Dave Williams is a radio news/talk personality originally from Sacramento, now living in Dallas, Texas, with his wife, Carolann. They have two sons and grandsons living in L.A.
It’s the pause in our week. It’s the moment we put down our worries, responsibilities and busy thoughts.
Just for a moment.
— My hummingbird is sipping nectar from the backyard feeder I filled last week. He goes away and comes back for seconds.
— The barbecue smoker stands proud and manly on its pad, ready for the lovely babyback ribs it will soon receive and slowly perfect over the long, busy day.
— Over breakfast as my wife is hurrying off to work she has this conversation with the seven-year-old:
“That’s a nice outfit you’re wearing, Nana!”
“Thank you, Sweetie!”
“It looks really old!”
— I drive to the newspaper stand outside the donut shop on Route 66. The usual crowd is there, old men with their coffee and cigarettes enjoying the chilly morning air, the rising sun and each other’s company. Some read newspapers. One has a racing form. They all sit alone at separate tables while talking to each other from the privacy of their individual space.
A similar scene is going on at the nearby Starbucks but it’s an entirely different crowd. They have lattes and laptops. No smoke; less conversation.
The sun is fully up. Yard sales are underway.
I have things that need doing and it’s time.
Saturday morning is fleetingly sweet and perfect. I pray for another one next week.
Did you ever have a nickname? Did you ever want one?
I’m betting the answer is yes to at least one of those questions, although most people never have a nickname that sticks and is used more or less by everybody they know. For the sake of the discussion here I’m not talking about diminutive forms of your actual given name like Rosie for Rosemary or Dick for Richard. (Now, there’s a discussion we need to have some day.)
No, I’m talking about nicknames that have absolutely nothing to do with anything.
People with… shall we say unusual first names often have a nickname like Bud. I don’t think any little boy was ever called Bud or Buddy on his birth certificate but the world is full of guys called Bud. When you get to know them better you learn the truth. These guys typically have real names so weird even their own parents wouldn’t use them. I have two friends everybody calls Bud though their given names are Harley and Clerin. No disrespect intended but those are odd names. My own father dodged a bullet because his middle name, like John Wayne’s real first name, was Marion. It was apparently a fashionable name in the 1920s but please, who is going to name his son Marion these days without also teaching him martial arts so he can defend himself?
Girls typically acquire nicknames that begin as simple endearments: Kitty, Angel, Candy, Missy, Boots, Peaches.
Seriously, one of my dearest friends in the world is a woman named Ruth but almost nobody knows that. She is called Boots by everybody. And even though I have asked her why I can’t remember her answer. She’s just Boots, that’s all.
I also really knew an adult woman called Peaches though I never heard of anybody called Plums or Apricots. Academy Award-winning Actress Gwyneth Paltrow has a daughter whose legal given name is Apple but that’s a Hollywood affectation that we can shrug off even if the poor little girl never will.
Don’t get me started on what became of Chastity Bono. We all saw that coming forty years ago.
I had a high school baseball coach who called me Ted. That was because I was a left-handed power hitting outfielder like the real Ted whose last name was also Williams. I thought that was cool but nobody else used it. No surprise there. You can’t use a real name for a nickname. If your name is Mark but one guy calls you Ralph you think everybody else will pick up on that? Nah. I don’t think so.
For the past twenty years I’ve gone on regular camping trips with a bunch of guys I used to work with. One of them started calling me Hoss ten or fifteen years ago because I am large and have a beard and always wear a cowboy hat. It seemed kind of fitting and I’m fond of it but only from these guys. I don’t want my son’s in-laws or my wife or my mom calling me Hoss.
I guess no matter how you look at it a nickname is a term of endearment even if the name is something less than flattering like Shorty or Bug. My wife and her first husband used to call their premie son Bug because he weighed only four pounds when he was born. He lives with us now. He’s about to turn thirty and looks nothing at all like a bug. I’ll just leave it at that.
Nicknames are interesting. What’s yours? Or what would you like to be called?
