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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scanning the Horizon for Mr. Tally

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celebrating National Finger Food Day

I wish they would have taught me more about how to eat healthy when I was in school. I would be the picture of health now, the second coming of Jack Lalaine pulling rowboats full of cheerleaders across Lake Superior. If I had eaten healthier growing up, I also might be a couple of inches taller, maybe even a foot. Back when I was in school nutrition was limited to a poster on the gym wall depicting all the food groups. Up in one corner was a fat little Italian chef guy pointing to a bowl of vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup. He was under milk, which was an entire food group in 1964. I know because I had to draw the chart for health class and had the hardest time getting the chef’s nose right.

Nutrition should have been a mandatory course in school, as the art of making a paper airplane should have been. When I was teaching, one of my principals did survey our faculty, asking us how our school could have a better curriculum, and I wrote about making airplanes out of nutritional leftovers… sort of, you know, a recycling slash nutrition slash aeronautics class, all in one. I thought it could fit into the STEM Initiative, or the Take-Your-Favorite-Vegetable-to-School-Day Initiative. Unfortunately, instead of being a source for inspiration, my suggestion became the focus of my next performance review, which did not go well, culminating in a long discussion about how I should take my job more seriously and the like, so I just sat quietly, chewing on an organic spit wad, looking out the window, wishing I could be one of those jet contrails up in the sky that sort of fade away into the sky.

Still, when I used to ask my students what their diets consisted of, what they told me made my blood sugar go up to around three hundred. In my questioning, I found that most kids ate nothing whatsoever for breakfast (the most important meal of the day), and even less at lunch, then gorged themselves in front of their computers playing Mortal Combat at night with mountains of junk food.

“Did you get anything to eat this morning for breakfast?” I asked one pale student as the school day began.

“Yes, I had a coke and some chips,” he answered quickly.

“That sounds like a snack you get on a plane. Were you on an airplane?” I asked, confused.

“No,” he answered, “I was at home and that’s all that is there.”

“Well, where do you live?” I asked, trying not to sound impertinent. “At a theme park?”

“Yes, we do live there, and we like it very much,” and that was the end of that conversation.

Of course, prevailing wisdom states that we are what we eat, and in the case of young students, I think it is very true. Most of them, sadly, looked pretty much like the very potato chip bag they hold, – torn at the edges, crinkled and slightly oily, you know, full of mostly air and not a lot of content.

I had one student who was a holy terror in the classroom from what I’m now sure was wholesale dietary mismanagement. He was the human manifestation of the very potato chip bag I’m talking about. From the moment Rasputin stepped forth into my classroom he engaged in wanton incivility and created an atmosphere of emotional vandalism. He talked all period, never did a lick of work that I remember, and spent a good bit of time in the hallway waiting to go to the office, being escorted towards the office or for his parents to come pick him up in the office. I wish I could think of something good to say about him, and maybe I will in a couple of years, but I am convinced he was a product of some very amoral and egregious food choices, particularly in the general category of junk food.

I saw his character play out as I drove to school every day, waiting on the corner for the bus with a bag of Cheetos in one hand and a coke in the other. It occurred to me that if he ate a better breakfast, maybe wolf down an avocado and beet salad while he was waiting, that his entire countenance would change by the time he reached my classroom and that things might turn around for him. Personally, I would have started him off with some kale and arugula soup sprinkled with shredded pitaya nibs, perhaps hand him a Nutella wheatgrass protein wrap with Camel Humus, and top it off with a Acacia-pinecone cucumber squeeze parfait for dessert. I could see his metabolism evening out, his mind clearing, and stepping on that bus like the Man of Steel, able to leap short teachers like myself in a single bound. Eventually he would also become one with the universe, meet God, get married and have three lovely children, in that order, and settle down near an outdoor mall. What a beautiful picture this is becoming I thought, as I drove by, all because of a couple gulps of a carrot and hearts of palm smoothie.

Sadly, every day as I passed him there on the corner, he tried to make a gesture we can’t talk about here, while trying to eat Cheetos and wash down a Coke. It was just too many objects to juggle of course, and he couldn’t seem to decide after he saw my car approaching, whether he should hold onto his precious junk food or wave at me as I passed with his… well… finger food, in a manner of speaking. I could see as I approached a kind of horrible tension creep across his face as he agonized over what to do. It was a terrible position to have to be in, to be torn between his two loves, one of junk food and the other defiance, and wishing all along he had an extra hand to get it all done at the same time. Truthfully, he had brought it on himself by buying those Cheetos and the Coke to begin with. A decision had to be made soon as he had only seconds before my car whizzed by.

