Hook, Line and Sinker. . . Well, Except for the Line and Sinker

In our previous house, the one we lived in before we moved into our current house nearly ten years ago, the mailbox was strategically situated on the facing of the porch, for ease of the mailman's access. Unfortunately, that also meant that it was more-or-less directly beneath the edge of the porch roof. Which was not a problem, most of the time. But on rainy/snowy days, water would drip off the edge of the roof, directly onto the mailbox. Which, again, was not a problem, so long as the mailbox remained closed. But, lacking one of those nifty red flags to indicate that we had outgoing mail, the way we signaled to our mail carrier that we had outgoing mail (utility bills, and such inconsequential items as those), was to leave the stamped end of the letter sticking out from under the lid of the mailbox. So now, perhaps, you can perceive the problem. Rain, or snowmelt, would drip onto the portion of the letter that stuck out from under the mailbox lid, and made the printing run (or, even worse, the ink on the enclosed check), or worst of all, in the days before self-adhesive stamps, it might wash the stamp off the envelope entirely, resulting in a three-digit electric bill falling down the postal service's Black Hole for Unstamped Letters. Not that that ever happened, or anything. . .

So, on rainy/snowy days, if we had outgoing mail, I would often just take it with me when I left for work in the morning. Some days, my route to work would take me past the main post office, and I would just drop our letters in the box in the lobby there. Otherwise, I would look for one of those blue letter-boxes that one finds on the edge of the curb, which used to be way more common than they are these days. Thus protected from the elements, our bills could wait in the relative comfort and security of the blue curbside letter-box until the mailman came along with his key to speed them to their intended destination.

All of which is an elaborate setting of the stage for the real story of this post. . .

-------------------------

One such snowy day - it had snowed a foot or more in OurTown, and the snow was still coming down furiously as I left for work - I had a fistful of letters to send off, and I was working in a part of town I wasn't very familiar with, so I was going slowly, peering through the snow, trying to find a blue letter-box. I finally spied one, on the corner of a fairly seedy side street, next to an old drug store. In order to get myself out of the flow of traffic, what with visibility and traction both being pretty seriously diminished, I turned onto the side street and maneuvered my car around so I could pull up near the letter-box. I hopped out of the car, deposited my letters into the blue box, and got back into the car.

I was just about to pull back onto the main street, when a woman I'd never met got into the passenger seat of my car. She was blond, and looked to be around 40 years old, not unattractive, but bearing a 'hard-life' sort of demeanor. She was wearing a leopard-print winter coat. "Hi!" she greeted me, cheerily.

"Uh, hi," I replied, wondering just what the hell this was about.

"So - where do you wanna go?"

"Um. . . excuse me?"

"Where do you wanna go?"

"Uh. . . I'm going to work? Is there some way I can help you?"

"Well, you pulled in where I was standing! Why did you do that, if you didn't want something?"

"Uh. . . I pulled off the main street so I could drop some letters in the blue box."

Now both of us are a little flustered, as I'm suddenly realizing what's going on with this woman in my car, and she's suddenly realizing that I'm not the 'customer' she took me to be.

"Sorry. . . " I mumbled, "but I'm not in the market. Can I drop you somewhere where you'll be warm?"

"No," she replied. "I'll be fine right here. Sorry to bother you. Have a nice day."

"Um. . . you too. . ." And she got out of my car, and back to plying her trade. . .

And that, along with the story I told from the summer when I was 17, is the sum total of my lived experience with prostitutes.

And just for what it's worth, Molly thought it was hilarious when I told her the story when I got home at the end of the day. . .

Thanks for Noticing

At one of our recent prayer meetings, Molly was wearing a sleeveless top, and the effects of her newly-rigorous workout program were showing on her lean, tanned arms and shoulders. One of the college guys stopped her for a second after the meeting.

"Mrs. Jones!" he exclaimed, "You're buff!"

That's right, kid, she is. And she's all mine. . .

Lost!

I've written in the past about my love of bicycling, and how my weight loss of recent years has brought a resurgence of my old cycling ways. Last year, I rode over 1400 miles, after riding over 1200 the previous year, and I'm on track to be around 1200 again this year, depending on the weather in November.

When I was fat and out-of-shape, but at least trying to get/stay somewhat in shape, I would ride with Molly from time to time. Which, in those out-of-shape days, could be pretty humbling. Back in my cycling heyday, Molly couldn’t remotely keep up with me, unless I was pulling the kids in a trailer, or something like that. But when I was at my fattest, I struggled to keep up with her. Which would be one thing, if she were an avid cyclist who was regularly out pounding the pedals, but she wasn’t; she’d ride with me, if it fit her schedule, but in terms of sheer miles, I was riding more than she was, and I still couldn’t really keep up with her.

But the good side of it was that, by that time, we were at a point where we really liked spending time together – all that Theology of the Body stuff, and all that. And so, we just enjoyed spending the time together, and didn’t worry about who was keeping up with whom.

Once I lost weight, and started getting back in shape, the riding situation pretty much reverted to what it had been in the beginning – if I was riding hard, she couldn’t stay with me. But we had come to enjoy riding together, and so we still looked for opportunities where it didn’t matter so much how much of a workout I got – during summer break, or over holidays, when I could get one good, hard workout ride, I’d take a second, lower-key ride with Molly, and maybe we’d stop for a picnic somewhere along the way. And whenever we ride together, usually once or twice, by mutual consent, I’ll ‘take a flyer’ - run on ahead for a few miles, and wait for her.

Last summer, we had one such ride – we didn’t have much planned, just 20 miles or so, to a neighboring town and back home. The little town we were riding to has a lovely little riverside park, but we didn’t even pack a picnic or anything – it was just a nice, low-key ride, for the two of us to spend some time together.

It started out very pleasantly. It was about 8-9 miles from our house to the town, and we were having a good time. Molly was feeling a little frisky, which made it fun for me, because she was riding a bit more aggressively than she usually does.

We got to the town, which is nestled on the banks of a small river, so there was a fairly steep descent down to the river as we entered the town, and a decent little climb away from the river, on the other side. I enjoy climbing aggressively, and so, as we came into town, I turned to Molly, said, “I’m gonna attack the hill; I’ll wait for you at the top,” and took off. There was a street corner at the top of the hill, and once I got there, I pulled my bike off the main roadway, took a drink from my water bottle, and waited for Molly to climb the hill.

A few minutes later, Molly still hadn’t arrived at the top of the hill, and it wasn’t such a big hill that she would have struggled that badly. I turned and looked back down the hill, but she was nowhere to be seen. I mean, she wasn’t on the road, anywhere. Which was really weird – where could she have gone? The little riverside park was at the bottom of the hill, and so I figured she must have stopped there; perhaps she was tired, and wanted to rest a bit before climbing the hill. So I rode back down the hill to look for her in the park. Not there. There was another park on the other side of the street, so I checked there. Not there, either.

By now, I was seriously scratching my head – where on earth could my wife have gotten to? This was a very small town – maybe five blocks from end to end. There simply weren’t that many places for her to hide. I checked the public restrooms at both parks, but no-one had seen her, and even her bike was nowhere to be seen. I rode back up the hill, noticing a mother on the sidewalk as I rode by, trying to calm her baby, who was crying very loudly. But still, Molly wasn’t at the top of the hill. There was one side street that angled off, halfway up the hill – perhaps she had taken that way, thinking to give herself a less-severe climb. But no sign of her there, either.