As long as I can remember I have had lousy teeth. As a child in the fifties and sixties I developed multiple tooth cavities by the time I was ten. In those days the only solution was a terrifyingly slow belt-driven drill that splashed pieces of enamel everywhere and literally caused smoke to waft from your mouth.
The dentist had to stop every so often to let the drill cool down so he could continue to torture me, unavoidably.
He said hopelessly soothing, sympathetic things. All I remember is that the shots of Novocaine were excrutiatingly painful and seemed useless in the long run. The pain of having my teeth drilled shot like a volley of needles through every nerve of my rigid body. The antiseptic smell, swathed in wisps of tooth smoke, was nauseating.
We didn’t have air conditioning. The doctor, his assistant and I all sweated profusely.
This went on for hours.
I was a child. I cried piteously before, during and after each visit.
State of the art dental science fifty years ago was arguably worse than fifty years prior when all a dentist could do was give you a stiff shot of whiskey and yank a tooth out of your head. That, at least, was quick.
They also did shaves and haircuts.
Yesterday I received two root canals.
The room was cool, my mouth was numb and my head was clear. Fearlessly and without a single flash of pain I chatted amiably before and after the procedures with the dentist and his assistant.
The only moment of discomfort I felt was when the assistant leaned into me as I was supine before her. Her right boob accidentally mashed against my arm which I was unable to extricate for fear that any movement might be misconstrued as something inappropriate.
Fifty years ago Dr. Clifford would have never filled my mouth with tools. He needed to get his hands in there.
Yesterday my mouth was propped open by a rubber block the size of a PT Cruiser spare tire. I had a wire bracket framing my mouth. Stretched across that was a thin, stretchy sheet of rubber which allowed the dentist to isolate the tooth he was working on and not forget where he was.
That seems like a good idea to me.
I also had a saliva-sucking vacuum hose in my mouth, constantly on the move and under the impeccable direction and guidance of the booby assistant.
There were clamps and odd-looking gadgets, a pair of pliers, I believe, and I’m not positive but pretty sure he also hung a rearview mirror and a rubber-bulbed bicycle horn on my mouth.
“Your sons weren’t made to like you. That’s what grandchildren are for.” — Jane Smiley
The boy is seven.
He hangs his clothes on the floor with no regard for whether they are clean or dirty. He leaves string cheese wrappers in the family room, never learns to turn off the TV, frequently forgets to flush the toilet and makes his own breakfast, leaving half of his chocolate milk on the kitchen counter and Cheerios splayed across the floor.
He’s only seven.
As grandparents we are constantly reminding ourselves to be patient. He’s still trying to learn things his father never quite got the hang of. Or maybe he’s not trying and that’s the problem.
But it’s not our problem, it’s his dad’s.
I was pecking away at my computer one early morning recently when Isaiah came in wordlessly, picked up the phone from my desk and rang his dad’s room on the intercom.
“Dad? Would you come get the peanut butter for me? It’s too high in the pantry and I can’t reach it. — Okay, thanks.”
“Isaiah,” I said, “I would have gotten the peanut butter for you.”
“I know, Grandpa,” he said with a new, impressively mature tone to his voice.
“I just figured Dad needs to get up and get ready to take me to school.”
Whether you call that learning the art of diplomacy or of manipulation it is something that gives grandparents a special sense of appreciation.
Lately I have been uninspired. Or, maybe I’m just tired. Whatever the reason, I’ve had a bad case of writer’s block for the past month. To be accurate it’s more like writer’s blahs.
But I have found myself wanting to go camping again, now that it’s spring. And that made me remember one of my favorite blog entries from two years ago.
If you haven’t already read this, I hope you enjoy it and that it makes you want to grab your family and a stinky ice chest and go roll in a pile of dirt and mosquitoes.
Dave, April 17, 2010
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If I was honest enough to remember the whole truth I’d probably recall some very uncomfortable or even miserable experiences while dirt camping as a kid.
But why would I want to do that?
Anybody who intentionally spends hundreds of dollars plus weeks in excited preparation for the opportunity to sleep on the ground, live in a perpetual cloud of dust and mosquitoes, eat food from a milk-sodden, meat-bloodied, melted-ice ice chest, and to pee and occasionally poop into an open, fly-infested pit has no grounds for complaint on any level, least of all personal convenience.
