Category: Uncategorized

January 15, 2022

It was 72 degrees in North Texas  yesterday. Today we’ll top out at 36. Windy as hell. I love Texas weather.

Picking away at a novel I have been picking at for 34 years, I needed a character description for my protagonist. Nick Nolte sprang to mind because I like him. Not the 80 year-old Nick Nolte, the one most of us remember from 1986, which is when my story is set.

That made me try to remember a particular movie he did with Barbra Streisand. I went to Google. It was called The Prince of Tides, premiered in 1991 based on the novel by Pat Conroy. I liked both, the book and the movie.

The book was published in 1986. Perfect.

Then I realized I haven’t heard much about Nick Nolte or anything at all about Barbra Streisand in recent years except for an occasional political outburst that I generally consider nutty. But who cares? She’s Barbra and she sings like an angel.

I Googled Barbra.

My first thought was, wow… why is she trying so hard to retain her youthful beauty instead of gracefully looking her actual, beautiful age? She’ll be 80 in April. I think looking 80 would be better than looking 80 trying to look 40.

My second thought was that I should be ashamed of myself for my first thought,  judging her appearance. Still, I wondered what she’s been doing since her last semi-memorable movie, Meet the Fockers, which came out in 2004.

Say what you will about Barbra, she’s one of the few true superstars in our lifetime who is so blessed with talent that she’s immediately recognized by just her first name. She is an exquisitely gifted actress, both dramatic and comedic. Her voice is angelic, her ability to interpret lyrics with refined passion is unequaled.  Her voice simply takes me away.

I can overlook Babs’ nutty politics. And hey, if she likes what she sees in the mirror, good for her.

After noodling around on Google some more, I’m thrilled to report that Barbra is still singing as beautifully as ever! Here’s her latest, released just last August. (Notice, she’s not seen in the video. Just sayin’…)

And now you know how I can spend 34 years writing one-third of a story.

February 10, 2009

This morning I took my almost-four-years-old grandson to school.

His parents are out of town and though he spent the night with his maternal grandparents they both leave for work very early. So, I had the honor of driving to their home at 4:30 AM and being on hand when Tyler awoke around 7:00.

He was very pleased to see me.

“Oh, yeah!”

Still wiping the sleep from his eyes he had suddenly remembered that I would be here for him this morning. He flashed a drowsy grin and ran to me, bare feet slapping the wood floor, his favorite soft baby blanket slung over one arm. His arms went up as mine went down and I lifted him high over my head. We hugged and smiled as is our habit and standard greeting.

I guess he thinks I’m sort of special.

At first, I just sat on the couch and held him on my lap, allowing him to wake up gently.

I don’t like brisk, lively beginnings to a day. I like slow, quiet starts and I think Tyler does, too. At least this morning he did. I held him in my big, bear-like grandpa arms and spoke to him softly.

“Did you sleep good?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you ready for a great day?”

“Yeah!”

We talked like that for maybe ten minutes, me asking leading questions designed to put him in a happy frame of mind, him responding affirmatively and with increasing animation. Finally, we decided it was time to get dressed and off to school with a stop at McDonald’s for breakfast.

And that’s the way my day began. No big deal and yet quite remarkable.

As I look back on nearly sixty years of life I am amazed at how little of it I remember with any degree of detail or certainty. I remember the big things but not much of the ordinary and that just makes sense, really.

On a cold, dazzling-bright February morning Tyler and I ate hotcakes and sausage at McDonald’s surrounded by old men in ballcaps sipping coffee and solving the world’s problems.

He’s not going to remember this.

I will never forget it.

I took this picture of our grandson, Isaiah, ten or eleven years ago when he presented himself to me in our kitchen, wearing his skivvies on his head, proclaiming himself Captain Underpants.

Today is his first day at boot camp in the U.S. Navy as Seaman Recruit Isaiah Daniel King.

We got to talk with him on the phone yesterday before he took his oath to tell him we love him and are proud of him. He said he wasn’t nervous but I don’t believe it. When I was 19, as he nearly is, I was scared to death going to Air Force basic training but I didn’t tell him that. I told him some funny stories about my days in basic and he enjoyed them. “You’ll work very hard and be very tired but before you graduate,” I said, “you will be proud of the man you’re becoming.”

He told his Nana he was excited because they told him he’ll get paid his first day in the Navy. When she told me that later I laughed my ass off.

“Yeah, they’ll pay him,” I explained. “Then they’ll march him to the base barber and he’ll have to pay to have his head shaved. After that they’ll march him to the base exchange and give him a long list of personal items he is required to buy with his new money: toiletries, mostly. No snacks, no toys, just gear. Then they’ll march him into a building where he’ll be ordered to strip down to his underwear, give him new underwear and basic training uniforms for scrubs to carry in his arms as they they send him through a gauntlet of people who will inject both arms multiple times with vaccines to ward off every disease known to man, most of which you’ve never heard of.”

