MIGHTY MEATBALLS AND EGG PHOOEY YOUNG

At such a young age, I had not yet formulated my personal beliefs about religion, magic, or esoteric mysticism, but on that day I knew I experienced some sort of spiritual awakening. Was this the product of some sort of magical otherworldly sorcery? Or was this the divine intervention of the actual hand of God reaching down into that small, grimy, sticky brown tiled floored, bustling Manhattan pizzeria?  Though I had only existed on the planet for seven years, in that time I had already consumed thousands of meals. Yet none before it had awoken my tastebuds and stimulated my senses like that one had. Be it delivered by black magic or heavenly delight; I knew wanted more.

After just one bite, I wondered why mom was still toiling tirelessly in the kitchen every night making her usual bland dry meatloaf, humdrum broiled chicken, or those scary little exsiccated crunchy salmon croquette logs, when we could be dining on this amazingly delicious miracle manna every day?  There I was, a sheltered second grader losing my epicurean virginity with my first gastronomic orgasm. You see, that is how much I enjoyed the scrumptious pleasure of my first miraculous Meatball Parmesan Hero sandwich.

Sure, I’d eaten plenty of bowls filled with spaghetti with meatballs before. Mom frequently served her little dense mini meat marbles that sunk to the bottom of her brownish-red dried-blood-colored mild marinera, served over a pile of soft store-brand noodles that always tasted like they stayed in the pot long after Al Dente climbed out, toweled off, and showered.  And there was also the spaghetti and meatballs that my parents always ordered for me at Connie’s, one of the two reasonably priced restaurants dad could afford to occasionally take the whole family out to. But I always rushed through my meals there, because after I cleaned my plate I was allowed to throw a coin in the bar/restaurant’s jukebox to play my favorite song on the machine, What’s New Pussycat by Tom Jones. And of course, I had certainly already eaten many sandwiches. But most were bland slabs of luncheon meat or leftovers slathered in mayonnaise and plopped on boring white bread or annoying crunchy stiff toasted rye with seeds that wedged in between my teeth like homeless squatters encamped in an abandoned building.

But  no, no, no… that day things were very different. In that little pizza joint that I had never been to before, and never visited again, I was served life-altering perfection.  A delicious fresh crispy outside soft inside long roll with lush aromatic red sauce and mountains of gooey rich cheese poured over moist unctuous jumbo meatballs. It sounds funny, but mom called the shots over most everything I ever ate, and I had never had anything like that before. That meal changed forever how I looked at food. There were other options outside of what was in mom’s cupboard and freezer. It was no longer just substance, it was now, in the right circumstance, a source of intense pleasure to be savored and appreciated.

Maybe it was the uniqueness of that day that made that decadent sub sandwich so memorable. I’ve since learned that situation and company can improve a meal tenfold. But that magnificent meatball sammy made me almost forget about the misery of the actual purpose of that day’s trip into the city.

You see, this was the first time I was old enough to really remember spending the day with just my dad. Being the youngest of five, there was not a lot of alone time in general. And with Dad’s work life having become extremely difficult, tenuous, and stressful the previous few years, there was not a lot of time for one-on-one bonding with the bratty obnoxious baby of the family.  There is photographic proof that as one of the leaders of the Boy Scout troop my three older brothers were in, he once took wee little Dan on a day-trip to a campsite in the woods, but I have no actual memories of it. Just the pictures.      

So maybe it happened before, but the first time I can ever recall spending the entire day with just dad, was that Meatball Parm Hero day, when we went into the city together to visit the eye doctor where I got fitted for my first pair of glasses. Although I was not looking forward to becoming the fifth ‘4-eyes’ member of the family, had I thought about it, it would have seemed pretty inevitable. Luckily the day started out better than I expected because I got to stay home from school even though I was not sick. That was an exciting first for me. Since dad wanted to leave after rush hour, while everyone else was chaotically running around with their morning routines, we had a leisurely early morning at the house. 

I had heard stories of my older siblings sometimes going into the city to help dad pick up stuff or run errands for work, but this kind of trek was new to me. The optometrist visit ended up not being so bad. I got a brief reprieve since the glasses would not be ready for a couple of weeks. And it was nice to have a doctor’s visit that did not end with getting a shot. 

Afterwards, I spent the afternoon hanging around Jalofsky And Sons (SP), the place dad had recently started working out of, after economics and changing demographics forced my grandfather and him to have a messy time begrudgingly closing their long-running family business. During a day of new experiences, this was another spot I had never been before. It was on the southern edge of the down-at-the-heels Bowery, right around the corner from frenetic Canal Street, near the base of the Manhattan Bridge. I think dad had me rubber stamping some envelopes but mostly I just sat around kinda’ bored. The best part was when he let me wander around the sidewalk just outside the doorway, though beforehand he did sternly warn me to ‘not go around the corner!!!’ I stood fascinated at how huge the bridge seemed from that perspective.

In between the doctor’s visit and dad’s work, we went for lunch at that aforementioned little pizza place. Dad had me hold one of the restaurant’s few small tables while he went up to the bustling counter and ordered. He came back with two sodas, another very rare treat for me in those days. When the long, luscious sandwich was ready, dad picked it up from the counter, sat back down across from me, tore off a third of it, put it on a torn piece of the wax paper it had come wrapped in, and slid it in front of me with a giant handful of napkins. This was not how things were done when mom was around.

I still remember savoring each and every bite of that sandwich. We never ate anything like that at home. I thought about how lucky dad was that he went to work every day and could enjoy food like that. I don’t remember one word of our conversation or even if we chatted at all. Dad had a tendency of talking ‘at’ his kids, not ‘with’. When I was a lot older, I always enjoyed going out with my parents and their friends, because then I could hear how funny and entertaining my dad really could be. 

I did not realize at the time that dad’s workplace was just a few short blocks away from Joy Garden on Mott Street, the only other reasonably priced restaurant the whole family ate at with any regularity. I liked the food there too. My absolute favorite was roast pork Egg Foo Young. I mean, it was yummy, but it was no magical meatball hoagie.

In those years after I got my glasses, a third restaurant was added to the short list of places we occasionally ate out at. A closer to home cheapie but tasty Chinese place opened near The Drake movie theatre that took a fourth of time to get to than heading into the city. With all the long hours dad was working, time was becoming more important than taste. 

Those were the days my behavior was transitioning from little kid obnoxiousness to preteen smartass. One time at that ‘new’ restaurant, after my constant complaining finally got on my short-fused Dad’s nerves, he barked “if you don’t like it, leave!”  He was speaking rhetorically but I was at that age of testing boundaries and took it literally. I got up and started walking home. It would be a grotesque understatement to say this did not go over well. I was about halfway home when our family car screeched up onto the curb next to me and dad jumped out and tossed me into the backseat yelling “no one walks out on me!!!”. At least I was smart enough to not say out loud, “then why did you tell me to”.

That night was the most furious I had ever seen my dad get… and I have seen him get pretty wound up. But even though he occasionally blew up and yelled at us, the truth is all of us kids knew dad loved us. He never hit or spanked us. Actually, he usually left mom to be the real disciplinarian except for those rare times when he exploded. He constantly self-sacrificed and busted his butt to keep us safe, happy, and fed. But he was of that stoic generation where feelings were never discussed, and father/child relationships were far from the warm hands-on ‘friendships’ they often are today.  And though I usually keep it tightly under wraps, much to my chagrin, I definitely inherited dad’s hair-trigger over-reactive temper.

Dad somewhat mellowed as he got older, and now at 96 his shouting days are long behind him. But age has not stopped him from still being feisty as hell. Only now the blow-ups are more like angry frustrated slightly muted rapid-fire machine-gun shots versus an all-out nuclear explosion. 

When I was visiting my family this past weekend I thought of that meatball sub, as I watched dad plow through a take-out order of veal parmesan eaten directly from the metal tray it was delivered in. Growing up, not only would we have NEVER had take-out (except on some sort of special occasion), but mom would have made sure it was served on plates. Watching dad, I had food envy. His meal reminded me of that hero sandwich of yore and made me regret ordering a plateful of snooty-sounding Penne Rustica instead of an old-school meatball hero. Luckily the next night I was able to recover when I had some of my beloved Egg Foo Young. I guess some things never change.

They have repeatedly heard all the old stories, but I do not think my father’s large collection of grand-kids and great-grand-kids ever saw him when he was really all wound-up and furious like in the old days of my childhood. They’ve witnessed his occasional short-burst annoyed and blustery behavior, but mostly just know the slightly cantankerous guy that, with a wry smile and glint in his eyes, loves teaching little kids to say “phoooey”.

It’s a bit of a head-trip seeing my once tall and sometimes intimidating dad as a rail-thin shuffling nonagenarian old man.  But watching him still occasionally flash his temper and eat Parm or Foo Young reminds me he is still the same guy from my memories. I’m not trying to rewrite the facts of my youth with rosy retrospection. There were good times and bad. And while I might not have ever been buddy-buddy best friends with dad, we did have a loving healthy father-son relationship. And I am blessed with plenty of good memories. Including the one where I spent the day with dad and ate my first culinary transformative Meatball Parnassian hero.

DWEAMING

During our weekly extended family Zoom call last week, two of my sister’s grown-up adult daughters started making fun of the soft jazz music their father had always loved. You know the type of music. For years every big city had at least one radio station playing that stuff with monotoned whispering DJs that between each calm milquetoast song, usually over the sound effect of rolling ocean waves with the occasional seagull, would cloyingly purr the station’s moniker LITE or LOVE. It was common to hear those stations continuously playing at tame volumes in the background of doctor’s office waiting rooms, tropical themed hotel bar/restaurants, and the bedrooms of waterbed owning bachelor’s with overly groomed hair.