By this time, I was somewhere between panic (did something really bizarre happen to my wife?) and anger (did she just take off, without telling me?) and utter, stark confusion (what the heck could possibly have happened to her?). And I was wishing that she had her cell phone with her, so at least I could call her. But we’d decided that we didn’t both need our cell phones, so we’d only brought mine.

I was very reluctant to just throw my hands in the air, and ride on alone – if my wife was somewhere in that town, I sure didn’t want to just leave her there, if she was in some kind of trouble. But, after searching every corner of that town for nearly an hour, I satisfied myself that it was most unlikely that she was still there, and I took off on the road out of town.

Less than a mile out of town, my phone rang. It was Molly. “Can you pick me up?” she said. “I got a flat tire.”

“Where are you?” I asked her (probably more sharply than I should have, but I was still pretty upset by the whole experience).

“I don’t know,” she said, “just a minute.” I heard muffled voices as she asked somebody where she was. “I’m on Cottonwood Road,” she finally said. “Can you come and get me?”

“Um, sure, but it will take me a bit; I’m just leaving the town.”

“You’re not home?”

“No; I just spent an hour looking for you. Why did you leave without me?”

“I thought you left without me!”

“What?? I would never do that!”

“Well, my chain fell off on the downhill, so I just walked up the hill, and when I got to the top, you weren’t there, so I figured you just left without me. Where did you go?”

“I rode back down the hill looking for you! How on earth did I not see you?”

“I have no idea; I remember walking past a woman with a crying baby.”

“You were on the sidewalk?”

And suddenly the mystery stood revealed. Strange as it was, Molly had been walking up the hill, on the sidewalk, at the very time I was scanning the roadway for her, and then riding back down the hill looking for her. We both saw the same woman, struggling with the same crying baby, BUT COMPLETELY MISSED EACH OTHER!!

So Molly, thinking I had ridden on without her, put the chain back on her bike and headed off, thinking that she’d find me waiting for her at some corner on ahead, while I was frantically searching for her back in town. When she called me to pick her up, she assumed that I was already home, not miles behind her.

So I rode on to where she was, sitting by the side of the road with her flat-tired bicycle. It was still about six miles home from where she was, so I rode home alone, and came back for her with the car. And all was well that ended well.

In terms of a low-key ride together, there was precious little of it spent together, and there was WAY too much angst flying around (at least in my head; Molly has an amazing, Alfred-E-Neuman, ‘What-me-worry’ disposition) to be anything like low-key. But, when it was all said and done, it was a pretty amazing story of how we could pass within 15 feet of each other, and each think the other had somehow, inexplicably, disappeared. . .

*************************

While I'm on the topic of bike rides with family members, I can't help mentioning that the last two weekends, I've ridden with 4M. Star-athlete 4M. Four-year high-school varsity athlete 4M, who, even three scant months ago, was running on Large Urban Public High's track team, and winning the informal designation of 'The Fastest White Boy in OurTown'. . .

He has ridden with me occasionally in the past (maybe 2 or 3 times a summer), just to get some extra aerobic work in on the side. And of course, well-trained athlete that he was, and I being the 50-something weekend warrior that I was, he would mostly just kinda toy with me. Not to give a wrong impression - he got a good side workout by riding with me, but a 'side workout' is what it was for him, and even though I knew a lot more about cycling techniques and tactics than he did, his sheer athleticism just left me in the dust. Not that I ever had any illusions that it could be otherwise. . .

So, last weekend, I was preparing to go out on my regular weekly ride. My regular riding partner was otherwise occupied, so I was figuring on a solo ride, until 4M saw me getting ready, and asked if he could come with me. I told him that I had a pretty long ride planned - 45 miles - but I'd welcome the company, and also the small added challenge of having his athletic self along to push me a bit.

We started off on a fairly leisurely pace, not wanting to burn ourselves out in the first 10 miles. The route was one of my favorites, following some lightly-traveled back roads, with lots of trees and hills, and even a couple lakes. For much of the first half of the ride, 4M rode on ahead of me. At about the 30-mile mark, we stopped for a break at a party-store/bait-shop, and 4M was remarking how he hadn't really worked out much since track season ended, and how he was glad for the workout. And I, for my part, was feeling pretty good.

We got back on our bikes, to run the last third of our course on the way home. After a couple miles, we were approaching a moderate hill (actually one of the stiffer ones to be found in the neighborhood of OurTown, but honestly, our area is not very hilly), and 4M started acting frisky, and pulled ahead of me by a bit, making some suitably snotty comment directed to 'the Old Man'. Well, I wasn't about to let that pass unanswered, even as I had no illusions about his ability to respond. So I got out of the saddle and charged up the hill, letting him know as I passed him that the Old Man still had some gas left in the tank. And waiting for him to pass me back.

Except he never did. I got to the top of the hill, and was still feeling pretty good, so I shifted into my highest gear, and just let the dogs run for as long as I could keep it going. A couple times, I saw in my rear-view mirror that 4M was increasing his pace, trying to close the gap between us, and I just increased the pressure, and pulled even farther ahead. And I stayed a couple hundred yards clear for about five miles, until we pulled into a small town (the same one in which Molly and I 'lost' each other, above), and I sat up and waited for him to pull alongside.

And my star-athlete son pulled alongside me, saying, "Dang, Dad - you just ran off, and I couldn't catch up; I was pedaling as hard as I could, but every time I tried to catch you, you went even faster. I just couldn't catch you." And I smiled.

Of course, he hasn't worked out in three months, and is probably in the worst physical condition he's been in since he was in middle school, whereas I'm probably in as good a condition as I've been since I was in my 20s; if he keeps riding with me, he'll get back in shape, and my 'Window of Ego Stroking' will close. But I guarantee you I'm not by any means too proud to remind the Fastest White Boy in OurTown that his Old Man can still dust his ass when the need arises. . .

Herbal Aromas

Having now parented six children into their teens, and three, coming hard on four, all the way through them, and having been a teenager myself, once upon a time (which my kids don’t fully believe, but whatcha gonna do?), I have lost a lot of the earnest innocence with which I initially came into parenthood. Mostly, that’s a good thing, I think, but it has its moments of wistful sadness.

Like pretty much everybody I know who grew up in the 60s/70s, I came into contact with marijuana when I was in my high-school/college years. My freshman/sophomore years of college, every Friday evening in my dorm was marked by The Cloud – the fragrant aroma of burning hemp, which hung about eye-level all through the hall. One could get a nice, mellow secondary buzz just from staying quietly in one’s room. . .

My first experience with the Wacky Weed goes back to when I was in high school, probably sophomore year, but I don’t really remember. My brother came home with a nickel-bag (which was considerably bigger in those days than even dime-bags are now), and, on a night when our parents were out, rolled out a few joints, and wandered out behind the house to enjoy one or two. He asked if I’d like to join him, and, curious as I was, I went along.

-------------------------

At this point, I should flash back in time to when we were both ten, and the same brother tried to initiate me into the joys of smoking tobacco, on a Saturday afternoon, in a secluded corner of the school playground. He showed me how to light the cigarette; no problem. I put it to my lips and began puffing on it; this was really pretty easy. But then he said, you have to inhale the smoke. Now, even to my ten-year-old brain, that didn’t seem like such a good idea, but, if that’s what you’ve got to do, then all right. . .

But when I purposed to actually inhale the tobacco smoke into my lungs, my lungs informed me, in no uncertain terms, that they were not going to sit idly by and acquiesce to my misbegotten intentions, and they immediately sent each and every smoke particle, and, it seemed, a few small chunks of themselves, flying violently in an outward direction, in a massive coughing fit. Once I stopped coughing, I tried again, with the same result. A few more attempts yielded the same outcome (heh!), and my first attempt at smoking was a complete and utter failure (I know, you’re all just shedding a tear at my misfortune, aren’t you?). A few months later, I tried again, with the same result, and that was pretty much the end of me and smoking (except for a brief fling with a pipe when I was newly-married, but you don’t have to inhale those).

