television, and its nickname, “TV”. A lot. They are simple, easy and remind me of my first pleasant experiences watching programs as a kid when life seemed less violent, and I needed considerably less moisturizer.

I can understand the term “flat screens” being used to describe a thin crust pizza, or a football play where the quarterback laterals off to the side at the last second, or the place on our door my grandson put his hand through last summer, but not for an apparatus as important as the television. It is a creation that needs no further introduction, like mustard on a hotdog and does not need a new name either. I don’t need surround sound, places to hold my cup, and I don’t need salsa, guac, or a mesquite-flavored relish on my hot dog either. A TV, by any other name, despite what Shakespeare said, does not smell as sweet and when we go messing with the name or any part of it, we give up all that unsophisticated programming that filtered down to us every decade since the 1950’s and with it, the risk of re-inventing something that, like yo-yo’s, cotton socks, and the copper penny, is already dang-near perfect.

Unfortunately, flat screens are here to stay and in purchasing one, my wife and I felt a kind of electronic pressure pass through us, where thousands of unseen wavelengths were suddenly ricocheting off our skeleton system like caffeinated ping pong balls. No longer did we have that warm and fuzzy feeling like in days of old when our television set was our wonderland and the most important object in the room. We are isolated from that relationship now, blocked off and feeling alone. Before, when we watched TV, we used to rise from the sofa to get a snack, perhaps walk around inside our TV for a minute or two, then come back out when we felt like it, miraculously, and go back to the sofa. Now, that experience has flat-lined into a black hole, a cold and distant blot on the existential horizon between fast forward and rewind.

We often sit and stare into that void, out towards Somewhere and have had to get use to pausing this new flat screen temporarily to discuss whether we should be using our binocular or panoramic vision. We don’t know whether to focus on the general picture in front of us or a specific area, the big picture or the details. These new screens, we have realized, are more like watching a surface covered with programmable wallpaper – a lot more area than is visually possible to take in. Committing to watching one side or the other in the future is probably going to mean rewinding the show at some point to watch what we missed on the other side of the screen way over on the other side of the room.

“Honey,” I said in my new flat tone, “Tonight, why don’t you take the right side and I’lI take the left.”

“Ok,” she says, “and tomorrow we’ll can go back and watch the middle.”

“Yes, like we used to,” I add trying to keep the peace.

“And I can watch the trailer again in case we missed something somewhere,” she says with her head lowered.

“Somewhere,” I whisper back.

I realized we had just stepped into another new realm, the “home theatre,” as if we were now going to a movie place where, traditionally, we were greeted by a life-size cardboard cutout of superheroes like Batman and copious boxes of Raisinets. I call that home confusion, not home theatre and I am still trying to figure out whether our flat screen is a piece of art on the wall or a piece of furniture. I fear a future where my wife and I will start using it as a mirror when we walk by, say, to check our hair or teeth so we don’t have to run all the way back to the bathroom.

The main difficulty we had committing to this new black programmable wallpaper was when we realized it meant letting go of one of the last vestiges of our beloved cat Chloe, whose play toys were still stapled to the underside of our sofa table, which we still call a sofa table. When Chloe watched TV with us back in the day, she would eventually enter into such deep REM sleep that her eyelids would twitch as if she was watching her own fantasy movie in Kittyland. It was an endearing sight to behold, the quintessential peace that surpassed all cat understanding. There was only one thing on this fair earth that could bring her out of such a bottomless escape, and that was the epic beginning of a movie, where Columbia’s Greek goddess, high upon her pedestal, sent her glorious multi-beamed lights cascading across our viewing area.

When Chloe heard the majestic opening notes to that Columbia movie introduction, it was as if she was smelling catnip for the very first time. Her eyes opened wide and she sat straight up erect as telephone pole, and without taking time to stretch or lick herself, which is unusual for a cat, she tracked those light beams from the lady’s upheld torch from one end of the room to the other. It was Chloe’s literal nod to the radiating energy coming from the TV, sunlight pouring out onto her feline world. Fifteen seconds later, it was all over, and she would lay back down, and disappear once more into a fuzzy ball.

In this season of our flat screen change, we can finally let go of our little six pounds of family furriness. With the blessing of our upgrade to technology, I’m thankful our little kitty Chloe passed away before we got our new piece of furniture slash mirror-art slash flat screen, or whatever it is. I’m glad our cat was spared of the adjustment. I can’t image her now, waking up out of a dead sleep to behold the flowing gown of that symbolic Columbia Lady with the brilliant torch, expecting to be bathed in total brilliance, only to be confused by a beam of light that now flattens out in space, somewhere between her left, right and middle.

"C" is for Complimentary Compliment!

After publishing last week’s episode, I heard from readers who told me they were glad to see me back and looking forward to new episodes of Knee Deep. Because I did not earn a living through most my life as a writer, acknowledgements from my subscribers not only validate my stories as positive additions to their lives but also help me fine tune the stories to make them more meaningful, entertaining, and timely for you listeners. So, thanks for the words of encouragement last week – they were much appreciated!

This last week also marked the progress for one of my grandsons, Cash, who is getting acclimated to first grade. He’s been in pre-school and kindergarten, of course, but first grade is like a new planet, where naps and snack time take second fiddle to the work of learning. This milestone of first grade quickly leaves Toddlerville in the rear-view mirror, and the new scenery is a lot for the little whippersnapper.

On the days when I pick him up from school, Cash looks tired but wired, ready for anything but a desk. I think of that wonderful and quirky Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson where a student on the front row is raising his hand…

“Teacher,” he says, “may I be excused? My brain is full!” It’s that same exhaustion-frustration combo all kids feel when they just can’t take another moment of thinking. I see evidence of this in Cash’s face as he trudges out to the car carrying a backpack so big he could sleep in it, waving goodbye without looking back and trying to put as much distance between himself and the school building as he can.

As a rule, I like to ask him what the best and worst part of his day was, but now, on the verge of a bad case of BRAIN-FULL Cash has told me, sadly, that he has used up all his words for the day and can’t answer any more questions. So lately, I’ve switched my tactics and ask him instead to tell me about the funniest part of his day, which seems, at least for now, to be a question he can handle.

“Well today, Popeye,” he begins, “a girl lost her bow at recess. And then, when she couldn’t find it, she lost her glasses too.”

“Oh, a bow?” I say, encouraging him.

“Yea, a BIG bow and her glasses. But she didn’t care about the glasses, only the bow.”

“Don’t you need the glasses to find the bow?” I said, not using my first-grade brain.

“No, she was very upset about the bow for her hair. She was looking all over for it.”

“What happened then?” I asked.

“Well,” as he always begins, “well, right when I thought she was going to cry, she found a giant yellow LEGO on the ground and started jumping up and down. She started yelling ‘I found it! I found it!’ And the rest of the day she wore the LEGO in her hair!”

“What about the glasses?” I asked, but Cash jumped right into the next story.

He told me about a boy he watched slowly fall asleep at his desk, apparently also suffering from a brain too full of new information.

“He fell asleep working and got a D minus on his paper,” Cash said.

“Ouch, that’s kind of sad,” I answered.

“Yea, the teacher called him up and asked him why he didn’t finish his paper, and he told her he didn’t know the paper was there.”

“Not there?”

“Nope, not there!” Cash repeated.

“I get that,” I said, “a lot of times I don’t know stuff is there either.”

Hmmm, I thought, I always like to sleep when rules and regulations get to be too much. It’s a great elixir for everything. However, Cash is learning that with rules and regulations come ways to earn rewards, and he’s all about rewards. If it involves earning a Jelly Belly, or a gold chocolate coin, he’s on it big time. When his teacher outlined a reward system, and how to earn tickets for this or that, Cash’s ears went up like a jackrabbit. AND, as if a ticket wasn’t enough, kids could also earn a special blue ticket for outstanding displays of citizenship (you know, like carrying another student out of a burning building, things like that).

Now it just so happened that the big-ticket item this week was on, you guessed it, giving compliments, and how valuable they are, and how God delights when we lift each other up by noticing good things in one another. Upstairs, between Cash’s two little Jack Rabbit ears, the switches and gears were churning, so that when he noticed another class being very quiet on their restroom break, he took it upon himself to walk right up and compliment that teacher on how well behaved her class was.

“Mrs. Blackwell, I want to give your whole class a compliment. They did very well in the hallway today,” Cash remarked with some authority, but without a teaching license.

There it was! It was like a scene out of an episode of Kid President. Cash had given a first rate, first grade compliment! He had humbled himself, stepped out of his own bathroom line when he wasn’t supposed to, and powered up his complimentary compliment! This was humbling work being a first grader, but somebody had to do it, and it was going to be him. Later, when he unexpectedly received the coveted blue ticket reward, Cash must have felt like he had just been awarded the last Golden Ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, minus the chocolate and minus the free tour of Willy Wonka’s factory.

