The Boys in the Band

There’s an old Henny Youngman joke – ok, they’re all old, at this point – that goes something like this:

A violinist in an orchestra was playing a solo when a member of the audience stood and yelled, “Tell the sonofabitch to stop playing!”

The conductor turned and said, “Who called the violinist a sonbofabitch?”

And the man answered back, “Who called the sonofabitch a violinist?”

Anyway, I half-expect someone to yell out something like that whenever I tell anyone that I’m a guitar player. I’m just not very good. I try. I enjoy it. I know many of the chords. I could knock out “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” at a campfire. But that’s about it.

However, recently me and the boys have been getting together to play music. I use the term “boys” loosely since I’m often the youngest one there, and I’m about as old as the Cuban Missile Crisis. On the other hand, I’m not nearly as old as any of the Beach or Oak Ridge Boys.

It’s a pretty eclectic group – some of us have facial hair, some of us don’t. But we all have guitars, a passion for music and free time on Friday nights, at least until about 10, when we all start to get sleepy.

Our friend Millard hosts the party in his converted garage that has enough equipment to take The Who on tour. That’s the beauty of your kids growing up – disposable income.

We play a pretty wide range of music – anything recorded between the years 1973 and 1974 is fair game. Just kidding – we go back into the 60s sometimes.

Here’s how it works. Someone will suggest a song, and then someone will ask the key question – “How many chords does it have?” If the answer is 4 or fewer, then we give it a shot.

There’s a large screen TV, and the words and chords will scroll by as we play along. If it’s a song I don’t know by heart, I’ll sometimes forget to put my glasses on, which means that I can’t really see which chord to play, which means that I’ll just guess or try something, which means it will sound like badgers fighting because I almost always guess wrong. And the beauty of it – we don’t let it stop us. We just keep plowing through. Every now and then one of the better musicians in the group will look over in my direction with the same facial expression you get when you’re trying to figure out who just farted. It was me. I emitted a guitar fart. I’m sorry.

I’m thinking we should give this musical enterprise a name. I’ve suggested “Below Average White Band” but it hasn’t caught on.

I’m having a ball. It’s a healthy mid-life crisis activity that doesn’t carry the risk of jail time, barring the passage of a new noise ordinance. Some times I’ll even jump behind the drum kit for a song or two and bang away, until somebody yells, “Who called that sonofabitch a drummer?”

I own a very nice guitar, which I realize is not unlike Helen Keller owning a Coupe De Ville. But I don’t care. I’m going to show up on Friday nights and bang that sucker and play the wrong chords and sing like a cat in heat, until the cops shut us down or I just fall asleep. Rock on!

One Shade of Gray

I turned 50 last year, and one thing I noticed, other than the fact that I got irrationally indignant over receiving an AARP card in the mail, is that people start responding to you differently. You say certain things you’ve said for years, and suddenly, you get different responses.

Here’s an example. About the time I turned 40, I would punctuate some statement by saying, “But what do I know, I’m old.”

And the person would inevitably respond, “Hush, you’re not old!” Which is exactly what I wanted them to say. As each year passed, though, the responses changed. They would say “You’re not old,” but without the exclamation point in their voice. Then they would just kind of laugh. And finally, when you hit 50, the response is, “Well, that happens to everybody.”

Similar thing happened with my hair. At 40, gray hair started creeping in, so I would jokingly say, “I should dye my hair.” And the response would be, “No! It looks good.” Over the years that changed to “I like men with a little gray hair,” to “You look distinguished,” to what I get now, which is, “Yeah. You probably should.”

Speaking of hair, I was at the Fancy French salon where I get my hair styled – Le Fantastique’ du Sam’s, or as we call it in Henry County, Fantastic Sam’s – getting my voluminous locks shorn by my favorite stylist, Whitney or Lindsey or something like that. They have a lot of turnover there.

Is it a coincidence that the cute young hair stylist is the one who cuts my hair the best? Perhaps, but that’s beside the point. Anyway, she was talking to me, and admiring how much hair I have, and wisely avoiding mentioning the color, and I jokingly said, yeah, you’d hardly know I was an old man from looking at that.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“I’m 50,” I said, with the pride of a 3-year-old holding up fingers to show his age. This is where the young hair stylist is supposed to say, “You’re 50? No way are you that old!”

Instead she says, “Oh, my mother just turned 50. But she doesn’t act old.”

Clearly, this girl was not interested in getting a big tip.

Reeling from that shot to the jaw, I went down to see my dad, and his friend was there, and she said “Your daddy told me you’re 54. Is that right?” Of COURSE it’s not RIGHT! Surely you misheard him, I said. So then he got in the car and I said “How old am I?” And he said “You’re 54.” I looked at him and said, “Are you sure about that?” He looked sheepish and said, “You’re right. I forgot. You’re 56.” I said, “You know, THIS is why we’re moving you into assisted living.”

People! What is wrong with you? I mean, heck, come on, I don’t care. I’m not sensitive about my age. I don’t care that people know that I AM 50 YEARS OLD! And yes, my doctor did tell me I should not get excited like this, but I just can’t help it.

My day got worse. An aunt I haven’t seen in a long time stopped by to visit. She’s 84 herself, but I marveled at how sharp she still seemed to be mentally, even though she was breaking down physically. She looked at me at one point and said, “What are you now, about 60?”
Did I mention that she appears to be losing it mentally????

I don’t know when you cross that threshold from being younger than you look, to looking your age, to just looking old. Short of buying a Corvette, there’s not a lot I can do about it now, anyway. I will go gracefully into that good night, be proud of my experience, impart wisdom to younger folks, and embrace my status as a seasoned citizen. Just after I get through burning that @#$^%W@%^ing AARP card I got in the mail last week.

There really is no place like home

I remember being a teenager, and my dad drove me and my mom out to this God-forsaken piece of land in the middle of nowhere in Lamar County to show it to us. I don’t remember the details exactly, but I’m pretty sure I was acting bored and petulant and pouty, because, as I mentioned, I was a teenager.

We got out of the car and all I saw was trees and undergrowth and no signs of civilization. I said, “Why are we here?”

Daddy said, “I bought this land. I’m going to build a house and we’re going to move here.”

Well, I thought, this poor man has gone insane. We already HAVE a house. Who in the world would want to live out here? This is not the boonies. You can’t even SEE the boonies from here. This is like the suburb of the boonies.

Anyway, he decided not to build there, but soon solid that lot and bought some more land nearby, and set to work building a house.

Did you hear what I said? He BUILT a house. I can’t fathom doing this. The last time I opened something from IKEA I cradled a bottle of whiskey and sat on the floor crying for 30 minutes.

He didn’t totally build the house by himself – he contracted some of the work out – but the nails were hammered in by him, the bricks laid, the concrete poured. And did I mention he did this while still working at a real job at General Motors? He built cars all day, then went and built a house. Oh, and he built a barn. And he built a fence, to hold in the cow that he bought.

Ok, so the fence wasn’t so great. The wily cow managed to escape enough that it earned an early trip to the freezer. We ate steaks for quite some time after that. The message to other cows – remain content.

I helped build the barn. By help I mean, I scrambled up and down a rickety wooden ladder and toted his tools to him, while he tried to ignore the fact that I didn’t seem to know a socket wrench from a flugelhorn. And I helped build that fence. By help I mean took post-hole diggers and dug holes and whined it was too hot.

That house is still standing. The barn is still standing and full of farming implements that we can’t identify. The trees he planted have grown tall and provide shade over the impossibly large lawn that he has insisted on maintaining himself, even though he will turn 88 in May. Did you hear me? 88! This man served in the Navy and witnessed atomic bomb tests. He sweated in the foul air of a textile mill and then went to work building cars and trucks until he retired.

He has lived in that house for 35 years, the last 9 of them alone since my mother died. Other than his little dog Daisy, there’s been little to keep him company other than the crickets singing at night and the incessant crowing of the roosters from the nearby neighbor who decided to raise chickens (not many zoning regulations out in the country).