-------------------------

Those early experiences with tobacco came flooding back to me when my brother took to initiate me into the ways of the Weed. I lit the joint, even savored the smoky-sweet aroma, and took a couple puffs. Then my brother, looking on impatiently, told me that, in order to get high, you have to inhale. Suddenly, I had a sinking feeling, remembering my lungs’ rejection of earlier smoke particles. But this time, I had an added incentive to try again – there was this mysterious ‘Buzz’, to be had, if only I could force myself to inhale. And so I did. And the result was exactly the same as I’d had with those cigarettes five years before – I choked, I coughed, I hacked, I thought I was gonna die. There was simply no way that my lungs were gonna let me ingest smoke into themselves. And that was effectively the end of my brief career as a user of controlled substances. After that, I would be at parties, and joints would occasionally get passed around; at random intervals, I’d check to see if my lungs were inclined to be any more co-operative than they had ever been, and they never were, so sometime during high school, I gave up trying anymore.

As an aside, I might be the only person – I am certainly the only person I know of – who didn’t just immediately laugh derisively when our erstwhile former president said he had tried marijuana “but didn’t inhale”. I could actually share some space with the concept, even if the specific claim stretched credulity a bit.

-------------------------

So, then, when my own children came into their teens, I had no particular illusions regarding the opportunities that would be presented to them, to sample recreational herbs for themselves. Molly and I were quite open with them about our own exposure to them, in our youth, and quite clear on the dangers we saw associated with them – mainly in terms of who you ended up hanging around with while you were doing them, moreso than the specific evils of sampling the aromatic herbiage. We were never aware of 1F or 2F toking up, but we weren’t surprised when they told us, years later, that they had. 3M was very open about his fondness for the weed, and wrote several term papers arguing for legalization, when he was in high school (yeah, subtlety has never been the young man's strong suit). Sadly enough, those were probably the hardest he worked on anything academic, after about fifth grade or so. 4M was pretty strongly influenced by his older brother, and besides, he was on several sports teams, which, in the urban high school our kids attend, is pretty much its own initiation into recreational herbs. We had hoped, when 3M moved out of the house, that dinnertime conversation would be less dominated by discussing the merits of legalizing marijuana, but 4M carried on the grand tradition, although not quite as vigorously as his brother.

But 5M is different. 5M is a much more ‘innocent’ kid than either of his older brothers. His closest friends are nerdy home-schooled kids, who like to get together on a Friday night and play Lord of the Rings Risk. He’s a kind and sensitive soul, and not nearly as ‘edgy’ as his brothers. The only possible ‘red flag’ is a fondness for getting together with a couple of his buddies to listen to Pink Floyd and the Who, and argue the relative merits of ‘The Wall’ versus ‘Tommy’, or ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ versus ‘Quadrophenia’. But that’s so endearingly retro, that the ‘druggie’ aspects of the music (at least as I experienced them) seem almost a non-sequitur.

So, I was a bit perturbed when, a few months back, I wandered up to the bedroom that 4M and 5M shared, and there was a distinctive ‘herbal’ aroma hanging in the air. A very familiar herbal aroma, harking back to my college days (or the last time I went to a McCartney concert). I was quite upset – I mean, it was really pretty brazen to be toking up right in the house, while I was home. So, I tracked down 4M, who was somewhere else in the house, and lit into him – what was he thinking, smoking weed right here, in my house? I understand that he’ll have opportunities to light up with his buddies, and I think that’s a pretty bad idea, but I can’t stop him from it. But, by damn! Not in my house, understand? And 4M nodded in agreement, while barely stifling an amused grin.

What’s so funny?

“Uh, I think you better talk to 5M.”

5M? What does 5M know about Weed?

“Uh, just talk to him.” Still with the stupid grin.

So, I tracked down 5M, who had his buddy Tim over for the afternoon. Now, Tim is sort of the Poster Child for dorky, socially-awkward home-schooled kids, right down to the mild lisp he speaks with; if anything, he’s even more innocent than 5M is. Tim's close friendship with 5M is one of the reasons I pretty much trust 5M to keep himself out of trouble. Tim was with 5M, and I probably should have taken 5M aside to ask him separately about my concerns, but I was, how do you say, pissed. So Tim was there when I asked 5M what he knew about the dope-smell in his bedroom. 5M was instantly evasive. But Tim, innocent that he is, said, “Oh – that was me.”

I spun on my heels, as my jaw hit the floor. “You, Tim??”

“Yeah. I had a little bag of oregano, and we lit some of it. You know, like for incense.”

Oregano.

“Yeah.”

Um, do you have any of this ‘oregano’ with you, Tim?

“Sure.” He rustles through his pockets, producing a bag with chopped, dried leaves (and no seeds) in it. “Here.”

I opened the bag and took a sniff. It smelled like oregano. I took a pinch and stuck it on my tongue. By golly, it was oregano.

Uh, Tim, could you light some of this for me?

“Sure.” He makes a little pile of dried leaves, and sets a match to it. It smells exactly like another herb which is more commonly lit for recreational purposes.

Oregano. I’ll be darned. Uh, Tim – you might not want to go around lighting oregano, OK? People might get the wrong idea.

“OK, Mr. Jones.”

And that was that. Crisis defused.

Oregano.

Who knew?

Hazards of Catholic Worship

Back last fall, during the Great Midwestern Blogger Get-Together, Molly and I went to Sunday Mass with Therese and RS. As it turned out, the church we went to was being remodeled, so Mass was held in the church basement, instead. While we sat quietly, waiting for Mass to begin, we noticed that several people had brought foam seat-pads with them - the kind that folks will take to football games, so they get a little more padding than just sitting on bare bleachers. I thought that was passing curious, and wondered what was going on.

Until it came to that portion of the Mass where the congregation kneels. It being the church basement, we had only the hard cement floor, covered with a thin layer of floor tiles, upon which to kneel. And this was a Latin High Mass (a very cool experience in and of itself), so the 'kneeling parts' were a fair bit longer than what I'm used to in my home parish, besides the fact that we were kneeling on concrete. So, when it was time to kneel, the 'locals' tossed their foam pads onto the floor, as a sort-of 'roll-your-own' kneeler, and saved themselves a half-hour's wear-and-tear on their kneecaps. For my part, when Mass was over, I hobbled down the aisle, and up the stairs, like a man much older than I already am.

-------------------------

The Catholic Mass, along with the Orthodox Liturgy, and a few other 'high church' liturgies, contains a series of shifting body positions, in the course of a normal worship service. Some clever types have referred to this as 'Catholic Calisthenics' - stand, kneel, sit, repeat as necessary. It can be a little bewildering the first time a visitor attends a Mass. My family is not Catholic (I converted when I was in college), and I once caused a minor scene at a cousin's Catholic wedding, by whispering 'Catholic Calisthenics' to my sister, during one of the stand-kneel-sit cycles, which caused her to burst out laughing. And generally speaking, there are no good times to burst out laughing during Mass. In case anyone was wondering.

-------------------------

So, last week, 6F graduated from 8th grade at Tiny Catholic School, and, as Catholics are wont to do, they celebrated the auspicious occasion with a Mass. The liturgy moved into the Eucharistic Prayers, which is where most of the kneeling happens.