Telling me about this moment, I couldn’t help but think what good things he was going to catch me doing around my house. With enough compliments and blue tickets, I might be able to skip my utility bill for a month or pass on my property taxes. Hey, this compliment and encouragement thing might begin to pay off, I thought, and I started dreaming of things I might do to earn a blue ticket. Without question, I certainly could be making much quieter trips to the bathroom myself, and that would be a compliment to everyone around me.

And so, the circle is complete. What bathroom break goes around, comes around. What’s good for the goose in the bathroom, is good for the gander in the bathroom and so on and so forth. The point is that in real life we have the power to overlook others' bone-headed moves and mistakes by jumping right to the good stuff – the compliments! It takes extra time of course, and a little practice, perhaps a new awareness of social cues and fair play in society, but in the end, someone else is going to shine. Giving a compliment, handing out that blue ticket smile helps us step down from ourselves for a moment for the lasting satisfaction of what it does for someone else. As Maya Angelou once said, “At the end of the day, people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.”

So, with that, and as a complimentary compliment to you, I’m offering the first five of my extraordinary listeners to this week’s episode a ten-dollar gift card to Starbucks. It’s kind of like my blue ticket to you, for reading or listening to my podcast. Just text or email me when you read this and I’ll let you know if you are a winner!

Wash, Rinse, Scream, Then Repeat

Hi folks and welcome back to another season of Knee Deep! I would like to tell you that my summer months have been filled with all sorts of incredible outdoor adventures, but alas that would not be true. For example, I could tell you that our family got stuck four hundred feet off the ground on a Ferris wheel and had to release ourselves upside-down from safety belts and then climb down 119 flights of narrow stairs, but that would not be true. I’m thankful that didn’t happen to me, even though it would have made a great story for my podcast. Still and all, it’s worth mentioning that this podcast, Knee Deep, isn’t so much about edge-of-your-seat stories as it is about the more common moments of life that are uncommonly inspiring.

Listening in to Knee Deep will put us together for a few minutes each week, hanging out just a few feet out in the water. The stories and observances I impart in my presentationI think of like pieces of sea glass that have been tumbled around and are now refined, shiny and just waiting for someone to bring them in to the light of day. I don’t see this podcast so much as me showing you what I’ve found as much as you and I wading in together to examine all the oblique shapes and luminous colors together.

If you’ll remember back the last time we talked here on Knee Deep, we were waving goodbye to Sumatra Sammy, a plastic toy surfer whose magical ability to right himself no matter what the surfing conditions, hovered just beyond our reach after a mis-toss into the Atlantic Ocean. He then turned south, rather anthropomorphically, and sadly disappeared forever from our sight on his self-imposed Closer-to-the-Edge World Tour. Around mid-July, however, we received this short note from the island of Eleuthera, a long, thin Bahamian island originally used by the Air Force to detect Russian subs during the Cold War. Here is what our Sammy’s note said:

“Greeting from Eleuthera! After floating for several days in the Atlantic, I was scooped up in the net of a fishing trawler! Can you believe that?! By then my colors had baked and faded from the intense sun, and I was listing badly to one side. What happened after that is not exactly clear to me, but I awoke to find myself attached to the bow of this ship, now docked in Eleuthera. To say that I am thankful to be a toy figurehead on a fishing trawler, protecting the fisherman from the cruelties of the sea, yes, this would be true, except that the ship’s name is “Whoops-A-Daisy,” which frankly, waters down the otherwise honored position I thought I had at the front of the ship. I’m not sure how long I can stand this disgrace, but I am safe for now, blistered and worn, but safe. I hope all is well in your corner of the world, as I remain always yours, Sumatra Sammy, Surfer Dude.”

Reading this short message, I couldn’t help but be touched by the inherent good nature of those fishermen, who could have easily thrown Sammy back in with the rest of the chum. Reading Sammy’s letter, I felt my hope in all mankind restored, and at the same time transported in memory back to a time when I too was rescued from a perilous journey at sea. Actually, it wasn’t the sea, but a sink… actually, a bathroom sink, and it wasn’t really a perilous journey either, but more of a divine, baptismal POP.

It all happened back in my youth when I still believed that if I swallowed a seed it would grow into a tree in my stomach, and that deep holes of treacherous quicksand were everywhere. I was on vacation with my family at a resort in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and when I say family, I am including here a father that was a doctor and a mom that was a nurse, so that when I began to turn a shade of yellow not on the color chart I was quarantined to my hotel bed with some form of the flu, probably the one any of us have at any given moment. In my flu haze-delirium, I looked out through our sliding glass doors, past the lanai, to what I thought were giant sea turtles soaring through the clouds. Palm trees, lined up like hula girls, swayed gently back and forth along the horizon, and could it be? Yes! It was George Jetson in his flying saucer hovering over beach bathers and dumping out samples of Baby Oil, the most popular sunscreen at the time with an SPF of minus 40. Envy and pity crept into me like watered-down intravenous ginger ale. I decided that I’d had enough of this bed rest nonsense, complete with complimentary baby aspirin and reruns of My Three Sons. It was time, I thought, for a bit of an adventure of my own, yellow fever or not! It was time to mix it up!

With renewed vigor, I jumped up and ran into our salmon-tiled bathroom with matching soaps and a brochure of a nearby alligator farm, to douse my face with multiple splash attacks to simulate the effects of an imaginary Splashin’ Safari. I had no interest in riding dolphins, or getting my picture taken kissing a sea lion that was trained to rocket itself out of the 100,000-gallon tank and slide up within an inch of my lips. No, all I wanted was to pretend for a moment that I was out there with the rest of the beach crowd, taking in the Florida experience, smelling the salt spray, perhaps get washed out to sea for an hour, then hop back into bed before anyone noticed I was missing.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, like our surfer friend Sammy, things turned nasty rather quickly for me. And for those of you who have ever done anything wildly stupid, this next part is going to make you feel a whole lot better. I was not in my right mind, so in keeping with my temporary insanity, I turned on only the hot water and stuck my head under the faucet, jamming the opening so that water scattered out in all directions.

There, I had done it. I had placed myself on an imaginary ride on top of a tsunami Splashin’ wave, dodging the sharks circling feverishly below me, and watching, at least in my own mind, judges hold up score cards of perfect tens. When I came back to reality I realized my head, that most important of body parts, was in fact not free and self-governing as it had been all my life but stuck inside the sink like cement, and roasting under a jet stream of water. In my exuberance, I had managed, in one amazing motion, to wedge the back of my head under the faucet while simultaneously jamming my front two teeth, yes, my front two incisors, under the front lip of the sink.

Even as I tell this story, now, some sixty years later, I can feel an uneasy vibration run through my teeth, not unlike a root canal. Even my eyes will begin to twitch as a kind of bathroom shell shock still tries to set in. And in these circumstances, with my teeth locked under the front lip of a porcelain pink sink, scalding water spewing forth in torrents, my screams for help were not of this earth. Suffice to say I was in a private hell of sorts, like some strange orthodontic nightmare where the somber looking dentist walks in and announces the following:

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this Mr. Bender, but the news is not good. We were unable to detach your head from the sink you jammed it into. We can fit you with a prosthetic, but that is about it (long pause with sobs). With time, and some therapy, we think you might be able to live with it, but you’ll never get rid of it. I’m sorry, very sorry.”

In what seemed like years later, when my dad finally walked into the steaming bathroom and discovered me uttering cries for help using only the bottom half of my mouth, he calmly turned off the water, and simply asked me what in the Sam Hill I was doing out of bed.

“I unted to oh oo ashin afari,” I whimpered, “ut eye ed hot uck in a ink.”

Dumbfounded at that reply, Dad simply grabbed a jar of Vaseline, slathered a handful on my mouth, teeth and gums, and with one coordinated chiropractic move, popped my head out of the sink like a cork.

Pushing me gently through the bathroom fog, Dad settled me back into bed and I gratefully allowed the full measure of my flu symptoms to return. I erased all thoughts of ever visiting a theme park again, especially ones with water, and began an exercise of repeated swallowing to erase the hotel sink aftertaste from my mouth. I knew I would probably never feel completely comfortable in a bathroom again, at least alone with a sink, and that this was one of those family incidents that was so bizarre it would be brought up again and again during get-togethers as close relatives tried to make some sense of it.

The trauma of what had just happened was just too much, my embarrassing future too bleak to handle at my age. I couldn’t remember ever seeing a sink quite that small, I thought, ever! I looked outside, past the sliding glass doors and let the hypnotizing effect of the swaying palm trees rinse over me. Surfers riding salmon-colored surfboards rode to their oceanic destiny just beyond, but I’d had enough of that awful off-pinkish hue for one day, rolled over, and let my yellow skin tone return, a color I might live with, a color, as it were, I could actually sink my teeth into.

