Dave Williams, Author at The Aging of Aquarius : Page 18 of 31

Lorraine Latorre

I got my first kiss from a girl when I was in third grade. That’s what, about eight years old? That seems ridiculous, though I’m pretty sure of it. I was there.

Her name was Lorraine Latorre and I recall her only vaguely before and after the moment she appeared out of nowhere and, for no reason I can recall or imagine, kissed me on the cheek on the playground.

Let the record show I did not return the kiss.

But I liked it.

I don’t remember if either of us said anything before or after the kiss. I don’t remember if I thought she was cute before then, though I sure as heck thought so afterward.

(Stock photo of kids; sadly, not Lorraine and me.)

And let’s stop for a moment right there and ponder something psychologists have no doubt picked apart into tiny, tasteless, tedious pieces:

How can pre-pre-pre-pubescent kids be instinctively attracted to a person of the opposite sex? Isn’t there a biological component required to engage a chemical reaction that third graders haven’t begun to physically develop?

I didn’t desire Lorraine and I’m sure she didn’t have any such feeling for me. We were eight, we weren’t capable of desire.

So, why was it a happy thing? Lorraine kissed me on the cheek and I liked it.

But, why?

She was a beauty, I remember that. She had long dark brown curls and a complexion that was just slightly darker than mine.

If I was writing a sizzling novel of elementary school lust I’d probably describe her skin as “florid” and I’d throw in a passage about the flirtatious, dancing fire in her eyes. Frankly, I don’t even remember what she looked like except for my vague description of her hair and skin. The experience of an eight-year-old sifted through five-plus decades of life is very sketchy and requires a dash of imagination.

Lorraine had an older brother named Ron, I remember that for sure. He was probably in fifth grade at the time. I steered clear of Ron because he was older and just too cool to approach. He was Eddie Haskell to my Beaver Cleaver. And, because I was afraid he’d find out what happened on the playground that day and beat the ever-loving snot out of me even though it was his sister who had kissed me, not the other way around.

But I didn’t just fear Ron, I envied him, too. He was grown up (ten or eleven!) and cool. He lived in the same house as Lorraine. He watched TV with her, ate dinner with her, went on vacation with her for cripes sake and probably even saw her every night and morning in her pajamas!

Lorraine Latorre changed me forever. She injected an Adam and Eve aspect into my life I couldn’t possibly understand at the time and still don’t. But I do remember that moment.

She kissed my cheek and I liked it, though I have no idea why.

No worries

Like you, I worry a bit. Okay, maybe more than a bit. We all do.

We worry about our jobs and money, our personal relationships and whether our kids are healthy and happy.

We worry about big stuff like climate change and politics, we stress over little stuff like our weight or a new gray hair.

Worry, worry, worry!

We even worry about that.

On Friday September 12, 2008, 25 people got out of their beds long before dawn, prepared themselves for work, kissed their families good-bye, left the house and died. They were killed in a freak commuter train crash in Southern California. My KNX radio partner, Vickie Moore, and I told their stories with relative dispassion because that was our job but I never got over the soul-jarring realization that you can walk out of your home one morning and never return.

It happens every day all over the world, of course, but we never imagine it happening to us. Among all the trivial stuff we worry about it never occurs to us to be worried about sudden, dumb luck death.

Caught on video: The explosion in the town of West, Texas, April 17, 2013.

It happened last night in the nearby, very small town of West, Texas, which one resident described on the radio this morning as “a Mayberry kind of place.” There was a fertilizer factory in West which employed and supported a good portion of the 2,600 people who live in the town. It caught fire at 7:30 p.m. and 25 minutes later it blew away everything within a five block radius.

Now, almost 18 hours later, they’re still looking for bodies, alive and dead. Texas officials tend to play their cards quietly. Ten hours ago they allowed that there may be as many as five to 15 deaths. Most likely there are dozens of others who died with no warning, people who hadn’t even been aware of the fire but were close enough to have life literally blown out of them as if they were birthday candles while they finished supper, watched TV with their families and fed their dogs.

