Dave Williams, Author at The Aging of Aquarius : Page 25 of 31

Am I blue?

“Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.” — Will Rogers

Summer days in the Sacramento Valley are scorchers. Back in the 1950s and 60s when I was growing up we didn’t have air conditioning. Nobody did. Our home had a swamp cooler on the roof directly over the hallway to the bedrooms, adjacent to the kitchen. The hallway had a gray tile floor. Not nice ceramic tiles, just the cheap asbestos tiles that came as standard equipment in a 12-thousand-dollar house.

Asbestos, of course, causes cancer but since we didn’t know that at the time, none of us got it.

On summer days, I could generally be found lying on that cool, cancer-wreaking floor, bare-footed and bare-stomached, reading Little Lulu and Sad Sack comic books directly beneath the huge hole in the ceiling and the water-dripping blast of air from the swamp cooler above. It was cool, the floor was hard, but I was seven. As nice as it was I couldn’t lie there all day.

Eventually I would wander outside and run through the sprinkler to cool off. Then I’d look around and see if anything interesting was going on.

They didn’t charge us for water in those days and we apparently had more than anybody needed. We’d leave it running all day, soaking the front yard and pouring like a river into the gutter, down the street, into the drain and who knew, or cared, where from there — just in case we wanted to run through the sprinkler.

Sometimes we didn’t. But the water ran, just in case.

I know that sounds like wanton criminal behavior now but at the time we thought no more of leaving the water running than we did about smoking cigarettes in church or the grocery store. Our dads spent a couple of hours each evening talking with neighbors, all the while washing the dirt off the driveway with the hose. Water was water as air is air. We had all we needed. Nobody hassled us or tried to make us feel guilty or threatened to fine us for using water. I guess it just hadn’t occurred to them yet.

One day I wandered into the garage where my dad was fiddling around.

My dad loved to putter in the garage. At least, that’s what I thought at the time. Now that I’m older and thinking with some perspective I’m wondering if maybe he was just bored to death and puttering was nothing more to him than lying in the dripping hallway with Nancy and Sluggo comics was to me.

Sometimes Dad would work on the car but most of the time he just puttered. What else was there to do? The TV only had three channels and unless it was time for The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports there was nothing to watch in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.

(Channel 6, the educational channel, had seemingly nonstop French lessons which I thought was pretty cool but my dad was from the World War II era and in no mood to learn French.)

So, on this particular day Dad was puttering in the garage, as usual, painting something blue with a spray can. I don’t remember what he was painting. That’s actually the definition of puttering: finding something that would look or work better with a minor, thoroughly irrelevant “improvement” that nobody else would likely notice or appreciate.

When he was just about finished spray painting whatever it was the paint can neared the end of its cargo and began to sputter. Dad shook it mightily but it would only spit a blob of blue here and there while farting useless blasts of aerosol propellant (which didn’t cause cancer but, in our blissful ignorance, was obliterating the ozone layer of our atmosphere and destroying life on Earth as we now know it.)

You see where this is going, don’t you?

Never one to waste a drop of paint, my thrifty dad grabbed the ever-handy churchkey on his work bench, gave the can one more good shake just for the hell of it, and punched a hole into the bottom of that fourteen-ounce rocket.

It took off like a Kamikaze woodpecker with a firecracker up its ass!

That paint can flew around the garage with the thoroughly chaotic and mindless pattern of a balloon released before being tied off.

That can had more paint left in it than Carter’s had pills.

By the time it landed the can had spent its passion, smiling weakly, surprised and yet victorious at its expense.

Everything in the garage was spotted blue. It all looked like a three-dimensional Rohrshach inkblot.

I was blue from head to tummy to legs and toes.

The garage floor and walls were blue. The ceiling was blue. Our lawn mower, camping gear, boxes of Christmas tree ornaments and all the weird, useless crap that doesn’t have a place and no certain use, but which you can’t bring yourself to throw away…it was all blue!

BLUE, BLUE, BLUE!

I don’t remember what I thought of it all but I do remember Dad.

His glasses were spattered blue, as were his nose, ears, lips and the cigar stogie on which they were still puffing furiously.

Our beautiful collie, Rusty, still lying sedately at my feet, was blue.

Mom wouldn’t let us in the house.

