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A Mommy
Some of the best conversations I have happen in the most simple places.
I was sitting at the table eating pancakes with my six-year old granddaughter this weekend and asked her if she wanted to have children of her own one day.
She quickly said yes around a mouth full of sausage.
“A boy or girl,” I asked.
“A girl,” she said.
Then I suggested a few names for this unborn great granddaughter of mine.
Jefferina. Maybe Jeffanie (like Stephanie).
She said no. She already had a name picked out.
She wanted to name her baby after her dance teacher, Shelly. I don’t think it rolls off the tongue nearly as smoothly as Jeffanie but it is sweet that she loves her dance teacher enough to make her the namesake of her child.
Then I asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. I was expecting the usual answers. Princess. Super hero. Ballerina.
Nope.
She said she wanted to be a mommy.
Before I could stop myself, I laughed and said, “No, like a job.”
My granddaughter put down her fork, looked me in the eye and said very seriously, “That is a job.”
And she is right.
I was being a mysoginist. I didn’t mean to be. It just came out. All those years of living in a male dominated society and having the old stereotypical family dynamic baked into my brain and I just blurted it out before thinking.
My lovely wife was in the other room and I know she heard me.
I expected a wayward shoe or brick to come flying towards my head at any moment but she said nothing.
There were no projectiles of revenge.
Of course, being a full time, stay at home mother is a full time job. More than a full time job.
I know that because my wife did it.
When we had our first child, my lovely wife worked at a large bank. She was a trust officer and had a very promising career ahead of her.
But as our son got older, she hated leaving him at daycare while she went to work every day. She liked her job but didn’t want to miss all of the little things our son would do for the first time.
So we decided to take a risk and try to live on just what I made. We knew we would have to sacrifice but it was worth it.
My wife never went back to work. When our twins were born, she was at home with them every day and got to experience all of the little things we missed with our older son- their first steps, their first words.
And it was hard. Real hard.
There were days that I would come home from work and she would be sitting on the back steps crying. Being home all day with three small children wasn’t the barrel of laughs she thought it would be.
What she did used to be common. Women would stay home and take care of the children and house and the husbands would go off to work.
Now, it’s not so common.
Very few women stay home with their kids any more. Not because they don’t want to but because they just can’t. Trying to raise a family these days is expensive and requires two working parents.
And even if a woman wants to stay home and raise a family, she is often looked down on by society. Television and movies portray stay-at-home moms as unfulfilled women who are haggard and continually stressed out or who drop the kids off and then spend their day with friends doing hot yoga and drinking pumpkin spice martinis.
So, when my granddaughter said she wanted to be a mommy when she grew up, I wondered what kind of life she would have.
Would she miss the opportunity for a career? Or be considered ‘less than’ by society?
I asked my granddaughter why she wanted to be a mommy.
She picked up her little doll and held it under her arm.
“Because everybody needs a mommy,” she said.
You can’t argue with that.
Sounds like Shelly will have a good life.
Thanks Mom
Today is Mother’s Day.
This is the day for all sons and daughters to honor the women who carried us in their wombs, suffered through our births and somehow managed to keep us alive until we could at least feed ourselves.
So, thank you, Beverly (that’s my mom) for doing all that for me.
But that’s not the mother I am honoring here.
Oh, I love my mother for sure. But there have been other women who had a big influence on me as well.
One was named Mama Joan.
In 1983 and I was a senior at the University of Georgia. And like a lot of people, I had foolishly joined a fraternity.
I’m not really sure how I wound up in this fraternity. I met some guys at a party. They invited me to come over to their fraternity house and we kept on partying.
And before you know it, I knew the secret handshake, all the letters of Greek alphabet and was one of them.
Like most fraternities at Georgia, we had a big house where a lot of the brothers lived, where they had meetings and, most importantly, where we could drink and be rowdy far from the ever-watchful eye of the university and the authorities.
Our fraternity house was a big white Greek revival mansion in a quiet street a couple miles west of campus.
If you’ve seen Animal House, you have somewhat of idea of what it was like around the fraternity house.
After class, a couple of kegs of cold beer would magically appear and the brothers would begin their nightly slide into a drunken stupor.
I was no angel, but up to this point, I had saved my intemperateness for the weekends.
Not these guys. Nightly debauchery was the norm for them.
And of course, when young men in their early 20’s throw back a few, things usually get out of control.
Broken furniture. Holes in the walls. Missing teeth. Police called.
It would have been a total Lord of the Flies scenario if not for one person.
Mama Joan.
I don’t know if it was a requirement by the university for fraternities to have a responsible adult resident or just a way fraternities tried to keep a little law and order, but every one had a ‘house mother.’ She was someone who lived in the house with the fraternity brothers, cooked meals, cleaned up enough to keep the property from getting condemned and generally tried to prevent the brothers from killing each other.
We didn’t know a lot about Mama Joan. None of the brothers could remember who hired her or where she came from.
There was a rumor that she was retired from a career as a drill sergeant in the Army and another that she was once an enforcer for the Gambino crime family and kept a switchblade hidden in her girdle.
All I know is that she was always at the fraternity house, day and night, and if things went a little off the rails, Mama Joan would miraculously appear and break up a fight, kick a violent drunk out the front or shame the brothers into acting like they had at least a little sense.
Mama Joan was built like a linebacker and I have to admit she scared me a little.
I didn’t really believe all of the stories about her but still, I wasn’t about to do something that would cause Mama Joan to whip out her switchblade and carve a little sobriety into me.
