The Aging of Aquarius

Saturdays are Grandpa and Isaiah days.

Carolann works. Isaiah’s dad works. So, it’s just the eight-year-old and me.

This past Saturday I was preparing to fix us lunch when Isaiah marched into the kitchen and proudly proclaimed, “I AM CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS!” I didn’t turn around to look at him right away because this is the sort of goofy thing I’ve come to expect of young boys, having been one myself and having several of my own. It was the sort of announcement that would have evoked a shake of the head and a single word from my dad:

“Knucklehead.”

My grandpa called me “Knothead.” Same thing, I guess.

Capt. Isaiah Underpants

When he persisted, “Grandpa, look!” I turned and found myself facing Captain-Honest-To-God-Underpants in the flesh. At that point I think I actually did call him a knucklehead. I laughed and that was apparently all he wanted. Pleased with himself, Fruit-of-the-Looms perched firmly on his large, round cranium, he took off to save the world. Or, the TV room, at least.

I marvel at childish imaginations. I would give anything to have mine back.

When I was a kid in the fifties we had cowboy TV heroes like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, the Lone Ranger and Sky King, among others. We all had our own cowboy outfits and toy cap guns. We did not ride stick horses made from a single fence picket. That sort of thing was for babies. We merely slapped our thighs in a hoofbeat rhythm as we ran through the fields and neighborhood flower beds. We lived in a perpetual cloud of dust.

Back then I made a name for myself in the Wild West of North Sacramento as “Dapper Dave!” I don’t think I ever mentioned it to anybody, it was my secret. I think even then I had an instinctive understanding of how stupid it sounded. But you have to give me credit for using the word “dapper” before turning ten and for appreciating the cheesy charms of alliteration.

Denny, Mike, Danny

Dapper Dave rode the range, battling bandits and rescuing lovely ladies with the help of  his sidekicks, Denny, Danny and Mike. These are my uncles, my mother’s younger brothers, only slightly older than me. If they had their own cowboy monikers they kept them secrets, too.

Now, here I am half a century later, rinsing dishes and looking squarely into the britches of Captain Underpants and trying to figure out how we got from cowboys to this.

Don’t get me started on Spongebob Squarepants, which is obviously where this lunacy began.

Only today have I learned that there actually is a Captain Underpants character! Isaiah did not invent him.

Captain Underpants is a super hero in a series of children’s books with such

titles as Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of Professor Poopy Pants and Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy (Part 1: The Night of the Nasty Nostril Nuggets). These books are being sold at Isaiah’s school fundraiser. Mind you, this is the same school that will send a kid to the principal’s office for calling a classmate a “butthead.”

I wonder who makes the call when a kid is referred to as a “Nasty Nostril Nugget”?

Look, I take pride in being open-minded and young at heart but I confess that when I first heard of these books I was a bit shocked and annoyed. Suddenly, Spongebob seemed as old-school and boring as Popeye. But, after thinking about it a bit I understand that the writers, cartoonists and publisher of these books are merely appealing to kids at their own level of developing sense of humor. And while part of me fears this will boost our progeny into more advanced levels of outrageous humor involving obscenities and pornographic themes at an even earlier age, the truth is, what I think doesn’t matter any more. No, really, it doesn’t. And that’s a profound relief.

My work here is done.

While I assist in the care of my grandsons they are not mine to raise except when their own parents ask for help or drop the ball. Then I get involved because technically, I am merely continuing the raising of my own sons.

It’s a wonderful release to no longer feel personally responsible for the plight of society and the direction it is headed. I’m an oldster now, paddling alongside those younger adults frolicking and jockeying for position in the mainstream of ever-changing modern culture. Our kids are now making the tough calls and the big decisions. They’re the ones guiding the development and/or decay of the society.

Not my job, not any longer.

Just as Dapper Dave is nothing more now than an old, fond memory, so shall be my little Captain Underpants in the not-too-distant future. I suspect he’ll be just fine for it. I’m not going to sweat the small stuff. But I’ll tell you one thing:

The first time Captain Underpants refers to his five-year-old cousin, my youngest grandson, as “Bionic Booger Boy” we’re going to have a little talk.

© David L. Williams, 2010

® Captain Underpants is a registered trademark of Scholastic Books. (That’s funny too, huh?)

Now I’ve done it.

After living a good, clean life for nearly six decades I’ve thrown it all away. Well, I didn’t throw it, exactly, I just knocked it off the kitchen counter onto the floor. It shattered on impact.

The warning on the bulb’s housing read:  CONTAINS DANGEROUS MERCURY POISONING. DISPOSE ACCORDING TO LOCAL, STATE AND FEDERAL LAWS.

Yes, of course I panicked! My eight-year-old grandson came running in to see what happened.

“Did it break?”

“GET OUT!” I shouted, “STAY BACK!!”

It scared him. He ran into the dining room.

“IT’S DANGEROUS!!” I said, my grandfatherly tone of assurance stripped from me like a catfish shorn of its skin by a pair of pliers.

“WHY??” he asked. “WILL I DIE?”

I’m not making this up. Every word is true.