And now, he has decided it is time. It is time to stop driving his car everywhere. Time to stop sitting alone in that house and waiting in the driveway for the mailman to come. He has decided it is time to move into assisted living.

I promise you, this is not easy. After a year of driving dangerously that involved more than one accident, my brother and I had to tell him that we felt it was in his best interest – and everyone else on the road’s – if he discontinued driving. He took it about like you would expect a very independent man to take it. I think he knew we were right, but he also knew that he was having to give up a vital part of himself. It was heartbreaking.

I honestly think he will move into assisted living and take the place over. He’s never met a person who didn’t become his friend. The ladies will find him charming and the men will find him to a good fella. He may not always remember my name, but he is still sharp. He may not get around like he used to, but he is nowhere near feeble. I’m quite sure he could still kick my butt.

I am dreading the day, and it won’t be long, when he says goodbye to that house for the last time – the house he built, the house where finished raising me, the house where he loved my mama, his refuge after hard days of work, his castle. There will be tears shed, and sad faces, but there will be memories, memories of a house that was so much more than just wood and brick and concrete. It was, and will always be, home.

Running a half-marathon after living a half-century

Supposedly, you get smarter as you get older. But in truth, while wisdom does come age, it is sometimes accompanied by a stunning lack of judgment.

For example, in the middle of a nice hike in the north Georgia mountains with my wife Susan and daughter Allie recently, I wasn’t content to just gaze at the lovely waterfall at the end of the trail. No, I had to go walk across the rocks like I was a mountain goat, not realizing that one of them had apparently been greased with Crisco just before my arrival. I slipped and went down faster than Michael Spinks against Mike Tyson, landing on my shoulder, which I sprained, and on my head, which I’m pretty sure I concussed.

Being a man, I told everyone that I was fine, walked back to the car, drove back home, and quietly cried myself to sleep every night for a week until I went to the doctor and he gave me enough muscle relaxers to subdue King Kong.

I wasn’t going to let that little setback get in the way of more bad judgment, however, which is why a week later I found myself on the streets of Athens in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday morning, getting ready to run a half-marathon with a couple thousand other total morons.

What made me do this? I’d run one before, so what the heck, I figured, I can do it again. Never mind the last time I did it was several years before those jerks at AARP had the nerve to mail me a membership card. For one thing, I resent the implication that I’m old. For another, at my current rate, I’ll be 102 years old (roughly) before I’m able to retire.

But 2014 has been a pretty rough year for me. I’ve had some things happen I never would have imagined, made some dumb decisions and suffered from some pretty back luck, so I figured I was due for something positive, thus my decision to train and complete the torture course known as the Athens Half Marathon.

We started running on Clayton Street in downtown before the sun even came up. I used to run the streets in Athens in the dark quite a bit when I was a student at UGA, but that was something different.

When you do something like run a half-marathon at the age of 50, there are couple of ways to look at it. One is, wow, almost everybody else doing this around me is younger than me, so I should feel pretty proud. And the other way to look at it is, wow, almost everyone else doing this around me is younger than me, so I must be totally insane.

I didn’t run fast. I got passed by a lot of people, including college-age girls, which again – I got pretty used to college girls running from me when I was a student at UGA.

My son David and I ran this race together. Well, not together, exactly. We ran it the same morning. He finished predictably well ahead of me. He had time to go home, shower, make a sandwich and take a nice nap before I finally crossed the finish line. But he isn’t carrying some of the baggage I am, like old injuries, 40 extra pounds and financial burdens. So, on a weighted basis, we probably tied, when you think about it.

The good news is, I finished the race, and with a time of 2 hours and 14 minutes, beat my goal by a minute. At the last part of the run, they let you do a lap inside the country’s greatest college football stadium, and when you finish they give you a bottle of water and one-fourth of a banana. OK, maybe that part wasn’t so great, but I also got an incredible sense of satisfaction. I might be seasoned, I might no longer have the body of an underwear model (Did I ever? I’ll let the reader wonder), and I might not be breaking any Olympic records. But for at least one morning, I felt that maybe I wasn’t over the hill quite yet. That alone convinced that maybe this decision wasn’t a bad one after all.

My personal commencement address

So, what advice do you give a brand new college graduate who is about to go out and truly face the world for the first time?

I will soon have one of those in my family. Allie will graduate from the University of Georgia in a couple of weeks. It is so hard to believe. The great John Prine once sang, “Time don’t fly, it bounds and leaps.” It feels like it was just last week when I was dropping her off at the decrepit dorm on a warm and bittersweet August day. It was not the Georgia humidity that caused the wetness on my cheeks as I drove away from Athens.

That is such a wonderful stage of life, a time full of wonder and anticipation and fear and excitement. A time of being on your own, of finding new friends and experiences and eating pizza five times a week. I am so proud of her for how she handled things. I got no phone calls in the middle of the night from the Athens police, never had to post bail or hunt down a male student to deliver justice.

Oh sure, there were some emergencies – a broken foot here, a fender bender there. There were some calls looking for advice, or guidance, or money – well, mostly money – but I don’t mind those. I’ll let you in on a secret about dads, we actually sort of like those kinds of calls. It makes us feel useful.

She made a lot of great friends and did a lot of meaningful work through Navigators, an on-campus ministry, in which her brother David is also active. She went to football games in the country’s greatest stadium, went to parties and dances and cookouts, spent long nights writing papers she’d put off doing and lazy days swinging in a hammock and reading. I am intensely jealous.

But, now what? Here comes the real world, the world of payments and commutes and idiot bosses and premature gray hair. The thought of leaving behind those friends and that social scene has to be frightening. I know it was for me, and I didn’t have nearly the collegiate experience she did. I was only at UGA for two years and lived off-campus with a group of fellow slackers and derelicts known as my friends.

I was completely unprepared for life as my college career ended. I guess my strategy was if I didn’t think about it, it wouldn’t be real. I mean, I had things pretty good. I had a lot of friends, I had my own apartment, I was playing drums in a band, and I was living in Athens, Ga., a town blessed by God and populated by lots of pretty girls. Why would I look forward to leaving that?

And then, about two weeks before graduation, I was at home on the weekend and my dad said “What are you going to do when you graduate?”

I said, “I dunno.”

He said, “Well, I know what you’re NOT going to do, and that’s just sit around here and do nothing. Go find a job.”

Thus ended our one and only conversation about my career prospects. I went out, and got a job, and have had one (mostly) ever since. Some have been good, some have been bad. Some paid me a lot of money, some paid me less than a sharecropper. I have had bosses who were great and I’ve had bosses who shouldn’t be in charge of an outhouse. It’s life.

This is not easy for a parent. On the one hand, you want your child to earn money. You want them to be able to support themselves and pay for their own car insurance and life insurance and cell phone bill and..hang on, I need to wipe the drool off my face.

But you don’t want them to make the same mistakes you have made. You don’t want them driving home from work and wondering if what they’re doing is positively impacting anyone, anywhere. You don’t want them waking up with a stomachache thinking about what they’ll be doing for the next eight hours. And you don’t want them one day to be filled with regret, asking themselves “How did I get here?”

So here’s what I will say, to my kids and to anybody in the same spot who will listen – figure out what you love to do, and find a way to do it. That is simple, but difficult – much like losing weight. Don’t take the path of least resistance. Don’t give up your ideals and dreams just because it’s not easy. (This works better if you play inspirational music while you’re reading, like maybe the theme from “Chariots of Fire”).

Will it be wonderful if this career path offers insurance and enough money so that you can live on your own and not have to eat like Oliver Twist? Well, yes. But never do anything just for the money. Keep the faith, don’t quit, and never forget who you are, and how you were raised, and what you have become. I promise if you do that, we’ll all be all right.

Repairing my reputation

I have never really considered myself much of a handy man. Nor has anyone who’s ever known me. I have always enjoyed working in the yard and keep a meticulous lawn, but inside the house, I was useless.

Oh, I would try to fix things. If something broke that was crucial to day-to-day living – toilets, for example -  I found a way to get it done. I have a lot of experience with toilets. (insert your own joke here).