That night as calm was restored in our hotel room and my parents sat watching the TV, the nightly news reported that Cape Canaveral, only a short distance away, had picked up some bizarre interference on their radar, an unidentified shriek of some sort, and had for safety reasons postponed their scheduled lunar launch.

Surfer Sam's Into-the-Void World Tour

A ship in harbor is safe. But that is not what ships are built for. – William Shedd

We discovered a toy recently called Surfer Dudes, a beach toy designed to be thrown beyond the breaking waves and then surf its way unassisted back to shore. Weaving amongst whitecaps, these lively dudes jive and wiggle, then pick up speed until a final curl shoots them right back to your feet. Due to the special rudder design, these wild-haired surfers always pop back up as if the song Good Vibrations was written just for them.

Given that my imagination runs rampant most of the time, I imagined that the typical surfer-slash-rebel would display himself wave after wave. With names like Costa Rica Rick and Sumatra Sam, who couldn’t relate to these chill, beach-cultured characters, braving the ocean alone, who seem to be always ready for the next joyride?

Countless times, my grandsons and I hurled our miniature Rastafarians out just past where the last wave line was about to crash. We expected them to get swallowed up in the froth and taken down into the gnarly depths, but Sam and Rick landed flat, popped back up on their board every time, squared off on a three-footer, zigging and zagging down the half pike.

But at the risk of sounding like a California commercial for dreadlock wax, our washing cycle was about to hit rinse. One of our over-zealous tosses apparently crossed the threshold of what Sumatra Sammy could handle. We watched several waves roll under him while Sam sat motionless, an oxymoron for surfers. Another slow wave rolled in, but the current’s pull sent Sam, frozen, a few feet further away.

“He’ll catch the next one,” I assured both boys, but by then Sumatra Sam was pointing the wrong direction, staring at the sun, or maybe staring out to sea for Wilson and Tom Hanks.

“Why didn’t you swim out and snatch him while you had a chance?” You ask.

This may be a good time to pause the podcast while you take a moment to laugh yourself silly. Ok, ready? Well, really, I was afraid of swimming out fifty feet to rescue Sam for fear of getting eaten by Jaws…or his sharky shark friends that circle beneath. (Just hit the play button when you have stopped laughing).

We boys did have a moment though when we thought Sam might turn it around, and if nothing else, express his loyalty by paddling back in. We noticed a hint of a smile, a wry upturned lip we caught in the last rays of the afternoon sun, but alas, he had crossed into uncharted territory for a toy surfer, and now set his sights for Cuba or perhaps a rescue by Greenpeace.

We could not even muster a solemn goodbye, still thinking by some miraculous lunar pull, Sam might catch a rogue wave and return to us. Instead, we were awakened out of our trance by a fast walker in a tortilla sized hat whose support dog, driven to insanity, was drinking salt water out of the Atlantic Ocean.

Since our return home from vacation a couple of weeks ago, I find myself imagining just where Sumatra Sam is right now. Did he end up back on shore for some lucky kid to discover? Is he still out there drifting in the Sargasso Sea, looking into the stars at night for a new compass, or is he looking down through layers of an ocean ecosystem that supports the only blue planet in the universe?

In spite of the playful intention of our toy, perhaps you can imagine how Surfer Dude has become kind of a symbol of a sojourner for me, a man who is thrown into the world on a trip to find his soul, and where life will take him. Even though Sumatra Sam is just a piece of plastic, there was a sad feeling that crept over the boys and I thinking Sam was going to spend too many nights out there alone with no one to talk to, nothing to eat or drink, and perhaps little hope of ever returning to his home. You can say I’ve gone off the deep end, that allowing for these kinds of thoughts are a kind of madness, but the instant when Sumatra Sam finally disappeared from our binocular view, we could not muster any humor from the situation and had to accept that he, like us, had to face the horizon sometime.

Is that him, or is that us out there waving the Shaka sign? We all know that sometimes it takes an ocean of emptiness before we are willing to risk wading in beyond knee deep. There we may find that the best journeys are always the ones with a loose definition of destination, where our discoveries are mysteries, and where the bottom is no longer visible.

“Well, would you look at that?” I asked. “Does your dog always drink from the ocean?” But the guy in the ridiculous saucer-size hat just kept walking, looking out to sea himself, forlorn and vacant, as if he’d missed his chance in life. Our surfer buddy, however, our little homey home slice Sumatra Sammy was looking back over his shoulder at us from fair winds and following seas, on the starboard reach of Pura Vida, and his next best life.

For my loyal listeners, I will be working on a book until September, so dive into your treasure trove of forty episodes here at Knee Deep. Until then, have a great summer and as always, don’t forget the “m” as in MORE please!

Hitting an All-Time Low(note)

I came down with a head cold this week, and it is the beginning of summer. Even mollusks and paramecium know that one doesn’t get a cold in the summer. It’s just not medically or biologically appropriate. A cold is something one gets in the winter when there is no sun, and when our immune systems are not running as efficiently as they should. Colds, quite simply, were invented to go along with other things in the winter we can barely tolerate, like fruitcakes and Youtube videos of people slipping on ice and falling on their children. They aren’t appropriate, but we expect them in the winter, not the summer.

However, I have tried to look at my cold as a positive thing, a chance to rebuild a few new habits, sort of look at life a little differently. Here are just a few things I’ve tried since this summer cold came on:

• I’m sleeping sitting up to help with drainage, and because I’m in a perfect position to read, I leave a book over my head in case I wake up.
• I’m using a variety of containers to hydrate myself, and drinking out of vessels that are more fun like our frying pan, the crock pot and a conch shell.
• I take more liberties to say odd things, phrases that take full advantage of my semi-delusional state. Phrases like, “Honey, I miss the ant farm we used to have. Those guys were my friends.” Or, this one: “Have we touched down yet? I thought for a moment I heard the captain speaking.”

And finally, I go around the house complaining of symptoms unrelated to a cold like dry kneecaps, missing fingernails, and the sudden appearance of long, pirate-like scars.

I think one of the worst things about having a cold is having to hear people-commercials about new, over-the-counter remedies and miracle cures that will lessen my symptoms. Our mail lady, for example, cited how Roman soldiers slathered honey all over their bodies to cure a cold, and that this honey-smothering technique also made it difficult for an attacking soldier to get them in a headlock. Our mail lady would be capable of putting me in a headlock, so after her explanation, I keep a bottle of honey by the door in case she tries any sudden battle moves on me.

As a last resort, I did make an appointment with my physician. During the examination, he asked me more questions about my family than about my condition. I think, truth be told, that doctors don’t want to help you when you have a cold because the common cold offers no new medical challenge to them. It doesn’t present itself with bright purple and chartreuse blotches, or parts of a mustache falling off.

“Jeff, how are you doing?” the doctor said. “You sound a little hoarse.” I smile and cough on him, tell him I’m about to throw up and need to be in the ICU. Unfazed, he sticks a temperature gun in my ear, a move that feels like something my brother used to do when we were ten, and looking at me squarely, feels around on my tonsils and adenoids, which were taken out forty-five years ago.

“Have you tried Vic’s VapoRub?” he says, listening to my back with a telescope. When I hear that question, I can feel my blood pressure start to rise. No one, and I mean no one, uses the term Vic’s VapoRub anymore, I think to myself. In the twenty-first century, we just say Vics and everyone knows what you are talking about. I don’t walk around my house using the full names of products in conversation. If we need more creamer at the grocery store, for example, I just say that, and not “Hey honey, can you pick up another container of Vanilla Coffee Mate Natural Bliss Real Milk and Creamer, please?”

Still, there is one part of getting a cold that I enjoy, and that has to do with how my voice changes. Since I have a rather delightful habit of practicing various noises as I go about my day, like machine-gun fire, and baby tiger growls, changes in my voice when I have a cold offer a host of unique possibilities. And because my throat is all off kilter, I am able to hit a note at least two octaves lower than usual. As I practice my scales, particularly in the morning, I can sometimes hit a low C, a note so low that flocks of Canadian geese begin gathering in our front yard.

You might not really fathom how incredibly important my voice change is to the future of our family. Let me just say for starters that there is no one, NO ONE, in our family, our extended family, our nuclear family or anyone related to our Bender relatives that has ever been able to hold a tune. We have all been genetically engineered to sound really bad when we sing anything, going all the way back to the Revolutionary War.

Now, with a summer cold, and my voice wonderfully low, I thought this would be a unique opportunity to restore some credibility to the family singing name, or at least the part we played in history and possibly the founding of our country, although that is a bit a vocal stretch.