When things like this happen and my work day is done I wonder about that. What’s it like to die with absolutely no warning? One moment you can be laughing and the next moment you’re nothing.

There is no sense to be made of this sort of thing.

But today I’m not worried about anything. Nothing at all.

The kid pitches to a Dodgers legend

It’s early April. The North Texas wind is, as they say, blowing like a bandit. White, fluffy clouds are scooting quickly and I have that wonderful aching feeling again, the one I’ve had every March and April of my life for as long as I can remember.

Cool, soggy dirt, the smell of new wet grass. It’s spring.

Baseball season is back.

In the early 1960s, when I was a kid of 13 or 14, I spent my summer days on a baseball field on Thomas Drive in North Highlands with my buddy Norm Miller. We always got there right after breakfast and didn’t leave until nearly sundown.

Sometimes we were eventually joined by other kids. Often we were not. Didn’t matter to us. Norm and I would throw baseballs at each other, taking turns swinging for non-existent fences, hearing cheers from imagined crowds.

The stars of our daily fantasy were our San Francisco Giants heroes: Mays, McCovey, Cepeda, Marichal, Jimmy Ray Hart, Tom Haller, Jose Pagan, Jim Davenport, and the Alou brothers. We loved them all and paid tribute in our two-kid fantasy game by batting left or right-handed as they did and even mimicking their unique batting stances.

Mays looked at the pitcher with both eyes, not just one. Cepeda held his monstrous piece of lumber straight up and circled it slowly. Matty Alou was an odd duck. He always held his bat head pointing at the ground behind him as if it weighed 40 pounds. He made it work quite well.

As make-believe Giants hitters, we advanced to the plate mimicking Candlestick Park public address announcer, Jeff Carter.

“The batter, number 5, Tom Haller!” We heard the cheers in our heads as we had in our occasional real-life visits to the Stick.

That’s how Norm and I spent our summer days, in baseball heaven.

One day an old man wandered up behind the backstop and watched for a while as I threw slow fastballs and flat curves to Norm, who was always a sucker for any pitch high and away as many of mine were.

Balding, portly, and puffing on a cigar the man behind the backstop watched. We thought nothing of him until he eventually hollered, “Hey, mind if I take a swing?”

In those days it never occurred to any kid to say no to any adult request. It was a weird thing for an old fat guy to ask but we never thought about running home in fear and suspicion. Bad things didn’t happen to kids in the 60s.

He just wanted to hit a baseball and we said, “Sure”.

Together, Norm and I had collected a kid’s treasure trove of baseballs, maybe three or four between us. Some had their torn covers taped shut. Maybe one had all its seams intact. That’s the one I picked up as Norm ran out to center field.

Something told me I should impress this old guy with my best stuff. I was only 13 or 14 but on that particular day I had never been older and I had never played baseball with an adult.

I concentrated, scraped my toe at the non-existent pitching rubber, peered in at the non-existent sign from non-existent Tom Haller, and fired in my best non-existent fastball.

Thwack!

The fat, bald guy slammed it on a line into centerfield and hadn’t missed a puff from his cigar.

Two or three more times I threw baseballs as hard as I could and the old man peppered them around the deepest outfields, left to right. Poor Norman was run ragged chasing them down.

The old man smiled, dropped the cigar on the grass beside him, and got down to business.

THWACK! THWACK! THWACK!

He slammed everything I had that came anywhere near the plate. A couple of wild pitches he let pass but had to chase down because there was no catcher. He casually ducked the ones that were flying straight toward his head.

The game ended when the bat splintered. It simply gave up, glued, nailed, and taped together as it had been to begin with.

When the old, fat, cigar-chomper came out to the infield, grinning from ear to ear and offering to pay for the bat, we said nah, it was already broken. We were just amazed at what he had done and asked him, with the ignorance of youth: “Did you ever play baseball?”

He smiled again and took the wallet out of his back pocket. Then he carefully fished out a yellow newspaper clipping nearly twenty years old.

I’m sorry to say it didn’t mean anything to me at the time and I remember nothing about it now. But his wallet also displayed his driver’s license and his name caught my attention.

Wikipedia explains the rest of the story.