But usually, when something was broken, I would make one attempt, decide it was too difficult to complete the needed repair, tell my wife I’d take care of it later and then hope she would forget about it.

Lately, though, I’ve been on a tear. I’ve been fixing stuff left and right, and I’m learning it’s not as hard I’d feared.

Here’s a case in point. We had a few light fixtures that hadn’t worked in years. I had replaced the light bulbs – that was in my skill set – but it hadn’t worked. So I chalked it up to some sort of mysterious wiring problem and put off calling an electrician, because they charge more per hour than a neurosurgeon.

But on a recent day, after fixing a laundry door that hadn’t closed in years (total repair time – 30 seconds) and replacing a smoke detector that had been disconnected since the Clinton administration, I looked at one of the light fixtures and thought, well, let’s just put a new light bulb in. You know, to confirm that it was a bigger problem.

It wasn’t a bigger problem. There was light.

“I fixed the lights,” I told my wife when she came home.

“What was wrong with them?” she asked.

“It’s technical and I won’t bore you with the details. But I was able to diagnose the problem and make the repairs.”

“You just put new light bulbs in, didn’t you?”

Dang it. How do they do that?

Anyway, I remembered that a repairman had once told me that those fixtures wouldn’t really handle anything more than 60-watt bulbs. He told me that about, oh, 10 years ago, and I had forgotten. I can remember all the words of “American Pie” and “Stairway to Heaven” every time they come on the radio, but sometimes I forget trivial things. It happens.

Our house is nearing 20 years old and was apparently built by the first two little pigs, so it’s been in need of some repairs lately – and by some, I mean a lot. Our house needs more maintenance work than Dolly Parton. And she’s much better built.

My wife watches these crazy TV shows where people (aided by an army of off-camera workers) take an old house and within the space of a 30-minute show, they’ve transformed a shotgun shack into the Playboy Mansion. These shows are clearly not real. They may as well have David Copperfield serve as host.

But my wife will watch, mesmerized as some male model makes it look like installing kitchen tile is as easy as fingerpainting, and then she says, “We should find an old house and redo it.” I either pretend I don’t hear her or I fake a heart attack until this madness passes.

The concept of buying a dilapidated house eludes me. You wouldn’t buy a rusty car that’s up on blocks and has holes in the floorboard.

My recent binge of repairs was prompted by a series of catastrophes in January.  A pipe froze and then burst when the temperature dropped to (approximately) minus-50 degrees one night, turning our entire downstairs into a kiddie pool.  As a result, we had to replace all the flooring and kitchen cabinets and a good portion of the drywall downstairs, so a demolition crew came over and ripped it all out, leaving us to live in a crack house for two months.

A local plumber/extortionist came out and repaired the leak, but apparently fixed the pipe with a piece of chewing gum, because two weeks later I came home to find water pouring out from under the front door. Now I’m not Bob Vila, but I knew that meant something was wrong.

Luckily with this break, nothing was damaged, since no actual repair work had begun. Which came in handy a week later when the damn pipe froze again, in large part because the wall was torn out and it was exposed.  This time my wife was home and has become well-acquainted with the water shut-off valve, and we weren’t even fazed.

“Well,” she said when she called me, “The house has flooded again.”

“Ok,” I said. “What’s for supper?”

Eventually, we got nice new floors and cabinets and drywall and fresh paint and something called a “backsplash”, all of which only served to illuminate the shabbiness of the rest of the house. So old Mark “Tool Time” Williams went to work, and now the house looks good enough for company, as long as we don’t let them go upstairs. Some of the lights up there don’t work.

Made in America

Made in America

October 25, 2013 at 4:39pm

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For no particular reason the other day, while looking around at an interstate choked with Nissans and Toyotas and Hondas, I proclaimed loudly, “I am never buying a Japanese car.”

 

Why, my wife asked? (Apparently, I’d forgotten she was in the car).

 

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “My father fought against that country and died in World War 2. How could I in good conscience buy one of their cars?”

 

“Aren’t you taking your father to the doctor next week?” she asked.

 

“Well, yes. Men of that generation were a lot tougher than those today. You had to kill them more than once.”

 

This was in my mind because I had to buy a new car recently. My sporty 2000 beige Chevrolet Impala with the cracked windshield and functioning cassette deck was totaled in a hit-and-run accident. I settled on a nice new Buick, which I know takes my coolness factor from 1 to minus-20.

 

I decided early in the process that I would buy an American car. This commitment to the red, white and blue has not always served me well. I once bought a Dodge Shadow, which appears on just about every “Worst car of all time” list you can find. It had an engine built by Briggs and Stratton and was less reliable than George Jones in the '70s.

 

My father worked for many years at General Motors, so I’ve always been loyal to those brands. However, it is probably here that I should point out that two of my dad’s most recent vehicle purchases were a Dodge truck and a Ford sedan. So clearly, I’m the only one who cares.

 

Well, whatever. I yam what I yam.

 

As dad and I were driving up the interstate on the way to the doctor, I was expounding on my theory that it was a dishonor to his memory, even though he’s still alive, to buy a Japanese car. So the World War 2 veteran pointed to an Altima just head of us and said, “That’s a nice car.”

 

“Daddy!” I said. “That’s a Japanese car. I would never buy one of those.”

 

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Me either.” I also got him to agree that neither of us would ever buy any damn Korean car, though they never attacked us directly, and they came off as pretty decent people in all the M*A*S*H episodes I saw. Then I saw a nice Mercedes-Benz and said “Now, if I had the money, I wouldn’t mind one of those.”

 

“You know, the Germans were involved in World War 2, as well,” he said. Well, nobody’s perfect.

 

Now, I know plenty of people would accuse me of being small-minded or jingoistic or just behind-the-times when it comes to not buying foreign-made cars. Maybe so. Maybe I was too affected when I watched “Tora! Tora! Tora!” as a kid. But for me, I guess it will always be baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet – or at least a cool Buick.

Couch potato

My wife informed me the other day that she intended to buy a new sofa.

“But we already have a sofa,” I said.

She glared at me and said she didn’t want something that was old, worn out, dirty, out-of-style, and needed to be replaced in her house anymore. At least I THINK she was talking about the sofa.

She showed me the one she was getting and, after I was revived from passing out when I saw the price tag, I allowed that it was a nice sofa, and should make for some pleasant, comfortable afternoon naps.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You can’t lie on this sofa.”

Now hold on just a cotton-pickin’ minute here. I’m ok with the fact that we have entire cabinets full of dishes and china that I’m not allowed to use. I made peace with the fact that I’m not supposed to dry my hands (or anything else, apparently) on the perfectly usable hand towels in the downstairs bathroom. I’ve accepted that cutting my toenails in bed is not conducive to a harmonious household – though in my defense, I only did it on MY side of the bed.

Anyway, my point is, there are certain concessions and compromises you have to make in life. But what good is a sofa you can’t lie on?

I am not going to give up lying on the couch and watching sports on my ridiculously large TV. It’s one of my hobbies.

I’m kidding. It’s my ONLY hobby.

I made this point and my wife said that we could move the old sofa upstairs to the bonus room, and I could lie on it there. Well, there are a couple of problems with that. For one, our bonus room looks like a highway underpass where homeless people live, minus the homeless people. And more importantly, there is no TV in there.

Well, she says, we can “fix it up.” Get a new TV to go in there. Clear out my prized record album collection, to which I am very attached even though I haven’t had a working turntable since before the Berlin Wall fell.

I don’t think this bonus room thing is going to happen, and I think I’m going to be reduced to taking naps on the floor, next to the dog, who is flatulent and snores violently. This is not working out well for me – I’ve been tricked.

At least I got to approve the sofa purchase. You have to watch women or they’ll sneak stuff in on you when you’re not looking. I just happened to notice what appeared to be some new pictures hanging on the wall of the bathroom the other day, so I asked about them.

“Yes,” my wife said. “I bought new pictures.”

“But what was wrong with the pictures we had in there before?”

“They were old,” she said.