So, for your listening pleasure, I thought I’d try my hand at a few of the raw notes I’m, enjoying here at home. Never hog a good thing, I always say. Here then, is a little ditty I’ve always loved. Just picture me walking amongst the geese out front, enjoying each other’s company with my new low frequency, fresh from my summer cold, melody. And please, feel free to hum along if you like:

Sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don't you call me
'cause I can't goI owe my soul to the
VapoRub store

If you see me coming, better step aside
A lot of men didn't, a lot of men died
One sneeze of iron, the other of steel
If a winter cold don't a-get you, then a summer one will

(Repeat until exhausted…)

The Monsters In Our Room

As a couple, my wife and I don’t spend a lot of time in front of the TV, but each year my wife insists I spend some time watching the singing talents of youngsters as they compete on American Idol. I temporarily put aside my purest artistic thoughts and settle in to watch contestants stand on their mark and give the judges their best vocal shot.

This year, on one of the first nights of the show, a Hawaiian eighteen-year-old named Iam Tongi delivered an emotional version of a song called “Monsters,” written by James Blunt. When Iam finished his song, we put our TV on pause and looked out into space until we could pull our emotionally wrecked selves back together. He had delivered, and as all of America knows by now, Iam’s went on to sing his way to a breath-taking thirteen million views, and this year’s winner of the show. His other performances were breath-taking as well.

As a lifelong artist myself, one of the things that struck me was the courage Iam had to take on a subject as personal and intimate as the recent loss of his father. That’s not easy on a national platform. Vulnerable and tender, his audition let some monsters out from our cages and freed some dreadful emotions from their chains as well. At our home, Iam’s ability to take us with him in his grief softened our world here for a moment, and probably lightened the big world Iam had on his shoulders too. For those of you who haven’t heard the song, it carries a universal message to anyone who has ever lost someone, a message that encourages us to weep when we need to, but also to tackle our own difficult moments with poise when the lights go dark.

One of the things you gotta love, even if you aren’t a fan of Idol, is the simple character Iam shows us while on stage singing and playing his guitar. When he performs, he has no fancy dance moves, no glitz or glimmer, and rarely an accompaniment. He is just a man, one person standing in sandals and a t-shirt, sharing his buttery voice and handing you a cupful of grace as if you are the only person in the room. He invites us to walk with him through the loss of his father, his idol, and by doing so a chance to chase the monsters away.

After performing one evening for the judges, Katy Perry complimented Iamon his ability to tell a story. I had to pause there and think about what she meant and remember that not all stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. Some hold us in the middle and let us work it out.

In fact, isn’t it true that the stories we love the most are the ones that leave us wondering what the next chapter will bring?

Like Iam’s songs, our stories are layered, with some of those layers rising while others are sinking, with some so deep we may not feel them until…well…until a piece of art or a song comes along that reminds us of how truly vulnerable and human we are. Many times, they are the ones we learn the most from, the ones that become our salve for a loss we have no words for. These are the ones that make us hold our breaths and let us exhale it slowly while all that we have built up wash away in a song.

The thing about Iam Tongi, the songwriter, the Hawaiian, the human, is that the monsters he let you see in himself may be the ones you are fighting on days when it appears the rats are winning the race.

Some of you may know that my father is now one hundred years old. As one might imagine, he has seen a lot of history, and has a lot of layers floating around in his elderly frame. My father’s voice is still in my head, even when I’m not there listening to him at the nursing home.

When I am sitting with him and it’s just us men, I hear the strain of a man whose fatherly muscles are wearing out, whose voice is not as insistent or demanding. Those muscles are getting too tired for monsters, so we skip over the lessons on manners or why I should give more to the church or which insects to watch out for in the yard. We become just “two men saying goodbye.” The monsters are almost gone for my father now, and we talk as two people, two human beings with foibles and flaws, who are old friends that share some family history. I can tell you it is a sweet place to be, because Dad can finally quit worrying about whether he’s covered everything or whether he is still responsible for chasing anything away.

If that were the end of our story, it would be a very poor story indeed. If we all slayed our monsters, handled everything ourselves, then there wouldn’t be a need for anything or anyone else. The ending to all our stories, mine, Iam’s, my dad’s, is that there is no ending when you love someone. The stories we have, the monsters in our room, transfer to the next person who carries them for a little while until becoming too weary ourselves, close the door and go home. We should be so lucky that we have an idol, our precious Maker who will take us there with a song. It may sound a lot like Iam Tongi’s when we hear it again, but by then all our monsters will be nevermore.

Am I Getting Paid for This?

I’m not very good company on vacations. Taking time to relax somewhere else has always felt like an effort, and I don’t get into the flow of things for a couple of three days. At home I have my routine of gardening, fixing things, having a latte with my wife, or getting into trouble with the grandkids. I hear the term “obsessive” tossed around regarding my personality on vacations, but I would use the word “lost.”

As much as I try to loosen up when we get away, I find myself looking around for things to do to make me feel at home, which usually translates into doing pretty much what I do at home.

After we arrived at our destination this year, hashtag exhaustion, I began by rearranging the coffee cups so I could reach them in the morning, and then check out the fine print on the hotel shampoo to make sure I wasn’t going to asphyxiate on the aroma it leaves in my hair. I put out our Do Not Disturb Sign, even though it was only three in the afternoon, and try to to open my pressure packed suitcase without being hit in the head by my rolled-up belt. I notice my special travel-proof tube of toothpaste has exploded on the one good shirt I packed, so I take off to find some Dawn dishwashing liquid, but by then everyone else is ready to tour the resort, which really meant going to the front desk and asking for more towels and finding out when the Kiddie Climbing Wall will open.

Along the way, I pass men in brightly colored swimwear they would never wear back home, many of whom want to tell you about the construction company advertised on their hats. Over by the bar there’s more men dressed in floral shirts from Choccolocco, Alabama watching European soccer on a TV the size and shape of Montana, but I swing wide when I hear them ordering drinks like Murder at Sunset and Fatal Attraction, and I head back to the room to put on sunscreen. Along the way I hear music coming out of fake rock speakers in the ground. Naturally, they are playing Jimmy Buffet, but because the speakers are spaced fifty yards apart in the landscaping, Jimmy’s voice sounds like four brothers who tried to form a quartet in their garage.

This year I brought a book to read, a 900-page edge-of-your-seater I’ve been using at home to block a vent that blows cold air on my wife regardless of our thermostat setting. I’m not much for hanging around the pool, but feel obligated after applying twenty bucks’ worth of sunscreen, and open my book, skim over the list of chapters, and begin to read the Forward:

When I began writing this book some forty years ago, in a season that now seems like another lifetime, I was merely four years old. I was dressed in a white jumper typical of British funerals and was overtaken by a flashback of my great-grandfather who lay in state in that vertically stained and monolithic cathedral. Long before his death by an errant leopard attack, when our family was still animal lovers, he sat me on his knee, the only one left after The Great War, and began sharing with me his horrifying saga of being trapped behind enemy lines in the bloody trenches of Alsace-Lorraine. I looked now at his graven face, stiff and uncluttered by his customary salt-and-pepper beard, and I knew this great general, this lifeless unheralded man who led the last slingshot brigade of the twentieth century, was in fact, not related to me at all.

While vacation seems like an odd time to burst into tears, I found this book particularly moving, and knew instinctively I could never get to the end of it without putting my family through quite a lot of emotional upheaval. With the help of a passing weightlifter, I put the book down and headed out to the fitness center to schedule a family beach yoga session that starts at sunrise from a lady who could stretch like a FEDEX rubber band.

By six the next morning our family has finished the yoga session and watched the sun make its grand entrance over the horizon in a blaze of glory. Inspiring though it sounds, with everyone feeling lengthier and in-tune with their inner child, they opt to return to their rooms and go back to bed. I detour for coffee and run into our Hispanic maid, and in a fit of unbridled energy, offer to help her arrange the resort soaps on her cleaning cart, which was an epic fail, considering I didn’t know Spanish and she spoke only three words of English, two of which were “Good Morning.”

I moved on to refill my coffee like I do at home, but in this case, it meant going back to the front desk to see if they have any Stevia. The concierge was now so accustomed to seeing me, he just looked at me and said, “Jeff, just go in the back and get it yourself.” While I’m back there I crossed paths with the reservation manager that had a jammed stapler, so we worked on that for a while making small talk like men do when they try to fix a stapler together.

By then it’s 6:30 and I’m ready to mow the resort’s small patch of zoysia grass in front of the marquis, so I mosey over to the maintenance garage, slightly left of the dumpster. Those guys are always up early, drinking coffee, standing around in threes, sometimes fours, doing exactly what they do at home. While negotiating for a lawnmower, we all agree I could rent out their back storage room with the 3000-gallon drum of gasoline for one-tenth of the price of our balcony room. “It could work,” Mower Guy says in native Floridian, “but we’ll have to clear it with the front desk.”