Now, in 35 years of being Catholic, I've become fairly adept at flipping the kneeler down into position with my toe. Molly used to admonish me that that's a minor breach of Catholic etiquette, that the proper form is to sit, and put the kneeler down with one's hand, but I can always plead my convert status, that I was never properly taught the subtle fine points of Mass etiquette. So, I'm a shameless toe-flipper of the kneelers. And she has mostly given up on the admonishments.

I don't know what-all, exactly, I had distracting me during 6F's graduation Mass, but, having flipped the kneeler up during one of the 'standing parts', I forgot to flip it back down when the next 'kneeling part' came around. So that, when I went to kneel, expecting the kneeler to be in place, I continued downward with some degree of force, catching myself on the pew in front of me, with the bottom of my rib cage. Which hurt like hell crazy, and I ended up with some bruised ribs for my trouble. And the next day, when I got out of bed, I discovered that I'd pulled a muscle in my side, to boot. Which doesn't really affect much, other than getting out of bed, or rolling over. It's also allergy season for me, which means I sneeze a lot more often than I do other times of the year. Which, if you've ever had bruised ribs, becomes a much, um, 'ouchier' proposition than if you don't.


Not that any of this is really so terribly debilitating, or anything. But I do get a certain wry amusement from the fact that, twice in the past seven months, I've managed to mildly injure myself just from going to Mass. As Carla from Cheers once said (in one of the great bits of dialogue ever in a TV show), "Catholicism is not a religion for wusses."

Seriously?

Sometime back in the 80s, a co-worker and I were having lunch at a Mexican restaurant in the college town next door to OurTown; a Beatles tune (I forget which one) was playing on the piped-in music. As we enjoyed the music and waited for our food to come, while munching on some blue-corn tortilla chips (with a delicious jalapeño cheese dip, in case anyone is wondering), we overheard two college kids in the booth behind ours. . .

Kid1: Hey, that sounds just like McCartney!

Kid2: You doofus, that IS McCartney!

Kid1: No it isn't - that's the Beatles.

Kid2: Idiot, McCartney was in the Beatles!

Kid1 (impatiently, condescendingly): Nooo, McCartney was with Wings!

While my co-worker (who was the same age as me; for the record, I’m pretty sure neither of us was 30 yet) and I banged our heads on the table. . .

-------------------------

And just because that's the kind of generous guy I am, I'll post Molly's recipe for Jalapeño Cheese Dip, which is really good (and posting recipes is a sure sign that your blog has 'jumped the shark', isn't it?). . .

1 24oz container cottage cheese
1 16oz container sour cream
2 cups shredded cheese – Monterrey Jack or mozzarella
(Pepper Jack is also good, for a spicier kick)
3-5 chopped green onions or scallions
3-5 garlic toes, pressed or minced
1-3 jalapeño peppers, chopped (mix in habañero peppers for a hotter bite)

(This is the basic recipe; we have also occasionally added other ingredients, like salsa, chili powder, or cayenne powder, as variations; feel free to be as creative as you feel like)

Combine ingredients at least 24 hours before serving, and refrigerate; serve with tortilla chips (we like blue corn best, but we’re not dogmatic about it), and DON’T rub your eyes without first washing your hands, preferably a few times. . .

Long-Stemmed WHAT?

Molly and I have never been particularly big on Valentine’s Day. We’ve tended to view it as pretty much an over-hyped ‘Hallmark holiday’, designed to sell candy and greeting cards. And we’ve figured that really, it’s much better if we spend 365 days a year finding ways to express our love and commitment to each other, than it is to ride in on a white horse every February 14th to say what, honestly, we should be saying (albeit, perhaps not in quite such extravagant form) all the time.

But, maybe that’s just us.

I did get in trouble once over Valentine’s Day, though. My birth-mother, as it turns out, is a HUGE fan of Valentine’s Day. And so, when the first V-Day after our reunion rolled around, and I gave it my typical blasé non-observance, she was pretty upset with me, and told me so. I mean, how hard would it have been for me to send her a card, or some candy hearts with cheesy ‘romantic’ messages stamped in them, expressing the true depth of my feelings for her, right?

So, I didn’t make that mistake again. The following year, I was in the card shop a month ahead, searching for the perfect V-Day card. And I found it. On the front, it had an old photo of a gnarly, scowling old gentleman, standing behind a chair on the lawn. The caption read, “Here’s your damn Valentine”, and inside it said, “Now sit down and shut up.” Molly wouldn’t let me send it to my mother. But I still have it in my files, to this day (I swear I still have it; I was gonna scan it for y'all, but I couldn't immediately lay hands on it).

-------------------------

We have occasionally had a bit of fun with V-Day observances, though. Many years ago, when we were married only a few years, I was in my office, working, on Valentine’s Day, when I got paged to the receptionist’s desk by the front door, so everybody in the office could hear it. When I got there, there was a long white box sitting there – the kind that long-stemmed roses often come in. “Your wife was just here,” said the receptionist. “She said she couldn’t stay, but she left this for you.”

Curious. . . Molly is definitely not the sentimental sort. She used to pooh-pooh it when I brought her flowers, but over the years she's grown more appreciative of the thought, and the effort (and the flowers are nice, after all). Getting roses for me would be way out-of-character for her.

I picked up the box. It was heavy. WAY too heavy for flowers. What the heck? So I set the box back on the desk, and opened it, to see what in the world it could possibly contain, that was so heavy.

And I saw six cans of beer, laid end-to-end. A linear six-pack.

Sometimes, you know, there are just no words. . .

I married a great, great woman. . .

Our Flashy Wedding

Molly and I went to a wedding this past weekend. The bride was a friend of ours, a woman a couple years older than 1F, who is also a birth-mother of a six-year-old boy (her son, and his adoptive family, were at the wedding, and it was a personal highlight for me to meet them). Her willingness to share with us about her experience of birth-motherhood has been wonderfully helpful to us through 1F’s experience. And I think she has appreciated hearing about my experience with my birth-mother, as well.

-------------------------

Of course, I have many memories of our wedding day. I remember washing my car in the morning, more to kill a couple hours until I had to be at the church, than because my car was so dirty (this ‘what to do until you have to be at the church’ question is a major one for grooms; I’m given to understand that brides don’t typically find themselves at quite such a loss for how to fill their mornings. . .)

Once I arrived at the church, there really wasn’t all that much for me to do. All my groomsmen showed up in a timely manner, my brothers took their places as ushers, and I just took some chill time in the sacristy, as the guests started to arrive.

About a half-hour or so before the wedding was supposed to begin, my head-usher, a guy I’ll call ‘Tom’ for purposes of this story, with whom I’d shared a house while I was in grad school, came into the room where I was relaxing, a concerned look on his face. “Ummm. . .” he began. (I don’t know; it just seems to me that your head usher coming to you a half-hour before your wedding, saying “Ummm. . .” is probably not a good thing). “Ummm. . . there’s a retarded guy out in the parking lot, exposing himself to the guests as they arrive.”

I just stared at him, blankly.

“So, what do you want me to do?” he asked, as I contemplated the image of my grandmother being greeted in the church parking lot by a retarded flasher. The fact that it was a Catholic church parking lot is probably worth noting, because my family is not Catholic, and some of them, possibly including my grandmother, held less-than-flattering opinions of Catholics and Catholicism.

“Huh?” I replied, quickly grasping the gravity of the situation.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Tom,” I replied, with all the mellowness I could muster at that point, “I asked you to be my head-usher so I wouldn’t have to think about stuff like this. I’m sure you can figure something out.”