The thing about partying at the level these boys were at was that you couldn’t stay where you were for long. They were always looking for a better high. A wilder night. A deeper trip.
I noticed this after a couple months when one of the brothers asked me if I was coming to ‘pill party.’
I wasn’t sure what a pill party was, so one of the brothers explained with a laugh.
“It’s fun! All the brothers bring whatever drugs they have, or can get their hands, and we dump all the bottles into a big fishbowl.”
He went in to explain the that you took turns rolling a dice and whatever number you rolled was the number of pills you withdrew from the fishbowl and swallowed.
I told him this sounded pretty dangerous and the guy just laughed.
“Well, no one’s died yet.”
Yet?
The night of the Pill Party, I found something else to do.
Drinking was one thing but taking random pills? That wasn’t what I signed up for.
Still, I stayed in the fraternity thinking this was just a blip of bad judgement.
It wasn’t.
A couple of weeks later, another fraternity brother announced after dinner that his ‘buddy’ in Atlanta would be coming that weekend and he would have a big bag of ‘goodies’ with him.
There was a cheer from the brothers. Apparently, visits from this ‘buddy’ (translation: drug dealer) meant there was going to be a huge, blackout party.
Later that night, I asked one of the guys exactly what they meant by ‘goodies.’
He laughed and said, “Cocaine, man. What do you think?”
I will admit that I was raised a naive country boy from backwoods Georgia. I had never even tasted liquor until I went off to college.
A
nd now these guys were about to start snorting cocaine. Wasn’t that one of those drugs that turned you instantly into an addict the first time you used it?
I smiled and tried to act enthusiastic, but inside I was terrified.
I didn’t mind a few beers but hard drugs? I didn’t know if I was down with that.
I stepped out on the front porch to catch my breath and think. This was a pivotal point in my life and I knew it.
As I settled into one of the big rocking chairs, I heard a noise to my left. I looked over and saw Mama Joan, sitting in the farthest rocking chair smoking a thin little cigar.
I sat back and watched the cars passing by. After a few minutes, Mama Joan asked me why I wasn’t inside with the other guys.
I stammered some lame excuse and she laughed. Then she asked me what was the real reason.
And I told her.
When I finished, Mama Joan took another long drag on her little cigar and blew out a big cloud of blue smoke. And then with a voice that I imagined had seduced gangsters and hit men, she spoke softly.
“Is that what you want to become?,” she asked. “One of them.”
She hooked her thumb over her shoulder towards the guys in the living room, most who were already inebriated to the point that they were passed out face down on the floor.
I looked through the windows and for the first time saw these guys for who they really were.
They weren’t cool. They were a bunch of drunks and drug addicts. There were none- not a one- who I looked up to.
I turned back to Mama Joan and she smiled at me in the dark.
“You have the chance do something than none of those other guys have been able to do,” she said.
“What’s that?,” I asked.
She took another drag on her little cigar and spoke one word.
“Stop.”
I got up, went inside the fraternity house and gathered my stuff. Then I walked out the front door and never went back.
I have often wondered through the years how my life might have been different if it were not for my encounter on the porch that night with Mama Joan.
We all have mothers. And we should certainly honor those women today and every day. But some of us have also had women who stepped up and mothered us when we needed it the most.
So, Happy Mother’s Day to those women for being there. And for saving us.
Thank you, Mama Joan, for being a mom when I needed one. Wherever you are, Happy Mother’s Day.
Dance Like Nancy
I wish I wasn’t afraid to dance like Nancy.
Just to put myself out there and not care what people said. Or worse, thought.
Many of you may know Nancy from way ‘back in the day’ at Shiver School. Or when she used to cook the biscuits every morning at Hardee’s.
Nancy is different. She acts differently. She talks differently.
A lot of people pull away from her. They stand over against the wall or in the corner, pointing and snickering.
And that’s too bad, because despite her outward appearance, Nancy is one of the kindest people you’ll ever meet.
She certainly is one of the happiest.
I saw Nancy at the street dance this weekend. She was walking towards me in the middle of the street. I wasn’t sure if she would even remember who I was.
It had been a long time since I talked to her.
That didn’t matter to Nancy. To her, there are no strangers.
“Hi, Nancy,” I said when she was a few feet away.
Nancy’s face broke out in a big toothy grin and gave me a tight hug.
“Hey, baby,” she said. Then she grabbed one of my hands and pulled me towards the stage on the other end of the street.
“Wanna’ dance?”
“Maybe later,” I said, knowing full well that once my butt hit the bottom of my folding chair, it would stay there until we were ready to go home.
My inhibition didn’t bother Nancy. She hugged me again and told me she loved me and she was off to dance.
By herself.
In humans, inhibition is generated in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. Most people outgrow it by the time they’re six years old.
Some people never do.
I set up my little blue folding chair up next to the sidewalk and plopped down it. The band was wailing away on some old song from the 70s. There was only one person on the street dancing.
Nancy.
And boy, was she dancing.
Nancy had some pretty awesome moves. If I had agreed to join her out on the ‘dance floor’, she would definitely be showing me up right now.
A few more people wandered into street over the next hour or so. Nancy danced with all of them.
They were smiling and laughing and seemed to be having so much fun.
I was almost tempted to get up out of my chair, tighten up my arm sling and join them.
Almost.
It’s not that I can’t dance. I can. Or at least I used to could dance back in high school and college.
I spent a few thousand hours gyrating my hips in various clubs around Athens and Atlanta in my younger, trimmer days. Nobody ever told me I sucked. But neither did anyone ever tap me on the shoulder and ask me to leave because I was scaring the other patrons.