As sometimes happens, the two sisters wound each other up and briefly took over the group conversation with their lighthearted grousing and reminiscing. But to be fair, versus the music itself, one of the girls was mostly just creeped out over the disconcerting mental images she’d created, after recently finding out her dad had a personalized ‘lite jazz’ playlist that he listened to in the bathroom while taking his daily shower. And while the other daughter fell just short of wishing a pox or plague on her dad’s beloved favorites like Phil Collins, Joe Sample, James Taylor, and Chuck Mangione, she did spend a good amount of time railing and cursing about his torturously abusive genteel soft rock/smooth jazz “elevator music” assault on her eardrums that was constantly thrust upon her throughout her childhood.

Anyone that knows me is well aware I have very strong feelings about music, yet I remained uncharacteristically quiet throughout most of that discussion. I knew the sisters would have deaf ears to my opinion that there were actually some fantastic soft rock gems to be found hidden between the docile drivel of Kenny G and Gino Vannelli. I figured the point was their memories, not the music. Besides, rejecting and abusing the music of your parents’ generation is a time-honored tradition practiced by children all over the world for centuries. I assume Zook the Caveman’s kids mocked the dated stick and rock banging of their lionskin loincloth wearing elders. As did the hip and modern polyphonic rhythm-loving 12th century children did with their square, old-school Gregorian chant loving parents.

Jointly making fun of the 1940s and pre-rock 50s music my mom loved, or the classical Beethoven records my dad occasionally blasted rattling the windows of the entire house, served as a bonding agent for my siblings and me. We might have constantly teased each other and most certainly did not see eye-to-eye on everything, but we could all stand united on how much we disliked our parents’ favorite music.

If I had children, I know they would absolutely hate a lot of the stuff I listen to. I mean, I have VERY varied tastes, which again, is why I was quiet on the family call when others made fun of entire genres of music like jazz, country, K-Pop, and heavy metal.  I like a little of everything, so it’s hard for me to trash an entire category of music. I also know it’s hard for me to throw mocking rocks at other folk’s taste, because musically, I live in a very thin-paned glass house.

One of my favorite types of music is the stuff that is so horrendously bad and cheesy, that it is amazing. That is probably the hardest type of music to explain because it’s a wiggly narrow line between just bad, and so bad its fantastic. Think Wiliam Shatner’s egomaniacal self-indulgent Mr. Tambourine Man, Ethel Merman’s head-shaking genre bending disco album, the caterwauling of Houston street musician Bongo Joe – George Coleman, or the absolute assault on anything close to carrying a tune or being on key that The Shaggs presented to the unsuspecting universe on their astoundingly amateurish self-produced masterpiece album Philosophy Of The World. Each of those is a life-changing remarkable trip into the bowels of music that everyone should experience at least once.

The fact that I have always felt that way might be one of the many reasons I didn’t have tons of friends growing up. I listened to mountains of that so-bad-its-good stuff and forced it upon a lot of other people. It was all part of my clueless dork persona that radiated off my glasses and braces wearing unkempt body and made me about as alluring to girls in elementary and junior high, as a case of chlamydia. 

When I got to high school (and pretty much in all the years since) I was certainly still the same goofy dofus that loved Dr. Demento-esque bizarre music. I just started to learn how to package and present myself better. Like I did not start a pick-up line with “have you ever heard the song The Lurch by Ted Cassidy from the Adams’s Family?”  That became more of a second or third date thing when the question seemed more quirky than creepy. CLICK TO SEE THE LURCH!!!!!

Kind of related to both the soft jazz and the so-bad-it’s-good genres, is the wussy pop rock bubble-gummy over-produced hits of the pre-disco 1970s. Kitsch stuff like Clint Holme’s Playground In My Mind, Terry Jacks’ Seasons In The Sun, and Rupert Holmes Pina Coleta Song that played constantly on AM radio and teen-aimed TV shows. This was the stuff geeks listened to while all the cooler kids huddled in basements, garages, and street corners listening to FM album rock staples like Led Zepplin or Pink Floyd. And later, even occasionally even creeped into the playlist of those soft music radio stations.

But there is a place for those cheese-tastic pop tunes. Maybe it’s simply nostalgia but I find there is a certain irresistible tacky factor to that ‘wus-rock’ music that I find strangely comforting. Nothing like that could (or likely should) get made today. It is unique to that era and transports the mind to illusionary simpler times.

I do not think I have ever admitted this totally embarrassing fact to any other human being before, but I think the worst, most hideously wretched, embarrassingly bad song from that era, is also the same one that plays in my head the most. You see, my brain loves the sickeningly syrupy awful tune, I Like Dreaming by Kenny Nolan. I mean, I don’t actually ever actively try to listen to it, but it has been a steady fixture rolling around inside my head for decades.

For those lucky enough to have never heard it, I Like Dreaming is a horribly overproduced symphony of wussy strings and harps with a wimpy singer who slightly lisps when he repeatedly says “I like dweaming”, as he tells the sorted details of an intense romance with a woman that he completely created from afar inside his head. I cannot fathom a world where this became a hit, yet it was. CLICK TO SEE I LIKE DREAMING

Sadly, throughout my life, I Like Dreaming has popped into my head zillions of times. Why, you might ask?  Well, the answer is as embarrassing as the song itself.  It’s because I too, like dreaming. And when I catch myself daydreaming just a little too much (which still occurs at my age more frequently than I should admit), that song almost always pops into my head.  I don’t know if it’s my brain’s way of jerking me back to reality by punishing me with it, but it happens time after time over and over again.  

Back when I was a very little kid, I frequently daydreamed about what my life would be like when I grew up. You would think that would have spurred me to actively do something to steer my future, but I was content just to sit back and daydream about it. Then in elementary school, when I discovered I had a fondness for the opposite sex, my daydreams started to focus almost exclusively on that subject matter. Again, you would think that might make me do something to make myself less of an undesirable freakshow. But no, I just daydreamed.

So because I did nothing about it, I remained a mega dorky little kid with no game or ability to tell a girl I liked her. Before my early growth spurt, I was picked on by other kids all the time. Oh, I was still taunted afterwards, but it was easier to ignore when I was a tall gawky nerd versus a fat-faced short loser twerp. The fact was, I could deal with all that. But the fear of being soul-crushingly laughed at by a girl I really liked paralyzed me. I obviously unconsciously decided it was better to keep the dream alive by never letting my feelings be known, than to get crushed attempting a move. Cue that horrible song… ‘I like dweaming’.

Even in high school, I kind of just fell into most of my dates. It was not until later that I developed the self-confidence and swagger to comfortably ask a girl out, no matter what their answer might be. But even after possessing that skill, I still spent way too much time daydreaming about the potential possibilities. Cause you know, ‘I like dweaming’.

There were several girls in elementary school that I daydreamed about. And while most of the boys ogled and clamored around classically pretty-faced statuesque (for grade school) Ellisa, I mostly daydreamed about Stacey. She was a little shorter and wider than Ellisa, but she had long curly hair, a crazy cute smile, an infectious laugh, and developed breasts very early (so no, my tastes have not changed in the many decades since then).

Since I kept all my feelings in my head, I really had no clue if Stacey would have gone out with me, or liked me at all, or if I still would have liked her after I got to know her better. But I think I knew those answers, which was why I kept my mouth shut. Yet in my daydreams, there was always a happy ending to our little love story. I moved to Florida in the middle of Junior High where I eventually figured out who and what I was. I did not like that wussy fraidy-cat ‘dweaming’ kid I had been, so I tried my best to distance myself from him and the few freinds I knew in that world. But you can’t really hide from yourself. It was not till later that I realized how little I had actually changed. But luckily I found a way to make it all work.

I always wondered what happened to Stacey. As grownups, would I still find her attractive? Several times as an adult I tried looking for her online, just out of curiosity. Even when I was single, if I found her, I don’t think I would have reached out.  Not because I would have still preferred just ‘dweaming’ about her, but because of the whole weird liking you from afar even though I knew jack-crap about you thing.  I mean, that’s almost as creepy as picturing your dad in the shower listening to his custom ‘soft jazz’ playlist.

DORK

MEDICINE AD LIFESTYLES

My sister used to tease my Mom that she lived in an unrealistic “Leave It To Beaver world”. Now for those of you under 110 years-old that might not get that reference, despite it sounding like the name of a porno parody of a 1980s teen John Hughes film like Ferris Bueller Gets Off, The Booty-Break-Fest Club, Doin’ It On Planes, Trains & Automobiles, or Uncle @uck,  Leave It To Beaver was the actual name of an ultra-wholesome, mega cheesy, 1950’s family sitcom show that was so out of touch with real world issues, by comparison it made the Brady Bunch seem gangsta (although who wouldn’t wanna’ see groovy-clothed permed-hair Greg in a gang initiation jumped-in beatdown from Wally, Lumpy and Eddie Haskell).

It’s not that my mom had not experienced her share of real-world pain and loss. Her beloved father passed away when she was a teenager, and her younger brother died a few years later being a hero sacrificing himself while pushing two women out of the path of a speeding drunk driver. My parents married young and started with nothing. They worked extraordinarily hard to create that ‘Leave It To Bever’ illusion world. So I think what my sister actually meant was that mom wore very rose-colored glasses and was not necessarily attuned to the changing modern times we grew up in.

As a dedicating loving parent, I believe mom saw it as her job to insulate and protect us from the challenging changing world outside our double locked Queens NY front door.  As if somehow, if we simply did not acknowledge its existence, none of us would ever succumb to society’s ill pressures and her five kids would all be a bunch of ‘goody 10 shoes’. It’s not that we were sheltered. Hell, she let my high school age brother take the subway alone in the middle of the night all summer when he got a job doing computer coding in midtown Manhattan. Like the Leave It To Beaver clan, we just never talked about all the bad stuff and negative temptations happening outside of our house.