“No,” I said, grasping for a sense of experienced, calming leadership. Even as I said it I wondered if the dread mercury poisoning had already found its way into my lungs and blood stream. Is it wafting through the air to my boy? Are our Yorkie and Papillon about to keel over in horrifying death throes?

“Will YOU die?” He sounded slightly less worried, here.

“No. I don’t know. NO! Nobody is going to die.” I said it with authority. I just didn’t quite believe it. “Keeps the dogs out of here.”

And then, because I don’t know any better, I did what I’ve done throughout my nearly sixty years of life whenever I’ve dropped a lightbulb. I grabbed a broom and a dustpan and cleaned the damned thing up.

Oh, did I mention — these cfl wonders are supposed to last fifteen years or more? And this one burned out a year, maybe sixteen months ago?

I tossed it in the trash with the junk mail and spent soup cans. I took it out to the big rubber bin in the back yard, the one that will be picked up by an unsuspecting civil refuse engineer tomorrow morning. Off it goes — my poisonous contribution to the destruction of our environment, Mother Earth; of all things holy.

That was an hour ago. We’re fine so far. The dogs are fine. 

I’m cooking dinner in that room.

But, still sporting a trifle bit of concern I checked it out thoroughly on the Internet on several websites. Get this…

One cfl light bulb contains roughly 1/125th the amount of mercury of the old mercury thermometers our moms frequently stuck in our mouths and up our infant rectums.

1/125th.

George Bush signed the mandate into law. Otherwise, I mostly liked him.

The greenies are still ecstatic. Ace Hardware is stocked to the rafters with cfl bulbs and have doubled the price of old, incandescent bulbs. In a year, all we’ll have are the screwy ones. It will be illegal, by federal law, to manufacture, sell or purchase good old Tom Edison light bulbs.

(Which, by the way, are much brighter and whiter in our bathroom.)

Incidentally, in case you care, the cfl bulbs are made in China.

You can mount protests and carry signs and raise hell, maybe start the Clean Light Party. I don’t know.

I’m just gonna keep a broom handy.

And a bottle of wine.

One week ago today it was 115 degrees outside. Now it is 60 and raining hard.

I love weather extremes.  I especially love Fall.  A week ago I sweated outside over barbecued ribs.  Today I’m making chili on the stove.

Today is my youngest son’s birthday.  He’s a good man.  I love him.  Wish he’d find his way.

I went camping over the weekend with my closest friends.

My radio buddies and I made our annual trek to Big Sur. Had chili and beer and a million laughs.  It will sustain me for months.  I love those guys.

When I got home I found out I was being fired from my fourth job in ten years. All my former employers praise my performance and my character. Go figure.

Glad I got the camping trip in first.

My wife and my kids and their kids adore me.

The dogs get very excited when they see me each morning and evening. They follow me from room to room.

I need to go stir the chili and head out to one of my last days on this particular job.

I do love cold, rainy days. I’m a happy man.

There’s a word that won’t be around long.

Remember your first day of first grade when you got that big, fat pencil and the brownish, grainy paper with printed blue lines about half an inch apart? I do. I literally remember that day 53 years ago, and even at the age of six there was something in me that thrilled at the prospect of crafting ideas into words in my brain and transmitting them to paper through my hands. I loved it from the beginning.

And for years they kept on us about our penmanship.  We spent time in class working on it. We were graded on it. Mine got pretty good. Attractive, even. Especially for a man, women would say later. I never really understood that but it sounded like a backhanded compliment. I didn’t dot my I’s with circles or hearts, for God’s sake.

By the time I entered my senior year of high school I had probably written the equivalence of War and Peace in longhand. (Longhand. That’s another word your grandchildren won’t need to know.) And then, came a turning point in my life. Mr. Moore, my high school counselor, talked me into taking a typing class.

Typing!

Listen, in the sixties only girls took typing because only secretaries used it. For a boy to take typing was as odd and as certain to elicit rude comments as a boy taking home economics. (I don’t think that was allowed. Seriously. Never saw a boy in Home-Ec.) But, good old Mr. Moore told me he thought it would be a good thing for me to learn to type. I had excellent grades in English classes. My teachers gave me high marks for my essays. Mr. Moore foresaw a possibility that I might become a writer at some point in my life and thought I should know how to type. Besides, he added as something of an afterthought…

…I would be the only boy in a class of 35 girls!

I was sold. It turned out there was one other boy in the class, Gerry Smith, and that was very cool because Gerry was a good guy and a friend since kindergarten. He was also a star football player and Student Council President. Nobody was going to make fun of Gerry and I was his typing class wing man.

And now, 41 years later, I tap away at keyboards all day long.

When it occurs to me I thank my lucky stars for Mr. Moore and his wisdom.

But, my attractive (especially for a man!) penmanship? Pffft! I can barely sign my name anymore and am rarely expected to do so. When I do it’s on one of those tiny credit-card-swipe machine plastic windows with the pen that’s not a pen. On those things my signature looks like I am stricken with an advanced case of palsy.

I never use a checkbook anymore. Maybe once a month.