Looking back, it was a good life lesson for him, that is, to make some better choices about his eating habits. I am convinced that if he had been eating a plant-based burrito with saguaro cactus sauce, he would have been calmer, not so hyped up and inclined to use his finger for the wrong purposes. His outlook on the world would have been more agreeable, more in line with international standards, more ethnically well-rounded. He would have had one hand free, and, not feeling the pressure to juggle so much, his finger would have followed suit and laid low as I passed by. These are the kinds of decisions our young people are faced with nowadays and it’s a lot of pressure on them. Choices have to be made. While good nutrition will inform them the rest of their lives, defiance is terribly difficult to pass up, and kids are under horrific pressure to try to include both in their daily activities.

Given the pressure he was under, I said a little organic prayer for him, nothing extra, just a clean, spring-fed prayer with as few ingredients as possible – a wholesome, plant-based prayer with no additives and no coupons. My prayer was that a small purple carrot would fall from the sky and bean him on the head, and those by the way, would be black beans over kidney, the high fiber type of course, the kind that’ll go right through you, promote good gut health and build a healthy immune system, probably grown by migrant workers in a fair trade union and fertilized by manure from cows who were sung to sleep at night with the New York Symphony  Orchestra’s version of Brahms’s Lullaby…  (fading)

By the Waterfall of Psalm 23

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

Psalm 23 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surely, our cup runneth over.

Half Pints and Short Stacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 “What is your name?” She asked.

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

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

“Do I need new nickname?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

A Case of the Tale Wagging the Service Dog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why is that?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image by rawpixel.com on Freepik

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s a zoo out there,” I added.

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

In the End He Died the Way He Wanted, Talking

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hand-colored etching by Jeff Bender

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Found Myself Under "Befuddle" In My Address Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Wish All My Friends Knew Each Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Place in Oven, Bake at 350º for Twenty Years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I handed him the ratchet and waited.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Six Most Important Words

The average person will speak some 5.8 million words in the coming year of 2024. No wonder they say your mouth is the strongest muscle in the human body! And, what if I told you that you could eliminate all but fifty-five of those words and by so doing gain an extra five months each year? You would probably tell me to stick my head in a bucket of ice water. Naturally, we can’t all go around in a vice grip of silence, but perhaps we could resolve to take pause and pick our words more carefully in the new year.

There are so many good one-liners out there in the lexicon arena, so many great phrases and funny idioms, it’s impossible not to get in the ring with them, isn’t it?... You know, take a big new shiny word out for a spin. But those are all too often the same arenas where words go to battle with lions. Somehow, our grandmothers and grandfathers were able to use their pleasantries with such character I wonder why I don’t begin and end each day with a few of them for good measure, and skip trying to explain myself during the rest of the time!

If I came to my grandmother’s breakfast table back in the day, for instance, wearing my grumpy kid face and Zorro pajamas, she might have said “Looks like someone got up on the wrong side of the bed,” or some similar phrase that got her message across in the simplest of terms. I always loved the substitute phrases they had for swear words like “Fiddlesticks!” or “Jiminy Cricket!” or perhaps “Raspberries!” on a really bad day. My grandmother delivered those euphemisms with such volume and emphasis that, once heard, caused anyone in our family to slowly slink out of the kitchen, and made cussing obsolete around our house.

During my early years when art to me was merely a nickname for Arthur, my mother noticed I had taken a fancy to writing words in different styles. I called it lettering but in art it’s called calligraphy. My discovery of different fonts was a complete and innocent accident. A friend and I, bored to tears in music class, began passing sheets of lettering back and forth to bide our time. The idea was for each of us to begin with a category, like “Diseases,” and then write out examples using one of our invented typefaces. As I passed my friend my latest disease, like S-C-U-R-V-Y done in Boldface Brush Script he would in turn pass me his paper filled with examples of, say, “Reasons to Call 911.” Back and forth our notebook pages went, slowly filling the spaces with ingenious lettering styles. Unfortunately, our musical acumen never improved, but alas, our development as young graphic designers made major headway. And to the benefit of my mother, my skills were soon put to work on lettering projects of one sort or another.

While I had never thought of my creative ventures as anything but a way around chores, my mom had different ideas. Ever the unfocused child, I was happy to dive in to her latest lettering assignment and bypass homework like memorizing the digestive organs of a grasshopper, or wracking my brain on math problems like this one:

 If Sonny rode his bicycle to the pool eight mile away at five miles per hour hoping to meet his friend, how long would it take Max to catch up with him if he grabbed the back of a moving semi-truck going seventy- five miles per hour that was four hours away?