For a couple seconds, he stared back at me. “Right,” he finally said, and hustled off.

I’m told that the police were called, and our flasher friend was relocated away from the church parking lot before too many of our guests’ retinas were seared with images of his genitalia. The wedding proceeded without too many further glitches, Molly and I were well and thoroughly married to each other, and the rest, as they say, is history.

-------------------------

We like to tell young couples planning their weddings to not be too concerned that everything goes off perfectly, because every wedding has something that goes not-quite-according-to-plan. I was at a wedding once, where the bride’s veil accidentally caught fire when it brushed too close to the Unity Candle (a quick-thinking Maid of Honor averted catastrophe in that case). At another wedding we were at, the Best Man passed out cold, and spent most of the wedding being attended to by a doctor off to the side of the church. Those are both pretty good stories, and good examples of What Can Go Wrong at Your Wedding.

But our story of our wedding flasher always makes their eyes get real wide. “And besides,” we always tell them, “if things go really wrong, you’ll have a great story to tell. . .”

Cycling In the Moonlight

My recent cycling post reminded me of another story from the Jones Family Archives. . .

Way back in 1984, when 1F was a two-year-old only-child, Molly and I took her on the PALM ride (Pedal Across Lower Michigan; ie, across the ‘palm of the mitten’, ‘cuz Michigan is shaped like a mitten, get it?), along with a few other couple-friends of ours. PALM is a six-day ride, crossing the Lower Peninsula from shore-to-shore, west to east. With the shorter distances involved, PALM bills itself as a more family-friendly version of more rigorous tours like DALMAC; many parents brought their small children along for the fun, and a few 8-10-year-olds even rode the tour themselves. So I put one of those plastic kid-seats on the back of my bike, and off we went.

And we really did have a good time. The three of us shared a week of life on a somewhat more ‘elemental’ level, with nothing but our own legs to propel us down the road, and sharing a tent together at the overnight campsites.

Of course, strapping a two-year-old into a plastic seat on the back of her dad’s bike for four hours or so, every day for a week, has its own set of challenges, in terms of her attention span, and her willingness to sit semi-still for such long intervals. We planned to take short breaks every hour or so, to let 1F run around a bit before getting back on the bike. And, with some regularity, there were interesting sights to be seen just in the course of rolling down the road. I recall stopping by a turkey farm once (the birds were so fat they could barely stand up), and getting passed by an Amish buggy at another point (note to my readers: many Amish really, really resent being taken for ‘curiosities’ by the ‘outside world’, and attempts to take their photograph can induce a pretty surly response, which may or may not include threatening to run your bicycle into the ditch with their horse).

Molly had recently taught 1F a cute little ‘waking-up-in-the-morning’ ditty, which became a daily staple of our first few miles on the road:

When cows get up in the mor-ning, they always say ‘Good Day’.
When cows get up in the mor-ning, they always say ‘Good Day’.
They say, “Moo, moo, moo, moo,” that is what they say.
They say, “Moo, moo, moo, moo,” that is what they say.

And so on, through a whole barnyard-full (or ark-full, as the case may be) of various animals, and how they all say ‘Good Day’ when they get up in the morning. By the end of the week, I’d heard about all I cared to about animals and the sounds they make in the morning. And I’m hopeful that most of my fellow-riders on that tour have either forgotten about it, or found it in their hearts to forgive us. . .

But, our best efforts aside, sometimes boredom set in for our beloved first-born. Seated as she was on a seat over my rear wheel, the things which were most immediately presented to her senses were things pertaining to my backside. Like my pockets, for one example (I was wearing ‘cycling gear’, where the shorts are those nifty black lycra things, and the pockets are in the back of my shirt). One time, Molly just happened to notice 1F pull my wallet out of my pocket, inspect its contents for a minute or two, and toss it in the roadside weeds, or I might have ended up washing dishes to pay for our lunch.

Another time, as I was pedaling along, 1F grabbed the waistband of my lycra shorts and pulled. Pants-ing me in the process. And putting my, uh, reciprocating moons on display for the benefit of all my fellow-riders in the immediate vicinity (it would be gratuitous, I’m sure, to describe said moons as ‘hairy’, so I won’t). Molly corrected her sternly for that, you can be sure. Altho, I gotta say, some of the effect of ‘stern’ is lost when you’re trying to stifle a belly laugh, and snot is blowing out your nose. . .

But, as I say, we had a great time. We finished the week, and marked it up as a really cool family vacation. And within a couple months, Molly was pregnant with 2F, and the family dynamic never really meshed with the idea of doing PALM again.

Which is probably just as well, for modesty’s sake, knowwhatImean?

Stepping Out?

Probably my closest friend for my entire adult life has been a guy who, for blogging purposes, I’ll call H. We were college roommates for two years, and when I was in graduate school, he and I lived in a house together with a group of other guys. We got married just a few months apart, and we were each other’s Best Man. H and his wife (call her F) bought a house a block away from Molly and me, and we both had daughters, again within a few months of each other. 1F and H/F’s oldest daughter have been best friends since they were both in diapers, which is really unusual these days, and really cool.

H/F’s second daughter married the son of GF2 (remember her?) and her husband, and they now have a baby daughter of their own. It has been really cool to see the relationship between the four ‘co-grandparents’, who were good friends before their children married each other, but having a grandchild in common has made for an even closer bond between them.

A while back, Molly and I were at a party at GF2’s house; one of her younger children was graduating from high school. Her kids and mine are all aware that, back in the day, we dated each other, and from time to time, it becomes the focal point of some humor among them. And this was one of those times. So, when the young parents (the son of GF2 and the daughter of H/F) arrived at the party with their little girl (the ‘common’ grandchild), I held the little girl briefly and said, “You know, I used to date your grandma.”

F was standing nearby, and heard me. Whereupon she said, “Hey, you dated BOTH of us!” Well, F is a very good friend, but she was never my girlfriend, so I had no idea what she was talking about. At first. But then I remembered. . .

-------------------------

Several years ago, a buddy of mine, knowing my serious musical jones (nyuk!) for any and all things Beatle, scored tickets to see Paul McCartney (even before he was Sir Paul), and picked up a pair for me (for which you can be sure I was grateful). I told Molly about the tickets, and she was ambivalent about going. “Why don’t you go with H?”

So, I offered my second ticket to H, figuring that we could have some guy-time together at the concert, but he wasn’t particularly interested, either. “But, I bet F would love to go with you – heck, she even went to see the Beatles way back when. . .” Well, I didn’t know about that – my buddy’s wife, and all.

But Molly was all for it. “Go ahead and go to the concert with F. She’ll appreciate it, and you’ll both have a great time.” So we did.

I admit, driving the hour-and-a-half to the concert venue was a little odd, but not so bad as all that – Molly and I had been doing things together with H and F since before we were married, and I had a good friendship with F even apart from her being married to my best friend.

We got to the arena, and we had a great time. F told me stories about when she went to see the Beatles when she was 12, and it was cool. Paul came out with the band, and played a great show, and F and I had tremendous fun singing along with the songs, remembering our youth, and just generally having a lot of fun.

When the concert was over, we hung around the arena for awhile, waiting for the traffic to thin out before we got back in the car. While we were standing by our seats, we saw a couple we both knew – former members of our community, who we hadn’t seen for probably ten years or so. They came over to talk with us, and the whole time, they were both looking at us oddly, like, “I thought you were married to. . .” After a few pleasantries, they moved on.

F turned and hit me on the shoulder. “You didn’t say anything!” she squealed.