Carl Anthony Furillo (March 8, 1922 – January 21, 1989), nicknamed “The Reading Rifle” and “Skoonj,” was a right fielder in Major League Baseball who played his entire career for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers. A member of seven National League champions from 1947 to 1959, he batted over .300 five times, winning the 1953 batting title with a .344 average – then the highest by a right-handed Dodger since 1900. Noted for his strong and accurate throwing arm, he recorded 10 or more assists in nine consecutive seasons, leading the league twice, and retired with the fifth most games in right field (1408) in NL history. – Wikipedia

I’m a morning person

Did you know that people really do have biological rhythms which define us as morning people or night people? Neuroscientists have discovered some fascinating differences in how our brains are wired.

For one thing, night people apparently get stronger and more energetic as evening grows late. We morning people tend to hit our peak well before noon and then our energy and brain functions level off until drowsiness overtakes us just after the evening meal.

On the other hand, morning people are supposedly happier than night people! Who would have guessed that? I always suspected there was a party starting just as I was going to bed. That’s apparently a large part of the problem for you owls. One study calls it “social jet lag,” a disruption of circadian rhythms caused when you stay up late but are forced by responsibilities to get up early the next morning whether you want to or not.

(And by the way, your grumpiness really puts a damper on our bubbly morning effervescence. Try to keep it to yourself, okay?)

Here’s one final scientific finding that supports everything we’ve long believed: the older we get almost all of us become morning people even if we were night people when we were younger.

Does this sound a bit suspicious to you? I believe the science but the more I read I keep coming back to a physical reality that circadian studies just don’t seem to support.

I’m tired because I’m old. I wake up at four or five a.m. because I fell asleep in front of the TV ten hours ago.

Stick that in your MRI and smoke it.

Our baby girl

We called her Cricket because when she was a puppy she bounced through the grass.

Cricket, is gone.

I miss her jumping with excitement simply because I’m home from work, and at night when she snuggled in my arm alongside me in bed as we fell asleep together in security and comfort.

She’s not here to gently tap my face with a soft, insistent paw to tell me she’s hungry or thirsty or needs to go outside.

She’ll never lick my nose again to comfort me when I’m sad.

Our baby girl died Thursday.

If you ever had a dog that could make your eyes tear up for no reason but your mutual love; a dog who could lift you from the depths of sadness and pain by simply nudging your face with a cold nose and bright eyes, you are a believer.

For me God has the face and the eternal, unqualified love of a Yorkie named Cricket.

She crawled inside my soul and will live there forever.

Clara’s a quitter

Clara Cowell stopped smoking last week and chose her birthday to mark the occasion.

Her 102nd birthday.

The British mother of four, grandmother of nine, great grandmother of 12, and great-great grandmother of four decided, after 89 years and tens of thousands of cigarettes, she might be pushing her luck.

Clara’s 72 year-old daughter is more concerned that her mom might be tempting fate. She says the secret to Clara’s longevity has been a lifetime of cigarettes and whiskey. Why stop now? She said it cheeky but may have a point.

Everybody knows that smoking is bad for your health, it’s not arguable, but when I read a story like this I wonder if our culture-driven fears aren’t at least as hazardous as the actual risk factors.

Why are we all so scared? Because we’re told we must be. We live our lives surrounded by warning labels and bombarded with anecdotal horror stories mixed with rumors and urban legends. We’re scared of cancer and heart disease and every sort of illness whether attributable to poor nutrition and lousy lifestyle decisions or just dumb luck and DNA.

We live in constant fear of things that will probably never happen.

And here’s the kicker, the ultimate damned-if-you-do-or-don’t irony: the same health experts who shake their fingers at us when we eat a Big Mac or don’t get enough sleep insist that stress will kill us deader than anything.

Yes, of course we should be careful when we’re driving and mindful of how much bad stuff we ingest but is a lifetime of worry helpful in any way? Of course it isn’t.

Hand-wringing worrywarts are everywhere. They warn us with no uncertain gravity that sugar and butter are bad for us but artificial sweeteners and butter substitutes may be even worse. They extol the virtues of exercise and then some famous long distance runner drops dead from a heart attack.