I assume it’s because Mom had slightly more lax rules for her boys than her one precious daughter, but my rebellious wild-child older sister, was the only one of us that ever called mom out on her spasms of ‘sunny side of the street’ naivete. The four boys sort of blindly bought into mom’s fantasy, until we moved out and each stepped smack-dab into our own respective piles of real-world shit.

Meanwhile, my sister’s list of bad-behavior stories perpetrated right under the unsuspecting noses of my parents was as lengthy as it was legendary. I mean, for years she dated a long-haired, hippie looking guy in a band that drove a side-windowless van; you tell me that was not a recipe for less than angelic teenager behavior. Not that she needed his help to always find the volatile vortex of a party.  My sister’s antics certainly put to shame, any of the occasional bad stuff my other siblings and I did. Not that anyone was hanging my framed photo on the heavenly realm breakroom wall under the Angel Of The Month plaque. But by comparison I could have been an extra in the Beaver’s universe.

Mom would always tell us we would not get away with misdeeds because she and my dad were rebellious and mischievous kids themselves, so she would be able to spot our bad behavior a mile away. While we boys (mostly) believed her, my sister proved time and time again that she was wrong.

Decades after he graduated, my dad’s teachers still recalled him, telling one of my older siblings “you always remember the good ones and the REALLY bad ones.”  Dad’s childhood antics were way over the top, like the famed broken stained glass incident or when he and his friends smuggled an actual cow’s head to school (remember, this was not in a farm town but in the middle of NYC). But for some reason, I was always fonder of the tales about the stuff my mom did. They seemed more aligned with the type of twisted but not harmful pranks I would do.

My favorite of her stories was when she and her friends noticed that on one particular block, all the houses had trendy lawn decorations and fancy statues except for one. So in the middle of the night, they secretively moved everyone’s heavy yard decorations into the one empty house’s front lawn. Maybe that was the inspiration for the stuff I did in high school, like putting street construction cones onto a neighbor’s yard statues like bright shiny orange dunce caps.

But all bubbles burst, and it’s hard to forever dam-up the river of real-world woes. I’m not sure when the change occurred, but I think we have all had enough chaos in our lives that mom finally gave up believing our family lived in a Leave It To Beaver world.

I was thinking though. I must be a little like mom, because I certainly spend far more time here in the blog listing my family’s accomplishments than dwelling on any messy divorces, over-indulgent tendencies, head-shrinking visits, legal issues, ugly illnesses, societally unpopular orientations, and a whole array of semi-buried family skeletons that might prohibit any of us from successfully running for public office.  In reality, our family secrets are no worse than those that happen behind most households’ closed doors. But my point is, even though mom tried to make us feel like we were special, different, and immune to the bad stuff that lurks in the darkened corners of society, it turned out we were just as human as everyone else. No better, no worse.

Were she raising us now, I think it would be harder for mom to insulate us the way she did. Back then there was no social media to teach and tempt us with the unethical edges of propriety. And most television shows were kinda’ Leave It To Beaver-ish. It’s not that there was a lack of bad goings on. The world could be just as crummy a place back then as it is now. It just was not as in your face. It’s much harder nowadays to find any escape from the constant pressures and harsh realities of modern life.

As far as I can tell, there really is only one place where we are still frequently exposed to a fairy tale happy, everyone is always smiling, unrealistically optimistic, semi-fantasy universe. And that would be in the unescapable constant stream of big-Pharma medicine ads.

Granted, some those advertisement’s scenes of joyous celebrations, friendly workplace interactions, and happy family day-to-day romps, are often displayed behind a long laundry list of miserable side effects ranging from anal leakage to schizoid paranoia, to painful slow death. But if the sound is off, and you don’t read the small print, the little life vignette images they present in those extended ads are as close to a modern-day equivalent of Leave It To Beaver-land as anything else out there.

If spacemen from a distant planet based their opinion of our society solely on those old mid-20th century TV shows, they would have a very warped view of what our world was really like. I think the same would be true if all they knew about us was learned from the jolly interactions of the self-satisfied people in those extended ads for Skyrizy, Astepro, Rinvoq, Dupixent, and the rest.

But I wonder… If some highly evolved, brilliant brainiac spacemen from a culture far more enlightened than ours, did watch all those big Pharma medication ads, maybe they would be smart enough to answer one our world’s toughest, most difficult, vexing questions. You see, in all those ads they say to “not take the medication, if you are allergic to it”. So maybe our brilliant, advanced visitors could finally explain how we were supposed to know we were allergic to it, unless we took it first.

REALLY OLD SCHOOL SNOOTY

A few years ago, while giving another series of lectures in Asia, my economist brother Arthur decided to splurge and stay at the world-renowned Marina Bay Sands resort. The posh modern hotel’s three 55-story towers connected by its famed swooping arc rooftop infinity pool, is an eye-catching architectural landmark that dominates the skyline view from Singapore’s bustling streets below.

I always find it incongruently amusing when someone from my decidedly un-snooty family dips their toes into the world of affluent opulence. Growing up, my family did not spend relaxing summers off hobnobbing with the power elite on a Riviera based yacht, dining on our private chef’s daily bill of fare, served at sunset in the comfortable breeze on the open bridge deck. No, we piled into our old oversized un-airconditioned dinged and dented station wagon, with a sac full of premade white bread sandwiches, and drove 45 minutes through the run-down borough of gritty Queens, then hiked a mile from the parking lot dragging our crap over the splintery wooden boardwalk, to spend the day packed like sweaty sardines on the over-crowded dirty sand of Rockaway Beach on the chilly Atlantic Ocean just downstream of where it merges with the filthy odiferous East River.

We might not have been summering with the beautiful people, but we knew of nothing else, so it was a fun break from the norm. Except maybe for the itchy sunburnt long drive home, with the other 2 million people crawling down Cross Bay Blvd. I guess my point is, as opposed to silver, the spoon in my mouth I was born with was made of low-grade stainless steel and likely came from saved S&H Green Stamps. And that’s okay. Mom and dad still managed to make us all feel loved and special, even without the yacht.

A lot of people study their ancestry in the hopes of finding out they are proud descendants of nobility and royalty. Our family tree was more like a tangly ground-cover shrub, with some embarrassing eyebrow-raising marriages between cousins with the same last name. Granted, that was a more accepted practice in the days of ‘yore’… but I am not sure some ours were quite ‘yore’ enough. 

Most of my descendants were hardworking Eastern European folks of hardy stock.  Like millions of others, they came to this country seeking a better life. And like most immigrants, they brought with them a meager amount of money, few possessions, and more than one exciting story about their travels to the new world. 

To escape the gruesome meatgrinder perils of war, my Grandfather on my father’s side first made his way to England where he studied watchmaking before heading to the United States with his newly learned trade. While getting processed at Ellis Island, he called his already established relatives from a payphone. Standing there, he discovered a few pennies in the coin return.  At first, he was afraid to take them, fearing it was another test to see if he was trustworthy enough to be admitted into the country. But after a few minutes of looking over his shoulder, he proved he was already like a real purebred American, and he slipped the coins into his empty pockets. For the rest of his life, he bragged that he made money on his first day in the country.

The most told story from my mother’s side was a bit more harrowing. Forced from their small village by Russian Cossacks during the pogroms of 1899, the family grabbed what they could and fled by cart during a snowy winter night. They hoped to use the little money and possessions they were able to bring, to book cheap steerage transport to America.

On their freezing cold journey, sitting in the back of the bumpy cart, 12-year-old Anna was tasked with minding her baby brother Rochmael. She held on tightly to the napping baby swaddled in a warm blanket. But she too eventually fell asleep. When she awoke an hour later, the baby was gone. Frantic, the family backtracked the dangerous route and miraculously found the tiny child in the middle of the soft snow-covered road, still sleeping peacefully wrapped in his warm blanket. After finally arriving in New York, they changed that baby’s name to the more American sounding Samuel, and he was my grandfather.

Of course, those tales are from a long time ago and with each generation that passes, you wonder if they have become misremembered, changed, or exaggerated. I’m sure my suspect memory and personal interpretation have mangled some of the facts since I was first told these family stories as a very little boy. But since my family tree has somewhat suspect roots and a distinct lack of regal branches, I like to think the old passed down tales are true.

I do know for sure that both sides of my family worked hard and were successful at their respective trades. Well, successful enough to raise a family at the lower end of the middle-class spectrum that my brother Neil used to describe as ‘Upper Poverty’. Mom might have pinched a lot of pennies and stretched most of our dollars, but we always had more than enough to get by and we kids never really felt we were missing out. It was only through the eyes of age that I can look back and see how tight things sometimes were. But I don’t think any of us five kids ever conceived that one day one of us would be constantly traveling the globe staying at fancy high-end places like the Marina Bay Sands. While growing up, exotic travel for us was venturing into the city to eat the occasional dinner at Joy Garden, my dad’s friend’s upper-floor restaurant in Chinatown.

I was raised years before Robin Leach, Cribs, The Kardashians, and the Housewives flaunted and taunted their upper-crust lifestyles to any poor and penniless shlub with a TV.  But even without them, I guess I always knew lavish hotels and five-star fancy restaurants existed. I just never gave much thought to the idea I might ever go to any of them. But something happened as I got older and worked harder. In between my usual day-today average world, I have luckily gotten the chance to occasionally taste the fruits of the ‘good life’

Several years ago I found myself in the situation where a Mercades limo picked up my little-old sorry tuxedo-wearing ass from my private two-room double balcony suite overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, to drive me past the awaiting press to a star-studded Premier at the grand Monte Carlo Opera House, followed by an invitation-only extravagant dinner across the street at the famed Hotel De-Paris, attended by the Prince of Monaco and his family.

