Smack dab in the middle of Arkansas there is a tiny town called Yellville, where you’ll find the intersection of Thataway Rd. and Thisaway Rd., just about a quarter mile from Whichaway Rd. Wouldn’t you love to hear somebody out there giving directions to a lost RV family? Shades of Abbott and Costello.

Thataway and Thisaway isn’t the only funny intersection you may come to. In an Arizona retirement community residents undoubtedly get a thousand laughs a day from living, as they do, at the corner of Stroke and Acoma Streets.

If you’re bored and depressed in Albany, Georgia, you can always go hang out at the corner of Lonesome and Hardup.

Presidents are apparently tempting fodder for local street namers. Folks in Houston, Texas, are keeping true to their largely conservative perspective and their well-deserved reputation for being facetious by naming converging streets Clinton and Fidelity. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, people engaged in brief political commentary by creating the intersection of Nixon and Bluett.

You have to love Americans. We don’t get as much credit as we deserve for having a national sense of humor. Just look at some of the street names scattered across our fruited plain:

There are several streets in the U.S. called Psycho Path.

In Story, Arkansas, the only way to get your truck camper to Constipation Ridge is to drive up Farfrompoopen Road.

And, while we’re on that unfortunate topic…

Folks in Central Pennsylvania can direct you to Cowshit Ln. if you will kindly refrain from stealing the street sign. It seems to happen a lot. In fact, that’s why the merchants of Amador City, California, years ago began selling copies of their iconic Pig Turd Alley sign, hoping that it would stop thefts of the actual sign. That must have worked. I bought one.

Some street namers seem to be completely baffled and give up…

Lambs Terrace, NJ

…while others just seem to lack interest.

Vallejo, CA

There are some streets you should steer clear of…

And the famous road less traveled.

Wherever your adventures take you, keep smiling. We live in a very funny country.

A couple of days ago I was talking about aging with Gloria, my son’s mother-in-law and one of the wisest people I know. Specifically, I mentioned that as much as I’ve learned about the craft of radio performance over forty-three years of it, none of the younger people I work with seem to be interested in picking my brain. If I offer a small nugget of hard-won wisdom it seems to fall with a clunk on deaf ears. I believe I’ve occasionally seen a furtive wink, a roll of an eye. I’m pretty sure of it.

Gloria nodded sagely. She understood.

It’s a shame, I continued, that as we age we learn so much but eventually we die and all that knowledge of fact, of wisdom and experience, is lost without ever having been shared and appreciated. Worst of all is the lack of respect that piles on top of the years. Instead of being honored, I lamented, old people in our culture are the butt of jokes.

If brevity is the soul of wit, Gloria is a prophet.

“You’re obsolete,” she said offhandedly. “We all are, people our age.”

She said it as if she had just noticed that my shoe was untied and thought I should know.

I’ve been unemployed since October and this is the third time in three years I’ve been between jobs. Radio is an aging technology, an industry being dismantled. We’re sputtering to an end together.

I’ve had a wonderful career and no regrets. If it’s over that’s fine because I still have plenty of life left in me with wonderful friends like Gloria.

I’ll age gracefully. I’ll be obsolete, except to my family. That’s all that matters.

Sometimes, though, sixty is starting to feel like kind of a big deal.

CarolAnn and I recently got Netflix.

As a writer of dialogue myself I’m a slobbering fan of Aaron Sorkin for his creation of The West Wing and Studio 60. With Netflix I was anxious to get another look at Sorkin’s Sports Night for the first time in a dozen years. I immediately fell in love with the show again and settled down to watch all 45 episodes in three days.

Here’s what I discovered:

I don’t care if you’re watching Sorkin or Neil Simon or William-Fricking-Shakespeare, stylized dialogue gets appallingly self-caricatured if you watch too much in one sitting. Also, like picking up a Southern drawl after spending a weekend in Atlanta it’s highly contagious.

I’ve started speaking Sorkinese.

This morning as CarolAnn was leaving for work we had the following conversation:

Me: What do you want for dinner?

CA: What?

Me: Dinner. What do you want?

CA: Tonight?

Me: Yes, tonight. What do you want?

CA: For dinner…

Me: Right.

CA: I don’t care.

Me: Maybe not now but you will. If it was dinner time right now, what would you want?

CA: Where are my keys? Hey, can you please do some laundry today?

Me: Laundry, yes, but first I want to figure out dinner. And, how would I know?

CA: What?

Me: What, what?

CA: How would you know what?

Me: Where your keys are. How would I know?

CA: Found ‘em! Gotta go. Surprise me. Chicken fried steak.

(She gives him a peck on the cheek and goes out the back door.)

Me: Which? Surprise you or chicken fried steak?!

Adventures almost never end as well as we dream, though there is wisdom to be plucked from every day.

So, tomorrow I’m going home to my family and tomorrow can’t come soon enough. Home and my loved ones are just about all I can think about.

But I have also thought about this a lot over the past couple of weeks and it is suddenly desperately important to me that I share it with my sons.