These days Carolann and I visit the great outdoors in luxurious, indoor comfort. We have an air-conditioned 34-foot motorhome with a queen-size bed, full shower and toilet, complete kitchen, and two TVs. It’s wonderful, it really is.
But camping, it ain’t.
My dad had a big, unbelievably heavy canvas tent. It was bigger than some honky tonks I’ve been in and smelled almost as bad. He had to prop the thing up with a couple of huge wooden poles I think he bought from a circus fire sale. As far as I can recall that tent performed no useful service.
If it rained, the canvas would soak through and drip on us long after the rain had ended. Then it mildewed.
If it was eighty degrees outside it was ninety-five in the tent. If it was sixty outside it was forty-five in the tent.
By the time I started taking my son Jeremy camping in the early 80s, the equipment had improved dramatically. Our tent was lightweight nylon. It was the first of those now ubiquitous domed things supported by three long, flexible poles. It didn’t have to be lashed to steel stakes in the ground by twelve ropes poised to grab a foot and trip you every time you walked to the outhouse.
The downside of my new nylon igloo was its height, maybe four feet tops, which was fine for a kid but forced me to mimic a horizontal pole-dancer, writhing and wriggling on my back just to get out of my sleeping bag, pull on some pants and exit on hands and knees through the little flap at the front that was secured by three or four maddening zippers.
Like my father before me, I taught my son to build a campfire the old-fashioned way: with paper under kindling, under twigs, under sticks, all in fastidious layers beneath three logs wigwammed in the center. It was a thing of beauty. We would stand back in solemn appreciation of our half-hour handiwork before we lit the match. Me, with a proud fatherly hand on my son’s shoulder; him scratching madly at dozens of festering bites on his legs and neck.
After Jeremy mastered campfire-building I introduced him to “fire-starters,” those wonderful, waxy chunks of compressed sawdust that make it possible for any idiot with a Bic to start a campfire. Boy Scouts need not apply. My dad would have refused to purchase them.
Dad taught me to fish, of course, just as his dad had taught him, in the fast and frigid trout streams of Wyoming. I wasn’t very good at it and, frankly, I hated it. But that’s what fathers and sons do. It’s tradition.
My kid broke the curse. Oh, I taught him and he caught his first fish when he was five or six. But the next time I asked him if he wanted to go fishing he asked with a gentle degree of pity, “Dad, you know you can buy fish at the store, right?”
That finished the sport for me and I still owe him for it.
L-R: My sister, Linda, me, our mom. Looks like Pollock Pines, California but can’t be sure.
But I miss it all…
…the laughter from nearby families, the smell and WOOSH of a white gas-powered lantern sputtering to life; the crackle and smoke of a jolly campfire properly built of wood chunks gathered and chopped by hand.
I even miss the dirt.
In evenings such as those by the campfire, with no TVs, no smartphones, or WiFi, we had no choice but to talk with each other about our daily personal lives; of fanciful, imagined wonders and deep philosophy; of past events shared and joyously remembered which made us a family, and of mutual hopes and dreams which we would then take with us, yawning and regretful of day’s end, into our sleeping bags.
Gazing through the open flap of our stifling canvas tomb we looked at God’s stars twinkling in the heavens. Secure with our parents at our sides, we inhaled deeply the fresh and gloriously smoky pine air, smiled to ourselves, and closed our eyes to sleep the unburdened sleep of woodsmen.
Except for the mosquito bites, it felt good and wholesome.
Everybody has a true life story or two which need telling, if only as a soul-cleansing confession. Here’s mine:
Some years ago Carolann and I agreed to take care of a parakeet for our friends while they went on vacation.
I know what you’re thinking; I thought the same thing: who needs baby sitters for a bird? You clean the cage, leave plenty of food and water and then go on vacation without giving the bird a second thought, right? Of course I’m right.