Uh, hello – have you ever been to a museum? EVERY picture in there is old. It’s what makes them good. Do you think they’re going to go and replace the Mona Lisa because somebody saw a cute picture of an Amish family having a picnic in Kirkland’s? If it’s good enough for The Louvre, it’s good enough for my loo.

Did cavemen go through this? I picture the following happening after a Neanderthal walks into his cave one day and looks around:

Man: “Honey, what happened to the picture I drew on the wall of me hunting a bison?”

Woman: “Oh, I got rid of that. I didn’t like it.”

Man: “OK, but do you realize that was, like, the first attempt at language in the history of man, and that one day historians and archaeologists can use it to learn how we lived?”

Woman: “It was old. Oh, and by the way, they’re delivering a new rock to the cave tomorrow. You can’t lie on it. We’re moving your old rock to the bonus cave.”

Hopefully he at least had a TV in there.

The old man and the garden

So it was time to plant the garden again. I planted butterbeans and squash and green beans and cucumbers and watermelons and I look forward to spending the next few weeks tending it carefully and boring people to death telling them about it.

I guess this is some sort of mid-life crisis thing, taking up gardening just before the age of 50. But hey, some guys get Corvettes, some guys run off with strippers. In comparison, my new vegetable obsession doesn’t seem so bad.

I learned some lessons last year, my first a full-time gardener. One was that deer love to eat peas, well before they are ready to be picked. Those SOBs ate every last plant, which is why I support hunting them to extinction.

I also learned that you need to study the seed packets carefully before planting. I grew some watermelons and they got to be about the size of a cantaloupe in a few weeks, and I thought mmmm, these are going to be good.

Then, for weeks after that, they remained the size of a cantaloupe, and finally I realized I had planted some variety of “dwarf” watermelons, and they weren’t going to get any bigger. Why is there even such a thing as a “dwarf” watermelon? Who eats these, Snow White?

I plant the garden on a patch of land out in Lamar County where my dad lives. He’s almost 86 and last year he assured me that he was done with gardening, and he was not going to plant anything this year. Month by month, his commitment to retiring from gardening began to erode. “Well, maybe a few tomatoes” became “I might plant some squash” then “I’m thinking about rowing some peppers” and so on. When I finally went to plant my portion, he had already plowed and planted enough to feed the population of Turkmenistan.

On the day of the planting, I took him to a follow-up doctor’s visit. While it is kind of cool to take advantage of the handicapped parking sticker on his car, these trips cab be a little discouraging. That’s when he seems older, a little more feeble every time, walking a little slower.

But out there in the garden, that all goes away. He’s out there manhandling the tiller up and down the rows to turn the ground and hardly breaking a sweat. Out there in his element, he doesn’t look like an old man at all. He looks like my daddy. Meanwhile, I used that tiller for about an hour and it made me so sore I needed help combing my hair for the next two days.

As I prepared to re-till the ground for planting, I asked my dad if he had any gloves. He looked at me kind of funny and said, “No. Why?” I said well, I just thought I’d use some, because last time I did this I got blisters.  He didn’t say anything, but the look on his face pretty much communicated “You’re a sissy.” Hey, I have delicate hands. Does that make me a sissy?

Don’t answer that.

Anyway, the seeds are in the ground, the anticipation has begun, and it won’t be long before I’ll be complaining about all the work this stupid garden has created and how much my back hurts and wondering why I can’t just be satisfied with eating green beans from a can. And I’ll be loving every minute of it.

Being neighborly

We had some new neighbors move in last week, a couple that appears to be about our age. I’ve met them both and they seem like perfectly nice people, but I’m going to reserve judgment because they could turn out to be something terrifying, like serial killers or swingers or Tennessee fans. They were wearing shoes and I didn’t need Honey Boo Boo-type subtitles to understand them when they talked, so I can probably eliminate the Tennessee angle.

It should be a nice change, because that house has been a nightmare next door for several years. First there was a couple that apparently suffered from agoraphobia, and neglected the front lawn until it became nothing but weeds and rocks. There’s more grass in Willie Nelson’s pocket than there is in that yard. After they moved out they started renting the house to a succession of rednecks who would move in, live for a while, and then escape under the cover of darkness.

There are some nice neighbors around me, on the other side and across the street, and although I like them and talk to them frequently, I couldn’t tell you any of their last names at gunpoint. These new folks have already worked on the lawn and spread pine straw and pressure-washed the house, so I think we might get along. But while it is nice to have neighbors who view their front yard as something other than a place to park their cars, I realize I’m going to have to adjust my behaviors.

For example, in the warmer months, I have been known to walk outside in only my boxer shorts after dark to get something out of the car or throw something in the trash can. My wife really wishes I wouldn’t do this – not because she’s afraid someone will see me half-naked, but because she doesn’t want people to know I wear Sponge-Bob Squarepants underwear.

I may also have to curtail my anti-squirrel crusade in the back yard. I like to sit out back on the patio when I’m grilling something, drink a nice cold beverage, and shoot at these despicable varmints with a .BB gun. It’s not powerful enough to do them any harm, but it is fun to watch them jump up in the air in surprise when I score a direct hit. Anyway, I can imagine how this will probably look to the neighbors.

Then there is my annual late winter-early spring backyard fire, which is also harmless and quite probably illegal.  I basically gather all of the sticks and limbs and leaves that have accumulated over the past year and put them in a pile, and then I pull up a nice lawn chair, get some lighter fluid and matches, and let the fun begin.

The highlight always comes when I toss the Christmas tree on top. Let me tell you, a Leyland Cypress that’s been lying in the yard, drying out for three months, lights up like a Saturn rocket when it’s tossed into the flames. The last time I did it, a legion of warriors from Gondor rode up and offered to help me in battle (that one was just for you Lord of the Rings fans).

I think I’m going to go ahead and have my fire this year and just see what happens. I may get some marshmallows and graham crackers and Hershey bars and keep them on hand, so if the cops show up I can say I was just making S’mores for me and Lucky.

I guess I’ll try to act decent for a while and not scare these poor people away. Maybe at some point, I’ll ever learn their last names.

Daddy Day care

I am at that age where the tables of life are turned and I am, along with my brother, becoming the caregiver for my daddy.

He’s doing pretty well, actually, to be 85, but he’s needed some help recently because of medical issues. This helps consists mostly of driving him to doctor’s appointments in Atlanta. He still drives, and would probably drive up there by himself if we would let him, but I would not feel comfortable with him driving on the interstate unless they closed the whole thing down first, like they do for the president, and installed bumper guards on the guardrails. 

He has officially entered cute old man stage. Women love cute old men and flirt with them shamelessly. He of course plays into this by flirting back and saying pretty much anything that pops into his head, to anybody, at any time. Nurses and waitresses and office workers just laugh and smile at him. Part of the charm seems to be that he wears suspenders. Us average-looking middle-aged men get no attention at all when a cute old man is around.

I took him to the hospital recently for a procedure. He was talking to a woman who was checking him in, and somehow it came out that her grandmother and he grew up in the same town. She wondered if maybe my dad knew her grandmother. I don’t know to politely say this, but in a small south Georgia town in the 1930s – well, it’s just not likely that daddy and this woman’s grandmother hung out much, you know?

But then the nice lady says “Here, I’ll show you a picture,” and hands a photo to my daddy. I held my breath, waiting to see what he would say.

He perused the photo and said, “She’s a nice-looking woman.”

Phew.

Then as he handed it back to the lady he said, “She was a big woman, just like you.”

Oh Lord.

The nice lady just laughed and said, “Oh, Mr. Williams, you’re just too much!”

She seemed to not mind that he had just called her fat. I guess it was the suspenders.

These long car rides to the doctor’s offices are not so bad. It gives us some time to talk. He had a great interest in the price of gasoline despite the fact he probably only has to fill his tank up once a month, as little as he drives now. We talk about the Braves and the weather and our respective dogs, etc. When I’m taking him back home, he’ll point out where I need to turn to get to his house, which is helpful, because I only lived there for about TEN YEARS and I might have forgotten.