Well, it’s not that she wouldn’t. She just couldn’t. She was incapable. After Dad rapped on the sliding glass patio door for her she dutifully responded, saw us, immediately assessed the situation and collapsed in a helpless heap of rubbery-legged hysterics.

Dad fumed, snuffed out his blue panatella, grinding it into his expensive self-poured concrete patio with a blue-spotted flip-flop

Eventually, Mom was able to regain the use of her legs, find the floor and unlock the door. Snorting and giggling she followed Dad’s instructions, taking a gas can to the filling station and returning with a full of “regular” gas so that Dad could scrape the blue off of every square inch of our bodies.

The toxic, cancer-causing (these days) fumes of fully-leaded gasoline nearly killed us in the shower.

We all survived that day and even my darling, now-departed Dad was eventually able to recount it at family holiday dinners with a smile and a rueful shake of his head.

But these days, as Mom gets older, I avoid the story altogether lest it send her to join him beyond the pale.

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.

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 neighborhoods from sunup to sundown free from fear of death or abduction. Nobody was ever snatched off the street. That possibility never even crossed our minds.

We didn’t have drive-by shootings. Hell, 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 imagined.

Cars didn’t have seat belts until the mid-sixties. It took years before most people used them. They seemed silly to those of us who grew up literally bouncing between the back and front seats everywhere our parents drove us. They didn’t mind in the least as long as we didn’t start fighting.

We had house fans with no protective cage 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.

I could go on and on…

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 feet and butts.

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.

Dogs ran free when we were kids.

You let the dog out of the house and he was gone, who knows where, until he came back to the porch and demanded re-entry. That might be the next day or the day after that. If he bit somebody while he was out you never knew about it. If he tangled with another dog you’d see him trot back into the house at dinner time, tongue and tail wagging happily, 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 two of his four legs Skippy was good to go.

We had killer toys.

When I was a kid we would choose up sides and have wars using toy guns that were nearly as deadly as real ones. We had air-powered BB-rifles and pistols 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!” Nobody ever stopped us from trying but the warning was issued occasionally and apparently it was heeded. Nobody 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 and whittled the wooden shaft into a pencil-sharp point.

And mind you, this was all going on shortly after World War II ended.

We had firecrackers. We made bottle rockets out of wooden match heads cautiously jammed tightly together into glass aspirin bottles. If you weren’t as careful as a brain surgeon they became instantaneous 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.

We weren’t very tall, maybe four feet. He’d always roll out of the way before the rock hit the ground. He never failed.

We climbed trees, great cottonwoods, scampering twenty or thirty 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. My grandma sprayed Bactine on my injuries and gave me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on Wonder white bread. I watched Popeye on TV and felt a lot better.

We jumped off the roof of my grandparents’ house with completely ineffective home-made parachutes.

One of my goofy uncles used to bounce on the roof on a pogo stick.

And we wondered why Grandpa drank.

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

They missed so much.

At home with the Cleavers

Carolann and I were watching TV the other evening when our seven-year-old grandson, Isaiah, asked if he could join us.

It was close to his bedtime and I figured he’d be bored to death by the movie we were watching anyway so his Nana told him yes but said he would have to be quiet so we could hear the movie.

Isaiah’s a great kid, he really is. He’s a little squirmy. He did start making some seven-year-old noises and we had to ask him to pipe down a couple of times. But the movie got his attention when the teenage girl asked the teenage boy if he would like to see her breasts.

“Breasts!” Isaiah said with some amazement. “That’s a woman’s body part, huh?”

Yes, we told him. I don’t know about Carolann but I started to get a little nervous, having no idea where this movie was going. But Isaiah solved the problem for us immediately:

“Should I not watch this?” he asked.

“Yes,” Nana told him. “Don’t watch.”

I told you, he’s a great kid. A good boy.

He turned his face away from the screen and listened to some dialogue that couldn’t have given him a clue as to what was going on. He was perfectly patient for a moment. And then, still not looking at the TV, he asked quite loudly and in a voice I can only describe as enthusiastic curiosity:

“Are they HUGE?”

Rain stories, part one

I love rain.

I don’t love driving or walking in it, of course, but sitting inside a cozy, warm house while God cleans and replenishes our world is high on my list of the best things in life. If there’s a fireplace in the room it goes up another notch or two.