So, guess what? I head back over there, stopping on my way to talk to Cart Girl, freshen up my coffee in the room she’s working on, grab a beach towel, and re-arrange all her hotel soaps again, the ones no one really uses because they are shaped like seahorses. I tell her on the way out that Mower Guy has his eye on her, but since she didn’t understand a word of what I said the first time we talked, she simply hands me a complimentary hair net and shoe mitt and says “Ok,” which is her third and final word, rounding out her entire English vocabulary.

This is more like it, I tell myself. It’s starting to feel just like home. I’m getting a lot done, I’m finally relaxed. And miracles abound! It’s only quarter past seven! I am on vacation, with the rest of the day ahead of me! My family is still sleeping, I’m starting to find my rhythm, and if you aren’t doing anything, I’ll meet you in the lobby where I’ll be touching up the paint near the free cucumber water.

A Trip to Planet Eyeball

Many years ago, we found our little slice of heaven along the Florida coast, and it’s been a yearly stop ever since. Now we tow our family down for a week and build as many memories as we can shovel into a beach bucket. After a couple of days acclimating to laziness, I rediscover what playfulness looks like from two grandsons as we form a battle line against nature’s forces.

The red warning flag has been out for the last two days, and high tide’s been throwing everything that it has at us. As green foamy waves crash over one another, lines of brownish foam bubble-masses form on the edge of the surf and are pushed by the wind across the sand like aliens from an interplanetary dishwasher. Eerily skin-like, they seem to propel themselves along by their own slime, then suddenly peel off and evaporate into the beach as if to regroup to a world underground. Within moments, another line of bubbles has erupted from the surf and is racing towards us, slithering up to cover our toes.

“RUUUUN! It’s the Sudsy-Slime!!” I shriek. “RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!”

I gather the troops downwind just long enough for me to explain that this is imaginary goop that is invading Earth and taking over. It’s time for a group hug, just for safety I tell them and a chilly wind kicks up and dodges between us. A good excuse to throw the Star Wars towel around us for a moment, make a huddle for our next play, a plan of attack on the world. Alien slime is allergic to hugs, so I draw the four- and six-year-old in close, like a grandfather Jedi should, wrap both my arms around them, and tell them we are safe for now.

Their eyes turn big as flying saucers and I point to the sky where a pretend starship from Planet Eyeball just disappeared into the clouds at warp speed. My warnings can barely be heard over the crashing surf, and a new atmosphere is upon us. The war is on. It’s the Forces of Imagination and Play against the dreaded Sudsy-Slime!

Up where mom and dad lounge in their beach chairs, a colorful array of molded plastic toys are scattered about, now half buried by blowing sand. The toys are fresh out of the bag, but they seem like outcasts next to the warehouse of jetsam junk the sea has tossed up, chewed, broken and unspoiled.

Have you noticed that kids never get tired of what the sea deposits? It is the nature-nothings than become our necklaces, our talismans, and faded pictures on our mantels back home.

Today, the best choices are the scratchy palmetto husks, and we use them to write messages in the sand to a coast guard helicopter whirling overhead. Was that the interplanetary starship we saw earlier? Never mind, our letters aren’t legible. They are in kid language, indecipherable and washed away by the incoming surf, but they not wasted to us.

The sudsy foam pushes us further back and back even further, melting our capital letters away. We make another attempt to write in the sand again but there’s no time to waste! The camouflaged whirligig, our pretend alien above, has spotted us and is circling back! We are not grown up yet, not ready to be out in the open. We don’t want to be teleported up in a beam of ’phistication and ‘sponsibility or other words we aren’t ready for.

We split for cover up near the dune where high tide has already made its mark. In a small oval of shade, behind a few sea oats, we duck down and hide, but are not alone. As the copter whizzes by, we discover a casualty in the sand, a large snow crab, barely alive, surrendering to the heat and ocean’s brown slime.

“Oh my gosh, look!” says Six-Year-Old. “A crab! It’s still alive! It’s only got four legs! And a GIANT PINCHER!”

We bend low to watch the half-crab, still wiggling.

“I think I see one eye looking back at us!” I say, pointing to the skeletal creature.

“Us?” Says Four-Year-Old.

“Yea, there’s one big crab eye!” I whisper as if it could hear us.

We poke the crab, watching the beady, telescoping eye rotate around and look at us again.

“That eye is a spy from Planet Eyeball!” says Six-Year-Old.

“A spy?” Says the younger.

We stare for a moment at each other, then back at the alien monster from Planet Eyeball.

“What happened to it?” says Six- and Four-Year-Old.

I could give them a serious answer, one filled with knowledge and wisdom, but they are not looking for answers, really, not when there is a big eye, bulging, looking at _us_.

“RUN EVERYBODY! RUN!” I yell, and like retreating troops taking fire, we scamper over the dune. But we are taking a break from the Beach of Real and allowing our playful visions to succumb to the gravitational pull of the moon on a lighthearted sea. We are Sand Soldiers on leave from active duty, intrepid explorers saving the planet from the Sudsy-Slime of maturity, one crab eye at a time.

You Just Gotta Be – A Tribute to Gord

This past week we paid our last respects to one of the greatest songwriters of our times, Gordon Lightfoot. Credited with being one of the most influential, if not prodigious folk musicians of the last half century, he died at eighty-four this past week. Gord, as he was affectionately called, penned some 300 songs over the course of his sixty-year career and was the inspiration behind hits from Elvis, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and the trio Peter, Paul and Mary, to name only a few. Quoting Dylan, “I can't think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don't like. Every time I hear a song of his, it's like I wish it would last forever.”

When I first attended a Gordon Lightfoot concert over thirty years ago, the eight track tapes I bought during intermission eventually wore out my rewind button in my car stereo, as I looped Rainy Day People or Summertime Dream continuously. Before all those tapes wore out completely, I recorded them over to cassette tapes, then eventually bought his entire anthology of songs in CD, which we play like a bad habit around our house. When we heard he passed away quietly this week of natural causes, we dug up the scrap of paper where he scribbled his name, and we felt the loss of a song-friend we had known all our lives.

If you are in your twenties or thirties, you may not be familiar with his vast repertoire of evocative songs. If you are older, you know how one of his songs can transport you to some northern lake where you can hear the call of a loon, or to a small town where a lonesome train whistle whines. Either way, his songs left us with chapters of soulful and singable lyrics, and melodies you could whistle all day long. And if you will take a brain break in the middle of your day to listen to Knotty Pine, or East of Midnight, I can assure you the day will be transformed into another world where ships plunge through the Great Lakes loaded down with virtuoso guitar licks and penetrating, resonate harmonies. Are you longing for a moving adventure, a daydream that was never fulfilled? Pull up a listen and sit back. His songs are full of them.

I met Gordon Lightfoot in college when my studies weighed like a foreboding cloud and friends and family seemed distant. He was there when I retreated to my tiny room just off campus made a cup of tea, sat down on my futon with my Irish Setter, and put on one of his albums. I had no God that I knew of then, but I was kept company with his songs that transcending his own failed relationships, alcoholism, and lost homes. At least for a short time, I could immerse myself in Sundown or If You Could Read My Mind and know that I was free from whatever ghosts were creeping up the back stairs of my apartment. We should all be so lucky to find the safety of one favorite Lightfoot song, one that will help us find our own personal bridge between the wherefore and the why.

I saw him again in concert last fall when he walked out on stage in Columbus Ohio on what would be part of his last tour. During the performance Gordon had to be administered oxygen, which is a bit frightening to witness as a spectator, and there were more than a few in the audience who wondered why he would come out and put himself through another appearance. However, a few bars into each song, it was obvious he was going to go out of this life doing what he loved the most, celebrating the tracks of his life on stage with his fans. His playlist was short, perhaps 12 songs, but he had the same enthusiastic verve he always had, tapping his feet to each song, staying within a safer vocal range, and occasionally needing to be prompted on a few lyrics. Just a few weeks later, Gordon fell and broke his wrist and had to cancel the rest of that US and European tour. More than once I thought he may not make it through, but his rendition of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald got a standing ovation, a fitting tribute to the “chimes that rang twenty-nine times for the wives and the sons and the daughters.”