So, I wasn’t worried about being able to dance. What I was worried about was that somebody would actually see me dancing.
In fact, there are a lot of things I don’t do in public because someone might see me.
Like take my shirt off at the beach. Nobody wants to see that.
Or eat a Sloppy Joe. With my shirt off.
But that stuff doesn’t seem to both Nancy.
Dance in public. No problem. Eat a messy sandwich, without a napkin. Bring it on.
I watched Nancy do some shimmy shacks as the band played Brick House. And I wondered how she managed to be so self confident.
Wasn’t she at least a little concerned that some bystander might laugh at her?
What was it about Nancy that made her not care what anybody thought? And makes the rest of us mortified if someone sees us chewing?
The band started playing Stevie Wonder’s Superstition and Nancy was whirling around in a circle, swinging her arms. If people were watching and judging her, Nancy didn’t seem give a gnat’s ass.
I smiled and wished I had the nerve to be like that. What had I missed in my life because I was embarrassed someone might see me.
How many things had I not tried because I thought I might look silly? How many times had I watched instead of joining in? How many friends had passed me by?
Yeah, Nancy is odd. She’s awkward and she is loud.
But, she’s also free.
Free to love, to laugh, to eat. She’s free to dance as much as she wants.
It’s a freedom that only comes when you don’t care what other people think.
It’s something that very few of us are.
Fearless.
I wonder what my life would have been like if I wasn’t afraid to dance like
Nancy.
The Cuffie Club
I just had rotator cuff surgery this week.
Everything went well. It’s pretty painful, even after five days. And I have a big sling so trying to hide my disability is going to be pretty difficult.
You know after you get a white Toyota, everyone seems to be driving a white Toyota?
That’s the way it had been with this surgery. Over the last few days, it seems like just about every person I run into has gotten rotator cuff surgery.
Unbeknownst to me, I have joined some type of special club. Me and my fellow ‘Cuffies’ can all commiserate over the pain, the procedure and our recovery.
We’ve all had a shared experience. And there lies my problem.
When I encounter someone who has also had rotator cuff surgery, they don’t just say “I had that, too”. They have tell you their entire ‘cuffie’ journey.
And it always starts with how they got injured.
“I tore my shoulder lifting a large boulder.”
“After pulling truck transmissions for thirty years, it was finally time to have it done.”
“Yeah, I messed mine up playing intramural rugby.”
Every person I encounter has a story. They seem proud to tell me how they got hurt. And the more gruesome and painful, the better.
Their stories are heroic and macho. Apparently, you’re not a ‘real man’ until you’ve had at least one torn rotator cuff.
When they finish with their story, they look at me as if to say, “top that.”
Then it’s my turn to share my ‘cuffie’ story. What gruesome injury occurred that gave me membership into this exclusive club.
“Ah….” I mumble and stutter. “Ah… I fell down.”
And that is the truth. I did fall down. But it wasn’t from doing anything macho like rescuing a child from a burning building or prying apart the doors of an elevator just as it was about to plunge 80 floors to certain death.
No, I tore my rotator cuff dancing.
And not the kind of dancing you do down at the club on a Saturday night.
Nope, my injury occurred while dancing in the ballet.
Yeah, ballet as in tutu’s and pointe shoes.
There is no way I can say that and the other person keep a straight face.
“So how’d you hurt your arm. I tore my rotator cuff back when I was a bull rider in the rodeo.”
“Well, I… ah…. fell down during the Nutcracker.”
“The ballet?”
“Yeah, the ballet.”
And would never live it down. I could become a professional wrestler or work on an oil rig but to those people, I would always be the sissy boy who hurt his arm in the ballet.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love the ballet. All three of my children took dance. My wife and I have appeared in various shows including The Nutcracker for decades.
I don’t hide that I’m in the Nutcracker every year but it doesn’t add much to my masculinity score. And that’s already dangerously low.
I don’t hunt. I don’t fish. I don’t spend my Saturdays watching football or drive a big jacked up truck.
I didn’t need to add to that being the guy who tore his rotator cuff falling down during the ballet.
So, I’ve got to come up with a story that is still marginally true and makes me look macho like all of those other torn rotator cuff guys.
The truth is that someone stepped on my cape during the Battle Scene and it pulled me off balance. And that made me fall down on my elbow.
It didn’t involve heavy machinery. Wrestling a bear or stopping a car jacking. I was dancing in a cape while wearing lipstick and blush.
So, I’ve got to come up a better story. A believable alibi.
“So, how did you injure your shoulder?”
“I was in a fight.”
That’s not really lying. The Battle Scene does have mice fighting with toy soldiers.
But one look at me, and you know I don’t fight. I can throw a birthday party but I can’t throw a punch.
So maybe I could say, “I was assaulted during a hostage situation.”
That sounds much more dangerous. The Mouse Queen is trying to steal Clara so it’s not really a lie. Maybe I’ll go with that one.
Or, “I was attacked by this guy with a big sword.”
And that’s kinda’ true. Sure, he’s dressed like a mouse. And he does have a sword. A big plastic one.
But, how many sword battles have you read about since the 17th century?
For now, I’m just trying to avoid people so I don’t have to explain how I got injured.
No matter how hard I try, I know I’ll never be able to convince anyone I was in a fight, a hostage situation or attacked by a big mouse with a sword.
Falling down during the ballet. That sounds like me.
Being heroic. Not so much.
My shoulder will be healed in a couple of months. The sling will be gone and I won’t have to come up with some phony story of heroism.
