I got steamrolled

When you are married, or are a parent, there are things you do and places you go, things you would not ordinarily do, but you do them for your loved ones.

For example, I saw every animated movie released between 1994-2005, including some really bad ones (Ice Age 2, anybody?). I have been to Chuck E. Cheese and birthday parties at skating rinks, and I once saw “Barney Live” at the Atlanta Civic Center. We had front-row seats. We were so close, you could smell the sweat on Baby Bop.

I have endured a few things for the sake of marital happiness, as well. You know, chick flicks, arts and crafts shows, pottery stores. A few years ago I took my wife to see a Dan Fogelberg concert, and just the other day I promised her that I would take her to see him again the next time he was in town.

I swear to God, I didn’t know he was dead.

A while back, Susan asked if I would go with her to see Manheim Steamroller. Great, I thought, I love monster trucks, so of course I’ll go. So I said yes, but then she told me that it was not a monster truck, but it was a concert at the Fox Theater.

Well, that’s cool. I’ve seen some great concerts in my day at the Fox – REM, Elvis Costello, Squeeze, Jason and the Scorchers, John Prine. It’s one of my favorite places. I love the live Lynyrd Skynyrd album that was recorded there, where Ronnie Van Zant keeps saying stuff like “Look a’here” and “Bring all my mules out here, kick ‘em one time.” Maybe this would be like that.

This would not be like that. Manheim Steamroller is, well, I’m not sure how to describe it. It’s like if Emerson Lake and Palmer let Yanni join them and then he took over and insisted they only play Christmas music.

But hey, I’m not against broadening my horizons, so I went in with an open mind. I paid $15 for two thimbles-full of white wine, and settled into my seat among 2,500 other white people in sweaters, and waited to get my world rocked.

These dudes came out on stage in resplendent white coats. There was a keyboard player, a solo violinist, a bassist, and they had both a drummer AND a percussion player, like The Grateful Dead. There was a small orchestra over to the side. And a groovy light show in the background, like you used to see when a band like Jefferson Airplane or The Doors would play on The Mike Douglas Show.

They started playing their music, some of which I sort of recognized and some which I didn’t, and after about 45 minutes they stopped and a big movie screen came down over the stage. Well, that wasn’t so bad, I thought, and I stood up and got ready to go – but it was only intermission. Intermission? What is this, a hockey game? Skynyrd never had an intermission.

So I left my seat and finally found a concession stand where they were selling beer, and I got myself two. I came back to my seat and my wife asked me if one of them was for her, and I said no.

“Why did you get yourself two beers?” she said.

“Because I couldn’t carry three,” I replied.

The last half of the show was a little odd. The movie screen stayed down, and there was some sort of medieval scene being shown, which didn’t make sense, and then a long shot of a guy riding a horse across a field to a castle, and I missed the Christmas connection, but a lot of the people around me seemed to get it.

I was a little disappointed, because they didn’t play any of MY favorite Christmas songs, like John Lennon’s "Happy Christmas", or "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer", or the theme from "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas", or “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.” You know, the classics. About the only song I recognized was “Carol of the Bells,” which drives me INSANE every time I hear it.

So, I have done my Christmas penance. I thought about trying to get even with my wife, but considering that I went with her to that show AND to a Richard Gere movie the same year, her debt is too big to repay.

Just know that for at least the next year, I have a get-out-of-jail-free card. Any time she asks me to go shopping, or to watch some house renovation show on TV, or anything unpleasant, all I have to do is say two words: Manheim Steamroller.

She will know exactly what I mean.

Head for the hills

Just got back from a nice little two-day excursion up to the North Georgia Mountains. I came back with a nice sack of apples, a hacking cough and a greater loathing for the Metropolitan Atlanta area.

We stayed in a cabin on top of a mountain, a really rustic place with authentic foosball, air hockey and pool tables, satellite TV and a four-person hot tub. As I sat in the hot tub, sipping a glass of cheap wine and looking out over a peaceful valley, I knew exactly how the Indians who used to live in those hills felt. You know, before my ancestors chased them out.

