A Tip Of The Cowboy Hat

I remember the day so well, the day I realized my father was a genius.

We were driving in California and had just turned onto San Andreas Road.  He turned to me straight faced and asked if I knew why it was named San Andreas.

I didn’t.

“Because it’s made of ass-FAULT.”

Genius I tell you.

My mother looked at him with a look of comedy disaproval.  I, on the otherhand, knew that his brain worked differently, worked better.  With hardly any effort, little thought, no preparation he had come with with a clever, no, a perfect one-liner.

Genius.

Through the years I have tried to follow in his footsteps, and I do believe that I too have that special part of the brain, the one that takes random fragments of knowledge and language and places them together for no reason other than to make people laugh.

But it seems that appreciation for one-liner comedy genius is not found everywhere, in everyone.  A few weeks ago I was in Charlottesville with some friends, and we were driving around in a Jeep, looking for a parking spot.  The driver pulled up to the entrance of a building with the sign that said it was The Lewis and Clark Parking Lot.  I, of course, immediately pointed out that we might night be able to park there… because we weren’t in an Expedition. (Now, you are either rolling on the floor laughing your ass off, or you need the following explanation: Lewis and Clark led an Expedition.  An Expedition is also the name of a Ford vehicle.  We were in a Jeep.)

Unfortunately, the rest of the people in the Jeep either weren’t up to speed on their American history, the current line-up of Ford SUVs or they just didn’t get it.

I know, it’s no “ass-FAULT” but given the speed that it entered my brain, it was pretty good.

Tonight, however, I recognize someone else for his wit, his speed, his timing and delivery.

We were watching the 11:00 news, when a man who appeared to be from India delivered a soundbite.  He was also wearing a wide brimmed hat.

Without skipping a beat, M.D. said:

“Hmm, this guy’s a cowboy AND an Indian.”

Genius!

I Really Hope That’s Mayo

I have lived in my neighborhood for more than five years, and through that time I have been a regular customer at the local corner store. It’s a typical city store, with all of the essentials, more expensive than at the supermarket. Its convenience more than makes up for $6.00 Skippy.

It also has a deli counter, and a couple of times a week I’ll grab my lunch there, usually a simple ham on rye with a touch of mayonnaise.

But the sandwich maker hates me.

I don’t know why, but it’s clear he does. He’s a chatty guy who loves serving the ladies, and talks up a storm with the guys too. He’s a hip city dude with his finger on the pulse of what’s going on everywhere.

Except when it’s my turn to order.

His wide smile disappears, he taps his pencil impatiently, he looks like I’m asking him not to slice the ham, but to kill the pig and brine the meat.

Sometimes he puts mustard on instead of mayo, sometimes there’s no mayo at all.

Last week I caught him muttering while her put the meat on the bread. “He wants me to make a ham sandwich, making sandwiches, who does he think I am…”

I thought he was the sandwich man. I was wrong, he might be Jeffrey Dahmer.

There was a moment when I felt like he was going to grab my head and put my nose through the slicer.

And then when the next person ordered he was all charm again.

Real Conversations On The Street

I was walking Cosmo the Cancer Dog tonight for his evening tour when we came across two couples heading into a house.

The women took a long loving look at Cosmo.

One looked at me, holding his leash, on this street at 12:30 am and asked “Is that your dog?” The tone was the same she’d use if she’d seen him alone and lost.

“No,” I replied, “I took him from a stranger.”

“Oh… he’s so big. How did he get so big?”

Remember, he’s a bullmastiff. They’re all big.

“Fertilizer.”

“Wow, because they don’t usually get so big do they?”

“No, it took special chemicals to get him to grow like this. But he’s sweet, he just drools a lot.”

“Yeah, he’s just like the cat I had as a kid.”

Oh Dea… nevermind

Have you ever wondered why there are so many dead deer along the side of the road?

Over population, you say?

They’re hypnotized by the lights of passing vehicles, perhaps?

No, today I watched first hand why deer die.

They’re dumber than shit.

I’m at the family compound in the Maryland countryside. I passed many deer, including lots of young ones on my way in this afternoon. Because it’s like a reverse game of Frogger, I drove slowly today, still, confusing the hell out of the moronic creatures.

At one point there were two adult deer, one on each side of the road, surrounded by the young ones. It looked like a field trip, a day of learning in the wildnerness. They watched me approach, eyes wide in wonder.

As I got closer, the adult deer on the right side of the road dashed full speed in front of me to the left side. At the same instant, the deer on the left side of the road ran full speed to the right side. Beautifully choreographed!

The little ones watched and learned. When in doubt run full speed in front of the deadly danger.

Why did the deer cross the road? Because they’re stupid.

By the way, no deer were harmed in the writing of this blog, although they tried their damnedest.

Autumn

Out in the countryside of New Hampshire, on a cool fall Friday night many years ago, a group of early 20-somethings met for the first time as adults. They were all starting their lives as grown-ups, but they weren’t quite ready, not just yet.

It was the eve of a huge Halloween party on a family farm. Hundreds of people were expected to roll in on Saturday for a bonfire costume bash.

