Stuff

As I type these words I am awaiting a knock at the door from the repo man.

He's coming to get my beloved motor home. Unemployed for four months now, I must let her go. (I say "her" because men always give cars, boats and RVs women's names. We love them, ya know? We really, really do. But at this point I'm glad I never named her.)

It's just a thing. Just stuff. Frankly, I'll be glad to have it out of the driveway where it was a constant, nagging reminder of my income shortage.

Carolann and I had a couple of years of great comfort, relaxation and good times in and around our motor home.

The repo man can't take the good times.

Art Linkletter would be proud

They say a picture is worth a thousand words and I believe that. So, today I'm going to spare you  959 words.

Our five-year-old grandson is learning to spell. Doing exceptionally well, too. Right up to that last letter.

Up on the houstop reindeer pause...

(This is an annual re-publication of my holiday warning I issue to friends and strangers alike every year at this time. Please take heed. Stay off the roof!)

December 8th is an anniversary for me. This time it will mark twenty years since the day I fell off the roof of our house while putting up Christmas lights.

I only fell eight or ten feet and I managed my fall. Knowing that I couldn’t prevent it I intentionally jumped and hit the ground with a tuck and roll strategy to minimize the damage. I shattered nearly every bone in both heels and ankles. After five hours of reconstructive surgery I spent a week in a hospital. I was in a wheelchair for the next three months while receiving painful physical therapy three times a week. And now, nineteen years later, I still walk with a noticeable limp and am in constant pain. If I spend a full day on my feet for some special occasion — a family outing at Disneyland, for example — the pain can be so excruciating I can’t sleep. On my best days it’s just a constant, nagging reminder of one really bad decision I made a couple of decades ago.

And I’m the lucky one. 

I could have easily broken my neck or back and been in that wheelchair for life, paralyzed from the waist down. I could have died. People do, even from a fall of just eight feet. The doctors at the ER told me ‘tis the season. They get many such cases every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And there is one thing all of us have in common: We’re all, every one of us, smarter than the fools who will take a tumble.

Absolutely none of us think we might fall off the roof when we go up there.

I know you. You don’t think so, either. You’ll be more careful than I was. “Thanks for the heads up!” you’re thinking. That was my attitude, too.

That morning, December 8, 1990, Carolann phoned me from a friend’s house to say she saw a sign in our neighborhood for a guy who would put up Christmas lights for $20 but I said, “Oh, no. It’s my job. I’m the dad!” It cost me thirty THOUSAND dollars and a lifetime of constant pain to put the lights up that year.

And there are the dreams.

You have occasional dreams of being able to fly? I have frequent dreams of being able to run again, to run like the wind in a baseball outfield as I did when I was young or just to chase after my grandsons at my current age. I can’t do that. I have to call after them and hope they run back to me.

All for the sake of Christmas lights.

I met my wife when we were teammates on a competition dance team. I haven’t been able to dance with her for nineteen years now. Oh, we can slow dance but we can’t do the show-off stuff, the fun spins and fancy twirls that brought us together in the first place.

Thanks to those damned Christmas lights.

Frankly, I get tired of telling this story so I’m not putting much effort into it.

Some of you have no plans to go on the roof so it doesn’t matter. The rest of you are going up on the roof no matter what I say.

Personally, I’m not going to fall off anything higher than a bed or a barstool from here on out. You all do what you like.

You've been warned.

Merry Christmas! (It's a lot more fun without oxycodone.)

Circles of Influence

Had lunch with Dwight Case yesterday. 

We met at one of those fabulous intimate, classy joints along Ventura Blvd. -- this one in Studio City -- on a perfect, sunny and mild Southern California autumn day.

Dwight knows everybody in the place, of course, including the owner, with whom he has established a warm relationship fostered over nearly 40 years of business/social events. 

I arrived first and was sipping a Heineken at the bar when I spotted Dwight through the window handing his keys to the valet. He came through the door and was greeted like Dolly Levi strutting through the entrance to Harmonia Gardens.

I gave him a bear hug and we were swept to our table by a doting proprietor and his staff, fairly singing the signature to Dwight's return and my unquestioned VIP status for merely being in his company.

We spent two hours over wine and one of the best lunches of my life. (Place is called The Wine Bistro, on Ventura just east of Laurel Canyon.) And while we shared a fair amount of warm, laughing reminiscence it wasn't one of those maudlin affairs where old men gather to bitch about the changing world. We talked a lot about the current state of media but Dwight, as always, has his sights firmly fixed on potential and possibilities and "what ifs?"

He walks slower now, though bears no cane. He wears a windbreaker on a warm day. 