The cabin had a nice gas fireplace, which I could never figure out how to work. What kind of a fireplace comes with a remote control? Every time I tried to get the fire going, I wound up changing the channel on the TV. So I finally gave up.

It is quite beautiful up there near Blue Ridge, Ga., and the surrounding areas, though some of the inhabitants are a little bit sketchy. I saw a lot of Confederate flags, which seems unnecessary. The war is over, boys. We ran out of bullets.

It rained harder than a cow peeing on a flat rock all day Monday, so that limited our outdoor activities. I didn’t see much wildlife, though I did spot what I believed to be a giant peacock outside our cabin one morning. But then it spread its wings and went soaring off the mountainside, and I changed my mind and decided it was a wild turkey. As God is my witness, I didn’t know turkeys could fly.

The mountains weren’t too crowded this time of year, which is the number one reason to go there. And it was too cold for all of the Harley riders who take over that region in warm weather, which I don’t mind, except they’re so damn loud it’s like you’re vacationing on an airport runway when they go rumbling past.

The rain stopped Tuesday and we ambled our way back, stopping for a few minutes in Helen, Ga., which looks like a town built by Disney. The town has an “alpine” theme, with all sorts of Bavarian and German-sounding names, like Edelweiss and Hofbrau, and polka music blaring over loudspeakers. We were hungry, so naturally we spent the first 30 minutes looking for a good old “country cooking” restaurant. Believe it or not, we found one, and I had a country-fried steak that would make Heidi proud.

After that, I had to stop somewhere and get a sack of boiled peanuts, because I don’t feel like I’ve been to the mountains if I don’t do that. I washed them down with a nice, cold Peach Nehi, and then we were on our way back to hell, I mean, Atlanta.

Specifically, Atlanta traffic. It was brutal. I knew better than to try to go through town, but when I was coming down Ga. 400, I picked up a traffic report on the radio and the woman said, and I quote, “Not much going on out there, except much lighter than normal volume.”

Two hours later, as I passed through downtown, a scant 10 miles from where I heard that volume was light, moving slower than the speed of smell, I decided that I would hunt down this traffic woman someday and make her pay for her sin. I began to believe we would never get home. Every way I tried was backed up – 1-75, 1-285, 1-675, Highway 138. I felt like Griffin Dunne in “After Hours.”

Finally we made it, and I began plotting some way to retire early and move away from this madness. To keep from sitting in that traffic again, I would fly a Confederate flag in my yard, listen to Harleys all day and even learn how to work a remote-control fireplace.

Skinny jeans

I heard a co-worker the other day talking about buying some “skinny jeans.”

I asked her what those are, and she said they are jeans that make you look skinny. Wow, I thought. That’s pretty awesome. What kind of voodoo magic is that? And where can I get a pair?

But she told me that they aren’t for men, only women. That doesn’t seem fair. Don’t I have the right to look skinny in a pair of jeans?

Then the more I got to thinking about it, I realized I probably don’t want to wear skinny jeans. For one thing, they are bound to be tight, and I don’t wear tight things. I hate being constrained. I’m the kind of guy who unsnaps his pants after a big meal, which causes quite a furor in the catfish restaurant.

I will stick with my “relaxed fit” jeans, which are the greatest invention for middle-aged men since the recliner. I don’t know who came up with this idea, but he or she is a genius. We all know who Eli Whitney and Robert Fulton were, but when’s the last time you used a cotton gin or rode on a steamboat? And yet the inventor of relaxed fit jeans lives in obscurity. Don’t seem right.

Like many men my age, I fight the battle of the bulge. Well, OK, I don’t really fight it, but I think about fighting it. Just the other night, as I watched a football game and looked down at the empty bag of barbecue potato chips at my side, I said to myself, I gotta do something.

So I brushed all the crumbs off my shirt, finished off my beer, and went upstairs to come up with a plan of action. Then I saw my bedroom, and I figured I didn’t want to tackle a drastic life-change like that without the benefit of a good night’s sleep, Luckily, when I woke up, I had forgotten the whole thing.