Okay, that kinda’ crap does not happen to me often, so I have to milk that story as much as my grandpa did the ‘making money on his first day in America’ tale. But I have done some other fancy-shmancy hoity-toity stuff too. I’ve met famous people. I’ve stayed in an over-water bungalow in the Maldives, scuba dived the Great Barrier Reef, and spent the night at the famous Dolder Grand overlooking Zurich. I’ve dined at Geranium in Copenhagen, a three Michelin star establishment that had won the previous year’s Best Restaurant In the World award. And even during the heart of the pandemic, when most finer places were completely shut down, I hired someone I consider a friend who also happens to be a multi-time James Beard Nominated chef at our favorite restaurant, to prepare and serve my wife a custom private birthday dinner on the porch of his temporarily shuttered top-rated gourmet eatery.

But despite having my share of snooty bragging rights stories, I still tend to feel out of place and disconnected in those situations.  Like I’m pretending, or I snuck in and don’t really belong.  I recently was in Las Vegas taking a quiet early morning walk through some of the ritzier hotels. I looked at the other people dressed in designer wardrobes with flashy accessories that likely cost as much as my car. And I wondered if they could instantly tell that in my head, I am still that kid from Queens who didn’t know the difference between the tony ‘be seen’ Hamptons from grubby Rockaway Beach?

I was around 11 when my much older brother Neil and his girlfriend Martha took me to my first fancy French restaurant in Manhattan. They teased me for ordering a hamburger, but it was the only thing I recognized on the menu. We learned the words to Frere Jacques in my sixth grad French class, not fancy menu items like coq au vin or boeuf bourguignon. I hated that they made fun of me, but I was eternally grateful that they creaked open the door for me to get my first addictive taste of a different world that I did not know previously existed. One of my many regrets is that I have not properly thanked all the people in my life that have opened doors and introduced me to new experiences. 

Walking in that swanky Vegas hotel, I fell into my usual routine of chastising myself for even worrying what other people think of me. Of course, I can fit in if I want… but do I want?  That is the debate that rages in my head. Why should it matter that my nails are not manicured, my clothes are not tailored, and I have no clue how to do that European double air kiss on the cheeks without looking like Jerry Lewis eating lemons blindfolded. If that’s what I am being graded on over the substance of my soul, do I really want to be around those folks?  But then again, it is nice to be pampered. In some ways, it was a lot easier before I knew how the other half lived.

I think I am the happiest when I can seamlessly straddle the border between both worlds. I enjoy a palace and a dive. And I hope to keep being able to visit both.

ECLIPSING MY VOCABULARY

Besides serving as a constant reminder that I am an obsessive goofball that spends way too much time sloshing around the mushy muck and mire inside my own head, if there is one thing that writing this weekly blog for almost 18 years has taught me, is that I have a better vocabulary then I previously realized. Apparently reading all those semi-popular almost classic books in my Advanced English high school classes did have some sort of lasting effect.

My teacher, Mr. Kendall, had a sneaky way of making sure we really did slog through everything on his massive, required reading list. By only assigning very famous author’s more obscure tomes, he knew there would be no short-cut movie adaptations or Cliff Notes versions for us to cheat with. For someone as contrary and independent minded as myself, who would gladly spend triple the time and energy trying to find a loophole to buck a system rather than blindly follow it, I found him to be a worthy adversary. Of course, it never dawned on me that he was not the enemy and was just trying to help us all. I was far too busy trying to get under his skin proclaiming and debating goofy stuff like that Shakespeare was an attention-seeking hack who constantly ripped off Ben Jonson.   

I guess his plan worked, because I read an awful lot of books in those classes, and since then, random superfluous gratuitous recrementitious words pop into my brain all the time. And while his classes, and my year as an English major in college, might not have had a direct traceable impact on my eventual financial and social standing (i.e. make big bucks or score with the ladies), they most assuredly did help develop my grasp of the English language’s excessisities. (OK, I made up the word ‘excessisities’, but you can pull off crap like that when people believe you have a goodlyish vocabulary.)  Truthfully, it was not till decades later when I started this blog, that I realized the extent of my vocabulary.

My buddy Mike might not have suffered through / benefited from that same English class as me, but since his mom was an actual English teacher, I think he had a similar life-lasting language experience. For years Mike had one of those square brick tear-off sheet word-of-the-day calendars. I recall sometimes there was a little pile of more interesting, saved words sitting next to it on his table. Occasionally, after I got home from visiting him, I would discover that a stray wacky word had been shoved surreptitiously into my luggage or was occasionally included in some colorful snail-mail letter. One of his favorite words from those calendars was ‘bruhaha’, and on more than one occasion, I have used it in my blog just to see if he would bring it up afterwards.                

Nowadays, whenever I come across a fun word, I’ve gotten into the habit of jotting it down on a scrap of paper or Post-It note and tossing it onto my desk.  While writing these things, if I happen to get stuck fishing for an interesting adjective, I sift through the messy pile of papers hoping to trigger some a-ha moment. My cat Sophie likes it when I finally use one of the saved words because the paper then becomes a toy, after I wad it up and toss it across the room in her general direction. It’s become such a frequent occurrence, that she gets a spazzy eyed, stiff back, alert look, whenever she hears me crumble paper.    

Some of my word suggestion notes have been sitting there for years. The little ruffled-cornered discolored blue post-it with the words ‘jack-legged’ and ‘Jake-leg’ has been there so long, the ink has almost completely faded away and I just know what it says from memory. For all my years of trying, I still have not figured out a way to wedge either of those great sounding descriptive words into a blog (until now). I think my problem was my desire to use both in the same sentence, but it’s not too often that I am describing an ‘unscrupulous untrained incompetent’ who suffers from a ‘walking gait paralysis due to drinking improperly prepared moonshine.”

Another one of those slips of paper has the great word ‘peripeteia’ on it. Typically, it’s used to describe that crucial turning point in literature or movies when a character finally believes everything is under control and his world is great, only to have it suddenly collapse into a dumpster fire of chaotic crap. I keep thinking I will use that one because I’ve certainly had that happen in my life. And although unpleasant at the time, those moments tend to make a good story afterwards.

My summer after high school was like that. I was flush with the feeling of freedom from graduating and the comfort of already being accepted to the college of my choice. I had coin in my pocket from a good summer job. And best of all, my folks left town for a month, so I had the condo all to myself. I was feeling like a cocky ‘real’ adult. Having recently gotten over my high school sweetheart / already-in-college girlfriend dumping me with the old ‘we should expand our horizons and date others’ speech, I was now actively applying the hard press to start a summer romance with a girl I had a ‘missed opportunity’ crush on years earlier, before we both got involved with others.

The good vibes that had been rolling all summer seemed to culminate in my mind during one particular day in late July. That afternoon, I had spent time at the house of my old crush / hopefully new inamorata, while Mike borrowed my unsupervised empty condo for his own rendezvous. Despite the fact that the object of my teenage lust had dinner plans with her family, I was in a particularly great mood because before I left, we awkwardly stumbled into one of our first smoochfests. I was walking on air. Although immaturely, it likely was due to the boost in my fragile teenage ego from her wanting to be with me, versus the thought the relationship might actually go anywhere.  

Knowing I could not go home yet, I instead met up with my close friend Allyson to see the latest Raiders Of The Lost Ark movie. To make sure I didn’t get home early enough to interrupt Mike, we spent extra time after the movie sitting outside chatting in the warm Miami night air. Ally was always one of the smartest, kind-hearted, more driven people I knew, and somehow just hanging out with her always made me feel like a better, smarter human.

But that night was particularly special because there was a cool ‘Dragon’ Luner eclipse. It was named that because the slow-moving shadows on the moon looked like the back of a passing dragon. I had never seen anything like that before and I was struck by its cosmic grandeur. When we eventually called it a night, I headed upstairs.  As a thank you gift for the loaning of my place, Mike had left an album for me leaning against the front door along with an ‘all clear’ safe-to-enter note. I remember going inside, listening to the record, and thinking how great my world was.

Life was easy with minimal responsibilities. I felt happy, carefree, and it was like I had complete control over my world.  Less than a month later I was at college hundreds of miles away feeling lamentably lost, melancholically morose, and outrageously overwhelmed. The new flame was gone and out of comfort and ease, I had moved self-destructively backwards, getting back together with my wandering-eyed high school girlfriend.  Mike and I shared a dorm, and while we always had fun hanging out together, neither of us was happy with the way school was progressing. I knew at that point I was just dipping one foot into the real-world pool, but I was already shellshocked and unhappy. Plus, I had this constant sense of dread that things would only get way worse before they started to get better. And that was exactly what happened.

This past weekend, my brother stayed with my wife and I, to watch the solar eclipse from the full totality vantage point of my Dallas backyard. That morning, he and I chatted about his own recent peripeteia, and specifically the life-altering day he was diagnosed with the stage 3 deadly cancer he recently overcame. Then, as the eclipse time drew closer, we headed outside and started gazing up at the shrinking sun though our cardboard glasses. I thought about how small my little world was, in the scheme of the unfathomably large universe. No wonder I sometime feel so out of control and adrift. 

Then suddenly I recalled that day in July after high school. Watching the dragon eclipse with my old pal Ally.  And just for a brief moment, in my head, I was back there again. When life was carefree and easy. With so much more in front of me instead of in the rear-view mirror. But despite the increased pressures, heartbreaks, health issues, and all the other struggles and obstacles that fill an adult’s life, I think I am even happier now than I was back in that magical July. I’m more confident, satisfied, and content. I even still get excited about a smootchfest with my wife of over 20 years, the same way I did back then.

Then the sky started to darken, and my full undivided attention moved back to the cosmos where things quickly moved from day, to dusk, to night and back again in just a matter of minutes. My brother, an experienced eclipser, even pointed out the wiggly vapor-like lines on the ground just before and after the sun was completely covered, that I most certainly would have missed on my own.