I am hopeful that my kids will help me out one day when I need them, though they’re still at that cute age where you pretty much have to pull a gun on them to get them to turn on the dishwasher or bring in groceries from the car. I imagine they’ll be nice to me until they figure out their inheritance is going to work out to about $17.50 apiece.

Well, here’s hoping I have a good, long time left to take Daddy to the doctor or to the Cracker Barrel or wherever he needs to go, and that someday, when I start wearing suspenders of my own, I’ll have somebody to take me.

Emptying the nest

I dropped my youngest child off at college this week. I had been denying to myself for about 18 years that this day would ever come, but time marches on – or rather, rolls over you like a Panzer division - and there I was.

While my wife had been a sobbing mess for the previous week, I had decided to be a man and be strong and not cry like some sort of blubbering fool. I mean, this was a good thing – the boy was embarking on a new adventure, going out to seize the world, and I was going to be able to pour milk on my cereal without worrying how much of his slobber was going to land on my Corn Flakes (never could stop him from drinking directly from the carton).

I held up pretty well throughout the day, cracking jokes and complaining about how much stuff he brought. Just before we left him, he unpacked his Bible and put it by his bed, because he reads from it every night after spending about eight hours of shooting people on his X-box (a slight contradiction, but who am I to question?). Well, that got to me a little bit, but I just pretended I was coming down with a cold, slipped him some cash, hugged him and headed out.

I was still ok when I got home, but later that night, a little bit before it was time for bed, the damn stupid dog did me in. For a long time Lucky has slept in the room with David every night, curling up on her doggie bed and lying still for so long we’ve come close to burying her twice. But this night, she was just lying there outside his door, waiting for him, and when I walked by she gave me the “shelter face” and I could almost hear a Sarah McClachlan song in the background, and, well, it was all too much.

I remember my mother crying when I went off to college, and I remember humoring her but thinking it was ridiculous that she should cry over that. I imagine she was looking down on me from Heaven laughing at my fool self that night.

Why is this so sad? I don’t know. I suppose I’ll get over it soon – I felt the same way when Allie went off for the first time, but eventually got used to it. I’m not sure poor Lucky is going to recover for quite some time, however.

I was at the track the other night and I saw a man with his younger daughter, pushing her on the swings, and I resisted the urge to go tell him, “Don’t get too attached to her. She’s gonna move out and break your heart someday.”

Well, all you can do is try hard to raise them right and make sure they grow up to be good human beings who won’t try to put you in a nursing home the first time you twist your ankle. I take solace in knowing that both my kids are much better people than I was at their age.

It does seem like yesterday – you’ll have to forgive me for my use of clichés – that I would come home from work and be met at the front door by a little fella holding a plastic baseball bat or a NERF football, waiting patiently for me to get changed so we could go out to the front yard and enjoy the rest of the remaining daylight. One day my wife told me that some boys had come and tried to get him to go play with them, but he told them no, he didn’t want to, he was waiting for his dad to come home and he’d rather play with him.

(I will pause here for a moment so you can wipe your eyes. I’ll do the same).

I can tell you that I never minded or turned down those play sessions. Even though I’m gonna need rotator cuff surgery eventually for all the deep passes I threw, it was worth it. I raised a fine young man, and some day he’ll have kids of his own (not too soon, son, if you’re reading this), and I can just about guarantee you he won’t say no when he’s asked to go play catch.

Don't be an a-hole!

I am now frighteningly close to 50 years old, and that has caused me to undergo some serious self-examination.

No, I don’t mean looking for new places from where hair is now sprouting. (Seriously, what’s up with that? I think if men could live to be 200 years old, we’d be covered in hair like an ape. I bet Methuselah resembled a Tibetan yak when he finally kicked the bucket).

I’m talking about the need to examine the type of person I’ve become, or person that I was all along, and am just now really realizing it. Let me give you an example:

The other day, I was running on the trail at a nearby elementary school, when I see this guy with a big dog. I immediately got agitated, because dogs aren’t allowed at this park, and there are signs posted everywhere to that effect, but this guy apparently just ignored it. But I decided to let it go, figuring he didn’t know any better.

Then I came around the corner and his dog –a big one, probably around 70 pounds – was running around without a leash. I came close to saying something but was still going to remain quiet, until the dog made a couple of kamikaze runs at my legs and knocked me off balance. I snatched out my earbuds, turned around and yelled at the guy “Hey, there’s no dogs allowed here. There are signs all over the place.”

The man said, “Really? I used to be able to bring my dog here.”

“Well, you can’t now,” I said. “And especially not on a leash. You can’t let a dog run anywhere in the county without a leash, dude.” Yes, I called him “dude”. And having told this fella what’s what, I haughtily snapped my earbuds back in place and did another lap.

When I came back around, I noticed he was sitting on a bench, and his dog was nowhere to be found. Well, this was ridiculous, I thought. He’s just going to ignore me and the signs and let his dog run around and terrorize people. So I walked over to have a word.

As I got closer, I noticed this man was pretty old – probably at least 75. He was sweating profusely, and as I got close he looked at me with a very sad expression.
“I’m very sorry,” he said. “I haven’t been here in 7 years and I didn’t’ know they had banned dogs from the park.” I said OK, no problem, then he said, “I can’t get him to come back. I just adopted him from the shelter a few weeks ago and he doesn’t mind me yet. I’m afraid I’m too old to go chase him.”

Well, now I was feeling lower than a frog’s ankle. I saw the dog a few feet away, near a creek, and I was able to go over and grab him and hold him while the man came over. He thanked me profusely and apologized again, and I nodded and ran off before he had a chance to tell me that his wife had just died or his other dog had gotten run over or something else that would make me feel even worse.

So I got to thinking as I continued my run, and a very troubling question popped into my brain and it wouldn’t go away, even when I put Van Halen on my iPod and turned the volume up to 11, and the question was this: Am I an a-hole?

I think it’s quite possible. I certainly acted like one toward that old man. And it’s not the first time I’ve done that.

There was a woman who worked downstairs in the cafeteria in my office building. She would dip the vegetables, and she was frighteningly slow and confused most of the time. You asked for squash, she’d give you corn. You asked for butterbeans, you might get cabbage. You get the picture.

I would get very frustrated with this woman, roll my eyes, say things under my breath, and generally act like – well, an a-hole. I remember once I actually muttered, “Is it really that hard?” I must have said it louder than I thought, cause I looked around at the other people in the line, and they were all staring at me like I’d just stepped on a kitten.

So one day, I was going through the checkout line, and there was a framed photo of the woman by the cash register, and I heard the cashier telling the customer in front of me that the lady had died the previous weekend. Feeling a bit abashed, I asked the cashier what had happened.

“Oh, she had Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” she said. “Poor thing, she just didn’t want to be stuck at home, so she kept working for as long as she could. We sure do miss her. She was the sweetest thing.”

Holy Crap. Lou Gehrig’s Disease? What kind of an a-hole would fuss at a woman fighting Lou Gehrig’s Disease? (In my defense, I didn’t KNOW she had that – but still).

So maybe I really am just an a-hole. I don’t have a reason to be. I complain about my job, but I know some folks who have been out of work for a long time and are desperate to find a job. I get frustrated because my back and stomach have hurt every day for 3 ½ years, but I have some friends who are fighting cancer, and they aren’t letting it get them down at all.

I actually got angry the other day when the DVR messed up and I missed about 15 minutes of the golf tournament I was watching. Think about that – I’m sitting in an air-conditioned house, watching a TV screen the size of a billboard, a bag of chips on my lap, and I’m able to hit the pause button so I can leave the room and never miss a second of what I’m watching – and it made me angry that I had to miss 15 minutes of millionaires hitting balls around a big green pasture.

There are other instances. There are probably drive-through windows all over metro Atlanta with my photo on the wall and the words “Be on the lookout for this impatient a-hole” underneath. There quite likely are photos taken by traffic cams that could be used against me in a political campaign because of the gestures I used. And God help me if any of the other drivers are lip-readers.