I don’t really want to get skinny, I just want to avoid getting too fat. I’ve been wearing 34-waist pants for about 20 years and I don’t want to move up to 36. That would be admitting defeat, plus I would have to buy a whole new wardrobe, and I don’t buy clothes. I make an annual sojourn to a place called The Sock Shoppe down in Griffin to stock up on socks, T-shirts and boxers, and then I hope I get a couple of pairs of pants for Christmas, and that’s about it.

My wife and daughter have made a couple of attempts to spice up my wardrobe, but I have resisted. My wife is currently threatening to buy me a white linen shirt with some sort of embroidery on the front of it. She said it looks like something they wear in Mexico. That’s exactly what I want at this stage of my life, to look like Ricardo Montalban.

But back to the weight issue. I suppose there are many options out there to consider. Sadly, they all include eating less food, and that’s a big stumbling block. There’s no magic pill. I remember not long ago reading about some fat-blocking pill that allegedly worked, but it also caused “anal leakage.” There’s a word combination you never want to see.

And diets? They’re too restrictive. Almost all of them prohibit you from eating large amounts of cheddar cheese, and that, I can’t abide. I used to work with an older guy at a newspaper, and one day a shapely advertising girl walked through the newsroom, and he stood up and said, “Boys, if I ever get too old to want that, I want y’all to kill me.” That’s how I feel about cheese.

So I guess I’ll just exercise a little more, skip the late-night potato chips, avoid Little Debbie snack cakes, and before you know it my size 34 relaxed fit jeans will be comfortable again, and I keep them snapped even after dinner. The waitresses at the catfish place will thank me.

Arrested development

I’m sure that everyone who has ever had children has at some point thought to themselves, “Wow, kids are sure different these days.”

Case in point: They don’t seem to be as eager to be able to drive a car. My daughter is nearing 17, and still does not have her license. My son has been 15 for nearly two months, and has barely cracked the driver’s manual that he’ll need to learn to get his learner’s permit. I took him practice-driving once in a school parking lot, and I am still recovering from an acute case of whiplash.

I got my driver's license the day I turned 16, which was necessary, because I began working my first job the next day. I equated driving with being grown up, and freedom, and infinitely improving my odds of impressing someone of the female persuasion. Never mind that my car had no air condition, no power steering, and only a crackling AM radio. It wasn’t just a car, it was independence.

You had to have a car as a teenager when I was coming up, because the number one activity was riding around. The number two activity was parking, but you needed that member of the female persuasion for that one to be any fun. Not that I ever did such a thing (my kids read this).

After school, Friday nights, Sunday afternoons, riding around is what you did. You’d ride around with a buddy or two in the car, and hopefully you’d run into some other friends who were out riding around, and then you’d pull over and talk, and then ride around some more.

If you were lucky, you ran into some girls who were also out riding around, and if there was one you liked, you’d try to convince your buddies to walk home so you could get the girl to get in your car. Then you’d go park. General rule: If the car was moving, it was more fun to have your friends in it. If it wasn’t moving, then you preferred a girl.

Again, I’m talking about for other guys. I spent most of my time in Bible study or down at the Amish mission, preparing meals for the needy. When I wasn’t home studying, that is.

I suppose I should be in no hurry for my kids to drive. I doubt a parent ever has one peaceful moment while their child is out driving a car somewhere, and they don’t know where they are. I won’t miss leaving the house at midnight on a Friday night to go pick them up after a high school football game, but I doubt I’ll be resting easy when they’re driving home.

And I will have one advantage my parents didn’t have. I saw an ad on TV the other day about a GPS locator you put on your kids’ car. This is a great idea. Assuming they ever actually drive one.

Sure as shootin'

A friend of mine at work the other day expressed surprise upon hearing that I don’t own a shotgun, being a good Georgia boy and all.

I didn’t find it that strange. I don’t own a gun of any kind, and it’s probably for the best, considering how agitated I get in traffic, or going through the drive-through at a fast-food restaurant. Every time some lethargic teen-ager gets my order wrong, I’m half-a-heartbeat away from being Michael Douglas in “Falling Down.”

I had a BB gun when I was a boy, of course, but I found it only provided limited fun. There were so many restrictions – don’t shoot it in the house, don’t shoot the dog, don’t shoot at passing cars – that it severely limited the options.