Until then, if you see me around town and I still have a sling on, it’s okay to stop me and ask me what happened. Even if you already know.
Who knows what ridiculous story I may have to tell.
“I got attacked by giant crabs.”
“I lifted a car off a baby.”
Or, my personal favorite.
“Bees!” (Just bees.)
Recovery may turn out to be fun after all.
No Place
When I was six years old, I ran away from home.
I don’t remember what caused my pre-adolescent desire for emancipation from my parents. But whatever it was, I apparently decided that the grass was greener on the other side of the fence.
I told my mom that I was running away and she said, “Okay.”
That was all. No effort to talk me out of it. No list of the terrible things that could happen to a six year old kid out in the world on his own.
Just, “Okay.”
So I packed up my little cardboard suitcase and left.
I got as far as the chicken coop in the backyard. It had a roof. Straw for a bed.
I thought it was going to be perfect. I’d live out there with the chickens.
Nobody would tell me what to do or when to go to bed.
Nobody would tell me what to do or when to go to bed.
It would be paradise.
Unfortunately, a lot of people never outgrow the idea that things are better somewhere else.
They’re always looking for greener pastures. And one of those pastures is Europe.
When the rich and famous get fed up with America, they don’t pack up their suitcases and head out to live in the backyard chicken coop. They go to Europe.
They buy a chateau. Adopt a fake accent. And they make sure we all know how they are so much more progressive, cultured and enlightened than the rest of us peasants.
So, when my lovely wife and i finally got to take our trip to Italy, I wanted to see for myself this strange attraction that Europe has on some people.
Who knows? Maybe we’d get over there and never want to come back.
Our first stop was in Rome. From the airport, it didn’t look at all magical.
We took a taxi from the airport to our hotel. From the car window, it didn’t look like paradise. Or very progressive.
I don’t know what I was expecting but it sure wasn’t that every surface of the city- and I mean every surface- would be covered with graffiti.
I had two Italy travel books- two- and neither of them mentioned a single word about the urban blight in the city.
Buildings, bus stops, buses- even ancient Roman ruins were awash in graffiti.
Maybe all this talk about how Europeans were just so much more cultured than us ignorant boneheads in the US was just talk because this was not culture.
This was vandalism.
Yeah, they spoke a different language and used funny looking money but I noticed that the Italian people weren’t much different from the folks back home.
They ate and slept and were always in a hurry on their way to work. They argued politics and were selfish, pushy and rude.
Just like us.
Maybe I was just in the wrong part of the country. That must be it.
After a couple of days, we got on the train and headed south to Sorrento. Certainly this strange force that causes people to abandon their homeland must be strong there.
All the ex-pats who are so eager to slander Americans would be on the Amalfi Coast, living the good life without all of the things that were holding them back in the States.
There seem to be a lot of these disgruntled folk.
Every time there is a discussion on Facebook or Twitter about an issue in America, there’s always some bozo who chimes in about how much better things are in Europe.
“If ______ gets elected, I’m packing up and moving to Europe,” he writes. “Everything over there is better.”
I guess that’s what I was looking for. All of this ‘better’ they spoke so much about.
‘Over there’, things are just so much more progressive. There is no inequality. Men and women are treated the same. And there’s no racism, which they think is the main byproduct of America.
The schools outside of the US are always ‘better.’ Everyone wears a snappy little uniform and they all go to free college to become doctors, lawyers and physicists.
And when you finish school, your job is almost like an after thought. ‘Over there’, people only work a few hours a day. They have five months of vacation every year, and two years of maternity and paternity leave.
And of course, everyone is just so happy. Just look at all the photos of those people in Finland and Denmark. They’re all beautiful, blond, blue-eyed and smiling with the most perfect and whitest teeth you’ve ever seen.
I looked around Sorrento for this pedigreed society. After all, the Amalfi Coast is legendary for being the playground of the rich and famous.
There was less graffiti than in Rome but I didn’t see any signs of this progressive new society everyone always writes about.
Maybe they were just humble. From my experience, cultured rich people are a little stand-offish.
So I purposely struck up conversations with some of the local folks and none of them seemed to be any more cultured than I am. Okay, Italians do speak a different language, so they probably didn’t understand what I was asking them and I didn’t understand their answers, but the people I talked to didn’t seem real snobbish to me.
Maybe all the stuff about Europeans being smarter and more progressive than us Americans was just created by a PR firm somewhere. Kind of like they tried to convince us that New Coke was better than Old Coke.
Balderdash!
We took a cruise down the Amalfi Coast and it was gorgeous. It may be the most beautiful place I have ever been to and I could understand why someone might want to move there.
We were getting close to that great wellspring of culture. I could feel it.
Next stop was Venice. If I couldn’t find that enlightened society where everyone was smarter and more cultured than us American Neanderthals in Venice, well, it didn’t exist.
We got there late in the afternoon and went to visit this mythical city floating out in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.
Upon arrival, I already knew things were a little odd.
There was water everywhere and I didn’t see the first bass boat. Or the first person standing on the bank of the canal with a cane pole and jar of stink bait.
We crossed the bridge and joined about 400,000 other tourists crowded into a space about the size of my backyard.
Yeah, it was gorgeous. The old city is full of ancient churches, buildings and bridges built long before Christopher Columbus discovered America.
And I would have really enjoyed it more if there wasn’t 1,000 people in line to use the bathroom or if there wasn’t a six-mile long line to peek inside St. Mark’s Basilica.
Try as we may, we didn’t find any great enlightenment lurking around Venice, but we did get a good slice of pizza.