What Gordon Lightfoot was telling us through his last go-round of fragile concerts, was that he was still on a magical ride connecting us to the tattle-tail sound of wind in a sail, drinking his second cup of coffee or wearing polka dot underwear. His iconic The__Canadian Railroad Trilogy, the unofficial Canadian anthem, came from his love of country as he sang us through a landscape of steel workers, then through the nickel mines of Sudbury, and all the whistle stops in between. He missed a few notes here and there, but don’t we all? For those of us who have been riding shotgun with him through the years, his renditions were reminders that Gordon’s life was still full to capacity and that he, like Don Quixote, would be the last Canuck standing:

Reaching for his saddlebag
He takes a battered book into his hand
Standing like a prophet bold
He shouts across the ocean to the shore
Till he can shout no more

Should you take the time to listen to a Lightfoot song, try one that didn’t make it to the top of the charts, and see if you aren’t moved either to dance, or to tears, or to start taking guitar lessons. At one concert I attended many years ago, he wistfully remembered the days when he was travelling from one gig to another, spending long hours in ramshackle hotels where Dylan or Willie might stop themselves and share songs all night long down in the lobby. Spending countless hours in my dorm room studying, I often had Gord playing in the background, but honestly, I always felt like I could have been sitting with him in a speak-easy having a drink, or in front of a fire swapping jokes. For a songwriter to tell a story, for him or her to take you on an adventure with them while they sing is indeed a rare and rousing trip. The beauty of Lightfoot’s songs is that we can still go there with him through his music, even if he is on another steamship that we hear on Lake Superior, passing us in the night.

As I wrap up this short tribute to Gordon Lightfoot, I invite you to google one of my very favorite Lightfoot songs called I’m Not__Suppose to__Care. You may listen to the melancholy of a man who spent some time out in the rain, who battled with desperation and depression and disappointment, but in the lyrics, you’ll also hear a singer that still had places to go and people to see, and the gift of his prolific songwriting to share. As he says in the song, “I’ll give you the keys to my flying machine if you like,” but along the way you may find yourself canoeing through his Canadian wilderness home, or perhaps sitting in front of a fire, watching the flames flicker out with one of his beautiful ballads playing softly, my love, in the background.

The Catch (Part 3)

Recess bell rang out and wild horses couldn’t have stopped us from getting out to that ball diamond…

My bulldozing buddy had pushed me right through the door to get me out first on account I’d given him four peanuts packages that I traded to other kids. I gave away my milk under the table for one pack, my butter patties to a tubby kid name of Caddy for another, and I split my hamburger in half so as to get one peanut pack apiece even though the buns were soaked clean through from the creamed corn they served us every single day until it ran out, which we was all glad for. It was a fair trade, all of it, and Upland, eating peanuts all the way, led me out the gym door, down past home and straight out to left field to get a good spot for a pop-up, gawking up at the sky like idjits looking for Martians.

Shortly after, Dadburny strutted out the long way so Miss English Teacher had time to adjust her view of him, and then, dropping his first pitch, WHOMP! Out that first ball went, curved along the third base line, clean as a train whistle only six feet off the ground the whole way, and like to take the hair off Upland’s head. Hit the corner pole dead on, took a bounce like it was in a pin ball machine, careened off’n two teacher cars and knocked out most of the letters on the school sign announcing OPEN HOUSE for next Tuesday. We tried not to laugh, but dang it, all that was left on the school sign was a P, and two E’s and it was a teacher who done it.

Dadburny, man, he looked irritated at all of us laughing out there in left field. But we were glad he hadn’t hit a pop fly, be’n that it took the pressure off of us for a while. But he weren’t glad at all, he was nervous jittery, and not smiling, because he was going to have to explain why he put a dent in two cars and left P-E-E on the school billboard. Miss Flimsy-English just smiled at him from over by first base where she was standing pretending to grade papers, but she had her eye on him like a mother hen.

I thought of my grandmother just then, how she told me to go meet the ball if I got a chance. I thought of being there with my notebook spread out on her kitchen Formica counter working on the science, and I felt for the first time like I wasn’t going to get a chance to meet that baseball, being so crowded around all these cotton-pickin’ kids in left field. I needed some space to meet a pop-up the science way if’n I got the chance, so I took off, yes I did, and ran like lightning over to right field where all the first graders were playing in the sand boxes, and four square, and poke-me-then-I’ll-poke-you type a games.

I ran out there where no one was and stood there by myself looking up to the heavens where I could hear my grandmother’s voice back home and could talk to her for a minute before Dadburnit knocked the snot out of another ball. I looked way up to the eternal, and it was quiet up there, and I swear I saw the finger of God pointing to huge cloud shape of a white popsicle, least that’s how I looked at it, and I closed one eye to line His finger up with my own. It was like God and me having a conversation and him having the last words, “Go out there and meet the ball!”

Then, it came…I heard the pop of a bat sound off like a firecracker. CRACK!

Danged if Danburnit hadn’t hit one to right field, and everyone in left looked a disappointment because no one was out there waiting for it.

But I was.

I didn’t move my feet one inch because I was nailed to the ground frozen tight like a tin soldier, I was. The ball went up to that finger in the sky pointing to a popsicle, went right through and broke the clouds like a jet on the Fourth of July. In the back I heard Miss Flimsy say “oh dear” as if she might have to catch it herself. But I wasn’t giving gravity any time to make a mark. I took off towards the sidewalk, then back a little, lined myself up and let both my hands go up to meet that ball, which came down like a brick square in the middle of them both, clamped shut and done stopped solid.

Later someone told me there was a solar eclipse that day, which I had to look up in chapter five on weather in the science book. But it didn’t make any difference. You could have heard a pin drop from here to Itchy Goomy. I was stunned myself, and believe, now looking back that I may have gone to the bathroom on myself. Probably not, but I could have.

That baseball looked a lot different in my hands that it ever had, kind of like it was glowing in my hands, bright as an evening star and I felt like it was a ball that I was meant to keep, standing there. But Mr. Dadburny had a different plan. He was so mad that someone had caught his pop up, so enfumigated in front of his lady friend, that he didn’t know exactly what to do. I think Miss Flimsy lost a little bit for him when I caught that ball, a little of her affliction for him left because I looked over and saw her look away from him, like she was embarrassed, and then she went to adjusting her spring dress.

Out of sheer meanness, Dadburny was so confused what to do he took off running me down! Came straight at me full speed like a locomotion! And here I thought he was going to come out and shake my hand or pick me up and hug me or give me a science ribbon he had in his pocket or something. Nope, he was gritting his teeth, mad as a hornet. He came straight at me like a bull, and I just knew he was about to run me down and knock the ball out of my hand and then say I dropped his pop fly. Then he’d have his perfect record of never having one caught, and he’d keep his girlfriend too. But you know what save me? You’ll never guess.

Off to the side, Miss Flimsy screamed “FRAAAAAANCIS!” At the top of her voice she did, like she’d seen a ghost!

And if the baseball field hadn’t been dead quiet before my catch, it was now.

“FRANCIS!” She yelled again, “Don’t do it!” She called him by his first name, like do-you-take-this-man-to-be-your-lawful-wedded-husband-Francis! And I heard it, and my friends heard it in left field, and the entire school heard it like a loudspeaker drill off a tornader. Oh man, you’d never think an English teacher like her dressing like a flower could yell like a dock hand, but there it was!

“FRANCIS! DON’T YOU LAY A FINGER ON HIM!!”

And his full speed run stopped like a ring in a bell, just short of running me over, and I saw a madness there, like pride gone crazy, his bad side ready to hurt me got caught right out there in right field by the gal he’d been winking at and rubbing elbows with. Now she saw the other side of him, that ugly side he’d been hiding from her all this time, and she didn’t like what she saw, no, not one bit. And I saw a row of his ugly crooked teeth up close like could bite me in half.

So, there you have it, and I told you I’d get to it and tell you the whole story. I loved the game of baseball, and one way or another, through all the lies and anger the finger of God came down like gravity unleashed, and my hand went up to meet that baseball, and forced Dadburnit to show the side he never hoped would come out. I can stand here and say it happened yes it did.

Shortly after that I got that C in science out of pure revenge from Mr. Francis Dadburny. He weren’t no perfect baseball hitter, he weren’t no science expert neither. He was a teacher I came to know by catching his pop fly, and having to pay for it with a lot of booking I didn’t care for one bit.

And it all made sense now from my view behind the backstop. That was the day after I ran all the way back to school and saw Francis come to his knees in the parking lot begging Miss Flimsy to take him back, but she weren’t having it, no she wasn’t. She had seen the light and there wasn’t any future in a man who’d knock a kid down on account of a pop fly, and she knew it. And then, I understood why I had got that C in science, and that revenge was spelt with a capital R.

Funny thing about that too. I never got another C in science again, and that is the truth as I stand here. I got a few B’s, but mostly what I got on my six-week report cards was A’s after that, bigger’n all get out. Capitol A’s, with remarks from Francis Dadburny like “works well with others,” or “good handle on vocabumalary, and so on and so forth and what have you. I couldn’t believe it. My punishment was cut, and I played ball after school every day, except for the days when I ran home because guess who was waiting for me at the gate?

You’ll never guess in a million years. And it wasn’t grandma neither.

It was of all people, my dad! Sure as Lincoln standing there with a mitt on, ready to catch some with me, and not make a mention of that C I got and all the while, don’t you know, he’d talk up a storm about, yep, it was the science. Mostly about cell my-toesies, but he talked about Einstein’s Theory of Relatives, and Copernicus, and Otis and Wilson Wright and all the rest of the gravity geniuses, like a meeting, a great meeting of minds. And I was right there in the center of them all, like we were having the World’s Fair of Science and playing catch together with my dad jabbering a mile a minute.