Now, again in my defense, there have been some a-holes through history who accomplished some great things. These include:

• King Herod, who allegedly killed a lot of babies, but also built some really cool things in Jerusalem.
• Gen. George Patton, who slapped a shell-shocked soldier in the face, but killed a lot of Nazis.
• Musicians such as John Lennon, Neil Young and Elvis Costello, who often weren’t much fun to be around but who made some of the greatest albums of all time.

Of course, I haven’t accomplished anything, so maybe I really need to just stop being an a-hole altogether. I have no excuse. I might some day get cancer or Lou Gehrig’s disease or a big dog I can’t control – wait, I already have that one – and the last thing I’ll want to deal with if any of that happens is some a-hole.

How does my garden grow?

When I was growing up, my dad always planted a big vegetable garden. Being a stupid teenager (I know – redundant), I thought this was pure folly. After all, you could get pretty much any vegetable you wanted at the grocery store. All you needed was a can opener.

But he’d come home from his job at the General Motors assembly plant and get out there and plow up rows and plant seeds and hoe out the weeds. He’d grow butterbeans and peas and squash and cucumbers and okra, none of which I liked to eat. I pretty much lived off of Burger King. Had he planted Whoppers and french fries, I might have been interested.

The few times I’d actually pull myself away from watching Gilligan’s Island and look out there, it almost appeared that he was enjoying himself. I thought he must be insane.

However, the good part was, he pretty much left me out of it – until, that is, the vegetables were actually picked. Then HIS hobby became MY hobby, because all those beans and peas had to be shelled. Maybe I didn’t have the inclination – or sense – to get out and actually help in the garden, but I had two working thumbs, so I was expected to participate in the shelling process.

It was really kind of a social thing. We’d go visit people sometimes, and my late mother would grab a bucket and start shelling butterbeans while they talked. I shelled while watching Braves’ games or just sitting on the back porch talking to mom, shelled until my thumbs bled and my fingernails turned green. It was just part of life.

I grew out of my teenage years, so my brain became fully-formed and I realized that I actually enjoy eating vegetables, and that they’re so much better when they’re fresh. If I went to Burger King now I’d need to order a defibrillator as a side dish.

And this year, at the age of don’t-worry-about-it, I decided to plant a garden of my own – peas, squash, cucumbers, okra, and watermelon. My garden is planted right alongside that of my dad’s, on his land down in Lamar County. One half is mine.

I was going to plant pole beans, but dad informed me that you had to plant those next to a pole, so they’ll grow. Well, who knew THAT was why they called them pole beans? I just thought they were discovered in Poland or something.

I decided this would be a fun thing to do with my father. He’s 84 now, and I thought it would be a way to spend some quality time together. It’s hard to talk to him in the house, because he keeps the TV set at roughly the decibel level of a Black Sabbath concert. I’m going to have to learn sign language to communicate with him before long.

I had great plans to do a lot of stress-relieving, out-in-the-open work in this garden of mine – till the ground, put up some posts and wire and hang some things to keep the deer out, etc. I researched this thoroughly, meaning I Googled “Best way to grow vegetables in Georgia.” I was ready.

I went down to my garden spot to discover my father had already tilled the ground, put up posts, strung some wire, and hung some soap to keep the deer away. Then he proceeded to show me how to plant seeds - break up the ground, put in some fertilizer, mix it in, open the ground back up, put in the seeds, cover it up. Well, duh. What am I, a moron? Who didn’t know that? I DO have access to the Internet, you know.

I started working on my row, and then I looked up and my dad was at the other end of the row, opening up the ground with some sort of garden tool. It was 80 degrees and the sun was beating down and he was sweating – and did I mention he’s 84 YEARS OLD? – and I told him to stop, I would handle it, I knew how to do it.

Why was he giving me so much help? Well, half because he wanted to be helpful, and half because he suspects I’m an idiot who can’t do anything. He thinks this, in part, because he knew me when I was a teenager and a young adult, when I was an idiot who couldn’t do anything. And also, that’s sort of the default position for a father when he thinks of his son.

So I put out my fertilizer, and dropping my seeds on the ground when he looked at me and said, “Did you open the ground back up?” Well, no, matter of fact, I had not. “What are you, a moron?” he said.

Well anyway, I got the suckers planted, and when I went down to check on the garden a couple of weeks later, there were little green sprouts coming out of the ground. Dad is watering them for me, and I’m assuming that at some point they’ll get taller and I’ll have peas to shell and watermelons to cut and squash to – well, I don’t really know what you do to squash, but I can Google it.

Then I can get me a pan, fill it full of peas, turn on the Braves’ game and start working my thumbs while wishing my mom was there for me to talk to. I can hardly wait.

Dead zone

How are we supposed to act, or feel, when people die?

Our reflexive response when someone tells us of a death is, “I’m sorry to hear that.” We say this whether or not we’re actually sorry to hear it. It just seems like the polite thing to say.

We may not be sorry, though I assume what we’re really saying is, we’re sorry that somebody we know is experiencing a loss. And if it’s somebody we knew and liked who died, then we genuinely feel some degree of grief.

It’s pretty much accepted that you’re not allowed to be happy when somebody dies, unless it’s someone despicable like Hitler or Bin Laden or Urban Meyer. (for all you wearing blue jean shorts, that was just a joke.)

One of my professors from UGA, Conrad Fink, died recently. Now, I didn’t know him well at all, but I knew a few people who did, and they always spoke highly of him. I took one journalism class from him, and a few things stood out in my memory:
• He would throw erasers at me when I was drifting off to sleep or not paying attention in his class, which was often.
• He told a highly entertaining story about when, during his days as a reporter, he had a testy encounter with the King of Borneo. I don’t know nor care if it was true, but it was a great story.
• He always said to write for the “Kansas City milkman”, which meant keep your stories simple and understandable so even the least educated among us could enjoy them. I guess today he might say to write them for people who watch Jersey Shore.
• He pulled me into his office one day and told me that he thought I was the best writer in his class (is this bragging? Probably so), but that I didn’t have any “fire in my belly” and I should forget journalism and go somewhere like Coca-Cola and get a job in the public relations department. I was offended and angered by this and went on to have a lucrative 10-year career in newspapers, which ended when I went to Coca-Cola and got a job in their public relations department.

So even though I didn’t know Professor Fink that well or for that long, he did have an impact on my life, and I did note his death with some sadness.

Then recently, another person from my past died, and this was somebody I didn’t care for too much. He was generally not a nice person, thought most people thought he was. I found him to be dishonest, manipulative and mean-spirited. Maybe, as hard as this is to fathom, he just didn’t like me, so I never got to see whatever good side he might have had.

So while I didn’t pop open a cold bottle of Pink Champale when I learned he had died, I didn’t feel particularly sad, either. And I didn’t feel bad about not feeling sad. Maybe this makes me a bad person. I just don’t know.

The idea of death used to freak me out. I can remember going to funeral homes when some great-aunt or another died, and my mother would go to the casket and proclaim, “Oh, she looks so pretty!” Uh, hello, mom, no she doesn’t. Aunt Jenny is DEAD! She does not look pretty. She looks stuffed.

In The Return of the King, Gandalf tells one of the hobbits, “Death is just another part of the journey.” Of course, that was easy for him to say, since he had already died and been resurrected by that time. Oh, and he was a wizard. But I guess if that’s the case, we should just look at it as a chance to wish people well on the rest of their journey, and if we didn’t like them, hope we don’t run into them again when our time comes.

Paint the town beige

The driveway at my house generally looks like a used-car lot, in part because we haven’t been able to fit a vehicle in our garage since about a week after we moved in. There’s a refrigerator, freezer, dog crate, cedar chest and rusting universal gym in there, but no cars.

So the other day, I took notice of what was parked in front of my house:

- a fairly-new Saturn SUV, driven by my wife;
- a sporty red Ford Mustang with new rims and tires and all sorts of decals that my son added, I assume so he could attract even more police attention;
- a nice Dodge Stratus that is driven by my daughter and is only a few years old and in very good condition, except for the inexplicable make-up smears on the radio dial;
- and an absolute piece-of-crap 2000 beige Chevy Impala, with about 130,000 miles on it and a crack in the windshield that looks like an aerial view of the Snake River. This, of course, is my car.