Sure, don’t smoke. But, diet drinks? Less red meat? I don’t know.

I think we can be too careful. And when you see a 102 year-old woman giving up cigarettes after 90 years I think there are times when a pound of prevention is a silly concession to cultural bullying.

Take care of yourself. Be smart.

Moderation in all things, even moderation.

Beautiful Existence

This morning on my Dallas radio show I shared the story of a woman in Seattle who has gotten some minor national attention for her resolve to eat every single meal of her life this year at Starbucks. Eleven days into the year she’s apparently on track.

The source story doesn’t say why she wants to do this. She says she’s not employed by Starbucks and isn’t making any money for the stunt but I suspect that’s her plan. We all remember the young guy named Jared who became a spokesman for Subway sandwich shops by losing a boatload of weight eating there. If this is what this Starbucks woman has in mind, I kind of feel bad for her. For one thing, it has already been done. And really, Starbucks doesn’t need any help. They’re so successful they’re opening new stores on both sides of every McDonalds in the world.

The other problem is that for every fru-fru croissant and muffin they put in the display case leading to the cash register Starbucks is still basically a purveyor of coffee. Jared didn’t get the best-balanced diet in the world at Subway but at least he got a reasonable portion of veggies and some protein with his caffeine and carbs. Ms. Existence may find her health flagging by the end of February.

Wait, I didn’t tell you her name, did I? It’s Beautiful Existence.

Apparently that is her legal name and if you’re boringly normal like me your first thought is that she’s a nutball. That’s what I thought. But now, a few hours later, it occurs to me that this woman, for whatever reasons related to her life experience, lives on a different plane than most of us. She travels to the beat of a different drummer. A drummer with a banjo.

My good friend Chuck Woodbury spent many years of his young adult life traveling around the western United States in a motorhome gathering and reporting the stories of such people in a wonderful monthly publication called Out West. One story was about a young man Chuck met in some small town in Utah or Wyoming. The details escape me but I think this guy’s name was David. He earned a living as a dishwasher in a local cafe. He spent all of his spare time at home, alone, with one of those adding machines from the 80s that kept running tabulations on a long roll of paper. He started with 1+1=2 and proceeded from there to add 1 over and over and over and over and over again.

David had his house filled with carefully cataloged rolls of used adding machine tapes.

Before I left work this morning I wrote and recorded a radio report about Beautiful Existence for use later in the day. It was a professional, typically sterile radio news story that proudly sucks all the reality and fascination out of life.

But I can’t stop thinking about Beautiful Existence.

She might be a nutball or she might be just a Jared copycat.

David, the adding machine dishwasher, might be a genuine looney from where I sit.

“Crazy” is a slippery word and though I don’t know any of the trials and tribulations of the lives experienced by Beautiful Existence or David the dishwasher, part of me greatly envies them.

They wake up every morning with a plan, they follow through and go to bed each night with a sense of fulfillment.

They serve nobody’s expectations except their own.

If that isn’t life well-lived, what is?

Post script: Beautiful Existence apparently succeeded in having every meal at Starbucks for an entire year. And it seems I misjudged her in my assumption that she was trying to get some big paydays for her stunt. Here’s a follow-up article about her achievement and her future goals. – DW, 2022

Bactine, Bosco and Red Ball Jets

This is an abbreviated portion of a chapter from a book I’m writing. As slowly as I write I figured I might as well put this much in blog form. Maybe it will encourage me to get on with it.

Surviving Childhood

One of the things we aging boomers love to talk about is how much safer the world used to be when we were kids.

I guess it was in some respects. Mostly, though, I wonder how we survived.

As kids in the 1950s and 60s we were allowed to roam our entire neighborhood from sunup to sundown free from fear of death or kidnapping. Nobody was ever snatched off the street.

We didn’t have drive-by shootings. Heck, we didn’t have drive-thru hamburger joints. Back then if you wanted to buy a burger or shoot somebody you had to park the car and get out first.

It was a simpler, more forgiving time. But it was also a daily horror show we never even noticed.