I know. If your answer when you were in school was like mine, you simply wrote down that Max was toast at the end of that ride.

However, the problems my mother put in front of me weren’t that dangerous. One Sunday, taking delight from the insert of our local newspaper, my mother laid in front of me a list of the six most important words, (then five and so on) – affirming sayings we humans could share with each other, positive ways to lift the spirit of our fellow man.  Soon after, I delivered her the newly lettered art which she framed and hung in her office, and in her home thereafter. Here they are for your absorption:

The six most important words: I ADMIT I MADE A MISTAKE

The five most important words: YOU DID A GOOD JOB

The four most important words: WHAT IS YOUR OPINION?

The three most important words: IF YOU PLEASE

The two most important words: THANK YOU

The one most important word: WE

The least most important word: I

As the new year quickly approach-eth, it seems worthwhile to share this list with you, in the hope that you add them to the millions of word possibilities you will attempt in the year 2024, to work them into conversations whenever you can, and to observe the intimacy and friendships that flow forth when you do. There’s not a one of these phrases that is difficult to include to your repertoire of pleasantries each day, and you might decide to even try them in combinations. These words were like food for the soul in our family growing up, and they helped eliminate those battle grounds, those arenas when our words become warriors that hurt or shamed.  My mother used them more than anyone I ever knew, with my wife runs a close second behind her, a fact that is my living grace when I am tempted to don my armor and do battle with lions.

At church, our humble small group have taken it upon ourselves to add to the Six Most Important Word list by coming up with the seven, eight, nine or ten of the most important words. If you think of a positive addition to add, even if it is the forty seven most important words, please share your brilliance with me at Knee Deep and together we’ll help get 2024 off to a roaring start.

If my mother was here, she’d hand you a pen and say, “You can do it,” (four) or “I’m behind you one hundred percent,”(six) and maybe even frame what you had done for her home. In any case, you would certainly know how she felt about your creation when she held your calligraphy out to admire, like she did mine, give your hand a squeeze and say these TEN most important and affirming of words:

 “No one could ever do this any better than you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

”Please don’t forget…

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

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

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

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

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

The recipe? It’s simple–

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

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

Ten Tidings I Give to You and Your Kin: The Sequel

I used to love to listen to a radio program called Car Talk on National Public Radio. If you remember the show, you’ll remember the two mechanics, the Click and Clack brothers, who took calls from people who had car problems, but it was their brand of humor and mix of ridiculous advice that made their show fun. I always grinned at the end when they signed off saying: “Well, you’ve done it again – you’ve wasted another perfectly good hour listening to us.”

And now, as 2023 begins to fade into history, DESPAIR NOT! TAKE HEART! This next eight minutes and ten tidings list will be a well-spent way to ramp up your seasonal spirit and keep you off the naughty list! Like last year’s episode (Dec. 8th of ‘22) I’m going to dazzle you, not with information about your car, but a couple of great ways you can navigate through the winter wonderland with an admirable amount of aromatic good cheer! So, put on your Buddy the Elf stocking cap and pull a piece of chewing gum off the sidewalk. There’s a gumdrop forest to find and not a minute to waste…here we go!

Tiding #1: MUSIC! Hey! You gotta have good tunes pumping out to get your sugar plums moving this season. Here at the Blunder residence, we are big fans of comedian Steve Martin, with his off-beat skits and catchy banjo playing. On his last album he joined the Steep Canyon Rangers in a tune called “Strangest Christmas Yet,” which is kind of like hearing a music version of Christmas Vacation with Chevy Chase. All the members in your family are represented here in this wacky holiday song, including the ones who always park on your lawn and hook up to your water meter. So, get out your moose mugs and belt out the lyrics with the whole family.

Tiding #2: Speaking of movies, it seems we’ve all seen about every Santa Claus movie possible. I mean some of these titles really scrap the bottom of the barrel with absurd titles such as Freddy Krueger Claus or how about this one – Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol Santa. But when all is said and done, the Christmas movies that really get to us are the ones that leave us are less feeling hopeful and full of wonder. So, I’m recommending going off the grid and watching a movie like Forrest Gump or Apollo 13. They’ll make you cry it forward and rise to your better angels.

Tiding #3: If you don’t have someplace to be on Christmas Eve, I highly recommend going on a Moon Walk. This is the basic one foot in front of the other kind of walking, not the Michael Jackson kind, and you’re taking the steps by good ol’ fashioned moonlight. Not only will the cold be invigorating, but the silence will overwhelm you like a whiff of Vic’s VapoRub. As you look up into the heavens, the night sky will bring back all those memories of being a kid when you believed something magical was up in those stars, something that might just change the whole world. Grab your mittens whether you need them or not, and another person, whether you need them or not, and take a Moon Walk among the Christmas stars. There’s one out there just for you, and there is one special one that was given to all of us.