Afterwards, as the briefly aligned planets continued on their own separate paths, we all stepped inside back into our own normal lives’ individual tangly twisted journeys. But as the week has gone on, I think the eclipse experience has stayed with me a bit. And not just the awe of this one.  But also the recalled lighthearted blithe insouciance of that memorable summer day decades ago, when life was easy, carefree, cocky, and free.

TUBS ‘N’ BLINDS, ANNOY, ANNOY OH

My wife frequently watches and rewatches the same TV shows and movies over and over again. Unless I really love it, I’m a “one and done, what’s next” kind of guy. There are of course exceptions; I’ve seen Get Smart, Bullwinkle, Goodfellas, Jerry Lewis’ The Family Jewels, Vernon Florida, and Harold And Maude hundreds of times without ever growing tired of them.  Which likely says something very scary about me, but we shall save analyzing that list for a different blog or possibly several sessions of intense psychoanalysis. I get that we all have a handful of repeatedly watched comfort shows, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out why my wife and I felt so different about rewatching stuff. You see, if I’m parked in front of the tube with something I kind of like on, I almost uncontrollably have to give it my complete undivided attention. It’s like the screen has some sort of magic magnetic pull to my eyeballs. I’m akin to a mid-road agape deer frozen in an oncoming truck’s headlights, unable to move or look away. It’s why I hate restaurants with TVs, I can’t stop looking at them instead of my meal or companions.

Meanwhile, my wife is the total opposite. Even if it’s the cliffhanger final resolution episode of her favorite series, she is still usually only half paying attention, multitasking on some other project or playing on her cell. She must have a better, more advanced model brain than I have, because the TV definitely does not hypnotically control her like it does to me. But I think that’s why she can re-watch stuff so much. She does not catch all the details the first go round, so she gets something new out of each re-showing without the annoyances of repetition that I feel.

There are times I don’t think she even knows she is not being attentive to a show we are watching. Sometimes after a very stressful day, her brain seems to automatically shift into a shut-down recovery mode. Something like a sleeping computer’s background maintenance program that only pays attention to the most important of details going on around it.

But she’s not that predictable, because the opposite also frequently happens. Other times she is not paying close attention because her head is busy working overtime on some highly complex mathematical / engineering computer problem from work. I always find that amusing, because at the most random times, she will suddenly have an excited ah-ha moment.

Here I am being a slug-o vegetating shlub in front of the set, while her brain is busy serving up a brilliant elegantly gift-wrapped solution to a long-standing tricky problem. My head just does not work that way. Though I am used to being around that, since my brainiac brother Arthur does the same thing with his entangled economic theorems. It’s like in the background of their brains, there is an always running amazingly evolved AI-ish program sifting through mountains of data, even while their outer bodies are busy dealing with the mundane day-to-day. Meanwhile, I’m content that my body simply remembers to breath.

The only real problem this has ever caused us, is that sometimes we will be watching a show that I claim we have seen before, while she swears we have not. Because my memory is not as good as hers, I used to always acquiesce and then spend the rest of the night going crazy trying to figure out when I might have ever watched it without her. Finally, I caught on; we both were kind of right. I did watch it alone, but she was right beside me. Only I was glued to the set like a feeble-minded dog hyper-focused on a just out of reach bone, and her brain was busy gnawing away on something far away from the show.

Once I realized all this, I started feeling a little less crazy. Well… still quite crazy in general, but slightly less in that department. But I also realized her tolerance for reruns has a major advantage for me. I think it makes her far more tolerant of when I retell a story from my past for the gazillionth time. Which I do with enough frequency to really test her patience for repetition. I mean, part of being a good couple is occasionally indulging each other when one feels the need to wax nostalgic with an umpteenth spouting of the same tale from the past.  But I think I push the limits between ‘that’s an interesting story’ and ‘good god not that again’, far more than she does.

We experienced that again this past weekend while we were busy doing some annoying household chores. You know, the ugly oft-procrastinated ones you keep finding excuses to not do, like washing the accumulated winter scunge off the windows or scrubbing the dusty pet fur covered baseboards. We have been married for over two decades, and after pretty much every bigger-project cleaning jag of hated tasks like those, we have discussed the possibility of getting a housekeeper or maid to help prevent things from getting as out of control again. Yet that still hasn’t happened.

I am optimistic though. It took over 15 years, and me almost passing out from heat stroke in the triple-digit mid-summer Texas sun, for us to finally hire a guy to mow the lawn. So maybe in another few decades when I am too feeble to navigate a broom or fall off a stepstool, we might finally get house cleaning assistance.

There are some chores I really don’t mind. I mean, I might sometimes get tired of them. But with stuff like doing the dishes, I actually feel better getting them done than not.  A full sink gives me agita and taxes my OCD tendencies. I constantly clean the bathrooms because dirty sinks, tubs, and toilets skeeve me out. But there are some cleaning tasks I just hate, and really only do when I get to the point that I can’t walk by and pretend I don’t see it anymore. And during the past couple of weeks as the springtime sun changed angles, the dirty blinds got to the point that I couldn’t not see the dirt.

Now I might not clean the blinds every day, or every week, or even every month. But a couple of times a year they get a good healthy scrub. And every single time I clean them, I think about when I was growing up and how my mother used to take the metal blinds off the dozen or so windows in our old New York house and soaked the city smog soot off of them in a bathtub filled with sudsy bleach. There is so much stuff from my childhood I have forever forgotten, but for some reason that vision of mom bent over the tub wearing thick rubber gloves scrubbing the pile of bleach smelling noisy clinking clacking metal blinds in our old white cast iron bathtub, is vivid like it happened yesterday.

And it does not matter how many times I have told that story, I uncontrollably launch into it every single time I clean the blinds. Now I know my wife hates the sound of the blinds when I bang them around while washing them, but I assume it’s even more annoying hearing me drone on every time with that same identical incidental unimportant anecdote.

Now maybe it’s because I’m usually doing the physical blind cleaning versus her, but she always patiently lets me re-tell it and typically does not interrupt with a polite “you’ve told me before”, until I drift onto other childhood bathtub stories. Like how mom would wrinkle-free dry everyone’s washed handkerchiefs by sticking them wet to the pink tile wall above the tub.  Or how during my childhood Mr. Bubbles bubble-baths I loved making little water streams and rivers within the wrinkled drape of the plastic shower curtain.

I assume as the years go by, we both likely will run out of stories that the other has never heard, so hopefully her patience with reruns never fades. Otherwise, my only hope is that both our memories start to go at the same time. That way all of our old tales will be fresh and new again.

A few years ago, while playing on the real estate site Zillow, I found current interior photos of my old Queens house. There were some updates and changes made in the many, many years since I lived there. But aside from the new cabinet under the sink, the tiny bathroom was the exact same. The black and white patterned floor, those dated ugly pale pink wall tiles, and the big bright white tub. Seeing the pictures of the little restroom, multiple memories flooded my brain, but the strongest of them was of mom hunched over the tub loudly scrubbing those damn dirty metal blinds.

CHANGERS & SAMERS

While getting ready to post my blog a few weeks ago, I found myself fishing through my old yearbooks trying to find a particular old photo. Man, what a dorkfest those books are. Even the coolest of beautiful people, who really had it all together back then, couldn’t prepare for the battle against looking dated and dweeby that a couple of decades of passing time causes. As for the rest of us, we didn’t stand a chance of not ending up embarrassed by the images of our previous selves.

Of course, the thing that jumps out the most is the hairstyles. My era might not have featured slicked-back pompadours and stacked poodle cuts, nerdy crewcuts and poofy bouffants, or the scraggly hippies and scary dippies of the generations before me.  But there sure were a lot of frightening teased-out hairsprays and blow-dried waves on top of the gussied-up heads of the girls and boys of my day.  

The other obvious thing to me, is how the tone of everyone’s handwritten comments changed with each year. My New York Junior High yearbooks are all filled with aggressive put-downs, rude off-color jokes, and childish dirty poems. I remember years later when my buddy Mike saw my 8th grade book for the first time, he said everyone seemed pretty hostile. He was particularly amused that already at that age there was one kid proudly calling himself ‘The Head’.

By my 9th grade Miami yearbook, the comments had mostly evolved into backhanded compliments with a lot of stuff like ‘you’re so weird, but I like you’. Not exactly the most comforting words to find solace in at that awkward age, but a vast improvement from the ‘you suck Jerkface” stuff from my New York years before it.

My later High School books featured mostly heartfelt compliments peppered with more emotion than most of us that age, were equipped to express to each other in person. That is except for Jeff Jacobs, who during Spanish class, stole my yearbook and filled an entire saved blank page with dirty illustrations, offensive racist insults about others in the school, and a drawing of a giant 4-inch quaalude. There’s always one that still thinks he is Junior High.

I’m glad I still have those dusty old annuals (even the Jeff Jacobs page), though I don’t look at them much anymore.  Not long after I got out of school, there was a time I was feeling pretty lost, lonely, and directionless. I had been coasting for a while and really had not prepared myself for the real world. Since I was fearful of my future, I started crawling into the past. During those days, I definitely found an ego-boosting comfort in re-reading the complementary words people wrote to me. But that type of behavior is not really the healthiest and luckily somewhere while frenziedly racing down the twisty tangly messy road of life, that all completely changed.

Nowadays those old yearbooks just kind of taunt me in a ‘if you knew then what you know now’ sort of way. Especially because I have more regrets over what I didn’t do, versus what I did.  Those books are littered with reminders of ‘I coulda’, woulda’, shoulda’ haves’. And even though back then my elders tried to warn me that you only get one shot, like most, I did not really learn that lesson until after the road ahead became shorter and straighter than the path I’d already traveled.

Nowadays I really only look at those yearbooks when I am cleaning out my shelves. Once every couple of years, I get into a purge mode where I find myself going through my mountains of stuff internally debating what to keep and what to toss. It’s funny how the things I once held as priceless, I now could care less about. I’ve never remotely considered getting rid of those yearbooks (yet), but I certainly have given myself enough head-trips debating my motivations for saving them.