Our trip came to a close and oddly, we never did find this secret thing that seemed to mesmerize so many people into thinking this place was so much better than America.
As we sat in the airport, waiting to board our plane back to Georgia, I thought about how I had really expected my visit to Italy to be like going through this portal to a place where no one ever disagrees with each other, all people are treated the same regardless of where they came from, what they looked like, their sexual orientation or wealth status.
Yet, it was very similar to America. Sure, they drive weird little cars and their coffee cups are the size of thimbles, but people are just people. It doesn’t really matter where you live.
All the people who think they can just pack up and escape the horrors of America, will be gravely disappointed. It’s not our country that’s the problem, it’s us. And no matter how hard we try, we can never escape ourselves.
Just like I was when I was six and packed my little suitcase and ran away to the chicken coop.
I thought things would be so much better out there but they weren’t. My problems followed me.
By the end of the day, I tired of living with the chickens and was knocking on the back door, asking my mom if I could come home.
Italy is magical. It’s beautiful and if you ever get a chance to go, you should. But it’s no ‘better’ than America.
That’s one thing I have learned during my travels to different parts of the world. No matter how great the travel brochures and videos may look, it’s not America.
And there is no place like America.
We like to join in the lambasting of our country and complain about all the things that are wrong with the US, but the reality is that this truly is the best country to live.
Dorothy was right. There truly is no place like home.
The Emergency
I don’t know how I keep getting myself into these things.
It seems like every-time I go on a trip somewhere, disaster seems to follow.
Remember Alaska? Point made.
Well, my beautiful wife and I embarked on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Italy this past weekend to celebrate our 36th Anniversary. First, we had a brief 4-day layover in our favorite city of all time, New York.
Normally, we have no trouble navigating around Manhattan. We always ride the subway and there are plenty of apps you can get on your phone that tell you where to go.
The one my lovely bride decided to download apparently had some issues.
On Sunday morning, we asked it to show us the best route to get from our hotel near Times Square to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The app told us to get the ‘red’ train and stay on it for 17 stations. I thought that was a little odd since the Met was on the east side of Central Park and this subway line didn’t seem to be going anywhere close to it.
But my wife insisted that was right, so we got on and away we went.
Something similar to this happened the last time we were in NYC. We got on a south bound train looking for Chinatown and missed our stop. About thirty minutes latter, the driver of the train announced that we were at the end of the line and had to get off.
I had no idea where we were but there we a couple of burned-out cars on the street next to the subway platform and several skinhead looking dudes with tattoos on their faces that didn’t seem to be from the local Welcome Wagon.
So, we jumped back on the train. Kept our eyes on the floor and skedaddled back to the city.
Today’s train ride was similar.
We we finally got to our stop, we were at the very tip of Manhattan. Way north of Harlem in a section of the city I had never even heard of before.
We looked around and my wife said, “Hmm… this ain’t right.”
I concurred. Time to get back on the subway, head south and try again.
And then it hit me.
I had to go.
Ever since I had my bowel blockage several months ago, my doctor has been concerned that I may have something called Lazy Bowel Syndrome.
Apparently, my large intestines are a bunch of slackers and instead of doing their job, they goof off a lot and that’s when I wind up in the hospital.
To combat this, my doc gave me a pill to take every morning. It takes my Lazy Bowel and turns them into Ambitious Bowels.
Actually, Ambitious Bowels Who Gives No or Very Little Notice of Their Arrival.
In other words, after I take this pill, there is no more gradual sense of, ‘oh, I say old chap, but I think I may have to visit the loo before we met off to the polo game later.’
Oh, no. A couple hours after taking that pill, it’s more like ‘Okay, stand back folks! And if you have small children, please hide their eyes because if I don’t find a toilet soon, civilization as we know it will be irreparably changed forever.
We were standing on the platform, waiting for the subway train to come and take us back to the part of Manhattan where if we were murdered, at least they would report our bodies missing.
And that’s when the first ‘warning’ cramp hit.
I’ve been taking this medication long enough to know that when that first twinge in your gut hits you, you better start looking for a restroom- hopefully one that’s private.
And where was I? Probably as far from a public bathroom as that rugby team who crashed in the Andes Mountains and had to eat their own teammates were.
There are no bathrooms at subway stations. There are bathrooms in stores or restaurants.
There are no public bathrooms in New York City.
Now I know why there is so much pee in the street. That’s the only place, short of your own bathroom 168 blocks away, where you’re allowed to pee.
Tourists who visit are issued a doggy bag and, when necessary, they just step into the bushes or a dark corner, and use that.
Or at least that’s what it seems because if you need to go- and trust me, I needed to GO- New York gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘you’re shit out of luck.’
I told my wife I had to go and she asked if I could hold it until we got back on the train and back to Midtown.
“Yeah, I guess,” I replied. And then another cramp hit me. We have reached DEFCON 3!
I quickly retracted my answer.
“No, I cannot wait,” I said “I need a bathroom now!”
I looked over the edge of raised platform and saw several businesses lining the street below. They were my only option.
I told my wife I’d be right back and I headed for the exit.
Another cramp hit me as I crossed the street. This one was a warning shot across the bow. I better produce a suitable dump station soon or there would be screaming and terror in the streets.
My pain caused me to forget my shyness and all manners of a polite society.
I burst through the front door of a small shop that sold wigs and beauty products.
The small oriental woman behind the counter smiled at me but her expression quickly changed when I screamed, “I need a bathroom!”
She came from behind the counter waving her arms and rattling off what I can only imagine where curses in Mandarin aimed at me and the next nine generations of my family.