How did this happen? My son’s car has a sound system that would be the envy of Dr. Dre, and all the Impala has is a radio and a cassette player. They stopped making cassettes about, what, 20 years ago? Do you know how tired I am of listening to sports-talk radio and Bob Seger’s Greatest Hits?

This morning went outside about 6:20 a.m. to discover the Beige Love Machine was covered in permafrost. So I got an empty cassette case, scraped off as much ice as I could, cranked the beast and headed off to work.

I’d gone about 10 miles when it dawned on me that, somehow, the air coming out of the vents was actually colder than the outside temperature. Instead of defrosting my windshield, it was glazing it. Try sticking your head out the window on I-75 so you can see where you’re going on a 30-degree morning. It’s a miracle a truck didn’t swerve into my lane and Ichabod Crane-me. My head was colder than Ted Williams’ when I finally got to work.

Before I got the Impala, I was sporting around town in a 1997 Plymouth mini-van, a chick magnet if there ever was one. But that was like a Lamborghini compared to the AARP-mobile I’m driving around in now.

Why does Dad, the guy who pays for the car insurance and makes sure the oil gets changed and the tires get rotated for everybody, have to drive the worst car? I should be tooling around in style, in some sort of turbo-charged sporty convertible while the rest of them drive Yugos that have to be parked facing downhill in order for them to start. It’s just not fair.

Nobody in the family but me and Lucky will even ride in my car, and even she won’t put her head out the window because she’s embarrassed for other dogs to see her.

Oh, well. Someday, when the house is paid for and I get the kids off the payroll, I’m going to get a nice car for myself, even if I’m too old to drive it. I’ll get something fancy that even has a CD player, and me and Bob Seger will just sit in the driveway and have the times of our lives.

Phoning it in

There’s an exchange on my answering machine between me and my son that we’ve preserved to listen to whenever we want to laugh, or cry, perhaps.

It was one of those cases where I called the house and he didn’t pick up until after the answering machine had kicked on, so the entire conversation was recorded, and it went something like this:

Him: Hello?
Me: Hey. What’s going on?
Him: (uintelligible)
Me: Is your mom home?
Him: No.
Me: Do you know where she went?
Him: (grunt)
Me: Did she say when she was coming back?
Him: No.
Me: Ok, will you please tell her to call me when she gets in?
Him: (garbled):
Click.

I see these TV commercials where they tell us parents we should talk to our kids, and I’m like, YOU come try and talk to them. And bring a teenager-to-English dictionary to translate.

Of course, people under 20 don’t talk on the phone at all anymore. They send text messages with words like “u” and “r” and “l8r” and “idk” which is just a way to confuse us poor helpless parents and trick us into saying yes when they ask us if they can go to a marijuana-sampling party at a friend’s house.

When I was that age (yes, I use this phrase all the time now), it was quite different. We talked on the phone, which was a big old rotary beast that had to be dialed. We made prank calls, like calling the grocery store and asking, “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?”, and when they said yes, we said “Well, you’d better let him out before he suffocates!” Funny, funny stuff.

I remember my first-ever prank call. I was a little boy, less than 10, and I wanted to call somebody, but I didn’t know anybody’s number. So I just dialed 0, and when the operator picked up, I said, “Go to hell,” then hung up the phone and wondered which one of my friends I would tell first, to impress.

About 5 seconds after I hung up, the phone rang, and a stab of fear went through my body like an errant javelin. I let it ring 4 times, then picked up to hear a woman say, “”Are you the little boy who was playing on the phone?”

“Yes, m’am,” I said in a trembling voice.

“Well, I’m going to call your mother and tell her when she gets home.”

That evil crone at the phone company scared me to death. That night, the next day, and for weeks and months and years after that, I waited for the day when that fateful phone call would be made, and my mother would look at me and say, “Go get me a switch.” But the call never came, which was the genius part of the operator’s diabolical plan. She made sure I lived in fear for my transgression. To this day, I still jump when the phone rings unexpectedly. I really don’t think the punishment fit the crime here.

When I was about 15, my parents moved to a neighboring county. As hard as this may be to believe now, in those days, calls to the next county were long distance, and thus cost more. This was important to me because all of the girls I wanted to woo were in the county I moved from, not the new one. And writing a letter is not a great way to ask a girl out, unless she lives in Russia and you’re planning to buy her.

My parents, after moving me to the wasteland of Lamar County, also informed me that I would have to pay for any long distance calls that I made. This was difficult, as I had no money, and even when I got a job at the age of 16, the little bit of money I had was ticketed for the expenses I would incur if/when I ever persuaded one of these girls to go on a date.

So I had to put some change in my pocket, get into my car and drive across the county line to a quaint little town/convenience store called Orchard Hill, where there was a pay phone. This method of calling girls – which, really, is the only reason a boy, or man for that matter, ever needs to use a telephone – was fraught with pitfalls.

For one, there was no guarantee the pay phone would be available. You couldn’t reserve it, or kick somebody off it. So I was taking a leap of faith just by driving up there.

Then, you could not be assured that the girl you were calling would be home. Most people didn’t have answering machines then, so you couldn’t leave a message. I would just stand there forlornly and listen to the ring, ring, ring, hoping maybe she was just in the shower or outside and would soon hear the phone ringing and rush in and pick it up breathlessly and – but that never happened. Instead, I’d just hang up and decide whether to try again.

Then there was the dreaded busy signal. This was worse than no answer, because now you knew she was probably at home, and talking to some skunk who you thought was your best friend, but who had been lucky enough to call her before you did, and was monopolizing the durn phone, and probably asking her out! (Do I still seem angry?) In truth, it was generally just her mom on the phone, or her sister, and I would get angry and have fantasies about purchasing a handgun and shooting my former best friend for nothing.

Of course, there was no call waiting or caller ID then, so if you got a busy signal, you got a busy signal. You could, in case of emergencies, have the operator break into a call, but that seemed a bit extreme for a 16-year-old boy trying to get a date. Then again, when you think about the raging hormones at that age, maybe it did qualify as an emergency.

My pay phone of choice was unfortunately located next to a train track. A roaring locomotive 10 feet away puts quite a damper on a conversation. I’d hear that train a’comin’, and I’d either hurry up and say what I was going to say - “HeywillyougooutwithmeSaturdaynight?” – or I’d ask her to hang on and wait for the train to pass. Inevitably, she’d have hung up by the time it got quiet again, having decided she didn’t want to go on a date with a loser who asked her out from a pay phone.

I guess it is easier to ask girls out these days, but then it’s probably easier for them so say no, too. So maybe the good old days had their selling points, after all.

The heat is on

A terrible calamity struck my house this week – the air conditioning went on the fritz.

Since my house was apparently built by the first little pig, I’ve gotten used to having an annual major repair. Toilets, floors, walls, appliances, siding – I need an Obama stimulus package to take care of everything that needs attention around there.

But some repairs can’t wait, and a non-performing AC unit is at the top of that list. It’s not the first problem we’ve had with it, and my daughter asked me the other day why it always seems to quit working when it’s hot.

“Because, dear,” I said, remembering that I’m paying for her to go to college, “that’s when we use it. When it’s hot.”

My wife informed me that not having a working AC unit is a hardship on her, because it makes her hair frizz. My son hasn’t really complained, because he’s 17 years old and doesn’t talk to us except in case of emergency. The dog has said nothing, but she lives outside and isn’t really affected.

Anyway, I called a repairman, and for the price of a small Volkswagen, it is going to be repaired, and peace will again descend upon my household. The whole episode has served to remind me how spoiled we’ve all become.

Of course, when I was a boy, we didn’t live in 72-degree comfort from June through September. We didn’t have central air conditioning in our ranch-style house, just a couple of window units that rattled like a 747 on takeoff, and made about as much noise. These only ran at certain times - for example, when my father was at home.

