It’s hot. Throw off the bedspread. Can’t feel the fan.
Such a pretty sound. But it’s so loud.
How can it go on like that all night? And so loud? Most birds don’t make any noise at night. None. Sun goes down, they shut up. This one’s different.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about anything. Think about something else.
I forgot to clean the porch, the front door. And the light globe, too. And the pine cones in the basket. Need to hose them off. Need to get the truck into the shop. Hope it’s not expensive. Can’t afford it. Don’t think about money problems in bed, don’t ever do that. Think of something else. Anything.
Damn, that bird is loud!
“Dammit!”
“I know, Honey. Try to go to sleep.”
That was lame. Try to go to sleep?
3:14. Relax. Let your mind relax. Stop looking at the clock. Don’t think at all. Wait for the weird thoughts, the weird semi-dreams that morph into REM sleep. Don’t clench. Relax.
How many different types of birds is it mocking? How many different songs is it singing? Fascinating, actually. But so loud! Louder than the party and the fight on the street the other night when we called the cops. The bird is actually louder than a bunch of fighting drunks!
Still, it’s such a pretty sound. I’ll probably miss it when it’s gone. Won’t be able to sleep. LOL.
Wish I could call the cops on the bird. Wish I had a pellet gun. No, I don’t. Of course I don’t. Wouldn’t shoot it. Couldn’t find it anyway. It’s in a tree outside, hidden by moonshadows. It’s everywhere. Sounds like it’s right here in the bedroom. It’s out there.
3:46. What? Must have dozed off. But I don’t remember, so it doesn’t count. The bird is still singing. Carolann is thrashing and moaning.
I swear to you, this is a true story. I’m telling it with no embellishment, exactly as it happened not five minutes ago.
You think advertising isn’t effective?
It’s 6:13 on a Saturday morning. I know that precisely because I was starting my coffee maker and it has a clock on it.
Seven-year-old Isaiah appears, rubbing his eyes and telling me he sprained his groin while sleeping.
I don’t know. I didn’t ask.
A moment later he’s in our TV room as usual for a Saturday morning but instead of cartoons I hear something that sounds like an infomercial. I expect that to change to Spongebob Squarepants momentarily but it doesn’t. It’s too loud. I go into the TV room and ask him to turn it down. He does, but he still doesn’t change the channel and he is transfixed on whatever he’s watching.
“Isaiah,” I say, “why are you watching a commercial for a floor sweeper?”
Life is difficult. It’s complicated. Kids don’t understand that.
Well, why would they? We handle all the complicated stuff for them. They just play. That’s their job and most of them do it exceedingly well. You can even say they’re experts at it. The sad thing is that we were all kids once but for some reason as we get older and the world gets more complex we think we need to find more complex ways of having fun. It usually involves a lot of money and frequently a lot of time and planning.
Now you’re thinking, “Oh, fiddle-faddle!I don’t need a fancy vacation or dinner at an expensive restaurant to have fun.” Maybe not but I’ll bet I can’t get you to giggle your way through an afternoon by playing in a cardboard box.
Forgive me for saying so but I can’t imagine you and your closest friend squealing with delight for hours while running through a sprinkler.
And I’ll bet most of us would consider planting flowers a job rather than a pleasure. Maybe both if gardening is a hobby or one of your particular adult pleasures but it is still definitely a chore.
My grandsons just don’t know how complicated life is.
Please don’t tell them. They’ll figure it out in their own time.
Nearly sixty years ago my dad did something that seems pretty goofy now, but at the time we were all amazed and impressed. He was very proud of himself.
This was back in the fifties when TV was black-and-white, we only had two or three channels and a huge number of American households didn’t even have a TV yet. Nobody had more than one. That would have been as silly and pointless as having two cars!
TV commercials in those days seem quaintly funny in retrospect. Some seem flat-out unbelievable. Click here and check this out:
The commercials annoyed my dad. Not the messages themselves, just the fact that there were any. He thought all TV programs should be absolutely free. I don’t know if he ever considered why anybody would bother to create them if they were.
I don’t think it bothered him much that his favorite program, The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, was presented by the Gillette Safety Razor company. Boxing was purely formatted and made sense: three minutes of two guys trying to kill each other followed by a one minute commercial and then back to the fight.
I think Dad felt that having us watch a commercial in that situation was more a matter of respecting the fighters’ private dignity than commercialism. I think he also figured — as an afterthought — it was better that his six-year-old son watch an Old Spice commercial rather than be subjected to the between-rounds visuals of two guys sweating, bleeding and spitting teeth into a bucket while receiving one minute of facial reconstructive surgery as fat men yelled at them before they go back out to resume the effort to kill or be killed.
Dad was sensitive like that.
Incongruous as it seems now, any of these commercials might have popped up between fight rounds. I remember them all:
But Dad seemed to think that TV commercials were essentially the same thing as somebody intruding on our private home life. It was almost as if John Cameron Swayze or George Fenneman were making a habit of walking right into our living room every few minutes and interrupting our evening’s family entertainment.
So, what did he do?
My dad invented the MUTE switch!
I kid you, not.
Decades before the invention of TiVo and the insufferable mysteries of universal remote control units, my dad attached a long cord to one end of our TV’s speaker through the rear of the console. The other end was attached to a simple two-position plastic switch that allowed him to click the sound on and off at will!
Sure, we still had to watch and wait for the commercials to end but we didn’t have to actually listen to stuff like this…
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.
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.