Cars didn’t have seat belts until the mid-sixties and by then they seemed silly to those of us who grew up literally bouncing between the back and front seats as our parents sped along two-lane highways. They didn’t mind in the least as long as we didn’t start fighting.

We had room fans with no protective covers to keep little fingers out of the whirling steel blades. If you had invented the electric fan doesn’t a protective cage over the front just seem like a natural piece of the big picture? How did they not think of that?

I never heard of a single injury.

The heat in our homes came up from the floor through metal grates that got hot enough to sear a waffle pattern into tender toddler butts and feet.

Everybody smoked cigarettes, cigars and pipes everywhere. I mean everywhere: on buses and trains; in grocery stores, movie theaters, restaurants, churches and in every room of every home in America. That’s where this attachment to “fresh air” started, you know. Think about it. No matter where you live these days, big city or wide-open spaces, the air is no fresher outside than it is inside. But you still say, “I need some fresh air,” and then you step out of a filtered, air-conditioned room into downtown San Bernardino. When we stepped outside in the fifties it was like walking into the Alps. Nobody complained about smoke. It was just a natural part of life.

Dogs ran free when we were kids.

You’d let the dog out and he was gone to who-knows-where until he eventually came back to the porch and waited happily to be readmitted to the house. That might be the next day or the day after that. If he bit somebody while he was out you never heard about it. They didn’t sue, they just swore. If he tangled with another dog you’d see him trot back into the house at dinner time, tongue and tail wagging joyously, with one bloody ear and a mangled eyeball. You didn’t take him to the vet unless he’d been hit by a car and even then if he could hobble out of the street on three of his four legs Skippy was good to go.

We had deadly toys.

We would have wars using air-powered BB-rifles that allowed us to fire tiny steel balls with enough velocity to embed them under the skin of another kid, a dog or a cat. It stung but we loved it. This is where we first heard the sentence, “You could put an eye out with that!” But nobody I knew ever lost an eye to a BB-gun assault.

If there weren’t enough BB-guns to go around, we’d just throw rocks. Seriously, rock fights. And worse.

We had toy bows and arrows. Oh sure, the arrows had rubber cups on the end. You just took those off, threw ‘em away and whittled the wooden shaft into a pencil-sharp point.

We had firecrackers. We made bottle rockets out of wooden match heads cautiously jammed tightly together into glass aspirin bottles. When they weren’t made carefully they became instant bombs, igniting in hand and shooting shards of red-hot glass dozens of feet in all directions.

I’m not making this up.

One idiot kid I remember used to lie down on the ground and have the rest of us drop a huge rock — say, the size and weight of a bowling ball — right over his face. He’d always roll out of the way before the rock hit the ground. He never failed.

We climbed trees, great cottonwoods in my grandparents’ front yard, scampering twenty feet above the ground. Once I fell, skinning my bare back as I slid down the trunk of that great tree, landing hard on its exposed roots. Grandma sprayed Bactine on my injuries and gave me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white Wonder bread. I watched Popeye on TV and felt a lot better.

We jumped off the roof of my grandparents’ house with totally ineffective home-made parachutes fashioned from a bed sheet with ropes tied to the corners. One of my goofy cousins used to climb onto the sloped roof of their two-story house and bounce up there on his pogo stick.

We made go-carts out of two-by-fours and orange crates with tin coffee can lids for headlights and roller skates for wheels. A steep hill provided propulsion, a rope tied to each side of the front axle made for a delicate steering mechanism that was just as likely to dump you into the middle of oncoming traffic as it was to steer you out of danger. There was no braking system. For that you merely had to wait until the thing slowed of its own diminishing inertia or crashed into a parked car.