They are currently on a lower bookshelf behind a sofa. I literally have to move furniture to see them. Which is what I did when I was looking for that photo a few weeks ago.  I was sitting on the floor behind the shifted couch when I ended up taking that unplanned trip slumming down dingy Memory Lane. That one-way street has definitely changed over the years. My memories are more faded and rundown than they used to be. I always thought distant recollections were supposed to get sweetened and brightened by age, but to me the ‘good old days’ don’t always seem that ‘good’ when scrutinized by older, wiser, more experienced eyes. I’m far more happy and comfortable in my current wrinkly saggy skin now, than I ever was back then. And I like to think I am a better person too.

It’s funny how some people are ‘changers’ and some are ‘samers’.  I mean, obviously everyone in those books has aged. But some folks that I keep up with really do look the same, just less taut and with more gray. Their mannerisms, attitudes, and voices are pretty much untouched by time. Meanwhile others have changed completely and are unrecognizable to me (some for the better and, well… you know). The strangest thing though, is how my head does not compensate for the many passing years concerning the folks I have lost touch with. In my head, they are frozen in time. Still looking and acting like the punk-ass pimply faced teenagers I knew them as.

There was a very popular song right after World War 1 called “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree?)” The song questions if post-war U.S. soldiers would want to return to their quiet small-town rural family farms after experiencing the beguiling high culture of Paris and the excitement of Europe’s other transformative meccas.

That’s a little how I feel about the smallness of the world I knew in school.  How could I go back to that after experiencing so much more out in the real world. I appreciate that Dorothy missed her family in Kansas, but personally, I’d have rather stayed in colorful Oz with the wacky straw dude, funky metal man, and the goofy fat cat. Sure, Emerald City was run by a con-artist, but it’s not like most leaders everywhere are not bullshitters masterminding their false-illusion shenanigans behind a sheer curtain of lies.

I know a lot of sci-fi shows warn about the rippling bad effects related to time travel, but even if there was a way to revisit my past without mucking things up, I’m not sure I would want to. Mike has said that it would be fun to travel back to observe ourselves when we were in school together, to be reminded of all the long forgotten fun stuff we said and did back then. While that aspect of revisiting young Dan might be enticing, I’m not sure I could deal with watching too much of clueless goofball Dan wasting so much valuable time while haplessly daydreaming through his life. Besides, I know how cringy I get just seeing videos of myself from a few years ago. If those make me wonder why anyone puts up with me, I can only imagine the self-loathing I’d feel revisiting my youth.  

The more I think about it, the more I believe that taking Professor Peabody’s WABAC time-machine to eavesdrop on myself fumbling through my torturous teen years would be god-awful. I assume it would feel like the Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life movie, where he is forced to uncomfortably watch his younger self repeatedly make fear and worry based bad decisions that continue to haunt him through adulthood. As for revisiting that messy time of my life, I think the occasional yearbook reminder of my ‘blown-dry full head of hair’ past, is more than enough. Like my teachers used to bark back then, when we were taking tests, “keep your eyes forward”.  

That Guy!

STANDING AT A CROSSWORD CROSSROADS

“Ok childrens… gather round… (Wait…  I think this will go much better if you imagine me talking in a raspy grisly really-old man’s voice) Now put away all them little electronic smarty telephones and boopedy bippity games. N’ pull yer selves up a seat cause I’m-a gonna’ tell y’all agin’ about them moldy oldy goldy days of yore when I was just knee-high to fire hydrant spout.” (Hmmmm. Yeah… Maybe we should skip the old man voice thing.) Anyway…

When I was a boy, every day we got the Long Island Press newspaper delivered to our house. I’m just not sure why.  Well, I know THAT ‘why’.  Back then the newspaper was where you found out what was going on in your world. There were no 24-hour news TV stations or cells and computers to check up-to-the-minute current events or sports info. Plus, along with the news you got the funny pages, puzzles, movie times, grocery store coupons, horoscopes, Dear Abby, department store advertising circulars, and so much more.

(Man do I feel old having to explain this previously universal experience to younger people; now I know how my folks felt telling us kids about radio dramas, ice boxes, and the Automat.) What I was trying to say about the Long Island Press though, was that I know ‘why’ we got the paper delivered daily. What I don’t know is ‘why’ we got THAT exact one instead of the other better known, higher readership newspapers.

We lived in Queens, which along with Brooklyn was (and still is) wedged between Manhattan and Long Island (again with the over-explaining). At the time, the City had three major papers: The New York Times, which didn’t have comics so as a kid was worthless to me. The Daily News, which was kinda’ geared towards non-erudite middle class working stiff-led families like ours. And, finally for those that liked their news a bit more National Inquirer-ish sensationalized, with no big words, and focused more on hyped drama than accuracy, there was The New York Post.

My only personal experience with being mentioned on the front pages of all three of those papers, was after I was hijacked to Cuba. True to form, the Times and News correctly printed that walking off the returning plane I was wearing a timely t-shirt reading ‘I’m So Abused’. It was a catchphrase I repeated so frequently whenever my older siblings picked on me, that my sister had custom made and presented me with the shirt just a few weeks before my unscheduled trip to the communist country. As usual though, the Post got the shirt’s slogan wrong and also butchered my accompanying quote.

Now versus the big City’s three well-read papers, Long Island just had the one basic, average-ish one, The Long Island Press (which later went out of business and was replaced by Newsday, but why confuse matters with yet another unimportant parenthesis aside). With few reporters of their own, most of the news stories were straight off the AP or UPI newswire services and the features were primarily nationally syndicated.  My only guess as to why we got that rinky-dinky Long Island newspaper instead of the big NYC ones, was because it likely was cheaper. Which was what drove a lot of our family decisions back then. That said, I’m sure the concept of just not getting a paper, was never even considered.

Busy raising five kids and keeping our big house clean, mom did not have a lot of time to relax. Still, most days when we were all at school, she managed to find a few mid-afternoon minutes to take a short nap or read a couple of pages in whatever big thick hardcover book she was in the middle of. And of course, she always read the newspaper. I have no memories of my dad ever cracking a book, but especially on the weekends, he always read the news section and was unhappy if we kids mangled it before he got to it.

This created a routine in my life that I followed for decades. Back at our house, I read whatever section was free whenever I could get a turn with it but, after I grew up a system developed.  Almost every day, during either breakfast or lunch, I read a newspaper. First, I looked at the hard news. Then I checked the sports scores and standings. Next, I breezed through the business and entertainment sections in case anything of interest jumped out at me. And finally, to leave me in a good mood, I read the comics. When I started traveling for work, that practice got even more ingrained because no matter what city, workplace situation, or living conditions I found myself in, I could still practice the same comfortable daily routine. Wherever I was, I followed that same obsessive-compulsive process with whatever local paper was available to me.

While at a consulting job assignment just outside of Chicago, a friendly security guard that worked there noticed I always had a paper. He asked if I could save the crossword puzzles for him.  Each day when I finished with the paper, I gave him that page and he would wiz right through the puzzle in minutes. Now the Chicago Tribune’s crossword was easier than the famed New York Times one, but it was not lame like the TV Guide one, which by comparison made the children’s Highlights Magazine find the five hidden objects puzzles seem tough. Occasionally, if the guard got stuck, he would ask one of us to help him come up with a word, but he always got them completed.

In all the years I had been reading newspapers, I had never even considered doing the crosswords. The geometric snaked boxes looked intimidating on the side of the page next to goofy Marmaduke and the lame Family Circus.  I thought that was the stuff brainiacs did when they were killing time on the subway.

Now I don’t mean to imply that I think because someone is working a security job, they are not smart. It’s just, I had plenty of conversations with that particular security guard, and I did not see Mensa banging on his door with an invite. That said, he still really impressed me so before I left, I complimented him on his amazing ability to zip through those crosswords. He replied, “once you start doing ’em everyday, they get easy.” Right after I left that gig, I started doing them myself. And though I was not as good as that guard, I quickly got hooked.

But unless it was a leisurely weekend or vacation day, I rarely was able to do the crossword in the same window of time that I had reserved to read the rest of the paper. So I started saving the page with the puzzles. And saving them.  And saving them. Some weeks I would sit and do a few, but sometimes a busy month would go by, and I would have hardly done any. But still, they kept coming every day. And I kept obsessively saving them.

After I met and married my wife, I had even less alone down time to sit and do puzzles. My backstock of crosswords grew bigger and bigger. To save space I eventually started cutting the puzzle out of the page, so I would just have the crossword box and clues. I kept a few in the car and at work. I’d drag a stack of them with me whenever I went on vacation, doing a bunch on the plane and over lazy quiet lunches. But it felt like I was barely making a dent into the ever-growing puzzle pile. Some got so old that the newsprint yellowed and started crumbling apart, making the puzzles impossible to do. But I had so many, I didn’t care.

As the price of newspapers started to slowly increase while their quality decreased, saving the crosswords helped me rationalize continuing to pay for it to be delivered. But then the world changed. I suddenly looked up at the airports and Starbucks, noticing I was the only relic still reading a physically printed newspaper. Everyone else not old enough to need a cane or walker, seemed to have transitioned to reading the news on their phone, tablet, or laptop. It’s one thing to be retro-cool by still owning vinyl records, it’s another to be a dinosaur fumbling with a newspaper that’s content is dated 20 minutes after its printed.

Even though it made me feel old, I still got the newspaper delivered longer than most.  But the papers got worse and worse and eventually I could not rationalize paying so much for such a crummy small amount of content. I had long before shifted from over-the-air radio to Satellite and streaming, so there was precedence in my life.  After decades of having to always wash newsprint off my fingers, I finally pulled the plug and cancelled my subscription.