Not only did my mother warn me I would put somebody’s eye out, she claimed to know somebody it happened to. She also claimed to know of a boy whose face was disfigured because he kept making a popping noise by putting his finger in his mouth and pulling it our really quick (all boys know how to do this.) And she claimed to know of somebody who dove in a nest of water moccasins in a pond and died.

I’m not saying she didn’t always tell the truth. I’m just saying that the veracity of some of her claims is in question. Perhaps she regarded them more as parables than actual true stories.

My next-door neighbor Mike and I would shoot empty cans, though the BB gun wasn’t even strong enough to put a hole in them. One day we were shooting at the cans, stacking them in a pyramid next to the ditch and trying to knock them down. Mike was bending over in the ditch, re-arranging the cans, and I thought it would be funny to shoot between his legs and hit one of the cans, giving him a good scare.

Well, William Tell I was not, and my aim was a bit off, and the BB grazed his calf. He went off howling to his house, crying like he’d been shot – I guess he HAD been shot, but I still thought he was being a bit of a sissy about the whole thing. I went in the house and awaited my punishment, sure that I was going to get in some serious trouble, but I suppose my parents also thought he was being a sissy, because all they made me do was go and apologize.

We moved to a more rural setting when I was 15, and I got a .22 rifle, but the issues were pretty much the same. I just got no kick out of shooting. I was actually a pretty decent shot – we had to shoot rifles in my ROTC class at school, and my scores weren’t bad. Those were the good old days, when you could fire a weapon in school and not have somebody make a big deal about it.

When I got out on my own, I just never thought to have a gun. Then I had kids, and I had read too many horror stories about children getting hold of guns, so I wasn’t tempted.

I don’t really have anything against guns. I’m kind of ambivalent when it comes to gun control, though I do agree with the assault weapons ban. Are there really going to be occasions in your life when you need an AK-47? If so, you probably need to move to a better neighborhood.

So here’s hoping I never actually need a gun. If I do, somebody’s going to get hurt. Just ask my old next-door neighbor.

Whistling past the graveyard

Please don’t bury me down in the cold, cold ground
I’d rather have them cut me up and pass me all around
Throw my brain in a hurricane and the blind can have my eyes
And the deaf can take both of my ears if they don’t mind the size – John Prine, Please Don’t Bury Me

I went by the cemetery where my mom is buried and visited her grave for a few minutes Saturday.

It’s in a pretty non-descript spot, on high bare ground near the back of the cemetery. There’s really not much of a view. A few feet away from her grave there’s a chain-link fence surrounding some ramshackle house. Not far from the cemetery there’s a train track, but I don’t believe trains run through there anymore.

I’m not sure why we visit the graves of our loved ones, except to put some new fake flowers there, and make sure the headstone hasn’t been vandalized. I really don’t feel anything when I stand there. I guess I should feel sad, but I don’t, because I don’t associate her with that place. It represents nothing about her life, or who she was. She’s not there at all.

I think we feel and remember our loved ones in everyday experiences. If I walk into a house and smell turnip greens cooking, I remember her. If I hear one of the old gospel songs she loved, I think of her. If I hear a new joke that I think she would like, I regret not being able to tell her and hear her laugh.

But standing in front of a concrete slab surrounded by hundreds of other concrete slabs? It just seems odd to me. I guess I’m somehow missing the intended experience.

The grave next to hers was decorated for Halloween. What is that about? Were they expecting trick-or-treaters? Nearby, there was a headstone that featured a picture of the Winnie the Pooh character Tigger, with the inscription “Bouncy bouncy, fun fun.” Must be a child, I thought, but then I looked closer, and the man died at 37. I guess he really loved Tigger.

People memorialize their loved ones in all sorts of ways these days that are strange to me. I’ve seen plenty of the “In Memory Of” inscriptions in the rear windows of pickup trucks and other automobiles. Last week I saw one, and underneath it listed the birth and death dates of the person, and the person they were commemorating had died at the age of 91.

Some people have T-shirts made in honor of the deceased, with a silkscreen picture. Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned, and I guess people can grieve any way they want, but it all seems too much to me. I mean, where does it end? What’s next? Bumper stickers? Key chains? Bobblehead dolls?