Rooms that were deemed unnecessary to cool – i.e., my bedroom – were cut off from the cool air via a closed door. When I’d step from my bedroom into the hall, it was about a 20-degree temperature drop. It’s a wonder I didn’t die of pneumonia at the age of 10.

At night, the air conditioning was turned off completely, so I slept with the windows open on summer evenings. I could hear the chirp of crickets, the croak of bullfrogs, the far-off whistle of the train, and occasional arguments from the next-door neighbors. I learned some new curse words through that open window.

When I was about 15, we moved to a house that had central air conditioning, which would have been great had we ever used it. Instead, my dad installed a ceiling fan, which circulated air throughout the house. That sounds good in theory, but 85-degree air wafting over you at night is not terribly comfortable.

No, if you wanted to get cool in that house, you just had to wait for the winter. The house also had central heat, but he preferred to use a wood-burning stove. That thing required wood, which had to be chopped into smaller pieces, then stacked, then brought into the house. Who is going to do that, I asked my dad, and he responded by smiling and handing me an axe.

“Are you crazy?” I said. “What am I, Davy Crockett?”

OK, I didn’t really say that, I just thought it to myself. I learned how to chop, stack and carry wood, all while repeating the curse words I’d learned through the open window at my old house.

The wood-burning stove was something. If you were within, say, 10 feet of it, it was as warm as Lucifer’s kitchen. Again, my dad would close off the bedrooms, so none of that warmth reached me at night. Walking through that house in the winter was like going to visit the Heat Miser and the Snow Miser every day (that joke was for fans of The Year Without a Santa Claus).

After I moved out on my own, I couldn't help but notice when I came back to visit that my dad had at last embraced the notions of central heating and air, and the house was always at a nice, comfortable temperature. I guess he was just trying to make sure I wasn’t spoiled.

Kind of Blue

I have been accused in my day of not really noticing or appreciating things my wife Susan does to decorate our house.

I have to say, guilty as charged. About the only things I pay much attention to inside the house are the TV, my recliner and the contents of the refrigerator. As far as the rest of it goes, I may as well live in an Army barracks.

I tried to correct that once years ago, when she was a little frustrated after she had done some decorating and rearranging and I hadn’t noticed it. So one night I was sitting there on the couch, and I said, “You know, I like this lamp.”

“Really?” she said.

“Yes, I think it looks nice in here. I’m glad you got it. When did you get it?”

“About five years ago,” she said.

Oh, well. I tried.

One problem is, women love to watch all of those crazy home decorating and renovation shows that come on TV. They watch these shows and then they get the urge to go do some of that stuff themselves. I tried suggesting she watch a cooking show instead, but all I got was a dirty look.

The other day, riding in the car, she informed me that she had decided she wanted to paint the kitchen. I didn’t understand why. Didn’t we just paint it? I asked her.

“We painted it 10 years ago,” she said.

“Exactly!” I said. “It seems like just yesterday. Plus, I like it the color that it is.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said. “What color is it?”

I wasn’t sure, so I muttered something under my breath, turned up and radio loud and swerved the car violently, pretending a squirrel had run out in front of me, all in an effort to change the subject. Of course, she didn’t buy that, because she knows I hate squirrels, and am more likely to drive on up the sidewalk to run one over than I am to swerve to miss one.

Fine. So I didn’t know, from memory, the color of the kitchen. Knowing when I’m beaten, I gave in and said, sure, I think it would be a great idea for you to paint the kitchen, with an emphasis on the word “you”, cause I ain’t painting nothing!

This set off about a two-week quest to find the right color. She was going with blue, but apparently, there are about 967 different variations of blue paint available at Home Depot. She began to buy samples of the various blues, then would paint a small section of the wall to see if she liked it. Invariably, her initial reaction was to hate it; then, after a few hours, she’d decide she liked it; then she’d come around to hating it again. After a few days, there were so many different colors on our kitchen wall, it looked like the Partridge Family bus.

On about the 20th try, she called me in the kitchen, pointed out a new swath of color and said, “What do you think?” I said, “I think you need to be on Prozac. Just pick a color!”

One angry look later, she had decided on a color. It was blue. I thought it looked great. She hired some guy named Luis to come over and paint my kitchen. He had a puzzled look on his face when he walked in and saw the kaleidoscope of colors on the wall, but I just said to him, “Don’t ask, por favor.” He nodded and went to work.

Now, here’s a trick that women used that I’ve learned about. Basically, I look at home renovations in one way – how much is it going to cost? The price of painting the kitchen, and also the downstairs bathroom, seemed pretty reasonable to me, so I didn’t’ squawk much. But then, she hits you with the sucker punch – now that the room has changed color, everything else in there has to be replaced!

“I need some curtains for the kitchen,” she told me before the paint even dried. Why, I said. “Because, obviously, dummy, the green ones we have don’t match the blue walls now.” And she’s also commenced to buying new accessories for the bathroom, since it changed from whatever color it was before to blue, as well. I’ve hardly seen a woman as excited as she was the other day when she found a blue soap dispenser in Big Lots.

Hopefully, we’re through with the redecorating process for at least a few weeks. Now I can concentrate on the important stuff in the kitchen and bathroom, like leftovers and cold beverages and a stack of National Geographic magazines. I’ll let you figure out what belongs in which room.

How to talk to women

As a man who has lived a lot of years, and most of them in the same house as a woman, I’ve gained a lot of wisdom, and I feel the need to impart some of it to the less-experienced among us.

Here’s the deal. In order to get along with women, you have to talk to them. They like that. They’re not like us. They can’t watch a four-hour football game during which the longest sentence uttered is, “Pass the Doritos.” They enjoy talking, which is ok, but they also expect to be listened to, which is hard, and they expect you to talk back to them, which can often just be impossible.

Why is this? Well, for one thing, they often are not talking about what you think they are talking about. If they tell you that the weather is going to be nice this weekend, it’s not an encouragement for you to go play golf. It’s a subtle reminder that you promised to clean the gutters.

If they are being quiet, and you ask them what is wrong, they usually will say, “nothing.” They don’t mean this. What they mean is, “If you really loved me, you’d know what was wrong with me, and you’d fix it, without me having to tell you.” Even if there is no way in the world you could know what is wrong with them, you are expected to know. Then you have to apologize for not knowing.

I’m going to outline a few situations that men might find themselves in with women, and I’m going to give you the correct, and the incorrect, response to each of them.

Situation: She walks in the room, stands in front of you and says, “Does my butt look big in these pants?”

Right response: No, honey, of course not. Your butt is not big.

Wrong response: No bigger than usual.

Situation: She goes to get her hair done, and she comes home angry, complaining that it looks terrible and the hairdresser did not do what she asked her to.

Right response: I think it looks good. It actually makes you look younger. You’re just not used to it yet.

Wrong response: Why don’t you go see if the hairdresser will give you your money back?

Situation: She says, “It’s really warm in here. I’m burning up.”

Right response: Ok, do you want to me open a window, or maybe adjust the thermostat?

Wrong response: Yeah, I read the other day that you’re at about the age when hot flashes begin. It will pass.

Situation: She walks into the bedroom wearing a new nightgown and says, “Look what I bought the other day.”

Right response: Wow, that looks really great on you, honey. You know red is my favorite color.

Wrong response: Oh my God, how much did THAT cost?

Situation: She decides to try a new recipe, then asks you at the table what you think of the meal.

Right response: It’s pretty good. I never even thought putting cinnamon on spaghetti would be good, but this is great.

Wrong response: Do you think Domino’s is still open?

Often, the way to handle these situations is to realize that you’re not going to win no matter what you do, so you should just pretend you didn’t hear her. Then if she presses you on it, just say, “I’m sorry, honey, I was thinking about where I could take you for dinner Saturday night. You really deserve a night out. Now, what did you say?” If you’re lucky, she’ll let it drop, and if you’re really lucky, she’ll forget you promised to take her to dinner. Just make sure you have the number to Domino’s handy.