The thing is, our friend Tim (not his real name) had inexplicably fallen head-over-tiny-little-claws in love with this bird. He taught it to sit on his shoulder and play with him and to take food from his lips. I’m pretty sure that Tim would have taken the bird to bed with him at night but for fear that his wife, Susan (not her real name,) would roll over and crush the little guy.
Tim loved that bird completely, selflessly and without qualification and for that reason we felt a huge weight of responsibility for its well-being, as much as if it had been a human child left in our care.
But, still — one small bird in a small cage. How much trouble could that be?
Well, I’ll tell you…
We had three cats at the time so we wisely put the parakeet cage in a spare bedroom with the door closed tightly. Or, so we thought.
One day we came home from someplace and discovered the spare room door open, the cage on the floor with its door open, and a few horrifying feathers scattered here and there.
No sign of the bird.
After some frenzied searching and to our indescribable relief we found the parakeet literally trembling on the floor in a corner. Miraculously he had survived by scurrying from the terrorizing lightning pursuit of one to three monstrous cat demons, each a hundred times larger than himself!
You can just imagine!
Making cooing, soothing noises and with words of quiet reassurance we further terrified the little creature by picking it up and gently putting it back in its cage. We gave it fresh food and water just to be sweet, closed the door and left it alone to cry into its pillow and gather its wits.
An hour later the bird was dead.
Heart attack brought on by residual stress, or so they tell us.
Carolann and I were mortified. Tim and Susan would be home within a day or two and we had just murdered their baby.
What should we do?? Think!
And of course we reached the only reasonable solution to the crisis:
LIE!!!
We put the dead bird in a small paper bag and drove to a pet store. Honest to God, we did. Nerves jangling as if we were first-time shoplifters, we entered Jungleland and tried to act nonchalant.
“Hi, can I help you?”
“I hope so. Look…” (Opening the bag.) “We need a bird that looks exactly like this.”
I don’t remember if the girl looked at us quizzically or if she choked down a nostril-rattling guffaw. Maybe she did neither. Maybe this sort of thing happens all the time in pet stores, I don’t know. In any case, I didn’t ask and volunteered no explanation.
Miraculously, she found a dead ringer (so to speak) for our deceased charge. She netted it, we exchanged our lifeless bird-in-a-bag for the lively, but nervous, bird-in-a-box. We paid the cashier fifteen bucks plus tax and like Lucy and Ethel we hightailed it back home accompanied by a nervous laugh track and suspenseful bumper music.
“WAH-WAH-WAH-WAAAAAHHHHHH…”
Fade to commercial.
Tim and Susan returned from vacation happy, relaxed and refreshed but Tim was very anxious to hold his baby.
Carolann and I, shameful deceivers we had become, managed to hug them with warm smiles and, you should pardon the expression, give them the bird.
We held our breaths for about a week when Susan called on the phone and mentioned to Carolann, as if it were a passing thought, that the bird was acting peculiar. He didn’t seem as affectionate as he had before; seemed to have forgotten his tricks; wouldn’t sit on Tim’s shoulder; actually pecked at him!
We collapsed, Carolann confessed and we are both going to Hell.
Tim and Susan were stunned but held their disappointment as best they could. They didn’t chastise us and though it has never become a funny memory for us to laugh about over dinner and a glass of wine, they have continued to be our friends, albeit at some safe distance.
I think Godparenting their two sons is pretty much out of the question.
Pardon my French, but what in H-E-double-hockey-sticks is wrong with recipe writers?
Yesterday I had a craving for Swedish meatballs.
(I’ve been watching a lot of Winter Olympics cross-country skiing and while I feel a little sorry for the hapless Norwegians and their maddeningly inferior waxes, those crazy Swedes and their rhythmic, hypnotic, ponderous crab walks have swept me off my feet!)
So, I went to my favorite online recipe source for Alton Brown’s Swedish meatballs recipe. As always, I got sucked in by the relative simplicity of the recipe and the claim of convenience that it would only take me thirty minutes to prepare.
Oh, puh-leeze!
Having undertaken many previous cooking odysseys by the absurd assertions of ease of preparation you’d think I would know better.