Tiding #4: One of the very best gifts you can give everyone this time of year, plain and simple is the gift of your sense of humor. Watch your words, keep the griping to a minimum, and be flexible. Maybe let go of a dusty old tradition. Keep things fresh, and if you don’t get everything done, remember it’s not about doing, it’s about the gift we’ve been given. Wrap yourself around others, not yourself. As a wise person once said, “A person wrapped in themselves makes a very small package.” It’s especially true at Christmas.

Tiding #5: Get up off the couch, get out the art box and build something together as a family on Christmas day. Work on a puzzle, make space hats out of tinfoil, or carve ice cube under hot faucet water. When we were kids my brother and I got a homemade shortwave radio kit for Christmas. We soldered it all together, wires and all, and hung the antennae up in our gum tree. Then we spent the rest of the day talking to a man who was hunting moose, possibly reindeer, somewhere in the Canadian wilderness. Building, inventing or designing – they all help to kick in our happy holiday endorphins – and like my grandson says, do it “togever.”

Tiding #6: This next one may break your pocketbook, but what the heck, it’s just money, right? On Christmas night, when everyone is exhausted, pre-arrange a stretch limousine to come by and pick everyone up to go look at Christmas lights. Yea! Fill up your Stanley’s! Pile in! Let a _chauffeur take you over the river and through the woods. In our case, that would mean going over the Ohio River into Henderson, Kentucky and then through Audubon Park, which would be a $500 fine. Oh well! It’s just money! Stretch out, take a nap! When was the last time you fell asleep behind the wheel? Put a lid on worry and another dollar in the meter! Ask the chauffeur to put on Knee Deep and say More Please, and then tape yourself and send it to me for a prize!

Tiding #7: Every Christmas season I always wish I would have given more people some small present, even something very small, like an apple, just to rev up their smile and warm their spirits for a moment. Have your kids or grandkids help you decorate a wagon with wild attention-seeking lights. Fill your wagon with the 432 different types of apples available, and hand them out between services at your church. Call it the Homeless Apple Project, shake up the sanctuary with random acts of lawless apple-givers. Let’s get this kick Apple Project Party started, and make sure no apple goes home alone.

Tiding # 8: When I was a kid…excuse me…when I was younger, my mom would make something called Yorkshire Pudding for our Christmas dinner. I’ve never made it, and the recipe is long since been misplaced, but that pudding was something out of tastebud heaven. Try Gordon Ramsey’s recipe, which is rated five stars. You will like it because he will put the Yorkshire smackdown on you if you don’t, and I’ve seen him do it. I cannot even describe how good this bread-ish pudding Danish roll-thing is, and for me to say that as a writer, well, is to admit defeat at the hands of a dish that is supernaturally mouthwateringly scrumpdillyocious times pi over infinity plus butter DYNOMITE DELICIOUS.

When my mom made it, she used the beef drippings from the rotisserie roast, and she followed some very detailed directions about baking. Apparently, there is a certain point at which Yorkshire Pudding is very light and delicate and can collapse easily, so we weren’t allowed within a city block of the kitchen for fear my brother would trip me and my fall would flatten the whole concoction. It may be time to use this recipe as an excuse to kick everyone out of the kitchen, very carefully, while you become one with your Yorkshire.

Tiding #9: Have you ever been singing a song in church, or anywhere and somewhere behind you has the voice of an angel? Well, I can assure you, itain’t mine. When I sing, my wife gently taps my knee. That is my sign to stop singing immediately. I have that special talent of being able to absolutely ruin a perfectly good Christmas song in E flat or E minor, take your pick. So just for laughs, call my number, (812) 479-8264 and listen to my Christmas message,** take pity on me as I sing about chestnuts roasting, and try to be serious. I dare you. I double-dog-barking a-mile-away dare you!

Tiding # 10: Prepare for the aftermath. Everyone gets a bit down at Christmas. There are moments we remember Christmases of the past and feel moody or subpar. There are moments when our expectations may have outweighed the reality that people are human, they are messy, they are late and pushy and so forth. Today, for example, I had a lady yell at me for blocking traffic, so I rolled down my window and tried to sing her a round of Joy to the World, but…well, you know, there’s that issue with me holding a tune…

Still, I think Christmas can be a time filled with too much filling, and then we get crusty on the edges and fall apart. All any of us really want is to be accepted, right? One Christmas we will get it all perfect, when we’ll remember that compared to the birth of Jesus, everything else is just noisy traffic. So, open the lane, let people in, let that old screaming Grinch through. That is the day your heart grew three sizes too big, true, but it will also be the day when you remember why you were given a heart.