When I was fourteen or fifteen my dad was in Vietnam. He knew I was having trouble coming to grips with his absence, junior high, being a teenager and having the creeping suspicion that boys and girls are different and that it might be important to me someday. I was half-child, half-Martian. Life was confusing and difficult for me and I didn’t even know why.

Dad sent me a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s “If…” and these words became the guiding light of my life.

I pass it on here to my sons and theirs. Works for daughters, too.

Read it from time to time, take it to heart and walk tall. It’s a powerful philosophy that can allow you to have your head in the stars with your feet always safely on the ground.

You just have think of it as an adventure.

On the CTA you can set out for a Sunday farmers market and return home nine hours later with two fully ripened avocados.

You can haul a package to the post office and have it arrive at grandma’s house in Des Moines before you reach your front porch.

One day I didn’t feel like walking the two blocks to the train station so I took another train to get there even though it took half an hour and I had to stand the entire way, crushingly, intimately close to a bunch of people to whom I had not been introduced.

I’m sure this all sounds terrible to my California friends and family but I am saving several hundred dollars a month by not buying gas. And frankly, being alone in the big city I have nothing but time on my hands. I’ve read two full books while riding trains and buses. Plus, I’ve met some — shall we say interesting? — people.

More on that later. I have to be at work in three hours and it’s twelve miles away. I must run to catch my rides!

Copyright 2011, David L. Williams

It’s July and Chicagoans are just adorable. The blistering, humid heat makes everybody on foot soak through their shirts in less than a block, though it’s only 8 a.m.

Most of us lug computer bags and backpacks as we walk the streets of Chicago. Most of us wear loose cotton shirts and pants to work. A lot of men wear shorts. You see very few suits, sport coats and ties. That’s smart. After just sixteen days even I know those suit-and-tie guys are business travelers trying to earn their freedom, comfort and confidence.

Mid-Westerners are smart and practical. We dress as comfortably as we wish while still looking respectable; neat, clean and simple.

My wild West-Coast Hawaiian prints have no place here except in a box.

Staggering through beautiful streets in the steamy heat we mostly keep our heads down so the perspiration doesn’t drip onto our shirts and blouses. Occasionally we look up, nod, and give a pained but encouraging smile to our brothers and sisters who pass us on the sidewalk. We’re all in this together.

We have many destinations but one common goal: to just get where we’re going.

Chicagoans don’t complain.

The City of the Big Shoulders doesn’t suffer weather, it wears it with a shrug, a wink and a wry grin.

Everybody here  loves to warn me about the coming brutal winter. They tease and bait me. I think they’re trying to goad the guy from Southern California into whining about the heat and humidity; they want me to worry about snowfall and the coming icy Arctic wind.

I’m having no part of it. I have big shoulders

I’m a Chicagoan.

I arrived in the Second City on a one-way ticket eight days ago and haven’t stopped grinning.

I can no sooner get this blues classic out of my head than I can stop gawking at the skyscrapers, the trains and the river that flows around me in every direction.

Like me, life in Chicago struts, hums constantly and grins idiotically.

Over the past few months of unemployment I’ve had conversations with potential employers that never quite came to fruition but got close enough to send me online to look at homes for sale or rent in other cities. In checking the real estate sites nationwide, left coast to right, I have found a common thread:

Nutballs.

I suppose that’s harsh. It’s certainly not nice though I hope it has a lovable ring to it. Maybe it’s just that some real estate brokers have no marketing skills. Not everybody does. But I have read some outstanding ads on eBay written by Joe and Jane Lunchbox that make me think this is a particularly virulent form of ineptitude among real estate agents.

To begin with, all real estate agents have their own pictures on everything: their business cards, newspaper ads, bus benches and websites. They all look nice and clean and happy. But you know what might make me more likely to call them? A picture of a house I know I can’t afford.

Show me my dream home. That’s what makes my heart go pit-a-pat, not Jack and Jill Darling freshly-showered and nicely dressed for the kill.

When they do give me pictures of a particular house I sometimes wonder if they asked a nine-year-old in the neighborhood to take it. Mostly, I get to see the garage door and often a tree blocking the entryway and front porch. Sometimes I get to see a car blocking the front of the “storybook cottage” which needs “just a little TLC”.

Just once I actually saw one I was interested in buying — the car, not the house.

The inside pictures are usually the most maddening. Just today I went to a website advertising a luxury townhouse in a highly desirable big city neighborhood and it included three pictures: one of the weight room, which I am no more likely to use than if the complex had its own whore house. The second was a picture of the master bedroom. Just the bed, actually. (Nice comforter! And what is the thread count on those sheets?) And the third picture was of a toilet and sink.

Friends, I don’t care where you live in this great land — a toilet is a toilet and 98% of them come in white.

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m different than everybody else. When I’m looking for a new home I want to love the location, how it looks from the outside, and I want to see the warmth and comfort of the family and entertaining areas. I want to be excited about the house and I want the house to love me back.

