Uncategorized Archives : Page 19 of 25 : The Aging of Aquarius

They call me “Hoss.”

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?

Drill, Baby, drill!

I went to the dentist yesterday.

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.

“Feeling comfortable?” he asked.

What goes around…

“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.

Oh, yes. It comes around.

In the heart of a campfire

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

—————————————————————————————–

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.

Swedish meatballs

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.

Father knows best. Usually.

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:

He did some damned silly things.

I recently wrote about that incident in the garage with the blue spray paint. I have quite a few stories like that and they amaze me because Dad was a truly intelligent man. Everybody said so, not just me.

But he did some real bonehead stuff!

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!”

Making reservations for the cackle factory…

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.

That’s what I’m going to tell the doctor.

I’m making the appointment right now.

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.

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.