I did not miss it as much as I thought I would. I was already reading the weather, movie times, and up to the minute sports scores on websites anyway. I even subscribed to a comics service that emailed me my favorites each morning. But the one thing I could not get into doing online was a crossword. They were not intuitive for me. I could not jot notes on the side of the page, or dramatically cross out a tough clue when I finally got it. I found them cumbersome, clumsy, and just not as enjoyable.

It was not planned, but during the past decade I replaced crosswords with cell-phone games like Wordle and Wordscapes. But just like I am having trouble shifting from reading physical books to the Kindle my wife gave me (it’s the water-resistant one so I can’t even use the excuse that I can’t read it in the pool anymore), I still kinda’ miss the tactual experience of putting pen (pencils are for wimps) to paper and physically doing a crossword.

Then the other day I was cleaning out one of my junk drawers, and there, under some saved work training papers and old greeting cards from my wife, was one of my old stacks of crosswords. Maybe 20 or 30 of them. They were frozen in time from years ago still held together with the pocket clip of an old dried out pen. I had even started the one on top but had obviously never got back to finish it.

Holding the stack of worn crinkly crosswords in my hand, I thought back to how I spent hours and hours mulling over them. I used to feel guilty about how much time I wasted doing them; someone else with more drive would have used that same time to learn a new language or master a musical instrument. But now in hindsight, I’m okay with it all.

It’s funny to say, but I have good memories attached to my crosswording. Blocking out the world and clearing my head by sitting doing one during a break from work. Lounging pen in hand, on the porch picnic tables of my (now closed) favorite pub. Early morning in the quiet living room of a friend’s house back when I had few responsibilities and would just wander, travel, and sofa-hop for months on end. On the plane flying to see my family or sitting on a blanket on the shore of a sunny southern beach. I seemed to always have a stack of those crosswords nearby.

My first cruise was for my honeymoon. My new wife and I quickly fell into a routine of spending the afternoons in the same quiet spot by the indoor pool, lounging on beach-chairs overlooking the outstretching ocean. She would doze or daydream and I sat working through my stack of crosswords. Once while sitting there, a woman stopped in her tracks surprised and asked “where did you get that? I have not seen any newspapers sold onboard, and I miss my crosswords.” I told her I brought them with me and gave her a couple from my stack. She was thrilled. 

Thumbing through my just discovered pile of crosswords, I thought about keeping them. But the old newspaper pieces were brittle and crumbled as I touched them. Like so much of the past, I decided it was best to leave them behind me along with the old routines and habits that started me saving them in the first place. Maybe I will start doing crosswords again someday, but not today. For now, they are just another reminder of how things change and priorities shift.

It made me think of how I had recently started selling some old stuff on eBay that I no longer felt the need to keep. One of those things was my decades old, saved copy of the final edition of the Long Island Press.  It’s big banner headline proclaiming ‘Final Edition’ above an article about the changing times. It was a reminder of my past that I did not feel the need to hold onto anymore. I only made a couple of bucks selling it, but I was glad to get it out of the house and I thought hopefully the new owner would enjoy it. Maybe they will just save it buried in a box, sealed in plastic, like I had. But I’d like to think that maybe they will read each section in a special order.  And when they finally get to the comics at the end, to leave them in a good mood for the day, maybe they will stop and do the crossword puzzle down on the bottom of the page next to goofy Marmaduke and the lame Family Circus.

Way Back In Our Queens House, Interrupted By Our Dog, My Sister Eating Her Breakfast Cereal While Reading The Long Island Press Comics

A LONG CUTTING TALE, THAT REALLY SHOULD BE TRIMMED

A coworker recently said to me, ‘there is a big difference between an arborist and a guy who owns a ladder and chainsaw.’  Tree trimming is big business here in north Texas. Particularly in neighborhoods like mine where the 50-year-old trees that were planted when the area was developed back in the 1970s, are now big enough to be causing massive damage to the house’s pipes, foundations, and roofs. Barely a day goes by this time of year, that my front door does not get littered with flyers and glossy business cards from various local chainsaw welding entrepreneurs posing as trained arborists.

Being a city boy that finds no enjoyment in gardening, I know damn well that I will never have the best front yard on the block. My goal has always been to not have the most embarrassingly worst. And after the squatter-filled overgrown crackhouse down the street got fixed-up and flipped to some nouveau riche cash-paying snooty types, I’ve been concerned mine might be creeping closer to winning that dubious derelict distinction.  

Although it does make everyone’s trees look wonky for a few months each spring, after winter’s final freeze, it is common practice here to enhance future growth and shape by having dead and scraggly branches pruned off any decorative trees. The cheaper, non-arborist guys just chop the living daylights off the trees leaving a barren trunk with a few medusa-like wiggly branch nubs, while the trained professionals tend to carefully ‘top’ the trees while judiciously removing dead older growth and trimming away twisted ‘deranged’ branches.

I used to worry that the stacks of doorstep lawn service ads I got were actually less than subtle hints being left by a handful of passive-aggressive neighbors that were unhappy I might be tanking the local land values by not playing their keep-up-with-the-Jones’ manicured lawn game. But after I got one of those Ring camera doorbells, it became obvious that those guys constantly swarm the entire neighborhood like an army of starving ants on an un-minded picnic tray of sugary honey covered baklava. They pretty much leave those ads on every entranceway, gate, shed, garage, and treehouse in our sprawling suburbia hood.

All these tree trimming dudes hit the motherlode jackpot lottery a few years ago when the region was paralyzed by a weeklong record-breaking deep freeze snow and ice storm. Falling dead branches were causing major damage all over town, and the legitimate actual arborists suddenly had month’s long waiting lists.

At that point, every opportunist yahoo with enough cash to buy a chainsaw and print a colorful business card, was knocking on doors trying to get a piece of the tree-trimming pie. And even the worst of them was not cheap. The most bumbling bunch of Three Stooges-esque incompetent branch cutters were still raking in $500 to $5000 for a couple of hours of indiscriminately lopping off low hanging sticks. Unfortunately, these uninsured unscrupulous exploiters often had no regard for the health and well-being of the trees they were hacking or the cheap untrained day-laborer crews they hired. Even worse, they frequently left behind a bigger long-term mess by permanently damaging old trees.

A few years ago, my wife and I threw what felt like an obscenely large amount of money at a trained and insured top-rated arborist to correctly cull the overgrown overhanging branches off the massive hackberry tree that is growing in our yard way too close to our house and new fancy fence. We had priced getting it either trimmed or having it completely removed. But even though the expert called it a “local trash tree”, we still had a hard time indiscriminately killing a healthy nice shade tree just because a few branches overhung the house occasionally blocking the sun from our solar panels and it annoyingly filled my pool with leaves every fall. Yes, its encroaching roots likely were shifting our foundation, but at this point the worst of that damage had already been done and repaired…twice. Besides, we had just recently lost our only other large shade tree.  Well… it wasn’t reeeeeally ours.

You see, that tree was in the green space between our house and the neighbor’s. Based on our official Plot Plan boundary line, about 98% of it was on their side of the property line with just a few protruding above-the-ground roots crossing onto our side. Apparently, the tree’s leaves never saw the city blueprints, because every fall most of them blew into my yard and pool instead of theirs. But that was another issue. And certainly not our biggest. That would be that neighbor’s two massive cottonwood trees that every spring spew massive quantities of white sticky wads of fiber that cover my lawn, gunk up my air conditioner unit, and clog my pool pump.

When I was a fiery young man full of spit and vinegar, trying to change the world and uncover the existential secrets of humanity, I never would have imagined that later in my life the biggest blood-boiling bane in my existence would be my suburbia neighbor’s two cottonwood trees.  What have I become?

Anyway, that tall between-the-houses tree died during that afore-mentioned nasty ice storm. Spring turned to summer without it showing any new green growth whatsoever and by the next fall it was looking as dry and scary as the wintertime skin on my heels. In the past, that unmaintained tree had frustrated us because of the leaf thing and that its branches crept over our house blocking our other set of solar panels. We wanted to trim it, but since it was our neighbor’s, we thought that was inappropriate. Suddenly, our frustration had shifted to fear. We now worried that during one of our many tornado season windstorms, the whole thing might blow down and crush our roof.

For months whenever I happened to see the neighbors, I shifted my usual innocuous driveway greetings to hints about the tree looking dead, but they just seemed to rebuff my comments.  Yeah, I did not really come right out and ask what they were going to do about it, but I was trying to be a non-antagonistic good guy. Finally, the next year when they were getting their usual late-winter trim on their front yard decorative trees, I walked out and directly asked about the dead tree. They seemed to be under the impression that the tree was mostly on my property. I assume they had been playing the same waiting game with me, wondering why I was just talking about it looking dead, and not actually doing anything about it.

My wife and I double checked the paperwork, and it was definitely mostly on their side. But knowing how miserable it can be to not get along with the folks right next door, I quickly suggested we just split the cost of having the tree removed. They loved that plan but did not want to use my pricey arborist. Instead, they suggested their cheapie guys that were a third of the price.

Since it was not a hard spot to reach and was just a straight removal job, I agreed. I will admit, I loved saving the bucket of money, but the whole time they were out there sawing and chopping, I kept waiting to hear the huge crash mangling my house. And because they did not properly remove the stump, only weeds grow on that spot, but again, it’s mostly on their side so I just pretend I don’t see it.

Kind of like that Talking Heads song where David Byrne keeps slapping himself in the head, sometimes I wake up and wonder “how did I get here”. I mean… I really do love my life. Yeah, bad shit happens, but that is just part of the deal.  I’ve always figured I’m ahead in the Human Existence Game if I have more good in my world than bad. Which I do.

But it is strange to sometimes see how domesticated I’ve become compared to when I was a young rebel nomad wanderer with a reputation for being the first in line for the next party. That guy would have never worried about tree trimming. Yet here I was the past month, constantly standing in my scraggly (almost the worst on the block) front lawn, agonizing over what to do about my trees.