Merry Christmas my more please loyal listeners! It’s not the night before Christmas, but it’s getting clooose!

Parking Myself in a Corner

By now you all have noticed that I have been taking more and more liberties with my Knee Deep intro, particularly the part where I say “MORE PLEASE!” I’ve invited a few guests to try their hands at it with voice overs and have gone off the rails with a few wild screeches myself. Being that the holiday season is upon us, I thought it was time to set up a little yuletide contest and invite you to send in your own attempt. Sultry or sad, quick or quacky, video yourself saying, “Don’t forget the M as in more please!” and over the next week email it to jeff@jeffmbender.com. Send those more pleases to me, and I’ll choose the best one for a Christmas gift mailed directly to you. It’s my way of diving headlong into the season, and it’s your way to audition for your very first part as an authentic voice over. I know, I know, it’s not Hollywood, but who knows? You may be the next Tom Hanks doing Woody in the Toy Story Fifty! And speaking of stories, here’s Knee Deep, episode fifty-one called Parking Myself in a Corner.

From time to time when I was teaching art, I would get a student of exceptional talent, a student whose gifts were so extraordinary as to change the way I looked at the world. On my roster one year was a student who was on the autism spectrum, and as I got to know him, I learned he had challenges interacting socially with others. I’m going to called him Incredible Cal because his mind dealt with numbers like one of those hand-held calculators that came out in the seventies, the ones we all rushed out to buy to replace our slide rules. Most people don’t remember the slide rule, and it has gone by the wayside like spiral notebooks, oversized collars and eight track tapes.

Oh man, actually, I still have all of those.

Anyway, I loved having Incredible Cal in art class because he had a gift for memorizing all kinds of data and numerical information. Once I found out that he had this special gift, I threw away my personal calendar and began supplying Cal with the dates of every appointment I had on my agenda. For example, if I had a dentist’s appointment next Tuesday at 3:30 after school, I didn’t need to write it down. I just told Incredible Cal and he would remind me as soon as he walked into my class. If I needed to know anything, in fact, about any number, like what Pi was out to the thirtieth decimal, he could tell me on the spot. That kind of information is indispensable when you need to fact check the world or win a car for being the closest to guess how many jellybeans are inside a Volkswagen. With Incredible Cal around, I started to feel like I was young again and powerful, back in the seventies, wearing bell bottoms, and listening to the Electric Light Orchestra.

I also realized that Incredible Cal knew the license plate number of every teacher’s car in the teacher’s parking lot. It was his gift. You wouldn’t think information like that is very important, but, turned out, it kind of was.

“Cal, do you know the license plate numbers of every teacher’s car in the lot?” I asked one day.

“Yes, he knows all of them,” half the class pipped in. “Just ask him.”

“Cal, what is my license plate number?”

“IN RPTD 88.”

My mouth dropped open. “Oh, wow,” I said astounded, “That is right!”

Not able to let that go, I had to know more. I figured if he knew the numbers, he knew how many cars and what types should be in certain places. As it turns out, teachers park in pretty much the same place every day, based on how far it is to the entrance, or who they want to avoid on their way out. I always parked pointed towards the sun to warm my seat so that in the winter I could feel like I was in one of those mall massage chairs when I drove home. For many teachers, however, they just liked their spot. Their car felt at home in the imaginary privacy of their own area, much like a cat feels at home inside a microwave.

As long as all the teacher’s cars were where they were supposed to be, Incredible Cal was a diligent and quiet worker in class. The license plate numbers were all in place in his world, and all was arithmetically correct. One day however, he came in belting out a license plate number over and over. Something was up.

“Cal, what’s wrong, is there anyone who is parked in the wrong spot today? Is there a teacher that has taken another teacher’s spot?”

“Yes,” he answered frankly. “Mr. Dubious is in Mrs. Meek’s spot.”

“What kind of car does she drive?”

“Blue Toyota Camry.”

Where does she park?”

“Under the tree, always under the tree,” he answered in a flash.

This was beginning to sound like a game of Clue. There was a who-done-it happening here and Cal knew all the players. I ran over to the window and sure enough, under the tree was a somebody’s car, but it certainly was not a blue Camry.

“What’s Mr. Dubious’ license number?” I yelled across the classroom to Cal.