It’s not Chef Brown’s fault, of course, that the blade in our food chopper is mangled and I had to finely chop the onion by hand but that, alone, took ten minutes. And even if it hadn’t, even if I was as fast with a knife as a Benihana cook carving a chicken, you will notice that Master Brown’s directions say nothing at all about the need to actually CHOP the onion. It simply and blithely says to ADD it to the pan.
Aha! Now I get it!
As a wordsmith it kills me to admit I now have to validate a superfluous and redundant (and repetitious) phrase that turns people like me frigid with contempt: PRE-PLANNING!
In order to prepare food in the length of time promised by the recipe you have to get all your ingredients at the line, in the starting blocks, before you pull the trigger on the clock.
The good master directs me to weigh and shape the meatballs by hand…
…no mention of how long that should take, so let me tell you: fifteen minutes! Maybe you’re faster than I am. Maybe you’re less persnickety about perfection of size and uniformity in shape. Good for you. It will still take you ten minutes to shape 30 meatballs by hand.
Then, you can simply ADD the meatballs to your chopped onions, which are happily “sweating” in a pan with clarified butter.
Now, there’s nothing I dislike more than people who gripe about things without offering solutions, so here’s mine.
I propose the following example be adopted as the standard guideline for all future publications of recipes:
Cooking time: 25 minutes.
Alton Brown’s prep time: 30 minutes.
Your prep time: one hour.
Your prep time if your food chopper is broken: one hour, ten minutes. Your prep time if your spice cupboard is disorganized: one hour, 15 minutes.
Your prep time if you have to go next door to borrow nutmeg and/or allspice: one hour, 30 minutes. (Add 15 minutes for excessively chatty neighbor.)
Your prep time if you don’t have a fancy, expensive KitchenAid ® stand mixer: one hour, 50 minutes.
Your prep time if you have to Google “clarified butter:” one hour, 55 minutes.
Your prep time if this particular meal was a spontaneous decision rather than planned and you don’t typically keep heavy cream in your fridge, so you have to “run up to the store” and get some: two hours, 30 minutes.
Your prep time if you’re a big believer in “cleaning as you go:” three hours.
Speaking of go, I must. The curling semi-finals are about to begin and I’m getting a hankering for some nice Schweinemedallionen mit Spatzle.
“‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky!” One day not too long ago I wandered into a 7-11 storeand hid my smile from the clerk. He appeared to be on the fringe of his “golden years,” rotund, gray and balding. He was the only guy in the place and had Jimi Hendrix blaring from his boomboxbehind the counter. I thought it was pretty funny that an old guy like him was digging Jimi. Then, what you have already figured out hit me.
That “old guy” was my age. Something happened in the mid-1960s that suddenly narrowed all future generation gaps. It was a social sea change rooted in technology and nourished with an elixir concocted by a new breed of post be-bop musicians. Everything about them was radical, from their long, unkempt hair to their wildly-colorful disdain of fashion sense to their electronically amplified screams of youthful exuberance.
Our parents were apoplectic.
And we dug that, too.
“Yi-pi-yi-ay! Yi-pi-yi-o! Ghost riders in the sky…”
When my mother graduated from high school in June of 1949 the top-selling record of the day was Riders In The Sky by Vaughn Monroe. Twenty years later, June of 1969, I graduated high school and the number one song was Get Back by the Beatles.
So, what? So, this:
I’m not sure I have ever heard a Vaughn Monroe song but I’m absolutely positive I never owned one. On the other hand my son owns a nearly full Beatles collection and knows as much about the songs and the group as I do. He also loves the music of Creedence, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beach Boys and other artists who made their impact years before he was born.
And it works the other way around, too. I believe my contemporaries and I keep up with cultural changes much more readily than my grandparents did. When I was a lad you wouldn’t find me sitting with Grandma in front of her Philco TV watching the Lawrence Welk Show but here I am, my grandparents’ age, parked in front of the big flat screen Sony for each new episode of American Idol.