“Neither did you,” I responded. “Besides, it’ll be interesting to see if any rumors come back around from it, don’t you think?”

“I can’t believe you didn’t say anything!” To which I only smirked.

-------------------------

As far as I know, there were never any rumors spread about us. And I haven’t ever run into that couple again, to ask what they thought when they saw F and me together.

But, I have to admit, in all candor, that I can’t say anymore that I stopped dating other women after I married Molly. Heck, Molly even said it was okay (and so did F’s husband, for that matter), so long as I tell her about it when I got home. . .

I Didn't Even Know He Was Sick

When I was a kid, my parents (I think especially my mother) did the whole Santa Claus thing right to the hilt. One year, I think I was about seven or eight, on Christmas Eve, my brother and I were sent off to the family room, on the other end of the house from the living room, where the tree was, and instructed to wait, because my parents had just heard that Santa was in our area, and would no doubt be stopping at our house soon. Compliant souls that we were, we went off to the family room and shut the door firmly. We didn’t want to get caught trying to sneak a peek at the Big Guy, no sir.

After a while, my mom came to retrieve us, telling us that, yes indeed, Santa had just been there. We went to the living room, and, lo and behold, there were presents piled up under the tree, and spreading out across the living room floor! Just then, my dad came in, all flustered, telling us that we had to get back in the other room, because Santa was still at our house – he had just gone back up to the roof to get a couple more presents. So we ran back to the other end of the house, hoping like crazy that we hadn’t ruined everything by coming out too soon.

A few minutes later, they came to get us, saying that everything was okay now, we had all the presents, and Santa Claus had left. This time, when we came to the living room, there were a few more presents left near the fireplace, and a bright new sled (a Radio Flyer!) sitting right in the fireplace! Obviously, with us having come out before, Santa had been in a hurry, and rather than place the last few presents under the tree, he had just dropped them by the fireplace and left in a hurry.

It was a masterful ruse, and it kept me safely in the ‘believers’ camp for another few years. I mean, what could be more obvious – we came back the second time, and there was a sled that hadn’t been there before!

But, of course, in the fullness of time, I figured it out. And, in a way, I was a little sad when I did. Santa Claus was a sort of godlike figure in my imagination – “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good. . .” And, when I knew that Santa wasn’t ‘real’, it only seemed natural, by extension, to wonder about God Himself.

When I was in my teens, I came into a serious Christian faith, and, odd as it may seem, my whole ‘Santa Claus experience’ was a hurdle to be overcome on my road to faith. Both God and Santa were these benevolent old men (in my imagination; also the pictures I’d seen) who I never got to see, but who were looking after me, and keeping track of what I was up to. So, ‘no Santa’ seemed to point suspiciously in the direction of ‘no God’. Of course, I eventually figured out the difference, and all was well in the end.

So, when Molly and I began having children of our own, we didn’t want to sow the same ‘seeds of doubt’ for our kids – we didn’t want to set them up for future disillusionment that might possibly make it harder for them to believe in God. But, we didn’t really want to cut Santa Claus completely out of their lives – we had enjoyed the ‘experience’ of Santa Claus. So, we told our kids that Santa Claus was a fun game that people play at Christmas time, and we told them what the game was about, and how to play it. We especially told them that some kids don’t know it’s a game, and we don’t want to ruin it for them, so we should act as if Santa Claus is real – that’s part of the game – we know it isn’t really real, but pretending it is, is the fun of the game.

It seemed to work well enough for our purposes. To my knowledge, none of our kids ever ‘spoiled’ Santa Claus for another kid, and we did have fun with the ‘game’ – we would label some portion of the presents every year as ‘from Santa’, etc, etc.

You might imagine that, in the kind of ‘serious’ Christian circles we were traveling in, different people took different approaches to the ‘Santa question’. One family we knew insisted on strict factual accuracy with their kids – they taught them the story of St. Nicholas of Myra, who left little bags of gold coins to provide dowries for the daughters of poor families, and so on, and how St. Nicholas had lived long ago, and wasn’t alive any more, but his legend had been passed down to the present day and, like a game of ‘Rumor’, had sort of morphed into Santa Claus. Which seemed to me like a lot of trouble to go to, but, hey, I could respect what they were doing. And, my ‘it’s a game’ approach worked just fine with those kids, too.

One year, when 1F was maybe six or seven, we took the kids to mass on Christmas morning. When mass had ended, our priest, who was Indian, was greeting parishioners in the back of the church. He mussed the hair of one boy, from the family I was describing above, and asked him if Santa Claus had been good to him.

The boy straightened himself to his full height, and, with a tone of righteous indignation, shouted, “SANTA CLAUS IS DEAD!” The poor priest was taken completely aback, and before he could even come up with anything to say, the boy continued. “HE LIVED A LONG TIME AGO, BUT NOW HE’S DEAD! HIS NAME WAS REALLY NICHOLAS, BUT NOW WE CALL HIM SANTA CLAUS!”

I don’t know if the priest or the parents were more flustered. Father was looking around for someone, anyone else to talk to, and the parents steered the boy toward the door, while the boy carried himself with a look of smug satisfaction – he had set Father straight, and given him the real story!

And, intermingled with stifled laughter, Molly and I congratulated each other for being one notch happier with the approach we had taken.

(10 comments)

Here, Girl!

All new parents go through a kind of 'break-in' period, during which they slowly figure out the real ways in which being parents is different from how they were before. For Molly and me, this lasted quite a while - even past 1F's first birthday, we were still discovering unanticipated ways in which our lives would never be the same.

Once, the three of us went out to dinner at a restaurant which the childless Molly and me would have counted very 'family friendly', and in fairness, it probably was, as long as none of the children were younger than five or so. 1F was about a year old on the evening in question, though, and by the time we finished our dinner, there was a circle about five feet in diameter, centered on 1F's high chair, littered with an assortment of food fragments, torn napkins, pieces of silverware, and other miscellaneous items. I left a very large tip, and we realized that taking 1F to a 'nice' restaurant with us was not going to be a live option for a while.

I've always been a bit of a gadget buff, but I really like gadgets that have a certain simplicity about them, and Kid-world is rife with elegantly simple, practical gadgets. When 1F was a baby, the little seats that you can sort of hang off the edge of the table were new, and we got one of those right away. Suddenly, we could eat at friends' houses, or church potlucks, or at a picnic table in a park, without having to pack a full-blown high chair with us. A very cool, simple contraption.

Around the same time, we met a couple who were visiting from Germany, whose daughter was just a bit older than 1F. They had a little leather harness that they put on their daughter when they took her to a crowded public place; they would clip a short tether to the harness, and they could keep the child close to them, without all the bad posture that goes along with holding her hand, to say nothing of the struggles that invariably occur when the child in question decides that she doesn't want to have her hand held anymore.

I loved it - so elegant, so simple, so practical. And all the moreso, because the child actually had a lot more freedom of movement - a lot more freedom to go where she wanted to, within a much larger radius, than she would if her hand were being held. We were so taken by this little item that we asked our German friends to send us one, since they hadn't appeared in the US market yet.

A few weeks later, we received a package in the mail from a German address. We opened it eagerly, and put it to use at our first opportunity. It worked really well, and we were pleased - 1F could roam about more freely, engage her curiosity more freely, and we hardly had to exert any effort to keep track of her. In fact, we were so taken with it that we decided to make a modest improvement - in place of the short tether, we used a 25-foot retractable leash, so 1F could have even more freedom of movement.