“IN CKN74 JF.”

“Well, I’ll be darn,” I announced loudly, as if it were an assignment, “Mr. Dubious took Mrs. Meek’s spot today, and her blue Camry’s clear down at the other end.” Thankfully, I soon had thirty more kids by the window to back me up. We looked out across the big wide black paved expanse, and we all had the same thought.

Who was messing up Cal’s parking lot every day?

Who would have that kind of nerve? Why would someone purposely put another person through that kind of pain? Standing there, I began to wonder, as kids leaned out four stories up, just what kind of car wars had been happening right under my nose all these years as I pulled in and out of my workplace parking lot. This was undoubtedly some kind of a game of musical car meanness, and it had to stop. There were cars out there that I liked with their everyday cozy car spots, the ones they had become accustomed to, and they were being dethroned to some menial rectangle a half a block away! Someone was at the heart of the pattern change, responsible for this blatant disregard for personal space, and there was only one person could get us back to square one: Incredible Cal.

Of course, I immediately realized that Cal’s remarkable skill with numbers was far more important than anything I had to teach that day. I asked the kids to grab their stools, and, as was common in my class, invited them to come up to the blackboard for one of my chalk talks. We were on a mission.

“Class, Cal here has made a remarkable numerical discovery. We’re going to bypass today’s lesson to learn something about numbers,” I proclaimed.

Heads nodded. They trusted Cal and, they trusted his numbers. After all, he knew the birthdays of the six hundred and forty kids in the building on any given day. He knew how many kids could fit in the lunchroom as well as the amount of money each one owed on their lunch ticket.

“Cal, you’ve made me very curious.” I started. “We have a car situation in the parking lot. Some teachers, you’ve pointed out, are in the wrong places. I know it bothers you that the license plates aren’t in order, so let’s start with Mr. Dubious and work backwards and find out who started this parking disaster. Cal, do you know when did this start?” I blasted out.

“August eighth, the second day of school. The principal took Mr. Dubious’ place, and he had to move down one.”

“And whose parking spot was that?” I asked. “I mean whose spot did he take?”

“Miss Grayson’s.”

And hers? Where was her spot?”

“Next to the curb,” Cal announced.

“I see, so she had to go across to the other side. And then what happened?” I continued…

And on and on it went. Cal began indicting teacher after teacher who had outright stolen the spot of another. Evidence to the contrary, the school lot had become a psychologically twisted exhibition of manipulation, a living display of car dominoes, greed and acquisition. All across the lot, cars were parked in wrongful places, with felonious disregard for the parking wishes of fellow teachers. No sooner were teachers reaching school, putting themselves out there on the front lines as trusted civil servants, a kid’s first responder so to speak, that they found their own coworkers had pulled their parking spot right out from under them.

We listened in fascination as Cal went down the line and named every single teacher who had taken the spot of the one before, and just to make his point, their license plate number also. Even sweet Mrs. Hematoad, who had unfortunately taken her maiden name back after her divorce, had taken someone else’s spot. The game of Parking Lot Clue was coming to a dramatic tipping point. A teacher, some maleficent, had started this whole avalanche of perpetuity and dishonesty, and by the time Incredible Cal was done with them, their name would be drug through the mud of Integrity and Character.

And from out of nowhere, a tiny voice, unheralded, came forth from the back row.

“And where did you park today, Mr. Bender?”

The last car domino had fallen.

I looked at Cal. He had my number, and it was up.

The Blessing in the Backstory

Like everyone else, Thanksgiving represents a time when I think about all the ways I have been blessed, some of them material of course, the tangible ways, but mostly ways in which the Lord has directed my path towards his good, his beauty and his favor.

Along a grass pathway on the side of my yard, I designed a metal sculpture using some interesting words from the Bible that also reminds me of those blessings. If you like puzzles, you might like figuring out what the artwork says, shown in this essay. I won’t spoil it for those of you who want to figure it out on your own. (There is probably a way to print it upside down at the end of this essay, but I’m not that tech savvy). Suffice to say my word sculpture is a shortened version of the last line in Proverbs 3: 5-6, a verse that encourages us to trust in the one who keeps our path straight. This proverb, like so many, was written by King Solomon, a man with imperfections like the rest of us, but also a man who God gave immense wisdom.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
Lean not on your own understanding.
Follow Him in all his ways,
And He will keep your path straight.