I’ve told these stories as endearing memories I’ve kept for more than fifty years. It won’t be funny to Isaiah tonight but I assured him it will be, eventually.

When Isaiah gets back to his barracks today they’ll call him outside for his first day of torturous physical conditioning. They’ll yell him into the chow hall, yell at him to hurry up eating and yell at him some more before yelling it’s time to go to bed. He’ll fall into his “rack” next to fifty other kids as the lights go out. Some of them will be sniffling and crying as quietly as possible in the dark but he’ll hear them.

The next morning will arrive hours before sunrise with the demon sergeant throwing on the stark overhead barracks lighting and yelling at him to wake up, make his bed and fall out.

I suppose things have changed in 50 years but I hope not too much. This is how the military turns boys into men. They know what they’re doing and they almost always get excellent results.

They’ll work his butt off, shouting at him all the way, for the next eight weeks. He’ll be dog tired all the time, collapsing on the floor to sleep next to his bunk because he doesn’t want to mess up the bed he was ordered to  make with crisp hospital corners so tight that a drill instructor can bounce a coin off the top blanket.

But there is fun to be had along the way. In memory, at least, if not at the moment.

I told Isaiah of the time our basic training flight (that’s what they call a group of scrubs in the Air Force) was marching down the street with our drill sergeant screaming in our faces the whole way. Everybody had knit sphincters, not least of all a young man from Metairie, Louisiana, named Dawson. He was a pure Cajun kid who talked funny and couldn’t keep in step with the rest of us. The harder he tried the worse it got and the more he was yelled at. He had one permanently crossed-eye that flicked every which way but the right way as he tried in vain to follow directions. I was marching next to him as the beast with four stripes screamed at him barely inches from his terrified face.

“DAWSON! GET IN STEP! DON’T LOOK AT YOUR FEET, LIFT YOUR HEAD, SHOULDERS BACK, GET IN STEP! EYES STRAIGHT AHEAD, DAWSON! EYES STRAIGHT AHEAD!…BOTH OF THEM!”

When Sergeant Tenorio said “both of them!” six of us collapsed in hysterics. That’s what he was aiming for. He screamed at all of us to get the hell out of his flight and march in shame behind the rest of the group.

Isaiah laughed. That’s what I was aiming for.

He’s a good boy and now he’s becoming a good man.

Here’s my first chapter in the Captain Underpants story, written 11 years ago. It includes the origin of the name.

Captain Underpants

by Dave Williams

My travelogue: July 9, 2021
Wichita Falls, Texas

Nice  things happen when scooting cumulus clouds briefly block the sun of a North Texas summer day. The heat becomes bearable and the breeze gives voice to the poplar trees which rattle their leaves in harmony. The birds and even the cicadas quiet down to listen.

I’m on another writing sabbatical. I just arrived. This is my warmup piece to loosen up the mind and cool down my inclination toward purple prose.

Before I left home today, I got a haircut and had a nice conversation with a thirty-something barber named Jade. Being naturally shy and a native Californian I don’t easily begin conversations with strangers – I feel like I’m intruding in their quiet thoughts – but Jade is a pure Texan with no conversational hesitancy. I don’t remember how she started but she quickly shared a synopsis of her life. She told me about her mother and her mother’s divorce from her father who recently passed, I learned she is remarried and heard a bit about her husband and their kids: a 14-year-old stepdaughter who lives with them, and their 10 month old son. She adores them all, she told me. And there, she stopped. I guessed it was my turn.

Texans suck me in like that. I started talking.

I told Jade I’ll be turning 70 in about a month and that’s a significant milestone. I explained that I, too, have been married twice and that CarolAnn and I each have sons and grandsons we’ve shared from our previous lives.

I may be shy but men staring 70 in the face have no reluctance in sharing our hard won wisdom of age with just the slightest encouragement. Being a Texan she was polite and attentive, which was good enough for me.

I told Jade that I have had many lives: as a child, as a young adult, and through the long journey to creeping old age. I am a man pretty well in tune with life, I said. It was a prideful statement but I said it with quiet dignity.

I explained that I work at staying current with events, social trends, and cultural changes, even the ones that baffle or annoy me. The trick is to go with the flow and don’t worry about things that don’t concern you. I only half jokingly told her I had spent decades trying to fix the world and change other people to my liking before I realized it’s a fool’s errand. I’m fixing myself and that’s all I can do, I declared. She seemed to like that and I took it as encouragement to continue.

I talked of lessons I’ve learned through the trauma of love lost, single parenthood and a new, lasting love found.  My CarolAnn and I just celebrated our 33rd anniversary and are still on our honeymoon, I said proudly.