I backed out of the store and tried the vape place next door.
The owner told me that bathrooms were for patrons only. Or at least I think that what he said when he held up his middle finger and spit on the floor at my feet.
Strike two.
I tried the big CVS store down the block. And the Walgreens across the street. Both bathroomless.
I was pretty sure that was a code violation and almost threatened to call Mayor Gulliani, but the cramps shut my mouth and moved my legs.
I was starting to get scared. If I didn’t find a friendly john in the next few minutes, there was no doubt that I would be making an appearance on the front page of the New York Post the next day.
Before I went to that extreme, I decided to try one more place. The Mexican restaurant on the corner.
Certainly they had a bathroom. They sell Mexican food which is a natural laxative.
I slipped through the front door and noticed that the place was nearly deserted save for a couple of haggard old tourists sipping glasses of tequila at the bar.
I scanned the room and saw it back there in the shadows. A bathroom.
I decided that the best strategy was to assume it was okay to use it and ask for forgiveness latter. So I scurried across the darkly lit dining room and slipped through the door.
Relief at last.
When I finished and was getting ready to leave, I imagined two old NYC cops standing right outside the door to the bathroom , waiting to put me in handcuffs the moment I stepped out. One would by Irish and named Seamus.
“Aye, lad, we got ya’ on a 1067-b. Violation of the city’s Waste Removal Act, Section D, Part 2. Relieving yourself in a strange toilet. Throw him in the paddy wagon, boys!”
But there wasn’t. Just the same old guys watching golf on tv and drinking tequila.
I slipped out the restaurant and back to the subway station. Soon we were rumbling along back towards midtown.
I hadn’t lost control of my bowels and ruined my good family name. So our trip is going splendidly so far.
We’re heading to Italy tomorrow.
And we’re renting a car.
Uh-oh.
Bowling
This weekend, my family had the opportunity to show off our athletic prowess.
We try not to gloat about our stalwart agility. Not every family has the heritage of…
Oh, who’s kidding who? We went bowling.
My family doesn’t have some great bowling heritage. We are probably like most families. We bowl maybe once every 2-3 years and are lucky to leave without someone dropping a ball on their foot and breaking a toe.
Nobody is really ‘good’ at bowling. Well, I guess some people are but I have never encountered them at a bowling alley.
And you would think that’s where they would hang out.
My youngest son and his fiancé came down from Atlanta to attend the birthday party of my sweet little granddaughter. The party ended late afternoon and we were looking for something to do for an hour or so before dinner.
My son suggested bowling.
Why not? I hadn’t been bowling in years.
And there’s a good reason for that.
I am awful at it. Everyone I knew is awful at it.
So it sounded like fun.
Our crew rolled up into the bowling alley and got us a lane for an hour.
They put us between two other groups of folks out for a little Saturday night fun.
On our right were two teenage girls. Their bowling method consisted of walking to the edge of lane, sighing heavily and just dropping the ball.
The two looked like a judge had given them a choice between going bowling or going to prison.
It was a hard decision but they reluctantly chose bowling.
On the other side was a young family with a couple of kids. One maybe four. The other was in diapers and spent the entire hour using the vinyl sofa as a teething device.
It was halfway through their game and the four year was out-scouring his parents by double digits.
Right past them was a group of juvenile delinquents who were on a mission to see who could get the lowest score.
Every time one of their group was up, they purposely threw their ball into the gutter. And with every gutter ball, they laughed louder and louder.
Shaking my head and focusing back on our group’s progress, I noticed a sign near the scoreboard that read, ‘Bowling is the #1 participation sport in America.’
I looked around again and saw that this was probably true. Every lane was packed with people tossing balls halfway down the lane where they thudded and bounced off the polished wood like basketballs.
I listened to the constant clunk of the heavy balls dropping into gutters.
If bowling was so popular, why were so many of these people- including my own family- so lousy at it.
I knew the answer.
None of these people were serious about bowling.
They didn’t care if they threw a strike or broke a ceiling tile.
I don’t know how to bowl but I know how to recognize somebody who does.
I actually watched a couple of bowling tournaments on ESPN back during a period of my life when I must have lost the tv remote. And I noticed several things about professional bowlers that was missing from my fellow ball-tossers and gutter jockeys.
First, they never smile.
It doesn’t matter if the bowler threw a strike or Miss Venezuela just streaked naked across the lanes. Their expression always said one thing. Bowling is a serious game.
Also, how does that machine set those pins back up into a perfect triangle so fast?
Second, they don’t care how ugly bowling shoes are.
The rest of us hate those ugly shoes they make you wear. Not only is the design hideous, but you know the shoes you just put on your feet have been worn by approximately 499,312 people before the guy handed them to you and said, “Here, try these.”
If the show ‘This is Us’ does come true and we all die from a fungus, it will have originated from sharing bowling shoes.
But serious bowlers don’t care. Do you think they waste an hour making jokes about how ugly their shoes are, like the rest of us? No, they put on their ugly shoes and they start bowling.
And lastly, professional bowlers don’t spend more time eating nachos and drinking warm beer than they do actually bowling.
In fact, never have I seen a bowler on ESPN call for a time out while he wandered over to the snack bar and ordered a two chili dogs, a jumbo bag of Funyuns, three bags of Twizzlers (the red ones), a large bag of Skittles and a flimsy cardboard bowl filled with triangular corn chips covered with greasy, melted nacho cheese.
Not once.
That’s what the girls to our right had on their table. They wouldn’t have gotten those snacks in prison.