From what I have read, Solomon spent a lot of time alone with the Lord. Like the path I constructed, he was on a path that was made only wide enough for one person to walk at a time. It is a path for individual reflection, where he was steadied between his thoughts and those of his Maker. That is a path that is difficult to take this time of year when there is so much to get done. Even when I’m by myself, walking along my own garden path, I forget to pause and reflect on the words in my own sculpture! I’m on another walk out there in the busyness and hubbub, overthinking the Thanksgiving holiday, trying to get everything in place so that the goings-on are smooth and seamless before people arrive at our home.

That isn’t exactly what Solomon had in mind when he used the word trust. In his proverb he is suggesting that we can do all the hurrying around we want, but if our heart is not in the right place, the path is going to have some rough going. That path may even disappear when the time comes and it’ll be too late to put aside our heaviness, our own baggage, and pick up the visiting luggage coming in. We won’t be able to let go of our own exhausted story long enough to hear the backstories from those we love the most. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart,” Solomon said, and get your heart right before your Thanksgiving people walk through the door.

At this, the beginning of the hustle of the holiday season, that’s not always easy to do. We are confused by family members in our mix who feel like strangers, and strangers who can feel more like family. How did that happen? There are family recipes calling for a cup and a half of good cheer and we only have one cup on reserve, and it’s being saved for someone else. We have an antique gravy bowl that has sat in the cupboard of our heart all year, but we can’t quite bring ourselves to use it until everything is perfect. We straightened up our house, but our heart is not straight. Our heart has faded somehow with history up there on the shelf, and needs to be taken down and dusted off and used before the doorbell rings.

One year as my elderly father joined us, I worried that he would have trouble eating at our crowded Thanksgiving table in his wheelchair. I imagined that it was going to be very awkward for him as family squeezed in elbow to elbow and began passing casseroles. With so many dishes and objects and people, how was he going to feel comfortable and part of the family?

After the blessing, hot food began to make its insecure way around from person to person, slowly, with everyone being very careful. But Dad was talking, telling jokes, ordering up more helpings. He was doing just fine. He was in good cheer and whole heart was on display, and he wasn’t wasting a minute of his meal on the fine points. That’s because he is left-handed, the only left-hander at the table. While our hands and elbows were knocking and banging together, his arm was swinging out and scooping up the goods. He had all the space he needed on the left, and then some! He was on a path I hadn’t seen – the other one – that’s the one we lean on and trust, not the one of our “own understanding.”

I don’t see anything in Solomon’s wise proverb about irritation, frustration, or impatience, or other paths that crisscross in front of us as we stay up all night smoking the turkey. We lean not on those things, the nuisances, the awkward moments and sideways looks. We don’t take those paths. We focus on Him with all our heart, and we follow the path _He_ has put in front of us. It could be on the left of us or the right, but it will eventually be straight and good, and get us to the end. It’s not a pathway of inconvenience and worry, or of perfect pumpkin pies with whipped cream, but one with a life in the middle of it called a blessing. It looks a lot like Thanksgiving, but it is more like a path of giving thanks.

Lighting a Torch in the Land of Zoysia: Part Three

I realize growing up as a child that there were times when the physician in my father got the best of him. The Hippocratic Oath he had taken to become a doctor at times transferred to other passions he had, such as the art of growing zoysia grass in our front yard. Dad believed with enough care and skill, he could germinate a strain of grass that would be so attractive that my brother and I would want to set up a permanent camp outside.

“Hey boys,” he started one morning at the breakfast table, “How would you guys like to set up a little camp out in the front yard?”

“WOW Dad! Do you really mean it?!” We were ecstatic.

“Sure. Why not? You could come in to use the restroom of course.”

“Would we be able to set fire to the lawn in the Fall like always? We could watch The Zoysia for you all the time!” Gary added, reaching for a piece of burnt toast.

And so, the enriching atmosphere in our family grew at a voracious rate, like the zoysia creeping slowly across America. For example, a long zoysia runner I noticed on the way to school one morning had grown all the way up the block and was there to meet me in the boulevard as I walked home the same day. This was my father’s dream, the Hippocratic Oath lived out on God’s ever-greener zoysia earth.

Other pledges were being acted out around my father as well, as our entire neighborhood appeared to be on the verge of burning to the ground. Local fathers lined up like tin soldiers, rakes in hand, monitoring burning piles of leaves along the street curb. A fire truck had pulled up as a safety precaution, but seemingly had no interest in any of the nearby blazes. Instead, Mr. Brooks, the fire chief, looking down from his cab, had engaged my father in long conversation about his recent urinary problems and the history of kidney stones in his family. Nearby, the Civil Defense Committee was alive and well, having hunkered down on the front porch of our city’s leading leaf-burning zealot, Miss Crenshaw, whose landmark Even-Odd ordinance had made absolutely no difference in when responsible men burned their leaves.