Yesterday though, I had to drive to work in a pounding rain — highly unusual in Southern California and all the more dangerous for that reason. That nobody knows how to drive in the rain here is not only an accepted fact, it is the subject of much chuckling and chortling among Southern Californians. Not that it’s funny in the least. Busy freeways with people smacking into each other as if we were all driving carnival bumper cars is very stressful.

I was running a little late and didn’t take time to eat before I left the house. I figured a drive-thru burger would do just fine.

Now, the funny thing about the Carls Jr. in our neighborhood is that it was constructed backward. By that I mean the drive-thru window is on the wrong side of the building. Consequently, when you reach the window it is also on the wrong side of your car, the passenger’s side. I had to get out of the car to pick up my order.

The rain was hard and relentless. Not wanting the inside of the car to get wet, I left the keys in the ignition, engine running and closed the door behind me, making sure first that it wasn’t locked. Really, I did that.

The moment I stepped away from the vehicle THE DAMNED SECURITY SYSTEM IN THAT MODERN MARVEL LOCKED ME OUT!!

So, here I am — locked out of my car, waving the drive-thru customers behind me around my steaming, wiper-active, warm, dry, inaccessible 2005 Toyota Sienna.

I know some of those people are still telling the story of the idiot they saw yesterday standing in a downpour, without a jacket or umbrella, calmly eating a Western Bacon Cheeseburger.

The loving “ism”

Racism; deplorable. Sexism; unacceptable.

Ageism; adorable.

I recently annoyed some friends in an email chat group by expressing my irritation at the proliferation of jokes about old people. They think I’m overreacting. It’s no big deal, people have always made fun of old folks, right?

People still tell race jokes, too, but at least we know that’s disrespectful and wrong.

Look at what I just found at a website called “Old People Are Funny.”

If an old man falling on an escalator is funny to you, go ahead and close this window and go to that site, instead. It’s a damned giggle fest.

Black birthday balloons! Hoo-hah, how funny is that?

Look, I know it’s mostly in good, innocent fun and we should always, at all ages, be able to laugh at ourselves. It’s not that. No, what gripes me is the fact that many people, maybe all of us eventually, buy into the notion that getting old means we’ll be doddering, slobbering, laughable old fools. So, we simply assume the role, sit down in the rocking chair and watch the world pass by without so much as waving to it.

The jokes take us by the hand and lead us there

And, it’s not even the jokes that bother me as much as the allusions to how “cute” old people are.

I just received an email that had a link to a video of an elderly man and his wife playing the piano together. They weren’t doing anything amazing. They weren’t playing Flight of the Bumblee in rounds and different, harmonic keys. They weren’t playing the notes with their noses, toes, elbows and tongues. They were just playing a little tune together. Isn’t that cute!?

Why? What’s cute about it? If these people were in their thirties or forties instead of their eighties it wouldn’t be adorable. Nobody would have turned a camera on them in the first place.

I simply think we should treat old people the same way they were treated when they were young adults and middle-aged. Give them the same respect we afford people we take more seriously. Judge them by the content of their character and the wisdom of their years rather than the number of them.

And, by God, when an old person is being a pain in the ass, unload on ’em! Don’t give them a pass because of age.

It’s hard to text a sigh.

I know I’m being silly. Well, I don’t think it’s silly but I know a lot of people do. And certainly, part of my concern is personal and yes, I am offended at the idea I will soon be marginalized by stereotypes. Please don’t ever refer to me as a “senior citizen” or some other gentle euphemism. I will simply be old and wear my age as a badge of achievment, thank you.

I will laugh, I’ll converse as intelligently as I’m able and I’ll keep writing as long as I can. But I won’t be cute, okay?

Old dog, new economy

I’ve been spoiled my whole life. Never been poor.

It’s nothing to be ashamed of, no more than being poor is. It is simply our circumstance for a million reasons, including dumb luck – good, tragic or in-between. I’ve never been truly wealthy but until very recently I never had to pinch pennies, either.

And, brother, I did not!

About a year ago I lost my job and spent three months collecting unemployment checks. It put a temporary dent in our lifestyle and knocked a huge hole in my self-esteem which we won’t deal with in this report.

(You’re welcome.)

I did eventually get a new job but at just 25% the salary I had been used to for the past twenty years or so. 25%! Now we’re talking lifestyle dents Geico would just write off as a total loss.