We were on the last frame of our game and I noticed that nobody in my family had broken a hundred. But one thing I did notice was the fact that despite our less than stellar abilities to knock down the pins, everyone seemed to be having a grand time.
And they were getting along.
There was a time when something as simple as taking our kids bowling would end in someone yelling, someone crying and maybe even a punch or two being thrown.
Years ago, when my sons were teenagers, I honestly thought I would come home and find one of them standing over the body of the other lying dead in a pool of blood.
That how serious their fighting got at times.
And here they were. All grown up. Laughing. Drinking warm beer. Eating the world’s worst nachos. Throwing gutter balls.
They had somehow survived those teenage years and now actually loved each other.
I may not be a great bowler- okay, I’m not a great bowler- but when it comes to how my kids turned out, I definitely threw a strike.
The Power
My lovely wife and I are going out of the country in a couple of weeks, so in addition to buying some new underwear, a fresh roll of dental floss and a new eye mask for sleeping on the plane (those don’t go together), we decided it was time to revisit our wills.
The last time we updated our wills was when our children were little.
They are little no more.
So, if the Russians mistake our American Airlines 777 for a hostile intrusion into their airspace and we get shot down over France, we want to make sure a few of the original provisions are up to date.
Like the part about our kids being adopted by my wife’s brother if something were to happen to us.
Considering our oldest is 33 and the twins are about to turn 30 (damn, I’m old), I doubt being forced to move into my brother in law’s basement and sleep in bunk beds for the rest of their lives might not be very appreciated.
And now that we actually own a few things, it was time to decide who gets my old recliner and collection of ‘root beer bottles from around the world.’
Those have to be worth something.
So, we sat down with our attorney to hammer it all out.
My wife wanted to give them everything. I wasn’t so sure.
How many times had I asked my sons to take out the trash and they just looked at me like they no longer spoke English?
And how many thousands of times had I told them not to take snacks upstairs as they walked right past me with a bag of potato chips in each hand.
And what about those times my daughter… well, she did bad stuff but I just can’t think of anything right now.
During the years they lived in my house, I worried, I lost sleep, I developed these bags under my eyes. I purchased 6,000 gallons of milk, and I spent at least two hundred thousand dollars on Hot Pockets.
Why should I just hand over the family fortune to them?
That’s what I thought to myself.
But of course, when the attorney asked me who I wanted to be the beneficiaries of my estate, I didn’t mention the frown lines they caused me to have or the fact that if it wasn’t for them, I could be retired and living on a yacht somewhere the Caribbean by now.
I just smiled and said, “ISIS!”
My attorney looked at me in shock, “What?”
“Sorry… I meant to say my children.”
Apparently, upon passing the bar exam, an attorney is required to have an operation to remove their sense of humor.
Once our wills were signed in triplicate, witnessed and notarized and my wife and I cut our palms and rubbed the bloody cuts together, it was time to move on to fun part.
The durable power of attorney.
I’m not sure why it’s called durable. Is it possible write up a power of attorneys that’s just delicate? Or hasty?
Anyway, this was something that we have long needed in case one of us is unable to make our own medical decisions.
In other words, it I fall and scrape my knee or get a real bad mosquito bite, my wife needs to be able to tell the doctor to pull the plug.
I could tell that my attorney loved this part. There is nothing like pitting husband and wife against each other to see which one will say uncle and yank out the life support tubes first.
To determine which of us was the most cold-hearted, he had a whole litany of questions that each of us had to answer.
Like if I am in a coma, did I want the people at the hospital to keep feeding me through a tube or have them pull it out and let me starve.
Naturally, I wrote down that I preferred to be given a diet of grass-fed ribeye steak but that wasn’t one of the choices.
Pull the plug.
And then there was the section about if I should be given any pain medication to ease my suffering.
Just the mention of the word suffering calls for some kind of action, don’t you think?
My wife didn’t seem to think so.
She grabbed a pen and checked the ‘no’ box faster than a sneeze through a screen door.
She must already have her second husband picked out.
Apparently the durable power of attorney law in Georgia gives a person the right to do virtually anything in the other person’s name, not just pull the plug.
Our attorney explained that once we signed it, our spouse could borrow money in our name, buy a car or take out a mortgage in our name even without our knowledge.
In other words, while I slept peacefully in my bed at night, my wife could sneak out and borrow a million dollars, empty my bank account and even sell my root beer bottle collection and there was nothing I can do to stop her.
My attorney asked us several times if we were sure we wanted to sign the document. Apparently, at some point in his career, this little document had caused a bit of a riff in an otherwise happy union and someone had either been murdered or sent to debtors prison.
I looked at her. She looked at me.
We both knew we would never unplug the other. Not unless it was really bad.
You know, like me being in a coma might cause her to miss the new season of Yellowstone.
Or if it meant she couldn’t bring her dogs to the ICU waiting room.
Things would have to that kind of bad for her to tell the doctors that it didn’t matter if I was sitting up talking, it was time for me to go home and be with Jesus.
So we signed.
As soon as we return from Italy, I will probably need to have surgery on my shoulder. Full anesthesia.
It will be the first test of our new durable power of attorney.
So, if you see my wife driving around in a new Range Rover, you’ll know it took me longer than ten minutes to wake up.
The Solo
I am spending part of my week recording the band festival at Cairo High School.
A few minutes ago, I was listening to one of the concerts playing this slow, mournful piece and knew what was coming.
The solo.
I have been around band festivals and this kind of music for more than fifty years and am expert at knowing when somebody is about to play the dreaded solo.