It was also apparent that the committee’s burn ordinance had not made any difference in the destructive nature of fire itself. As a chunk of blazing zoysia came off Gary’s whiffed tee shot from across the street, its trajectory was in line with Miss Crenshaw’s front porch, and there wasn’t an ordinance this side of the Mississippi that could have stopped it. Gary’s shot may have been a slice, it may have been a fade, but golf vocabulary aside, every head turned as the flaming zoysia fireball arced across the street like a red-hot rainbow.

“HOOOOOLY COW!” said Mr. Brooks the fire chief.

“YIKES!” I yelled running after the firebomb it as if it were a puppy.

“That’s my boy!” said my dad, raising both arms up as if Gary had just won the PGA championship.

Yet Nancy, sweet-as-they-come-Nancy, the girl who had not been able to take her eyes off Gary, was so dazzled she had to grab the fence post for support – utterly committed to a relationship with a rising star in golf pyrotechnics. Never mind that Gary could be convicted of petty arson at any moment or that Nancy might be spending a lot of weekends visiting Gary in prison. She was, in every sense of the word, enchanted and utterly smitten.

Gary, taking advantage of the thrill of victory, walked over and politely opened the gate for her, escorting her through the Land of Burning Zoysia and handed her a nine-iron.

“Let me show you how this is done,” Gary said nonchalantly, and through a series of smooth romantic moves, positioned Nancy so that he could wrap his arms around her in preparation for a golf lesson.

“First you have to grip the handle like this,” Gary said, speaking softly, while Nancy, not caring one thing about a grip, simply stared into Gary’s eyes as if her world had gone celestial.

“Ok, no, like…yea, that’s it, ok, you got it, now, bend your knees a little,” Gary instructed ever so gently, and step by step, half-instructed half-carried her through a textbook golf swing. Within one or two tries, Nancy was swinging wildly herself, mostly missing, but still sending a respectable number of zoysia patches over the fence. Together, as Gary also began to attack the whiffle balls, the two became a match made in zoysia heaven.

Of course, Gary had already hit dead center underneath a wall of decorative crape paper on Miss Crenshaw’s porch, sending flames racing up to her gutter where more leaves awaited incineration.

“FIRE!! FIRRRRRRE!!” Came screams from inside, as members of the Civil Defense Committee stampeded out onto Miss Crenshaw’s lawn. Fireman from the idling Engine 99 fell off the truck like paratroopers and escorted coughing men and well-dressed ladies out to the curb where they were met by men stoking their leaf fires in the street. Mr. Brooks became over excited in the mayhem, soiling his uniform in a heartbreaking nervous bladder incident, resulting in another emergency firetruck being called for a fresh pair of fire-retardant overalls and his urinary retention medicine.

Naturally, one of the locals, probably living in an even numbered house, had notified the local news, who were now winding their way up the street in a Humvee. The producer/reporter/camera stiff, anxious to get the story had jumped off before detaching his seventy-five-foot antenna and was being dragged through small brush fires, prompting a 911 call for an ambulance. That night, on the ten o’clock news, footage of the chaotic and lawless scene, taken by a second-rate backup crew showed footage of my father swatting glowing embers a little too vigorously off of Miss Crenshaw’s chest.

Upheaval notwithstanding, Gary and Nancy, still traded love swings back and forth, were oblivious to anything but who could send the next chunk of Zoysia the farthest. To that end, the two lovebirds had succeeded in hitting nine adjacent lawns with fertile zoysia chunks, and as if love could have gotten any sweeter, a soft rain had begun to fall that engulfed Gary and Nancy in their own private love bubble.

For everyone else, however, the rain doused tempers and a modicum of civility returned, enough so that the fire department, the news anchor team and all other law-abiding citizens were able to return to their homes. The next day, as is typical in the Midwest, a sudden snowstorm blew in and replaced our neighborhoods scorched earth chaos with a blanket of unblemished white snow.

Peace had been restored, and with it, the seedlings of love embedded in uprooted patches of zoysia settled in for a long winter’s nap, safe in their secret hideaways until Spring rains awakened their greedy fingers and they began to reach out for new horizons. They had been delivered to new homes by a couple of hackers who were inspired by the torch of youthful passion and a couple of nine irons spreading The Zoysia from here to Kingdom Come. Love knows no bounds, and neither does Zoysia. Both had been a guiding light, a sign that greener pastures were ahead, on both odd days and evens, at least until next Fall when a new crop of white zoysia would go up in smoke.

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.