When I was a kid we had plenty of playgrounds in our neighborhoods and schoolyards were never enclosed by locked fences and gates. Still, we often just played baseball or football in the street. A parked car was first base or end zone marker. Second base was a smashed tin can; a water spigot was third. We played with broken wooden bats that had been glued, nailed and taped back into service. The baseball had ripped seams and a cover peeling off. Once the tear got so big the ball made a fluttering sound when thrown we’d peel it off completely and wrap the remaining ball of yarn into a solid mass of black electrician’s tape that needed to be repaired or replaced after bouncing along the pavement a few times. Any baseball becomes hard to see after sunset, especially one made of black tape but we played long after daylight had faded to deep purple and the cars rounding the corner into left field had their headlights on.</span>

As I think back on those days fifty-plus years ago I can’t remember any boys who didn’t have patched jeans and scabs on their knees and elbows. Many of the girls, too. Blood was simply a part of everyday life through no small fault of our own. We all fell off our bikes into asphalt and parked cars because were just clutzy kids. Occasionally one of the real numbskulls in the neighborhood would intentionally ride his bike off the roof of a house or try to leap a row of thorn-laden rose bushes on a bike with the help of a pathetically engineered plywood ramp. These stunts nearly always ended in bloody failure but they didn’t stop us from trying again.

Nobody died. We seldom cried. And now we worry about our own kids and theirs.

They missed so much.

Then and now

My radio partner, Amy Chodroff, and I had a conversation yesterday with a man who proposes we all learn to disconnect from our social gadgets just one day a week. Think about that: no Facebook, no Twitter, no My Space, no Google Plus, no Instagram, no Pinterest, no e-mail, no texting, no nothing: just you and the people you can see in real time and space.

I remember decades ago, before Cyber World Genesis, when people were making similar suggestions about technologies and social habits that would seem quaint to us now. “Turn off the TV one night a week”, they said. “Get reacquainted with your family. Talk about your day. Play a board game. Make popcorn.”

It really does sound nice, doesn’t it? (If you’re over 60, I mean.)

All the way back to my own childhood in the fifties and sixties I can remember the social psychologists urging families to always eat dinner together at the table. It suggested we strive for TV family perfection. Dad would be there smiling in his sweater and tie, Mom would be fresh as a daisy after a day spent driving a vacuum and an iron and then wrangling dinner in the kitchen. We could have funny conversations like the Cleaver family.

It all sounds wonderful but what I remember from my real life family dinners is my sister and me whining about the food, being scolded for the griping with threats of being sent to our rooms. There was nothing to do in our rooms at that time. Dad would talk about world matters, money problems and grouse about some idiot at work while dear Mom tried to hold it all together. It wasn’t always like that, of course, but often enough that I learned early that nostalgia isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Like it or not, family and social dynamics change with culture which is largely driven by technology.

Nobody sends handwritten letters anymore. Gone are the summer nights on a blanket in the front yard together watching the stars come out. Rocking chairs on the front porch over a pitcher of lemonade and shared tales of greater glories past are the stuff of fanciful memory and our social fabric.

It’s good to remember the past but a terrible mistake to try to live there.

I think I may give this disconnecting idea a shot, occasionally. Maybe not once a week, like on a schedule. Just occasionally, like opening a shoe box filled with old pictures. It’s fun.

But I’m not going to stress about it.

Out of the mouths of babes

And Jesus said to them, Yes; have you never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings you have perfected praise? — Matthew 21:16 (American King James Bible)

Two weeks ago tonight Carolann and I drove to Tracy’s and Martha’s house in McKinney to join their semi-weekly Bible study group. This will come as a surprise to our family and friends in California because we’re not church-goers but we’re not heathens, either. We’re quiet believers.

And frankly, more to the point, we’re new to Texas and have no social life. We need to meet people.

So, there we were, eight or ten of us having snacked and socialized, now seated together in our friends’ living room engrossed in the book of Daniel and sharing The Word.

Tracy and Martha’s eight-year-old daughter Sadie was upstairs in her room, unseen and forgotten.

The Good Book is passed to our new friend, Mike.

(A dog barks in the backyard. Sadie yells at the dog through her upstairs window, telling him to be quiet.)

Mike reads.

MIKE: “Ezekiel describes his vision of God…

(The dog begins baying outside.)

MIKE: “A voice came from above…”

(Upstairs, to the dog…)

SADIE: “SHUT UP YOU RETARD!!!”

We’ll try to pick it up at that point tonight. I’m praying that Sadie is there.