Dwight Case at KROY 40+ years ago

But he'll still have three drinks with you and give you more great ideas in two hours than you've heard or dreamed up by yourself in two years. Now, for example, he is studying what type of music will soothe the nerves of dogs in the waiting room of a veterinary hospital. There's money to be made there, I kid you not.

We talked briefly about my situation. He knows I am out of work, flat broke and can scarcely afford the gas money to drive the 30+ miles to meet him.

Nevertheless, he suggested we split the check, and we did.

For those of you who don't know him, let me just explain that Dwight understands every nuance, consideration and emotion going through everybody else's mind, or so it has always seemed to me. By suggesting we split the check he wasn't being stingy, he was cutting away the uncomfortable pride and insistence dance that always comes delivered by a guy in a stained black jacket and bow tie.

He was also showing me the respect I have proudly earned over forty years of being his student and admirer. He has rewarded me for achieving a degree of equality.

It's not at all unlike a boy growing to become a man in his father's eyes.

And, you know what's really cool?

I have a couple of proteges who feel the same way about me.

Spring forward, Fall back; rinse and repeat

This weekend is the end of Daylight Saving Time. 

Please note, it's "saving," not "savings" with an "s" on the end. You can't put daylight or time in a bank to be withdrawn and spent in the future. That would be very cool but it doesn't work that way. Time doesn't care who you are, what you do, what you think or how you use the finite number of breaths and heartbeats given to you on this earth. When you're finished, that's it. Doesn't matter what the clock is reading.

Time just marches on, as they say.

Still, it's amazing how many intelligent and otherwise reasonable people seem to think that when we turn the clocks back one hour late Saturday night or early Sunday morning that they will actually, magically GAIN an honest-to-God hour in their lives.

"Yay!" they say, "I get to sleep an extra hour!"

Patiently, I try to explain, "Uh, no. Not really. You'll sleep the same number of hours but the time will be different, that's all."

For some reason the fact that they turned the clock back one hour when they went to bed has totally slipped or befuddled their minds.

"No, when I wake up at ten tomorrow morning it will really be eleven!"

And that's where logic has somehow jumped the rails and turned over in a ditch.

"It will really be eleven."

My late, beloved Grandma Webster used to put us through our paces on this when we were just kids. For days, maybe weeks after a time change she would say, "It's really nine o'clock. Time for you kids to get in bed!"

"No, Grandma, it really is EIGHT o'clock!" we'd explain,  "Look, it says so right on the clock!"

She was undaunted because we were just dumb kids and she was in charge. And, so, we'd have to go to bed an hour early because the world had recently switched to Standard Time. Nevertheless, six months later we'd go through the same routine with her in the opposite direction.

"Why are you kids up so early? It's really only six in the morning."

"Grandma, no. It's SEVEN! See? The clock says so!"

After awhile she'd get her circadian clock in tune with the one on the stove. But it was a struggle to get her there.

And six months later, we'd do it all over again.

The Adventures of Captain Underpants

Saturdays are Grandpa and Isaiah days. 

Carolann works. Isaiah's dad works. So, it's just the eight-year-old and me.

This past Saturday I was preparing to fix us lunch when Isaiah marched into the kitchen and proudly proclaimed, "I AM CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS!" I didn't turn around to look at him right away because this is the sort of goofy thing I've come to expect of young boys, having been one myself and having several of my own. It was the sort of announcement that would have evoked a shake of the head and a single word from my dad:

"Knucklehead."

My grandpa called me "Knothead." Same thing, I guess.

Capt. Isaiah Underpants

When he persisted, "Grandpa, look!" I turned and found myself facing Captain-Honest-To-God-Underpants in the flesh. At that point I think I actually did call him a knucklehead. I laughed and that was apparently all he wanted. Pleased with himself, Fruit-of-the-Looms perched firmly on his large, round cranium, he took off to save the world. Or, the TV room, at least.

I marvel at childish imaginations. I would give anything to have mine back.

When I was a kid in the fifties we had cowboy TV heroes like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, the Lone Ranger and Sky King, among others. We all had our own cowboy outfits and toy cap guns. We did not ride stick horses made from a single fence picket. That sort of thing was for babies. We merely slapped our thighs in a hoofbeat rhythm as we ran through the fields and neighborhood flower beds. We lived in a perpetual cloud of dust.

Back then I made a name for myself in the Wild West of North Sacramento as "Dapper Dave!" I don't think I ever mentioned it to anybody, it was my secret. I think even then I had an instinctive understanding of how stupid it sounded. But you have to give me credit for using the word "dapper" before turning ten and for appreciating the cheesy charms of alliteration.

Denny, Mike, Danny

Dapper Dave rode the range, battling bandits and rescuing lovely ladies with the help of  his sidekicks, Denny, Danny and Mike. These are my uncles, my mother's younger brothers, only slightly older than me. If they had their own cowboy monikers they kept them secrets, too.