I just assume it has a toilet and a room for my bed.

Maybe I’m the nutball. I want to feel comfortable with my realtor but we’re never going to meet if he or she just shows me pictures of the themselves, the toilet, the kitchen sink or the absolute worst feature I have seen in apartment rental marketing:

A chair, half a drape and a piece of a potted plant.

Seriously, I pulled this picture from an online real estate ad and I didn’t crop anything out of it.

Nutballs.

This morning  I started re-watching the Ken Burns documentary, Baseball, and for reasons I understand in my heart but can’t put into words it chokes me up. I get teary and a lump in my throat. It’s that good, cleansing, happy emotion that makes you feel young, fresh and wholesome again.

The memories melt years from my body; I remember how I felt when my legs were lean, strong and springy; my arms were swift and powerful.

I could smash a fastball to the moon and run like the wind all day with a huge smile on my barely sweating, freckled face. I can still smell freshly-mown grass under a cool March sky of scooting, fluffy clouds.

The base paths are wet from last night’s rain. One leaden, water-soaked, torn-cover baseball is heaved toward the mud that immerses home plate. I swing my glued, nailed, taped bat. Foul ball. Pitcher and batter are enthralled by the escalating drama.

See? There I go, pushing the flowery purple envelope. When you love baseball you just can’t help it. It’s a disease you catch as a child and it lasts a lifetime. As the great sports writer Pete Hamill once wrote:

“Don’t tell me about the world.  Not today.  It’s springtime and they’re knocking baseballs around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning and the kids are trying to hit the curve ball.”

Pete Hamill has the disease of youth.

Here are some of my favorite quotes about the game from the men who played it and the rest of us who love it:

“You can’t sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock.  You’ve got to throw the ball over the goddamn plate and give the other man his chance.  That’s why baseball is the greatest game of them all.”  ~Earl Weaver

“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball.  I’ll tell you what I do.  I stare out the window and wait for spring.”  ~Rogers Hornsby

“I don’t care how long you’ve been around, you’ll never see it all.”  ~Bob Lemon

“It breaks your heart.  It is designed to break your heart.  The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”  ~Bart Giamatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind,” Yale Alumni Magazine, November 1977

“During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times.  I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times.  You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at bats a season.  That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball.”  ~Mickey Mantle, 1970

“The pitcher has to find out if the hitter is timid.  And if the hitter is timid, he has to remind the hitter he’s timid.”  ~Don Drysdale

“The season starts too early and finishes too late and there are too many games in between.”  ~Bill Veeck

“Every player should be accorded the privilege of at least one season with the Chicago Cubs.  That’s baseball as it should be played - in God’s own sunshine.  And that’s really living.”  ~Alvin Dark

“You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too.”  ~Roy Campanella

“Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up.”  ~Bob Lemon

“When they start the game, they don’t yell, ‘Work ball.’  They say, ‘Play ball.’”  ~Willie Stargell

“You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”  ~Jim Bouton, Ball Four

The proper title of the piece is Pomp and Circumstance March 1 in D. It was composed by Sir Edward Elgar in 1901 and takes its name from Act III, Scene III in Shakespeare’s Othello:

“Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th’ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!”

Today we know it as The Graduation March. It escorts all high school and college graduate candidates into and from the solemn and joyous, yet bittersweet ceremonies that set them gently on the next path of their lives. We’ve all been there and if you took it in the proper spirit of the moment there’s no way you can be unmoved by hearing the music nor just a bit wistful for your own younger, simpler life.

Our niece, Christina Conley, graduated from Patrick Henry High School in San Diego this week and Carolann and I drove down to pay her homage. Christina is Carolann’s brother’s and sister-in-law’s daughter but she is also the vicarious daughter neither of us ever had. She pretty, she’s smart, she’s fun and she’s a good person with a virtuous heart.

I don’t get to talk with Christina much. She hugs me and smiles with familial respect but I don’t want to be one of those old-fart uncles who makes embarrassing remarks and offers unsolicited advice. I don’t want to pry into her life but I’m sure curious about her interests and passions, her hopes and dreams. She has an excellent mind nurtured by her loving parents and grandparents. She also has a gleam in her eyes that tells me she’s excited to be alive and to have the whole world opening to her. 

She reminds me of myself at her age.

High school graduation, poised between sweet, secure childhood and exciting, though treacherous, adult opportunities; beautiful and relatively pure, we are arrived at the greatest single moment of our lives. 

As I watched the Patrick Henry class of 2011 walk proudly, with great dignity and yet with clear, goofy displays of the joyous child that still lives within each of them, I thought back to my own high school graduation and realized something: 

The joy of youth lives in us forever. The trick is to not bury it in disappointments, which are inevitable, and bitterness, which is nothing more than childish pouting. 

We still love you but after today nobody will dry your tears and give you an ice cream cone. Get over it. Get on with it. We still love you.

43 years and two days since my own high school graduation. 

It sounds so long but it lived so fast.