But it didn’t bother me one bit. By then I knew all of those science people in the book, and some that weren’t and could talk up a mean streak about every one of them myself, all the while throwing a dadburn baseball back and forth with my own dad ‘til Grandma yelled out back told us class was over and come in to wash up and smiling as we ran in, saying if we didn’t come now, she was going to call us out at the plate, even though, in a million years, I knew she weren’t never would.

The Catch (Part 2)

We’re picking up from last week where I was stuck at home studying science, a subject I had no capacity for, and then had run all the way back to school, hoping some semblance of a ball game was still on. But I was about to see more than I had bargained for…

Way down deep where a willow root meets reason, pieces I hadn’t understood at the time came together and began to make a whole picture. I wanted to yell across the field, when I saw them two love birds together, my teachers both, and yell out something that would ruffle their feathers and it was all I could do not to. I’m glad I didn’t though because if I hadda I wouldn’t have seen that flashback of me on the field catching that once in a lifetime ball and all the things that happened after, and the reason I got that C from Dadburny. I would have gone right past that picture in my own head and gone into science the next day the same way I came out, ready to light a fire, mad at the world, but I didn’t.

Instead, what happened in right field replayed itself down to the last detail, and like I said, made sense of everything forever.

First off, you gotta understand that recess bell meant we were out the door for baseball. You gotta know that was all of what was on our minds. We had to be excused of course, but when my lunch table was dismissed and that, I found David Upland, the biggest kid in the fifth grade, and stayed right behind him, straight out to the ball field. I had to give him my package peanuts for it, but it was worth it because walking behind him was like having a bulldozer in front of you. There wasn’t anyone gonna bet in front of David Upland and beat us out to the ball field.

So, about the time jacket weather came in and we were out on the playground rotating around, dodging the puddles to make a catch, we found ourselves looking at a brand-new batter one day. It was Dadburny. He was on lunch duty that week and had decided he could take a turn at bat anytime he felt like it, and not to be surprised, I noticed his lady, the one with the soft elbows, was out there with him, pretending to grade papers, and hooting for him like a cheerleader.

This wasn’t rocket science, no sir, what I was watching.

Dadburny came up to the plate like he owned it, carrying, mind you his own bat. That bat wasn’t wooden either like from our gym class but made of the same thing they make rocket ships out of. Rumor had it that NASA make it for him from a combination of nitroglyceride and Boron, which turned out to be one of those periodicals on the table that would blow up like lighter fluid if you jingled it, which explained why he could hit it so far.

Anyway, Dadburny waltzed up to the plate, looking over at his gal, his prized possession with her dress flowing in the spring breeze. He had his sleeves rolled up and his tie tucked down in his shirt, and began to hit pop flies out to us, the whole crowd who’d seen him come up to bat and come running. Nobody pitched the ball to Dadburny either. He pitched to hisself! Toss the ball up a little outa one hand, then clock it clean out near the fence every time.

Every day on his duty, pop up after pop up, he’d knock the cover off the ball and it would sail towards the fence, become like a dot in the sky and sometimes land in the crossing guard’s yard across the street. What’s worse for those of us trying to get under it, he’d hit it straight into the sun, so kids would run like Jim Thorpe to get under it, knocking each other down, stepping on the first graders, yelling “I got it, I got it, It’s mine, it’s mine, look out and so forth and so on and what have you, and then when that ball started its accel-er-i-zation down like an arrow towards our hands held straight up, it got lost in the sun and came down like an arrow and land with a dead thump in the grass that hadn’t been mowed yet.

We were all there, right under it, a ton of us, every single kid that had ever been at that school and some that hadn’t, were standing there like it was Jesus second coming, and not a one of us could do anything about it when the ball accel-amalated down that last twenty feet.

And then here it comes, the excuses.

“I had it but you got in my way. I called it when it left the bat you idjit, next time I’m pushing you away,” and so forth and so on and what have you. No one dared pick up the ball laying there like a bomb ready to go off, so here we go again with the excuses. And I was joining in with the worst of them.

“Dadburny said it was my turn to catch it, Dadburny said this and he said that and my dad said I could catch it today,” and on and on it went until Dadburny hisself had to put the bat down and come out and keep us from the kind of annihilation piled up on top of one another. It was the biggest, awfullest bunch of whiners you ever saw, and then recess bell rang and we all had to go in dirty from fighting and mad and ready to go home and slam the door on our way in.

Truth was, we were scared to death of those pop flies. And Dadburny could hit them like no tomorrow, one after another. They left his aero-nautical baseball bat like vengeance in a bottle, and they went up and up and up. Whatever wind repellant or resistance on the chapter on the physics of flight in the science book went right out the window and broke every rule. Man, how those pop ups flew!

And truth, there was no way on God’s green Earth any of us had the guts to get underneath one of them and catch it. Kids would beg him to hit one right to them, and I tell you he would! Right to them on the nose, with strict instruction for the rest of us to let Jamie, or Sally catch it. Here it come down, and they’d step away at the last instant, just like the rest of us, right when they could have stuck their hand out and caught it with their eyes closed. It was pitiful cowardly.

For us fifth graders that had to put up with him in science, it was even worse. Dadburny, gloating after recess because no one caught his flies again, sat back watching one his projector movies he’d put on so he didn’t have to teach, showing black and white movies from the 1920’s about the production of bombs, and the invention of first Henry Ford automobile, and then we watched another one on the first flight with Wilbur running after the first plane to get off the ground, like what was Wilbur going to do if’n he caught up with that plane? Grab it and hang on for dear life in mid-air? I saw that Kittyhawk film a dozen times, and every time I watched it, I still thought Wilbur’d jump on with Orville and take a ride with this brother. That’s what I would have done. If my brother went up in a paper airplane like they was, I’d grab something, maybe a wheel or the antennae or something and go for a ride! You go all the way out there in the field with your own hand-made airplane and not go up in it with your brother? That just made no sense to all to me.

So, I raised my hand one day and asked Dadburny the question all of us had talked about at lunch and was all thinking.

“Sir, is there more to this film?” I asked him after the film ended, two minutes before the period bell rang.

“No, Jeff. Why do you ask?” he answered.

“I just wondered if both of Wilson and Otis ever went up together at that first flight at Kittyhall.”

“It was Wilbur and Orville at Kittyhawk. And the answer is no, that’s a silly question, and the film is over,” he said looking right through me. Then he went over to the door, leaned out and looked down the hall to see if Mis Flimsy was out there with a new dress on, while I sat with no answer to my first science question ever.

So, with science there, and Kittyhawk and flight and the Russians attacking us down in Cuba at a missile conference, we kids were pretty riled up by the time it came to the ball field and catching one of Dadburny’s interstellar pop flies. We loved baseball, but we were scared to death of being clocked in the head and being laid up forever with dane bramage and such like. It was a fear we had, and it built and built all week because we knew Dadburny would be hitting those flies higher than the ones he hit yesterday. All the power he could bring to the science was on the speed and trajectory God could muster. I read about it every single solitary day after school on account of that C, with Grandma right there. Rate times time, xylem and phloem and all kinds of rocket science behind it. I had read so much science that his pop flies had science written all over them. They weren’t even part of baseball I had read so much. They was just pure science, Astro-man-omical feats of space and time, calculated by my Grandma and me.

So I told her about it one day. It was on a Thursday, the day before the last day Dadburnit would be on duty. She met me there at the gate after school, like always and, for once, I couldn’t wait to get started on the science. I told G’ma the whole story about the baseball pop flies, and how I’d like nothing more than to catch one.

“How do I do it, Grandma? Every kid in the world is out there, and the ball comes down so fast.”

“Well, let’s see if there is anything in the science book about catching a ball,” she said handing me a cookie.

And sure enough, in the chapter on flight, there was a small picture off to the side of a little kid hitting a baseball out of Fenway Park, like an old souvenir postcard you’d find in the bottom of a box.

“Here, look at this, would you,” she said and pointed to the diagram. Underneath, in small italics, G’ma read the words out loud: “An object falling has no power against the unparalleled force of gravity. There it is,” she said, pointing to the picture, “there’s your answer.”

“Does that mean gravity is more powerful as that baseball comes down?” I asked, frustrated.

“Yes, it does. It’s coming down with gravity behind it. The closer that baseball gets to you, the more the earth pulls it down harder. It’s a fact of science,” she said, “so if you want to catch that ball, you have to go up and meet it before gravity has time to grab it away from you. You have to meet the ball,” she said and raised her hand up like she was out there stopping the ball herself, which she would never do in a million years. But I got her message like a missile meets the nanny and it took hold with me.

