"What a long, strange trip it's been!"
Songs that stick in your brain and refuse to leave are called “ear worms”. They usually drive me nuts but occasionally I get one I never get tired of.
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.
A writer who loves baseball must be careful. It’s too easy to slip into flowery purple prose about the game and I’m prone to over-writing.
Besides, the love of baseball has already been written with soul-stirring elegance by the likes of Roger Kahn, Roger Angell, Red Smith, George Will, Jim Murray, Joshua Prager and many others.
This morning I started watching the Ken Burns documentary, Baseball, for the third or fourth time. For reasons I understand in my heart but have trouble putting into words it still chokes me up. I get teary and a lump in my throat. It’s that good, cleansing, happy cry 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, springy and swift; when my arms were powerful.
I could smash a fastball to the moon and run like the wind all day with a huge smile on my freckled face.
I can still smell freshly mowed grass under a cool March sky of scooting, fluffy clouds.
The base paths are wet from last night’s rain.
One water-soaked, torn-cover baseball is heaved toward the mud on home plate. I swing the bat held together by glue, nails and electrician’s tape.
Foul ball.
Pitcher and batter make eye contact. Both are determined, both are scared.
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 festers inside you for 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 delicious disease of his youth.
Here are more of my favorite quotes about the game from the men who played it professionally and fed the dreams of the rest of us who imagined we could.
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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 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.
Remember telephone books? Well, of course you do. Just because anybody anywhere in the world can be found in fifteen seconds on a computer or mobile phone doesn’t mean we’re finished with phone books. We can’t be, we get four or five of them on our doorstep every year.
I followed a fascinating conversation on Facebook this morning which began with the news announcement that San Francisco has decided to ban the unsolicited delivery of phone books. To politically conservative me it’s another laughable example of how local and state governments are assuming control over the simplest matters of our personal lives. It’s what some of us like to call the Nanny State. Of course, blaming “government” in a generic sense is easy and fashionable. The fact is, they do these things because a lot of people want them to.
This isn’t a political column, it really isn’t. Though I do think it is worth noting that San FranNanny (oops, sorry…that just slipped out) has already banned McDonalds Happy Meals and has an issue on next November’s ballot that would outlaw circumcisions. (I know…right?)
And now, phone books.
From the reactions I read on Facebook this morning it seems a lot of people are spitting mad about having to dispose of a phone book they didn’t ask for and won’t use. I’m not kidding, this is a big deal to some folks. Personally, I think a phone book is very easy to throw away and as it doesn’t happen more than occasionally it’s just not high on my list of things that stress me out.
I don’t use phone books anymore, except very rarely to balance a table with one short leg. Since you’re reading this on a computer you probably don’t use phone books, either, but a lot of people still do. How do I know that? Easy. Phone books will disappear from American life when they cease to be profitable.
As I thought about it I realized there are a couple of fairly serious issues at hand here. First of all, if we’re going to ban phone books from being dropped on the porch, why stop there? How about outlawing junk mail? Ye gads! I have to throw that stuff away every single day! It’s enough to make a preacher spit!
And what about those business cards people leave in my screen door offering to mow my lawn or fix my plumbing? And free weekly local newspapers I didn’t subscribe to and the Pennysaver?
I have to put that stuff in a trash can all by myself!
As long as we’re passing laws to restrict people’s ability to advertise their products and services because old-fashioned neighborhood commerce now annoys us, I say it’s high time to crack down on those pesky Girl Scouts hawking their damned cookies outside the supermarket. (That’s not only annoying, it’s deadly! Have you read the caloric and sugar content on those boxes? Somebody needs to file a class-action suit against these cute, young tools of corporate America!)
I’m being sarcastic and silly, right? Somebody will do it. Mark my words, before much longer somebody will stop Girl Scouts from selling their cookies.
My money’s on San Francisco.
If phone books on the porch are one of our biggest problems I think America is in far better shape than I imagined. On another level, though, I am a bit worried about our society.
It seems to me we’re becoming awfully self-centered, lazy, pissy and intolerant of each other.
(A note from the author, two days later…My son’s mother-in-law has made an excellent point in referring to this phone book “ban” as an opt-out requirement. After thinking about it for a few minutes I realize that my problem with this “ban” may be in the use of that word and in that, I may have jumped to an erroneous perspective. I don’t know how the ordinance was written. If, in fact, it requires phone book companies to ask people if they want one I now realize I would support it wholeheartedly. The Happy Meals ban and the proposal to outlaw circumcisions are different, though. They deny people goods and services they may want.”)
The royal wedding of William and Catherine was achieved today amid all the pomp and over-the-top ceremony the world expects of such events and I think it’s wonderful. We can well use more royal romance and less political bickering and personal nastiness. What really has me close to the boiling point is the contentious snarkiness I’ve been reading and hearing for the past few days from Americans who can’t seem to find anything nice to say about anybody, much less the royal couple.
If you’ll pardon the implied vulgarity, when did being an a-hole become cool?
The word, “snarky” by the way, is an actual word going back to the early 20th century. It is defined as “irritable, unpleasant and scornful.” Though, ironically in this case, the word may be British in origin I’d have to say it has become as American as the disrespectful and snotty attitude it displays. American society today is rife with nastiness. Even as we’re in a concerted national effort to teach our children to neither tolerate or be a party to bullying others it seems a huge percentage of adults can’t follow their own advice.
What I really don’t understand is the need so many seem to have to criticize and scorn people, events and traditions for which they have no personal affinity. You don’t like the royal wedding? Don’t watch! But keep your rude, nasty, sarcastic comments to yourself. You’re bringing me down and I resent it.