Now, here I am half a century later, rinsing dishes and looking squarely into the britches of Captain Underpants and trying to figure out how we got from cowboys to this.

Don't get me started on Spongebob Squarepants, which is obviously where this lunacy began.

Only today have I learned that there actually is a Captain Underpants character! Isaiah did not invent him.


Captain Underpants is a super hero in a series of children's books with such
titles as Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of Professor Poopy Pants and Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy (Part 1: The Night of the Nasty Nostril Nuggets). These books are being sold at Isaiah's school fundraiser. Mind you, this is the same school that will send a kid to the principal's office for calling a classmate a "butthead."

I wonder who makes the call when a kid is referred to as a "Nasty Nostril Nugget"?

Look, I take pride in being open-minded and young at heart but I confess that when I first heard of these books I was a bit shocked and annoyed. Suddenly, Spongebob seemed as old-school and boring as Popeye. But, after thinking about it a bit I understand that the writers, cartoonists and publisher of these books are merely appealing to kids at their own level of developing sense of humor. And while part of me fears this will boost our progeny into more advanced levels of outrageous humor involving obscenities and pornographic themes at an even earlier age, the truth is, what I think doesn't matter any more. No, really, it doesn't. And that's a profound relief.

My work here is done.

While I assist in the care of my grandsons they are not mine to raise except when their own parents ask for help or drop the ball. Then I get involved because technically, I am merely continuing the raising of my own sons.

It's a wonderful release to no longer feel personally responsible for the plight of society and the direction it is headed. I'm an oldster now, paddling alongside those younger adults frolicking and jockeying for position in the mainstream of ever-changing modern culture. Our kids are now making the tough calls and the big decisions. They're the ones guiding the development and/or decay of the society.

Not my job, not any longer.

Just as Dapper Dave is nothing more now than an old, fond memory, so shall be my little Captain Underpants in the not-too-distant future. I suspect he'll be just fine for it. I'm not going to sweat the small stuff. But I'll tell you one thing:

The first time Captain Underpants refers to his five-year-old cousin, my youngest grandson, as "Bionic Booger Boy" we're going to have a little talk.

© David L. Williams, 2010

® Captain Underpants is a registered trademark of Scholastic Books. (That’s funny too, huh?)

I just broke a cfl bulb!!!

Now I’ve done it.

After living a good, clean life for nearly six decades I’ve thrown it all away. Well, I didn’t throw it, exactly, I just knocked it off the kitchen counter onto the floor. It shattered on impact.

The warning on the bulb’s housing read:  CONTAINS DANGEROUS MERCURY POISONING. DISPOSE ACCORDING TO LOCAL, STATE AND FEDERAL LAWS.

Yes, of course I panicked! My eight-year-old grandson came running in to see what happened.
“Did it break?”

“GET OUT!” I shouted, “STAY BACK!!”

It scared him. He ran into the dining room.

“IT’S DANGEROUS!!” I said, my grandfatherly tone of assurance stripped from me like a catfish shorn of its skin by a pair of pliers.

“WHY??” he asked. “WILL I DIE?”

I’m not making this up. Every word is true.

“No,” I said, grasping for a sense of experienced, calming leadership. Even as I said it I wondered if the dread mercury poisoning had already found its way into my lungs and blood stream. Is it wafting through the air to my boy? Are our Yorkie and Papillon about to keel over in horrifying death throes?

“Will YOU die?” He sounded slightly less worried, here.

“No. I don’t know. NO! Nobody is going to die.” I said it with authority. I just didn’t quite believe it. “Keeps the dogs out of here.”

And then, because I don’t know any better, I did what I’ve done throughout my nearly sixty years of life whenever I’ve dropped a lightbulb. I grabbed a broom and a dustpan and cleaned the damned thing up.
Oh, did I mention — these cfl wonders are supposed to last fifteen years or more? And this one burned out a year, maybe sixteen months ago?

I tossed it in the trash with the junk mail and spent soup cans. I took it out to the big rubber bin in the back yard, the one that will be picked up by an unsuspecting civil refuse engineer tomorrow morning. Off it goes — my poisonous contribution to the destruction of our environment, Mother Earth; of all things holy.

That was an hour ago. We’re fine so far. The dogs are fine.

I’m cooking dinner in that room.

But, still sporting a trifle bit of concern I checked it out thoroughly on the Internet on several websites. Get this…

One cfl light bulb contains roughly 1/125th the amount of mercury of the old mercury thermometers our moms frequently stuck in our mouths and up our infant rectums.
1/125th.

George Bush signed the mandate into law. Otherwise, I mostly liked him. 