Jade was entranced. Or, she’s just a very good haircutter.

I told her that life will find its way to a happy conclusion if you’re a good person and get out of the way to let it happen.

Picking up the thread from a moment earlier Jade told me that her husband’s ex is a nice lady and that the two women are discovering the things they have in common. Sharing kids is a big achievement, she boasted. I told her my CarolAnn and I just shared our anniversary with my ex and her husband. Jade laughed and was thrilled by at that.

“Why shouldn’t we all be able to get along?” she exclaimed.

I told her about CarolAnn’s ex and how we’ve shared in raising their son, and that we all embrace the wonderful realities of our tangled lives:

“We were in love, once. We’re in love again,” I said. ‘Why should we lose any of that?”

It was a little like a barroom conversation except neither of us was drinking or bitching. We managed it all in about fifteen minutes.

Rising from the chair I said, “Jade, it was nice meeting you. You did a great job and I’ll book you again.” She smiled sweetly and told me she enjoyed our talk.

I tipped her appropriately but not too much. It was a good haircut but the conversation was priceless.

This morning I had a nice hourlong conversation with my longtime friend and blogging partner, Anita Garner. I use the word “conversation” in its most literal definition: we actually talked, face to face, across hundreds of miles via Zoom.

While we don’t talk often Anita and I swap emails frequently and we both reply immediately with the grace of sincere friendship and the not insignificant abilities we each have in stringing words together.

But talking today was really a treat.

We laughed out loud without ever having to type “lol”. We excused ourselves when we accidentally spoke at the same time because that’s how humans stumble through communication.

“Wait, what?”
“I’m sorry. What were you saying?”

That’s the pure form of a conversation between friends. Remember?

We listened and replied with only half-formed ideas.  My friend heard my hesitation, and I, hers. We helped each other by better defining the original thought.

“What I mean is…” one of us would begin to explain.  Then the other would arrive at the same mental place and agree, “Yes, that’s right!” or words to that effect.

The subject was thereby sealed. Our hearts did a fist bump.

Seems like the most natural thing in the world, doesn’t it, conversation? Until you think about the last time you had an unguarded chat with someone you trusted to really hear you, respond with care, and offer to help whittle down the fine points of a topic. Then together you can peel it like an artichoke and get to the heart of the matter. You might learn more about your own original thought. You might even change your mind about something.

Epiphany, the ultimate satisfaction of conversation.

Talking with Anita about her book, my work, her granddaughter, and the big, gray mammal in the room, getting old, was fun and enlightening for me.  In the course of a fast hour we each learned a little and found affirmation in understanding. We laughed when we agreed on something we had thought unique to our own experience. We remembered questions we wanted to ask each other thirty or forty years ago and finally, we ask, and get answers.

We touched upon the past but didn’t linger there. We are each still full of our nows and tomorrows.

A couple of hours later this has occurred to me:

You think you know a person but unless you catch up with her evolution from time to time you only know who you both were long ago.

 

 

 

by Dave Williams

January 19,2021: Tomorrow Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46th President of the United States. Harry Truman was the 33rd president when I was born just shy of 70 years ago.

When I was a child my grandparents never wanted to talk about their own childhoods. I didn’t know why, they didn’t tell me. They just said it was a long time ago. “Go play”, they’d say. If I persisted and they weren’t so busy as to be annoyed they would eventually talk to me a bit about their old days. They amazed me with tales of the world in which they were kids. Cars, phones and electricity were becoming common in the early 20th century but a lot of people didn’t have them yet. Some homes still didn’t have inside plumbing.

My grandparents never saw an airplane until they were teenagers or young adults. This blew my mind.

I can remember when my parents got their first TV. It was a large piece of furniture with a screen the size of a small laptop.

This morning on the radio I suggested people go online for more information about something. These days we talk as if everybody knows how to go online and they do. We just say, “Get more information at the county website” and people know how to do that with no lengthy explanation and instruction. About 25 years ago when relatively few people owned home computers I had to read the entire web address aloud very slowly: “H-T-T-P, colon, forward slash – forward slash, saccounty – all one word (added for clarification), S-A-C county, – dot – com.”

Then I’d repeat it all to make sure everybody got it.

While you younger people wonder how we old farts ever got along without the Internet and 600 TV channels we wonder how you managed to grow up pen-bred, never free-range kids. We’re constantly wringing our hands over that. We worry that our grandkids will never skin their knees or learn the frustration of losing a game and not getting a trophy. Maybe games will be banned altogether soon because competition will be considered unfair and unhealthy.

I worry about that a bit but then I wonder if it really matters; I could be wrong about everything.

I just hope my grandkids will think to ask me about my childhood before I’m gone. If they don’t, I hope they at least wonder.

If they don’t wonder I suppose it won’t matter. It was a long time ago.

Go out and play. Be happy.