Seriously, look at these kids. They’re beautiful. They’re happy and they’re performing a real-life Disneyesque fairytale ritual. What’s wrong with that?
This habit of compulsively expressing rude, unsought opinions and of displaying offensive disrespect for others has become a national epidemic. The ugly American is everywhere and I am deeply ashamed of us.
Morning is God’s way of gently shaking me awake with a smile and saying, “Get up, knothead. You’re not finished yet.”
I love mornings, by God. Always have. And by morning I mean a half hour or so before dawn. It’s the grand reawakening of my little corner of the world. Sunrise, birds, the dew; the works.
Sunrise outside my home in Southern California is always spectacular. Sunrise everywhere is spectacular, amid mountains, deserts and seascapes. Even urban alleys and poor, blighted neighborhoods are washed by a hopeful light at dawn regardless of weather and transitory human circumstance.
A new day. A thing of beauty and grace.
I’ll turn 60 in a few months. Though I’ve missed a few along the way I estimate I have had the thrill of experiencing nearly 20-thousand sunrises so far. I don’t mean to be greedy but I’d sure like to see a few thousand more.
And, isn’t there something extra special about a sunrise on the open road, away from home?
Whether holed up in a cheap motel, staying with family or, best of all, waking up in my RV in some exciting new place, daybreak feels like the Christmas mornings of my childhood: promises of wonder in yet unopened gifts.
I’ll take mornings wherever I find them.
I’m not finished yet.
I’m a dog lover. They not only make me happy, they inspire me to try to be a better man.
What other animal is always thrilled to see you, no matter how grumpy or mean you might be? Name one other creature whose only desire is to love and be loved in return?
I think dogs are God’s gift to us as a reminder of how He loves us unconditionally. (And yes, I know “dog” is “God” spelled backward but the etymologists assure us that’s just a coincidence.)
 |
| Cricket and me |
I have loved a lot of dogs in my long life but none so much as the Yorkshire terrier I bought Carolann as a gift eleven years ago. Only a few weeks old at the time, we named her Cricket for the way she hopped through the grass of our front lawn, grass that came up to her tiny chest. Cricket, or, as we often call her, our “Baby Girl”, stole our hearts when we first laid eyes on her and she owns us, still.
When we first brought Cricket home we began the potty training. We’d take her outside in the back yard every hour or two and command her to “go potty.” She’s a smart baby girl and she would learn quickly.
 |
| Our Baby Girl |
One evening, shortly after dusk, I took her into the backyard and we began going through the exercise. “Go potty, Cricket,” I said. Curious puppy that she was she ignored me and sniffed and poked around the yard while I continued to give the command, firmly yet kindly.
It was a lovely spring evening. A single cricket (the insect, not the dog) was chirping. I eventually became aware that our next-door neighbor was in his yard across the fence. The fence was tall enough that we couldn’t see each other but I was aware of his movements and he could hear me, of course.
Here’s what he heard:
A single cricket chirping.
And, me saying, “Go potty, Cricket! Cricket, go potty. Go potty for Daddy!”
Copyright © 2011, Dave Williams. All rights reserved.
These are the precise words we exchanged not five minutes ago:
Isaiah: (Hollering from downstairs.) “Grandpa!”
Me: “What?”
Isaiah: “Can we take the dogs for a walk and maybe go around the block or down to the park? I’m just asking.”
I half hear him, half-think for only a moment.
Me: “Maybe. That sounds like a good idea. Let me finish a couple of things. Then I’ll think about it.”
Isaiah: (Still downstairs) “Okay. I love you!”
Me: (Mindlessly, back to my writing) “I love you, too.”
Isaiah: “I’m saying that because I want to convince you to take the dogs for a walk. (slight pause) But also because I really do love you.”
And so it begins.
Copyright © 2011, Dave Williams. All rights reserved.
My dad, Don Williams, was born and raised in Wyoming.
About fifty-five years ago he and his dad taught me to fish swift trout streams in blinding snowstorms.
I fished the Yellowstone River for the first time when I was only four or five. It was January in the mid-1950s, a stiff wind and vicious, blowing snow stung my tender cheeks and scared me. I grabbed my daddy’s leg. He briefly caressed my head with his free hand just to let me know he was there for me.
Then he cast that Super Duper lure back upstream and continued reeling in the line.
A monstrous, lazy moose stood about fifteen feet away, knee-deep in the rapid, frigid Yellowstone, chewing on green river plants and looking at me with scant interest. The nearly-frozen river, the icy wind and snow, didn’t bother that moose in the least. Certainly, he had no fear of me.
My dad, Donald, and his dad, Lester Williams, fished with a religious fervor.
For one thing, it was the only way they could hope to enjoy fresh trout for dinner. More than that, though, they embraced God’s challenge that they provide for themselves and their families and be grateful for His bounty.
I loved my dad and grandpa. I wanted to be like them.
I’m a California kid just trying to hold onto family traditions. Yet, I occasionally have to jettison them when they no longer serve a practical purpose.
My son liberated me from fishing nearly thirty years ago.
Jeremy was about six or seven. I took him camping into Northern California’s Plumas-Eureka Campground. He had caught his first fish there when he was just five, back when he was still anxious to learn from me and to please me with his effort.
(He still is and does, of course. I’m just sayin’…)
By the early 80s — just a year or two after his fish harvesting experience — he was thinking for himself:
“Dad,” he said seriously and with no hint of sarcasm, “you know we can buy fish at the grocery store, right?”
He was right, of course, just as my dad and his dad were right in their time and place.
We have all been right together, forever.
Copyright © 2011, Dave Williams. All rights reserved.