My mother didn’t even have a funeral, just a graveside service, because that’s what she made my dad promise he would do. Knowing her, she didn’t want to “put anybody out” by having them come to a fancy funeral. Sure, it would have been nice to have a ceremony, with some of her favorite songs, and maybe a eulogy or two, but that’s not what she wanted. And none of that would have made the memory of her any more special.

I hope I don’t die for a long, long time, but when it happens, I want my family to make me some promises. No T-shirts, nothing on the back of the car, no decorations on the headstone, no roadside memorial if it happens in a car accident. No cartoon characters on the headstone, and I don’t really care where you bury me. Just make it someplace that’s easy to get to.

I don’t want to put anybody out.

Hip hip hooray

I spent pretty much all day Saturday at a cheerleading competition in Columbus, Ga., thereby earning my spot in Heaven.

Have you ever been to one of these things? It is madness. Hundreds of teenage girls screaming and dancing and cheering and doing backflips, while the people in the stands go crazy.

Well, the moms go crazy. The dads just sit there with a blank look and think, “What in the wide wide world of sports is a’going on here?” That, and “Why is my daughter’s cheerleading skirt so short?”

It’s mostly good clean fun, though occasionally a team will come out that looks like it’s been practicing its routine around a stripper’s pole. All that’s missing is a guy named Axl in the DJ booth saying, “Let’s show these ladies some appreciation,” as he spins another Motley Crue tune.

Lest you think I’m a pervert, I was there because my daughter is on one of those competition squads. This is a new concept to me. When I was in high school, our cheerleaders didn’t compete in anything, except maybe to see who could ignore me the most. But this stuff is a big deal.

A couple of my co-workers expressed surprise when I told them I would be at the competition. It seems my alma mater, the University of Georgia, was playing some sort of football game against a school from a neighboring state that afternoon, and they thought I would be watching. Luckily, I don’t really follow college football that closely, so I’m not even sure how the aforementioned event turned out.

(Sonofa@#$#$^%@#%^@blanking#%^@#!@#@!#bullsh^*&$%^&#$^!!!).

But I really didn’t even consider not going to the competition. I have probably been to 99 percent of the soccer, baseball, basketball and football games my kids have played in, plus every honors night banquet or All A's breakfast. I don’t think it makes me a better dad than those who don’t go. I go because I want to. It probably means more to me than it does to them.

I try to be a well-behaved parent, because I don’t want to end up on one of those YouTube videos, being pulled off a referee with my short torn and my lip bleeding and a redneck mama from the other team throwing a lit cigarette at me. But it’s not easy.

I was at one of my son’s basketball games last year and one of the dads from our team got mad at the refs, and went a little crazy and started yelling, and then the other team’s parents were yelling at him, and I thought, here we go. He’s going to get in a fight, I’m going to have to come to his aid, and my mug shot will be on the Nancy Grace show with the words “Middle school parents go berserk” scrolling underneath. But luckily he calmed down and I could sit there and continue to pretend I didn’t notice any of it.

I guess the closest I came to an incident was when my daughter was about 7, and her soccer team was playing one of those traveling teams, where the parents are all insane and they make the kids practice five times a week in the hopes that they’ll get a college scholarship, ignoring the fact that they’re SEVEN YEARS OLD.

Anyway, this team was up on ours about 20-0 and just pouring it on with two girls who must have been the twin daughters of Pele’, so I sauntered over and with a friendly smile said to their coach, “So, are you going for a world record?” One of the coaches got really angry and called me a loser and told me that his girls were winners, and he was not going to stifle them just because a loser like me was whining about it.

Whoa. Them’s fighting words. But I didn’t fight him. I just walked away, and later on he came over and apologized, and said he just got so intense during the games that his emotions got the best of him. I imagine he’s somewhere in a straitjacket by now.

There’s no such danger of anything like that happening at a cheerleading competition, partly because I really don’t know what’s going on. I watch my daughter’s team, and I think she does great, and I’m so proud of her, and as long as nobody falls from one of those human pyramids they do and gets hurt, I consider the event a success.

I guess that’s just my loser’s mentality at work.