The piece starts off energetically but somewhere in the middle, it starts to slow down. There are these long, mournful chords. A lot of French horns and trombones holding those long notes.
It sounds like something from the Game of Thrones soundtrack.
And then, just when the band members start to turn blue and you think everyone is about to pass out from holding their breath so long, the soloist starts playing.
This is the most dreaded part of the festival performance.
The difference between getting all ones or your reputation being forever smudged with a two (band people know what this means) comes down to whether this boy or girl can actually get through their solo without cracking up.
And it’s hard.
Imagine you’re a 17-year old kid. All eyes and ears is the entire band- and everyone in the 1,000 seat auditorium are on you.
It’s your turn to be a star. Or to be forever branded as the loser who ruined festival for everybody.
It’s a lot of pressure on a young kid and it usually shows. When it comes time for ‘the solo’ sometimes it rings out true and clear. But more often, you can hear a quivering in the notes as the poor kid playing it is shaking with fear so hard that his mouthpiece is banging against his teeth.
When I was back in band, being given ‘the solo’ by our band director, Mr. David, was both exciting and terrifying.
You instantly became a star among your peers. And you also instantly had a target painted on your back.
Most of the people who got ‘the solo’ pulled through on the day of the festival performance but during my years recording festival, I have witnessed many poor students who have crashed and burned.
Squeaked notes. Out of tune phrases. Starting too soon. Starting too late.
You couldn’t hear it from where I sit way in the back of the auditorium but I am sure that some of their band mates were whispering “we’re going to murder you on the way home” as the poor unfortunate soul lowered their horn at the end of the butchered solo.
Back in my days in the Cairo High Syrupmaker Band, I was like every other person in the band. I desperately wanted to play a solo at festival.
And I also desperately didn’t want to play one for fear that I would bring a blight on our band’s unbroken record of superior ratings going back to when Warren G. Harding was President.
When Mr. David passed out our festival music every year after Christmas break, you could hear the pages rustling all over the band room as we all desperately searched for the notation in the scores that read ‘solo.’
We wanted to play one and be the hero. That was until we played it that first time in rehearsal and made it sound like two pigs having sex in a cardboard box.
Then we just prayed to be run over in the parking lot by a runaway school bus.
Typically, unless you were some kind of child prodigy, you didn’t get a solo until you were a senior. Or played oboe.
Nobody wanted to play oboe. It’s a notoriously difficult instrument to play and sounds like a goose dying of cholera but there are always oboe solos in every serious piece of festival music. It’s a law or something.
You could be a 9-year oboe player and if you were any good, get a solo with the New York Philharmonic.
When my senior year rolled around and Mr. David passed out our festival music, I didn’t even bother to look and see if there were any solos for saxophone.
I was too scared.
But I didn’t have to look. As we were sight reading the music during class, there it was.
Solo: Alto Saxophone
Oh, yes Lord, please let it be me, I prayed.
And then I saw all of the sixteenth notes and the sharps in the key signature. And I prayed again.
Lord, please let me run over by a bus.
I did get the solo and for the next three months, it consumed my life.
I told Mr. David I couldn’t do it- it was too hard. He just smiled told me to keep practicing.
So I did. I practiced it at home a hundred thousand times. I took my saxophone to work and played it during commercial breaks. I played it during recess and after school in the band room while Mr. David sat in his office.
When I stopped, I would hear him say, “Do it again.”
And I did.
I played the solo in rehearsals with the rest of the band. Sometimes it was perfect. Most times it was not.
I told Mr. David I was going to mess it up. He should give the solo to someone else.He told me he believed in me and knew when festival day came, I would do great. So I kept practicing.
I was getting used to the cold stares from my classmates. And the subtle death threats like the notes left on my music stand.
‘Blow that solo and you’re a dead man!’
Well, maybe they weren’t so subtle.
The week of festival came and I was so nervous I couldn’t eat or sleep.
I took to sucking on my reed around the clock. For you folks who never played a woodwind instrument, the reed is the thin piece of wood attached to the mouthpiece that vibrates and makes the sound. The softer the reed, the easier it vibrates and the less chance it will squeak.
By the time festival day arrived, my reed was softer than a baby’s earlobe.
We put on our uniforms and took the stage. The first song, a Sousa march, was perfect. The next one would have my solo.
As we started it, I could feel my bowels cramp. Here it was. After this day, I would either be hoisted upon the shoulders of my bandmates and be paraded through the streets like a conquering hero or spat upon every time I entered the band room.
The part up to my solo went beautifully- the band was prepared and could have played it with their hands tied behind their backs. And then the music softened and the long, forlorn notes began.
It was time for my solo.
I felt the eyes of the trombone section boring into my back. Other than the tubas, the trombones were the biggest and meanest guys in the band. If
I messed up, it wouldn’t surprise me if one of them didn’t pull a switchblade out of their sock and gut me like a fish right there on stage.
I could feel the sweat running down my back as I took a deep breath and began.
I had played this 16-bar solo at least 100,000 times. Probably more. And miraculously, under all of this stress, my mind just shut down and my mouth and fingers took over.
Without even thinking, I played it- every single sixteenth note, every sharp- perfectly.
When my solo was over, I breathed a huge sigh of relief and looked up at Mr. David. For a tiny second, he allowed himself to smile and he winked at me.
He had been telling me for three months not to worry. I could do this.
And I did.
I sat in the back of the auditorium this week and I listened to the young man play his solo. It was flawless.
I wondered how much stress he must have been under these last few months.
But more than that, I wondered if he had a mentor who believed in him like I did.
I hope so.