And it’s not just music, either. I’m pretty sure neither of my grandfathers would have been caught dead at Disneyland. I’d bet on it, in fact. My dad went there with the family on our vacation when I was a young teen but I don’t remember him riding the Matterhorn or Dumbo. He would never stand near Mickey Mouse or Goofy for a photo op.By the time I became a dad, though, Disneyland was a whole new ballgame. That’s not surprising since the park was born after I was and having grown up with the Magic Kingdom experience under my belt, enjoying it with my kids and grand-kids just comes naturally. In fact, Carolann and I have annual passes.
So, here’s the thing: While we always hear people bemoaning the loss of American family relationships I’m not buying it.When I was a kid, yes, we all ate dinner together at a single table, at the same time, without the TV. But frankly, I don’t recall it as being a particularly nurturing and bonding experience. I don’t remember it being anything at all except dinner.
So, while my son didn’t often have meatloaf at the family dinner table he did have me at his Chuck E. Cheese’s birthday parties and I like to believe he enjoyed that.
I’m no social scientist so I really can’t figure out what it all means, if anything, but that has never stopped me from reaching a happy conclusion and here it is:
If our parents are the Greatest Generation, as is the title applied to them in recent years, we are surely the Coolest. So far, anyway.
I have a mental block about when I lost my dad, Don Williams.
I can never remember the exact date nor even the year for sure, but I think it was eight years ago this month, February of 2002. I guess I just don’t want to think about that.
I still miss him terribly.
I miss his kind, warm smile and the feel of his arms around me. I can remember the sweet smell of his pipe and cigars as surely as if I was with him in his old pickup truck right now.
My dad was the smartest man I ever knew and he’s still my hero.
Dad taught me how to camp and fish and how to use a slingshot. He helped me with my homework and took me to major league baseball games in San Francisco.
In the evenings after he got home from work Dad would sit in his chair, fill his pipe and read the newspaper. (The Sacramento Bee was an afternoon paper in those days.) When he held up the Bee, spread open in front of his face where he couldn’t see me, I would sneak up on him and plunk that paper with a flick of a finger to startle him. I thought that was a hoot! Sometimes he’d growl at me for it but often he would launch himself out of his chair and wrestle me to the floor and tickle me until I hurt and had laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe.
Sometimes I’d just be walking through the living room and he would quietly crumple an empty cigarette pack into a tight little ball and throw it at my head, hard, just for fun.
That hurt too, but it was fun.
As I grew up, so did Dad. He and my mother were divorced when I was a young adult. Then, when it was my turn to divorce and I was in great emotional pain he took me out for beers and to shoot some pool. He counseled me some but not much. What could he say? He just wanted to be with me in my time of need and he was right, I have never needed anybody as much as I needed him then. I know nobody is perfect but he was as close to it as anybody I ever met in my life. Still, there is one other thing I know for sure about my dad:
When I was about eighteen and still living at home I bought a used Fiat Spyder. It was a slick, sporty little convertible and I loved zooming around the winding roads near our rural home in Loomis, California. One day the Fiat’s gas pedal spring broke. This was the spring that allowed the gas pedal to lift up when I removed my foot to slow or stop the car. Dad wasn’t much of a mechanic but he fixed it in a jiffy. Took him…I don’t know, ten or fifteen seconds.
He tied a rope to the gas pedal so that when I need to use the brake I could just lift my foot and pull on the rope simultaneously to return the pedal to its normal position!
Oh, I have more stories like this.
As Jimmy Durante used to say, “I got a million of ’em!”
For some inexplicable reason I awoke this morning at 4:48 with this song running through my head:
There’s a hold up in the Bronx,
Brooklyn’s broken out in fights!
There’s a traffic jam in Harlem
That’s backed up to Jackson Heights!
There’s a scout troop short a child,
Kruschev’s due at Idlewild!!
CAR 54, WHERE ARE YOU??!!
If you never heard those words, it doesn’t matter. Move on and have a great day!
If you do know what this is about, you’re already shaking your head and thinking, “Oh, my God…”
I awoke this morning with the theme song from a 47-year-old TV sitcom running through my head, a song I haven’t heard in at least 35 years.
My working theory is that at some point in life our mental filing cabinets start to get too heavy and the little wheels in the drawers break down. Those little folders collapse and some old piece of useless memory crap spills out all over the floor.