The Fourth of July was coming up soon, and the harness setup seemed perfect for such an occasion - a large crowd in an open public place. 1F could wander to her heart's content within a 25-foot radius, and, as long as we kept hold of the leash, Molly and I didn't need to worry about where she was.

Our first inkling that this would work out just a bit less than perfectly came as we walked into the park. We were walking alongside another young family like us, with the toddler being carried on his father's shoulders. They were looking intently at the harness/leash setup we had 1F in. I smiled, knowing that they were appreciating the ingenuity, the elegance, the simplicity, the practicality of it, and preparing to tell them how we had friends in Germany, and this was all the rage among European parents, and how they could get one for themselves. Instead, the dad sort of sneered and said, "Kind of a sick joke, man."

What?!? Sick joke? What the heck does he mean by that? Ah, well; obviously a philistine who doesn't appreciate ingenious gadgets when he sees them. We found a spot suitable to our liking to settle at, and we spread our blanket. Molly and I sat down on the blanket, while 1F wandered around on the end of the leash. When she reached the limit, she would just turn around, and poke around in a different direction, checking for bugs in the grass, or whatever else captured her eye. We were enjoying ourselves immensely, just watching her exploring her expansive little piece of turf.

While we were sitting there, a woman approached us to talk. I smiled in friendly greeting, but she immediately ripped into us. "How could you?!" she shrieked. What the hell? "Treating your child like an animal!"

No, wait, you don't understand - see, she's so much more free to roam about. . .
But the woman would have none of it. See, this was a leash, and leashes are for dogs, and that was that. At the very best, in her mind, this was an inappropriate transfer of technology; at worst, it was slam-dunk evidence of depraved child abuse. And nothing I could say would dissuade her.

Before the night was over, and all the fireworks had flashed, two or three other folks wandered by to very helpfully read us the riot act and call us colorful names.

We were more circumspect about taking the harness out in public after that, and we eventually decided that the elegance, simplicity, and practicality didn't quite outweigh the grief we had to endure from well-meaning idiots fellow-citizens.

So you see, a thing can be wonderfully practical, elegantly designed, and a vast improvement on the existing technology. But, if you don't take account of public reaction, you can still wind up with a marketplace failure. . .

(13 comments)

You Want It When?

Years ago, at my previous job, my boss was a guy named Ross. Good guy; we had several interests in common, and it wasn't uncommon for me to sit in his office telling stories for a few minutes at the start of the day.

One morning, just before Thanksgiving, I was sitting in his office doing just that, when the Vice President of Engineering came in with a large stack of papers. "Sorry to spring this on you like this," he said, "but I need all this information by twelve-fifteen."

It was already almost nine o'clock, and there was way more than three hours' worth of normally-paced work in that stack. I offered to help, and he gave me a couple items that I could handle for him. It didn't take me all that long to find what he needed, and I returned the papers to him, filled out with the necessary information.

I found him in his office working feverishly, the phone tucked between his ear and his shoulder, as he frantically gathered information for the VP. I offered to pick up more of the load, but there really wasn't anything else that I could be all that helpful with, so I returned to my 'normal' duties.

But all the rest of that morning, and into the afternoon, I saw Ross running all through the building, tracking down this or that or another item for the VP's pile of papers.

Finally, about 1:30 or so, I met him in the hall, with the papers all filled out, heading up to the VP's office. "I hope he's not too mad, but this is as soon as I could pull it all together." I wished him luck, and he went on his way.

-------------------------

I saw Ross later that afternoon, and I asked him how it had gone with the VP. He got an odd look on his face.

"I went into his office," he began, "and he seemed surprised to see me. That was odd, since I was more than an hour late with information that he had asked me for just this morning."

"Anyway, I apologized - 'Sorry I'm so late with this, but I just couldn't get this all together any sooner' - and I handed him the stack of papers. He was looking through them, and finally he said, 'This is great, but why did you put yourself out so much? I don't need it until the middle of next month!'

'You said you needed it by 12:15; it's already 1:30'

A wry smile crossed the VP's face: 'Not 12:15 on the clock; 12/15 on the calendar - December 15th.'"

And at that point, there was nothing left to say, except for both of us to break down laughing. . .

(8 comments)

If I Had a Hammer

When he was little, our son 4M (now 16) was into ‘working man stuff’ – tools and machinery. One summer, the city re-worked our sewers, which meant that the street was torn up all summer, and a whole menagerie of heavy equipment passed in front of our porch the whole time. 4M was in juvenile testosterone heaven.

Hammers, in particular, held a kind of ‘Jungian archetypal’ fascination for him. A hammer was like a symbol of power for him – “I hammer, therefore I am”. Molly bought him a little tack-hammer, and he carried that hammer around with him like it was the Mighty Hammer of Thor. Of course, this also got us into the realms of parental nonsense – “I gave you this hammer, but don’t hammer anything.” I eventually gave him a little 2-foot chunk of a two-by-four, and a little box of nails, so he could hammer away to his heart's content.

One time I was working on some minor maintenance project, which required the use of my hammer. I brought 4M along with me, thinking that I could give him a few small hammering jobs where he could actually be helpful, and he was. But he also noticed that Dad’s hammer was bigger than his, which made perfect sense to his four-year-old cosmology – Dad was bigger and more powerful than he was, so it only stood to reason that Dad would have a bigger hammer. And it was hard to miss the vaguely (or maybe not-so-vaguely) phallic aspect of it.

That year, for Christmas, we went to my parents’ house for the holidays. One day while we were there, the wheels got to turning in 4M’s head – if Grandpa is Dad’s dad, then. . . He went to my dad and asked, “Grandpa, how big is your hammer?” My dad didn’t understand, and asked him to repeat the question.

“How big is your hammer, Grandpa?”

My dad gave a little chuckle, got up from where he was sitting, and went down into the basement, calling over his shoulder as he went, “I’ll be right back.”

A minute later, he returned, carrying a 12-pound sledge-hammer. 4M’s eyes bulged out of their sockets. “Oh, Grandpa – you’ve got a BIIIIIG hammer.”

“That’s right,” my dad told him. “And don’t you forget it!”

While we all rolled on the floor laughing.

(6 comments)

An' If My Wife Is Watchin'. . .

Any of you out there ever see The Red Green Show? It's a Canadian show that airs on our local PBS affiliate. I'm not a big fan of TV (a subject for another post sometime, perhaps), but I LOVE that show. I think it reminds me of growing up in northern Michigan. .

I want to do a post to bring you all up to date on what's been going on with our family, particularly those of you who dropped in on the previous incarnation of this blog, who are wondering what ever became of 1F and her baby, or 3M and his various troubles, or 4M and his, um, legal problems. But I don't have time to do a post like that right now.

So, I'll go with Red Green. At the end of every show, Red signs off by speaking through the camera to his wife, letting her know that the show's over and he'll be home soon, with some humorous (or, in Canada, is that humourous?) message. So I'll leave you with a couple of my favorites favourites, just to get you through the weekend:

(after an episode that dealt with some legal problems for Red):

"An' if my wife is watchin', I just wanna say that, when I get home, maybe you could present me with your briefs an' we could discuss a merger."

(my personal favo(u)rite, after a show about a science project gone awry):

"An' if my wife is watchin', I just wanna say that today I learned that there are some things that man is not meant to know. . . An' I'm hopin' that you're not one of 'em."

See you next week. . .

(4 comments)

The Couple that Does WHAT Together?