Three years ago, I cut them back myself using just a ladder, pruner clippers, sheers, and an old-school branch saw on a stick.  It took a full afternoon and was back-breaking miserable work that I swore I would never do again.  Last year, I had gotten my first estimate in the post-pandemic pricing world, for what seemed like an absurd amount of money to do the job. I then proceeded to procrastinate until the spring growth started and it was too late. They never did get trimmed and now it really showed.

This year I knew I had to do something. I agonized every time I stepped out my front door. I considered getting a quote from my fancy degreed arborist. I still had the business card of the neighbor’s super cheap guy. And there were the eight zillion ads that had gotten shoved in my door.

Then suddenly a solution hit me, but would my wife go for this. I remembered what my coworker had said about arborists the other day, when he was making fun of his clumsy, duplicitous buddy trying to make extra money with his new chainsaw.  What if I purchased a chainsaw of my own? I imagined my friends and family shuddering in fear imagining goofy city-boy middle-aged Dan up a ladder welding a giant powerful chainsaw. Would I end up with as many nubs as my neighbor’s overly trimmed tree?

Then I recalled an ad I had seen for a mini-handheld chainsaw. I did some research and purchased one. Then this past weekend, armed with my old tools and new toy, I set out to attack my four front yard crepe myrtles and majestic magnolia. About halfway through I started to really regret things. Even with the little battery powered tool, it was still a lot of work. And because the saw did not make the cleanest of cuts, I was a little concerned about the future health of the trees. But less than three hours later the job was done with the branches dragged around to the back alley in time for the next bulk lawn waste pick-up. Only time will tell if the task will be classified as a successful DIY (do it yourself) or disastrous DYI (do yourself in).

But, you know, things never go that smoothly. After trash day this week, my massive pile remained with a little note from the city that stated my stack was too tall and too unruly. I know I had actually cut them all to the required length and besides, I had previously put out taller messier piles, but if I am not willing to battle my neighbor about a provable property line, I certainly am not going to sit out in the alley next trash day to argue with the garbageman about stick lengths and stack shapes.

So now this weekend I have to break out my handy dandy little chainsaw again, to make my waste pile less tall and more ‘ruly’.  This leads me to the one big unknown question; will I ever do this again?  I’m not sure, but I think I’m going to save a few dozen of those non-arborist guy-with-a-chainsaw ads. Just in case.

MONDAY SHOWERS

Some Mondays are ultra Mondayish. And sometimes a Tuesday can be pretty darn Mondayish too. And during one of those particularly stressful, busy, tense weeks at work, where it feels like a year’s worth of headaches have been handed to you in an overstuffed pressure cooker with a faulty lid lock seconds before it’s about to explode spewing its ugly messy problems everywhere… a Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday can also feel really, really Mondayish.

A couple of weeks ago, both my wife and I had one of those long unpleasant weeks of Mondays. The truth is, neither of our jobs is normally that bad at all. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t have those dream jobs that you always hear about, where people spend most of Sunday daydreaming about how wonderful it will be getting back to work the next morning. I tried, but no one on Zip-recruiter, Indeed, or Linked-In, was hiring a Sunny Beach Beer Taster, Professional Pool Float Sitter, or a Worldwide Michelin Star-Rated Restaurant Pampered Mystery Diner.

But despite us normally liking (to a point) our jobs, every once in a while, things just go off the rails. And during weeks like that, the only thing that keeps us both going is the ensuing paycheck and the dream that the weekend will eventually arrive. Unfortunately, on a week of Mondays, that dream is very distant and elusive. Like you are on a treadmill chasing a dangling carrot or continuously trying to sit down on a chair that repeatedly gets pulled out from under you.  And even with our usual optimistic belief that it can’t get any worse, it usually somehow does… over and over again.

Ah, but like a bright dawn after the darkest night, there is always that beautiful dream of the upcoming weekend. 48 hours away from the stress. 48 hours without the pressure. 48 hours without feeling like Charlie Brown racing to kick the football just as Lucy pulls it away. And although on that particular upcoming weekend we had lots of chores and errands planned, none of them involved exploding spreadsheets, stressed employees, griping clients, Office Space-like bosses, or an Everest sized mountain of overdue late projects that uncontrollably raced past their deadlines like lemmings plunging off the side of a cliff.     

That weekend we had several little things we wanted to get done that would make our everyday lives better, like scrubbing away the winter coating of crud off back porch, cleaning the cars, and rearranging the garage chest freezer. But mostly my wife was looking forward to experimenting like a grinning mad scientist with her new healthy hobby, trying out new recipes for her fancy juicer. I was going to finally install the new shower panel we ordered for the master bathroom. It was replacing the old one that never really worked right. Since we moved into the house, every few months its thermostat would lock up causing it to only dispense flesh melting scalding water through its multiple nozzles and wide rain shower head. For several years I had been able to get it to behave by removing the heavy hulking thing off the wall and adjusting the thermostat controller inside the unit, but this last time it locked up for good, blasted only frigid water.

Now that might not sound like the usual relaxing fare of a long-anticipated weekend, but believe me, compared to that workweek of five miserable Mondays, it was a holiday paradise. Besides, we had one more little special activity planned I have not mentioned yet. We had pre-paid for a super-splurge ultra-fancy take-out short rib risotto dinner from our absolute favorite restaurant, complete with an amazing appetizer and a crazy yummy dessert. For two people dieting since early January, this was like a tiki bar party oasis in the middle of a trudged through barren lifeless desert. All we had to do was drive to the other side of town at our allotted time to pick it up.

My wife and I occasionally suffer from a malady we call ‘weekend brain’. After an overly hectic stressful workweek, sometimes our brains uncontrollably shut down for general maintenance for various parts of Saturday and Sunday.  It’s not like we spend the two days both looking like propped-up dead-eyed coma patients drooling into a cup, where a trip to the grocery store might look like a scene from Weekend At Bernie’s.

Weekend Brain is a bit more subtle than that. We just kinda’ occasionally make more bumbling thoughtless errors or don’t analytically think things through with the usual scrutiny we would use as when someone is paying us to be ‘on’.  We will make a completely wrong turn while driving a route we’ve taken a zillion times before or walk into a room only to forget why we went there. It does sometimes cause amusing brunch conversations where we both spend an incredibly long time grasping to recall the blatantly obvious. We tease each other when it happens, but it never really bothers either of us. We’ve learned the best thing to do is just give each other a little more space.

It’s that time of year in Texas where every morning you have to stick your head out the door to see what season it is. When we discovered how beautifully unseasonably warm it was, we modified our Saturday plans. Thinking we might each need some alone time to rejuvenate after the hellish week, we originally planned that she would hit the farm-ish market for her juicing supplies in the morning, and I would do one of those two dead birds with one rock things and swing by the downtown plumbing place on the way to fetch dinner at the restaurant.  But the summer-like weather made us forget about our ills and we decided to stick together taking my wife’s SUV for her early veggie/fruit run, and my Mini Cooper convertible later, so we could put the top down and really enjoy the long drive that late afternoon.

Apparently, a wave of Weekend Brain must have hit us both, because all day we saw no problem with this plan.  It was not till we were literally pulling into the plumbing place’s loading dock parking lot on the other side of town, that I suddenly realized we made a major tactical error. You see, the shower panel was big, heavy, and bulky. And likely came in an even bigger, heavier, bulkier box. Even with the top down to create a lot of extra space, a Mini Cooper convertible is not by any definition, big and bulky. But at that point we did not have a lot of other options. The plumbing place would close soon for the rest of the weekend and immediately going back home to change cars would have meant missing our assigned dinner pick-up window.

It was definitely not the goofiest looking drive we have ever made in a Mini. There were two others that topped it.  When we crammed 6 full size adult Florida State fans into the car for a short drive from the post-game stadium parking lot to a nearby restaurant.  And when we purchased three 6-feet-tall trees and several small hedge plants, then drove home with me sitting in the back wedged between them holding them down as they protruded well above the top of the car, blowing in the wind.

But this was definitely a much longer drive at much faster speeds. We tried to load the hulking unit in several different angles and positions, but most would have either mangled the new car’s seats, left it sticking way too far out the side of the car to be safe, or would have put it in a position that if we hit a bump would send it flying like a massive ballistic missile into the car behind us on the highway.

My wife said the only way she was comfortable doing this, was with the massive box seat-belted down on the reclined passenger seat and her scrunched into the backseat behind me like she was being chauffeured in a shrunken hearse next to a giant 45 degree angled cardboard coffin. Of course, I tried to make as much room as possible for her, so I pulled my seat as far forward as I safely could, forcing me to sit a bit like an oversized grown-up wedged into a first grader’s school desk.

So with the top down, under the bright warm sun, that was how we drove to the trendy part of town on a busy spring-like Saturday evening to pick up our fancy meal. Luckily, we have gotten very good at laughing at ourselves. And except for my wife’s legs being a bit cramped and her hair getting rather windblown, it all worked out fine.

Seeing a large car give up on trying to parallel park into a tiny spot just down the street from the restaurant, I easily zipped right into the space and hopped out to grab our food. The busy outdoor cafes and sidewalks were full of trendy au-courant hipsters, but they were all so absorbed in being seen themselves, most of them never even noticed my wife trapped in the parked convertible’s backseat next to the giant mysterious box.  

We got home safely and intact, then enjoyed our fabulous dinner. The next day after a far less dramatic trip out for an early brunch, we tackled our chores. The shower panel was back-breakingly difficult to hang, and the screened porch required far more scrubbing than I had hoped. My wife’s juice prepping for the upcoming week was successful but took several hours longer than planned. Yet all and all, the weekend was a nice mix of relaxation and productive projects successfully completed.  It was just what we needed to get us ready for Monday. And luckily this past week, there was only one of them.