The greenies are still ecstatic. Ace Hardware is stocked to the rafters with cfl bulbs and have doubled the price of old, incandescent bulbs. In a year, all we’ll have are the screwy ones. It will be illegal, by federal law, to manufacture, sell or purchase good old Tom Edison light bulbs.

(Which, by the way, are much brighter and whiter in our bathroom.)

Incidentally, in case you care, the cfl bulbs are made in China.

You can mount protests and carry signs and raise hell, maybe start the Clean Light Party. I don’t know.
I’m just gonna keep a broom handy.

And a bottle of wine.

The nice police

I don't know why we sugar coat things these days.

For some reason the word "cripple" is distasteful so we now say "disabled." Frankly, I don't see how that's any better. I guess the nice police figure it implies strength within infirmity. It excuses us our physical and mental shortcomings. It helps us pretend we are not less than complete; we cripples are just as good as anybody else, even though we are, admittedly, "disabled."

Pardon me for saying so, but in the words of my Wyoming coal-mining cowboy grandfather, that is horse hockey.

I'm crippled. It's no shame. I had an accident, that's all. My feet don't work well but my brain still does. And by the way, the accident was my own fault. I need to know that so please don't take it away from me.

Nobody is old these days. We're "senior citizens." 

Puh-leeze. It's cute but I'm not a big fan of cute except in babies and puppies. You can be a "senior" if you like but don't call me that, okay? I'd rather be "old" or, better yet, not defined by my age at all. Don't make me cute. It's condescending. 

People don't get fired these days, they get "laid off." 

I remember when "laid off" meant you could expect to be rehired in the near future. Not anymore. The fact is, you've been fired, canned, kicked to the curb. The company you worked for just doesn't need or want you anymore. But, it's somehow less personal to say you were "laid off."

It's not your fault, nothing is.

And that's the problem, isn't it? Nobody is at fault and nobody is to blame for the ups and downs of what we used to just call life.

My grandson's soccer league doesn't keep score. They don't want any losers.

I don't have to explain to you why that's so horribly twisted. Most of you are old and wise like me. You remember when your parents and grandparents watched you fall, waited for you to cry and picked you up to wipe your tears, clean your wound and say, "I told you so!" Touching a hot stove is the only way to learn to never do it again. Losing is the only way to learn to win.

It used to be, anyway. These days being on the losing side of a soccer game is considered the death of self-respect.

The only thing that seems to matter is our fragile ego and self-esteem.

I can't change the culture but I still have something to say about the raising of my own sons and grandsons:

--You will curse your mistakes and failures; I will quietly celebrate them because they are lessons I cannot give you. You are a winner and, at times, a loser. Deal with it.

--You will suffer emotionally and I will try to love you out of your misery. But then I'll have to go home and leave you to sort it out, yourself.

-- There is not enough time in my life or yours for us to completely share our hearts. Try to be grateful for every moment we have together, especially the ones that seem unimportant at the time.

Thirty years ago, while in the depths of my greatest despair my own father, my hero, told me -- in these exact words, which I will never forget: 

"If you don't love yourself you'll never be worth a damn to anybody else."

And now, I have finally reached an age where I am qualified to add to my dad's life-defining revelation:

You don't love yourself for your goodness, that's a given. You love yourself for falling down, getting up and living right.

Copyright © 2010, David L. Williams. All rights reserved.

The seven-year-old diplomat

Post-It Note found on our grandson's bedroom door this morning...

Summer

What is it about summer that fills and yet drains us?

You say it’s the heat and certainly that defines it. It’s the close intensity of the sun through a hazy sky. Sharp shadows. Fuzzy memories.

Summer was our youthful promise of immortality. It began at the exact moment of the final school bell in early June. It proceeded through endless days of hitting baseballs and jarring polliwogs from the slippery, slimy-green drainage ditch that ran through our neighborhood like our own private subway.

Summer involved rolling down grassy hillsides, giggling, wearing only shorts and then being itchy all day.

Summer made necessary running through lawn sprinklers, wherever we found them inviting us in.

The entire neighborhood played hide-and-seek. No place was out of bounds. It might take half an hour to find kids scattered behind parked cars, perched in trees and jumping fences to race through neighboring backyards.

“OLLY-OLLY AUCTION FREE!”

Summer evenings frequently found us in front yards on blankets. The entire family was there and neighbor kids and sometimes their parents, as well.

We’d look through the grass for four-leaf clovers and watch Venus follow the sun into a darkening horizon. We looked for shooting stars and UFOs. We drank Kool-Aid and talked about what we wanted to do tomorrow.

The cricket chorus began at full darkness as the Delta breeze arrived from the Golden Gate. Shortly after that Mom said it was time to come in and take a bath. The truth is, I didn’t really mind. I was tired.

And I wanted tomorrow to get here fast.