I am only rarely called upon to sign a legal document of some sort and in those times I really don’t care if my signature is attractive or even legible. Far from it. Legibility is a cry for attention. It’s the pathetic sign of a man in need of self-respect and purpose: a follower, a drone. In fact, I have been led to believe that a proper, manly signature on a line above my name impressively typed by a bespectacled legal secretary shouldn’t be legible at all. It should be a large, John Hancock-bold, “D” followed by a rapidly diminishing, “I’m-a-busy-man!” squiggle.

But several times a year I have to write in birthday and Christmas cards and this is a sore trial.

A palsy-like signature simply won’t do. I must express loving thoughts in a deeply personal, though somewhat formal way. And I must do this in longhand.

I always screw it up. Always.

I misspell words my brain has known intimately for decades. I know the letters but my withered, retarded hand isn’t up to the challenge. I have to cross out these words and correct them. In ink. Pathetic. Or, I leave out a word altogether, or I think of an adoring adjective as an afterthought and am forced to print it between the lines in tiny letters with a little insertion arrow > to complete the thought.

I misjudge the distance from my script to the edge of the card and must squeeze a long word into a teeny-tiny space.

The pen sputters and spasms. Barely legible, here, Bic blots there.

By the time I’m finished with a card it looks like it was written by a palsied, slow-witted six-year-old.

I am waiting for the day technology gives us the best of both worlds: a greeting card which is printed but at the same time animated with a moving picture of me and my actual voice, expressing my deep and abiding love and friendship for the recipient of the card. No longhand required.

You know, like the pictures in The Daily Prophet — the newspaper of Harry Potter’s wizard world.

Would you be shocked to know they’re working on it?  Seriously, look here.

Penmanship?

A generation from now we won’t even have pens and pencils.

That’s okay with me. I’m just sayin’…

I know some people miss those beautifully hand-crafted letters that took several days to write and several more to arrive. Nostalgia keeps a heart warm but it doesn’t have anything at all to do with reality. The trick is to live with your heart in both places at once.

What is it about summer that fills and yet drains us?

You say it’s the heat and certainly that defines it. It’s the close intensity of the sun through a hazy sky. Sharp shadows. Fuzzy memories.

Summer was our youthful promise of immortality. It began at the exact moment of the final school bell in early June. It proceeded through endless days of hitting baseballs and jarring polliwogs from the slippery, slimy-green drainage ditch that ran through our neighborhood like our own private subway.

Summer involved rolling down grassy hillsides, giggling, wearing only shorts and then being itchy all day.

Summer made necessary running through lawn sprinklers, wherever we found them inviting us in.

The entire neighborhood played hide-and-seek. No place was out of bounds. It might take half an hour to find kids scattered behind parked cars, perched in trees and jumping fences to race through neighboring backyards.

“OLLY-OLLY OXEN FREE!”

Summer evenings frequently found us in front yards on blankets. The entire family was there and neighbor kids and sometimes their parents, as well.

We’d look through the grass for four-leaf clovers and watch Venus follow the sun into a darkening horizon. We looked for shooting stars and UFOs. We drank Kool-Aid and talked about what we wanted to do tomorrow.

The cricket chorus began at full darkness as the Delta breeze arrived from the Golden Gate. Shortly after that Mom said it was time to come in and take a bath. The truth is, I didn’t really mind. I was tired.

And I wanted tomorrow to get here fast.

Mel Gibson is a bug. He needs to be squished.

He is famously handsome, funny, lovable, talented and wealthy.

Which is why he must now be squished.

It’s what we do to our icons, right? We make ’em bigger than life, take away their material needs, and leave them alone to wrestle with their inflated emotional needs.

It’s the deal with the devil, the price of fame and fortune.

And then, when they get as rich and famous as they’re going to get, when we’re about finished with them when they stumble and we can smell the fear, we jump on them like a pack of wild dogs.

“‘Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!'” *

There is no excusing or justifying Mel’s behavior but there is a reason for it. I don’t know what it is. It suggests a raging psychosis that must be chemically treated and held in check. But, hell. I don’t know. How would I?

How would you?

I don’t care what happens to Mel Gibson. Well, I do care but only in an abstract way. What I care about more is the cheap thrill we get from the pervasive, nonstop media airings of Mel and Oksana’s dirty laundry.

It relieves us to mock and spit on our icons.

Who cares if Mel eats a bullet?

And while we’re at it, send that booze-sucking slut, Lindsay, to jail and throw away the key.

We made them. When we’re finished playing we’ll destroy them.

“The desire to squeeze and hurt was over-mastering.” *

Lighten up, it’s all in good fun. These people aren’t real people, we invented them.

It’s not my fault Michael Jackson was weird; I didn’t kill him. He did it to himself. He was weird.

And I was finished with him, anyway.

“We was on the outside. We never done nothing, we never seen nothing.”*

It’s been a week. The story is old. Oksana will thrive. Mel will live or he won’t.

Who’s next?

“after all we aren’t savages really…” *

* William Golding, Lord of the Flies

© 2010 by David L. Williams, all rights reserved