Molly and I both turned 50 this year. It's funny, but 50 seems like a taller psychological hurdle than any of the previous 'decade' birthdays have been. I mean, when I was 49, I could say I was "in my 40s", and that didn't sound so old. But there's no way to make 50 sound younger than it is. Oh, well; I can always say "you're as young as you feel," and I feel pretty darn good. I also have a four-year-old and an eight-year-old, so I can't be all that old, now can I?

Anyway, the thing with these 'decade' birthdays is that they always seem to usher you into some new medical regime; I started doing regular physicals when I turned 40. I did all the blood work, peed in the little cup, had my doc and a couple of nurses poke me, prod me, listen to this, that and the other thing, and then, when it was almost over, the doc starts putting on a rubber glove, and tells me to drop my pants and lean over the exam table. "It's time for your very first prostate exam," he said, and he wasted no time getting down to work.

The good news: I have a very healthy prostate. I also have no latent homosexual tendencies; if I was ever 'bi-curious', I'm not any more.

I'm less sure of Molly's after-40 regimen. I think it was around that time that she started getting regular mammograms, but she doesn't talk to me about it much. She doesn't talk to me much about her pap-and-pelvic exams, either, and that's mainly just fine with me.

So, this year, after the doc slips off his rubber glove at the end of the physical, he says, "Hmmmm; you're turning 50 this year. Time for you to get a colonoscopy." Hmmmm. 'Colon'; 'scope' - I think I see where this is headed, and I'm not altogether sure that I appreciate it quite as fully as my doc does.

For whatever reason, by midsummer, I still hadn't scheduled my colonoscopy. I'm not squeamish, and I don't have some 'complex' about doctors or medical stuff; I just hadn't gotten around to it yet. Then, around her 50th birthday, Molly goes in for her own physical, and she comes back with her own colonoscopy order. And it's at this point that you're going to learn about another of the endearingly goofy things that make my wife wonderful.

"I've got a great idea," she says. "We could get our colonoscopies together! Don't you think that would be romantic?"

His-and-hers colonoscopies. . . No, I don't think 'romantic' is quite the word that comes immediately to mind. I'm not sure exactly what Molly is thinking, but I'm conjuring an image of the two of us lying face-down on adjoining gurneys, holding hands while the technicians poke at our hind ends. Shaking my head to clear my brain of that image, I say, "Sure dear; what the heck - we might as well just get them both out of the way, anyway."

So Molly calls the lab and tells them she wants our appointments scheduled together. The scheduler pauses for a long time before asking, "Who's going to drive? You'll both be doped up after the procedure; you'll need a driver." OK, no problem; we can get 1F to pick us up. Then the scheduler asks, "Um, how many bathrooms do you have?" Huh? Why would it matter how many bathrooms we have? "Well, when you're doing your prep work, you'll both need to have pretty exclusive use of a bathroom." Prep work? "Well, yeah, you need to have your bowel cleared out before the procedure."

Now, I'm starting to get a really bad vibe about this. Anyway, Molly says no problem, we've got two-and-a-half bathrooms, so we can each take one and still have one left over for the kids to use. Hmmm; five kids for a half-bathroom. Okay, I guess, if we really have to. So we schedule both procedures for last Friday.

Now, the prep work for a colonoscopy is outlined in two pages of instructions, which, when properly executed, will result in a completely vacant large intestine. It starts a week or so ahead of time; you have to stop eating things with seeds, like strawberries, tomatos or cucumbers. For a day and a half before the procedure, you eat no solids, only clear liquids. Two days beforehand, you make a trip to the pharmacy; the instructions give you a long list of meds to be taken on a specified schedule. In simplified form, this amounts to, "Go to the pharmacy; find the laxative aisle; get one of everything, except two of the most powerful stuff." Then go home and start consuming them, starting with the mildest stuff and working your way up. When your prep work is complete, there is nothing left inside of you.

Molly chose her bathroom, and I chose mine; if we needed to talk, we called each other on our cell phones.

Friday morning, we show up at the lab and check in. They give us the hospital gowns open down the back (well, what did you expect?), take our vital signs, and hit us with the 'happy meds'. Apparently this is a procedure that goes best when you're not quite fully cognizant of what's going on.

The techs come for Molly first, and wheel her off down the hall, while she cheerfully waves and chirps, "Wish me luck!" A half-hour or so later, I hear her giggling as they wheel her back to the waiting area, and we pass each other in the hall as they wheel me down to the lab room.

They roll me on my side, and there's a TV screen directly in front of me, so I can watch the colon-cam pictures while the doc goes spelunking in my large intestine. It's sort of bizarre to think that the cave on the TV is really somewhere up inside my own ass, but the 'happy meds' make it so that there really aren't any associated physical sensations, so it's sort of like a weird out-of-body thing going on.

The procedure went really well - they found one tiny, benign 'polyp', which they snipped right out while I watched on the live-action butt-cam. Other than that, I have a clean bill of colonic health. And Molly's intestines are even healthier than mine. Which I'm sure you're all happy to hear.

When they were finished, they rolled me back to the waiting area, where Molly was waiting for me with dreamy eyes (either she was really, really into the whole 'romantic' thing, or the 'happy meds' were slow in wearing off). The final stage of the procedure involves 'expelling' all the 'air' that had been pumped into our intestines to keep them 'open' for the colon-cam shots. I will say that Molly's intestines are tuned to a somewhat higher pitch than mine are.

So there you have it. I don't know, maybe Molly was right - maybe it was more romantic than I expected it to be; a real husband/wife bonding experience, you know?

Naaaaah, I don't think so!

(9 comments)

Taking Care of the Boss

I haven’t posted any stories from my work life before now; mostly because my work isn’t all that exciting. My job is what they call, in the engineering world, an FE analyst; in layman’s terms, we’re the guys the other engineers think of as nerds.

Now, the Conventional Wisdom on How to Get Ahead at Your Job includes the idea of Taking Care of the Boss – make him look good to his own bosses, cover his ass when you can, and see that he’s never embarrassed on account of something you’ve done, so that when he gets promoted for doing a good job, you’ll be in line to take his place.

Anyway, when I was young and fresh out of college at my first ‘real job’ (back in the days when engineers still wore ties to work), my boss was a guy named Alex. One of the other guys in the group who reported to Alex was a crusty old guy, a Navy veteran named Bill. Bill was just a couple years from retiring when I started there; he and Alex had been working together for a long time, and had developed a kind of symbiotic relationship.

One day, I was scheduled to be in a meeting that Alex was supposed to be leading, and Bill was in the same meeting. Just before the meeting, Alex, Bill and I were gathered outside Alex’s office, and Alex heaved a heavy sigh. “I really don’t want to be in this meeting,” he said, explaining that it was pretty much a useless meeting, and besides, he wasn’t really prepared for it.

“No problem,” Bill said. “I’ll take care of it.”

Alex looked at him quizzically for a second, and we all went down the hall to the conference room for the meeting.

When we got into the room, and the other attendees were all there, Alex called the meeting to order, and the small talk settled down. While we were all waiting for Alex to ‘officially’ begin the meeting, Bill let loose with the loudest, longest, most odiferous fart that I have ever experienced in my life. We all just sort of stared at Bill in awed, open-mouthed silence, until finally Alex said, “Good grief, Bill – did you shit?”

As the noxious cloud spread through the room, someone suggested that maybe it would be a good idea to postpone the meeting to another time, and Alex quickly agreed, rescheduling for a week later.

I was walking back to my desk afterward, and as I passed by Alex’s office, Bill was standing there, and I heard Alex say, “Thanks, Bill – I owe you for that one.”

Bill answered, “No problem.”

And that was my first, best lesson in the Art of Taking Care of the Boss. . .

(6 comments)