And then — this is the really funny part, the Oliver Hardy-like, slap-yourself-in-the-face consternation moment — I recently lost that new job, got yet another, newer one, and am earning yet less!

Isn’t that a hoot!?

I just bought a big bag of dry kidney beans.

Dry kidney beans will be the metaphor for this epiphany and maybe my entire life.

When my best high school buddy, Ray Hunter, and I moved into our first apartment in 1969 we went to the grocery store and bought a lot of stuff we didn’t know how to prepare, including a big bag of dry kidney beans. Ray’s mom always had some so we considered it a mysterious staple, a necessity. We also bought two steaks to celebrate our new independence and our first meal in our shared home.

We bought chuck steaks and tried to fry them.

Since that glorious, giddy evening at Albertson’s forty years ago I have never again purchased dry beans or chuck steak. I figured they were a terrific waste of money.

And now, at 58, I’ve learned something drop-jaw amazing:

Did you know kidney beans in the can cost more than twice as much as if you’re willing to buy them in a bag and simply soak them in water overnight?

I know a lot of things about a lot of things but that’s something I didn’t learn until today. More to the point, though, is that even if I had known that, until now it wouldn’t have mattered a — well… a hill of beans to me.

I recently bought the Albertson’s generic-brand of Grape Nuts® and it was three dollars less than the same size Post® brand box! THREE DOLLARS SAVINGS ON A SINGLE BOX OF CEREAL!

For the first time in my adult life there is no such thing as “junk mail.”

I anticipate the daily arrival of retail coupons and supermarket ads as if they were Christmas cards or love letters!

I’ve learned to make beef jerky for our dogs in the kitchen rather than spend twenty bucks for it at the pet store!

The crockpot is my best friend!

Somebody stop me before I buy a Flowbee® and start cutting my own hair!

Saving money is wildly fun!

I’m clipping coupons, I’m rifling through cookbooks I’ve never opened, exorcizing all references to specific brands.

Bless me and yet save me, I am a born-again-for-the-first-time penny pincher!

And I promise —

…I swear to you!…

— when I start turning my underwear inside out I will seek help.

A child for life

Late on Christmas Eve my grandson spotted an intruder in our home.

I suppose intruder isn’t exactly the right word since this old man was welcome and expected. Still, we never know what time he will arrive and he never bothers to knock on the door or announce himself.

Isaiah was awakened by his dad about 11:30. They crept silently down the stairs and peeked around the corner into the parlor.

And, there he was! The man who keeps us tethered securely to our childhood sense of miracles, joy and wonder.

As we watch helplessly, first our children and then theirs grow inexorably closer to grownup problems and occasional tragedy. We want nothing more than to hold them on our laps, suspended in time forever, but they just won’t sit still.

Some may argue that showing a child Santa Claus in his own home is an artful deceit that grooms him for disappointment. I beg to differ.

I never saw Santa in our house but he always came. I believe in him with all my heart.

On cold December nights I would perch in my bedroom window and scan the sky for a flying sleigh pulled by magical reindeer. I was no fool, even at seven or eight. But I believed it was possible to see Santa on his journey because I wanted to believe.

To this day I look at the sky every Christmas Eve and wonder where the old elf is at that moment. And while I’m looking for him I see something else, something I see nearly every night of my life and yet rarely notice.

I see the heavens.

All of God’s stars are there and somewhere among them is the One that made all this childhood joy possible and ageless.

And every Christmas Eve I am a child again. A child for life. And so shall my children be thanks to the miracle of one night every year.

Dearest family and friends,

So many of you have warmed our hearts and graced our home with your beautiful Christmas cards, family photos, personal notes and newsletters over the past couple of weeks I confess I have been enjoying them with a dollop of guilt.

It has been a tough year for Carolann and me financially and nothing stresses the heart and soul more than worrying about how to buy food, juggle the bills and remain employed with some degree of security.

And, most importantly, to always wear the infectious, beaming, loving smile our loved ones richly deserve.

I don’t want to belabor the subject or start whining. Good grief, I have riches a kingdom couldn’t buy: good health, honest love, and many hearts happy to see me waddling down a sidewalk or hallway in approach with my Popeye-squinty smile.

Carolann, of course, lights every room and heart she enters, and she bursts into them all.