The next day was Friday, and the last day Dadburny would have duty outside. All our gear was out there on home plate, ready for the rotation to start, but here comes Dadburny ready to bat again and knock the cover off and embarrass us all as we stood there afraid the ball would come down and bust our heads open.

Tune in next week, friends and baseball fans, for the conclusion of The Catch. I was wishing I’d never even heard of baseball when I first got that C, but as I looked at the whole field from behind the backstop, I saw the mess Dadburny had got hisself into by showing off to Miss Flimsy and not teaching us a darn thing, and you’ll have a front row seat to the replay of it all.

The Catch (Part 1)

We were still wearing jackets and long pants when we ran outside at recess and found our baseball gear laying on home plate. April air said chilly, and the grass was soggy from the sudden thunderstorms that dumped an inch an hour. Baseball at my public school meant we rotated from right field around through the infield until you got your chance to bat. Sometimes the outs came one after the other, as in a couple of flies and a strikeout. Other times one batter dominated the rotation until the bell rang to go back inside. We didn’t do teams at recess, weren’t allowed to and that, until school was out at three and the teachers went home. That’s when we put on our gloves, picked sides, and chewed the Juicy Fruit we’d been saving all day. That’s when serious ball started, and the minor leaguers from recess went home.

I went home too that spring, because I got a lousy C in science and was grounded from anything after school until I had studied science for a solid hour. For me, that was hell to pay.

My grandmother noticed the agony I felt. She could read it in my face. She didn’t agree with my dad either, that decision to ground me. I knew she didn’t because she was there to meet me at our back gate after school, when I came in looking like spilt milk. We kids were everything to her, so much that she had passed up many a suitor who had come to call on her at our house, passed them up to help us kids grow up. She chose being a grandmother instead, chose to get to know us. She knew my temper, she knew how I liked my toast and that, and she knew about me and baseball in the spring. She knew what missing those after school games did to my insides when I had waited all winter to get my baseball mitt out again. I had a face like a walnut, ready to cry when I got that C, and she hurt right alongside me with that ugly face. One way or the other, even if it meant that she had to learn the periodic tables and whether Krypton had nine molecular molecules or ten, she was going to get me back on that ball field again and let me be a ball player. She was my Kryptonite.

“Come on in, let’s get started,” she’d say, and close the gate and I’d mope into her kitchen, part of a tiny off-apartment in the back of our house, and sit down to study cell division or the food chain in some faroff country I’d never go to. Next to a plate of oatmeal cookies, I learned that I wasn’t that bad at science, that I was worth more than that dang C-grade, and that my grandmother was going to see this thing through. She may not have known one single solitary thing about baseball, but she knew me, and we were like a science team, hand in glove. We read that thick book out loud together. We looked at the complimacated diagrams and then we underlined the important sentences together. Then we copied and underlined them again, this time in red because my grandmother was mad at the whole business, like me.

“G’ma, we can’t mark in the books,” I’d say. “Mr. Dadburny will fine us at the end of the year.”

“Let ‘em fine us,” she’d snarl out loud. “Anyone who gives my grandson a C is gonna get marked up,” and that was how she felt about science book vandalism. What began as my prison after school and boiled over each day as I saw my friends go out to play ball, slowly melted away in the few minutes around her, eating a cookie and marking science up with red at her Formica table. An hour later and not a second more, right when enzymes and protoplasm and metaba-bolism collided in my brain, she told me I was done and could put the book away until tomorrow. And every day after, Monday through Friday, the last thing I heard from her as I blasted out the door with my mitt, was, “Knock ‘em dead!”

Deeper still, what she did by meeting me at the back gate of my miserable science grade, helped me collect my anger towards my father. He wasn’t there helping me memorize the inert gases, but he had big plans for me to go to college, yes he did, andmajor in the organic chem or bio-chem or whatever. From there it would be on to medical school, then, right on schedule, take over his practice tosave people from being sick. It was planned, this whole trip up thedoctor scale, starting not with baseball, but in the pursuit of a medical practice, and something he called a legacy. That was what this grounding was all about, and it all began with good science grades.

For me, my discipline or punishment, or whatever that was, was really rooted down deeper in being out on that ballfield in the spring, a sport my father had no interest in watching or playing. He wouldn’t let us watch it on TV either, thought it was a waste of time. Baseball had no future, he said, and was a game for spectators, so we missed seeing Mickey Mantle and the series and Willie Mayes. Instead, the rotation of the earth on its axis was more important, which I could care less about. I sat slumped, laboring over Science for Thinkers: Observing _the World Around Us, but my mind was rushing back up to the baseball field at school, cutting across the boulevards, hoping the ball game would still be on when I got there. Usually by then, only a few second graders lingered, still waiting for their ride home from day care – not exactly the kind of competition I was looking for.

Late one day, I ran nonstop back to school using every shortcut I knew. No one was left on the ball diamond, but I caught a glimpse of my science teacher, Mr. Dadburny leaving the building late. I quick hid behind the backstop when I saw him come down the side stairs. I could see every detail, and I can tell you he was not carrying his science book anywhere. He wasn’t interested in science. I saw what he was interested in though, and it was my English teacher. She was young and not married, and new to our school, and his hand was lightly pressed on her elbow as he walked her to her car.

It wasn’t the first time I had seen him with her. “Mr. Dadburnit” – the name we called him behind his back – had been wooing this teacher gal since the beginning of the school year with overtures he thought none of us saw. But us kids saw him moving on her, and gossiped about the way he slipped down to her room between passing periods to talk in those low teacher whispers as we went by to our next class. Under his arm he carried a stack of papers to make it look like he was on a copying run but then, he’d stop when he got to her, start up a little chit chat, then compliment her on her dress. Never went any further down the hall with those fake copying papers, so we all knew it was her and not us kids he was working on. And I knew it wasn’t science he was working on either or looking to see if I had written down a two or a three for the H-two-0 water formula on my test. He didn’t look at my paper when he graded it; he had no science written all over him, front to back, and was about as slick as a cat in heat.

“Well, would you look at that,” he’d say, flirting with her between classes, “There’s the bell. I guess I better get back. No telling what the little rug rats will be up to!” Then he’d wink at her, up close, one of those winks that looks stupid, more of a nod-wink, a gesture just shy of what he was building to next. “Time flies when you’re having fun!”

Then his lady friend would smile, and say something, maybe like, “See ya at lunch Mr. D” and let her dress flow some, whereupon he’d lean back up to her and whisper, “Call me Chet, we’re all friends here,” and wink that nod again.

Well, we weren’t all friends. I got a crappy C in science, I couldn’t play baseball after school, and I had a science teacher who was a dadburn flirt. Now, after studying volcanoes, and sound waves, and some unknown planet behind Pluto I had run all the way back up to school and spotted him walking Miss Flimsy out to her car, touching her elbow on the way down the stairs. And it was then I had a flashback and understood something about how the world works, and why I got that C, and why it didn’t matter anymore.

I can tell you Mr. Dadburn-you, he carried no brief case or folder of papers to grade like the other teachers, nothing but his coffee mug in one hand and her on the other. Punched out of his job every day and left it all behind when the bell rang. He had another life, some life that didn’t include one thing about our edumacation or our progress or good grades. He had his meal ticket, yea he did, and he had a gal, Miss Wink-a dink he was working on that he saw every chance he got, like at her fund raisers and that. But he was a fake, a louse, and had no more interest in science or teaching than a rock. He gave grades, yea he did do that, when they were come due, but that’s all he did. He gave them away like candy, and without even thinking about the damage they were doing. They were packaged in plastic, cheap, in bags of a hundred at a time, like half-off Halloween candy at the drug store, and then he’d fling them on the ground for us to fight over like inmates in a prison.

As far as I was concerned, I got my low grade from him for one reason, and one reason only. I’m going to tell you about that and you’ll see how it all came together out on the ball diamond that spring, where the ground was still muddy around the bags and no kid in his right mind would cheat. That was the baseball field where a got my C from.

My average ability in science, I can tell you, had nothing to do with what I knew or what my test scores showed. That C that kept me grounded, it was about what happened one day when I was playing right field at recess, way out where no one ever went except the first graders who played tag. No one hit it out there, but that’s where it all started. And now, seeing the two of them together through the screen of a backstop, and the right field behind them, I knew where my C in science came from.

It was also the moment baseball came to life for me and everything about it, and the dreams I had of rubbing the dirt in my hands and holding that red leather stitching hardball on a cold day, and tagging a bully named Mike Hinkley out at second. And the dream of the one glorious catch I made that one day out in right field, a catch that changed my science edumacation and me… well, really forever.

Tune in next week for Part Two of The Catch, when everything I had knew about Mr. Danburnit and Miss Flimsy and my grounding came together in right field and stole a page out of the baseball handbook that you could never find in any classroom.