So, I hope it’s a small comfort to you to know that we are digging deep to get ourselves out of relatively modest debts with our modest incomes.

I’m not quite “pushing sixty” yet but I am pulling fifty and we want to retire eventually. We’re trimming our sails, even to the point of cutting out 44-cents stamps.

This is your Christmas card.

We hope you’re not offended that you can’t hold it in your hand or tape it over your fireplace.

We love buying, wrapping and giving gifts and cards as much as anybody. But, for now we hope you’ll read this and know it serves as a personal prayer from Carolann and me to each of you:

Bless you and yours. And please know that you have all our love for these sacred holidays and the new year to come.

God bless us, every one!

Dave and Carolann

Things you’ll remember: Part Two

Nothing lasts forever. Except, perhaps, forever.

Before I got onto that honey bee tangent I was talking about the things from our lives which are rapidly passing into memory. And, in a mere generation even the memory will be gone.

Technology does that. It creates new ways of doing old things and mind-blowing new things most of us could never imagine. That’s cool stuff but what’s even better, I think, is that technology sweeps us all forward in a stream, rushing past ever-changing landscapes.

Take my profession, for example: broadcasting. It is rapidly become anachronistic.

For my forty years of experience and supposed expertise I can’t for a minute understand why music radio stations still exist. Who needs them? The human factor, camaraderie and entertainment, were distilled from them years ago. Now we’re left with mostly mindless jukeboxes that play songs they merely guess we might like to hear (and commercials they know damned well we don’t want to hear.) The fact that we all carry our own radio stations containing thousands of songs of our own selection in a device the size of a matchbox seems to have been missed entirely by my industry.

Talk radio is still viable but only because there is money yet to be made in it, which soon won’t be the case because technology has given everybody a pulpit: a microphone, a web cam, a podcast and a blog.

I am a lamplighter in the twenty-first century.

Luckily for me, I am approaching retirement age. My younger colleagues need to get scrambling to learn new ways to earn a living. And honestly, as much as I have loved my career I won’t bemoan its passing. That’s the way things work in a world driven by creative human ingenuity. We dream, we strive, we achieve; we move down that stream.

Last week Carolann, our seven-year-old grandson, Isaiah, and I were singing along with Christmas songs on the car radio. When Feliz Navidad came on we all had a bit of trouble remembering the lyrics. (That’s pretty funny considering there are literally just six words in that song plus a seven-word English translation.) Specifically, we were all butchering “Prospero Año y Felicidad.” When the song ended Carolann was repeating the words aloud so that she might remember that new year greeting en español. But Isaiah had a simple solution:

“Play it again, Nana.”

He couldn’t imagine a device that played a song one time, and one time only.

Goodbye, radio.

Things you’ll remember: Part One

I just read an amazing article about the Top 25 Things Vanishing From America.

Some of them are obvious: fax machines, homes without cable TV, drive-in theaters, etc. These are mostly gadgets and ways of doing things that technological advancements have improved into oblivion.

Pit toilets is on the list. I won’t miss those, will you?

Other things on the list will be certainly missed by those of us over fifty who will soon bore our grandkids with wistful reminiscences that begin, “When I was a boy…” These include newspapers, magazines, barbecue charcoal and the family farm.

Kiss ’em goodbye.

The decline of the worldwide honey bee population is the one that startles me the most. Imagine one-third of all humans disappearing from the face of the Earth in just the past sixteen months. It sounds like the plot of a science fiction horror flick but that’s exactly what has happened to honey bees, apparently.

When I was a boy…

…we feared for our bare feet in suburban lawns, parks and playgrounds that were all infested by hundreds of the vicious, stinging insects toiling in the white clover.

They were everywhere, remember? Who didn’t get stung at least once every summer? Who among us didn’t capture them in jars we prepared with fresh grass and flower buds for their enjoyment?

Your grandkids will probably never do that. Very likely they’ll never be stung by a bee. Their kids may never even see one.

I’m sure technology will find a way to compensate agricultural industries for the loss of the honey bee. But I think it’s very sad, just the same.

When a bee stung us we cried because it hurt, but a large part of the pain was in knowing that while we would survive in discomfort to eventual full recovery the bee, itself, would die from its defensive attack.

That’s a metaphor our grandkids really need.