But this was the night before. The people who were there that night were the core friends. And at the core of the core were young women who had known each other since their lower school days. They all brought the men in their lives, men they deemed worthy of a weekend trip in the wilderness.

On that night before the party, there would be perhaps 20 people, the girls who had known each other forever, and the boys who might be in their lives forever.

Two by two, the couples arrived, threw on their fleece jackets and grabbed spots around the fire.

The women picked up where they’d left off years before.

The men cautiously made friends with the other men. They drank beer, talked about their jobs, how they met their girlfriends, how they were selected to make the journey.

When the breeze would pick up, the women would snuggle up next to the men, together they would get warm in the glow of the fire, under their blankets.

The hostess gathered up the crowd after a bit and took everyone on a tour of the farm and into the newly built barn.

Someone found a soccer ball and then the children came out to play.

Teams were formed, positions taken, and a newly invented game of barn-broomball began. Some people used brooms like hockey sticks, some people actually found hockey sticks, one person used an old gardening tool, and some just used their feet.

It seemed like the game lasted forever. The music of the Samples played in the background, barely audible over the sounds of grown-ups yelling like kids on the playground.

No one hit their heads on the low hanging beams, no one was hurt when they ran into each other, or barn equipment.

They kind of kept score, but didn’t really.

And then, after a while, in the wee hours of that perfect fall night, the final buzzer rang. It may have been when the CD player stopped playing, it may have been that the players just knew it was time to call it a night.

The game was not one that could ever be replayed, its joy came from its sudden creation and its sudden end. For the core group, as much fun as the costume party would be the next night, Friday night would be the part of the weekend they would remember forever.

In the years since, time and distance have taken their tolls on the friendships, but those friendships remained. There were other great gatherings, although the same men weren’t always there. Still, on that night the men who met for the first time knew they would always remember each other, call each other friends.

That game, the cool New England breeze, the sounds of the Samples echoing through a big wooden barn left them all with a special bond, one of childlike fun, deep love and affection and the memory of the party before the party, the gathering of the core.

One last night when the kids could leave their newly found adulthood behind and play in the barn.

The Great Battle of 1984

It started, as so many incidents do, with a piece of bologna.

It was also a perfect storm.

On one front were the students.

It was May of 1984. We were about to move out of 8th grade and middle school. It was the eve of exams and we were 88 13-year-olds who were under a lot of pressure.

On the other front were the teachers, or in this case a lack of them.

There was a scheduling screw-up of mammoth proportions. Somehow, that day, during 8th grade lunch, there was not a single faculty member in the cafeteria.

At my private school, the cafeteria was in its own building, on the opposite side of campus from the main academic buildings. When the fronts collided, adult intervention was a long way away.

In the 23 years since, many have claimed to have fired the first shot (or tossed the bologna in this case).

I was actually at ground zero. While I won’t use full names, I will say that it was MR who first decided to see if he could throw his slice of lunchmeat like a Frisbee.

The next few seconds went by in slow motion.

SP launched a spoonful of green jello.

CJ threw a handful of Shrimpies.

Then came the official call, the one every teenager dreams of, the one that had never been yelled in our school’s lunchroom.

“Foodfiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!”

Immediately the lunch ladies went into a full retreat, pulling down gates and locking themselves in the kitchen. They may have picked up a phone and called for help, but they knew help wasn’t coming soon.

For some food fighters that day, it was a matter of brawn. They threw whatever they could get their hands on. They overturned tables for shelter. They aimed to kill.

For others, it was all about creativity. Shrimpies throw well, but they don’t make much of an impact. Dunk those same Shrimpies in cocktail sauce and you have a weapon that leaves a mark.

For still others, stealth attacks were the name of the game. The same MR who first threw the bologna never saw SF creep up behind him with a full bowl of minestrone soup.

TM fell into the brute force category. He was a catcher on the baseball team, and even in 8th grade he could gun a base runner down at 2nd. I don’t remember why I turned when I did… a shouted warning, a spotted movement of shadow, maybe just The Force. What I saw was his arm coming down and a Red Delicious heading for my head. Remember that scene from the Matrix? I invented it to escape a flying fruit.

Mr. A was a math teacher and the varsity football coach. He had no idea what he was walking into. Actually, it could have been a lot worse for everyone, but someone was watching for trouble through the window.

“Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!” It sounded like a siren. Just as fast as it started, it stopped. Those of us lucky enough to be on the east side of the building had an escape route. The fire exit let out on the opposite side of the cafeteria from the door Mr. A was about to walk through. An entire building stood between us and identification.

Some others found the secret tunnel that led to the auditorium. It was a daring choice since there was a risk of entrapment. Had there been a drama class in session, those kids would have been screwed.

And then there were the ones who were left behind. They were the real heroes. While they had to clean and serve detentions, not one pointed fingers, no one named names. But they also got to see Mr. A’s expression when he walked in. For years they said it was worth it.

Some of us got away clean. Others didn’t.

MR was one of the first out of the fire exit, but the blazer covered with minestrone was a dead giveaway.

There were a lot of khaki pants with cocktail sauce splatter patterns sitting in the front office.

In the years that followed, we remembered fondly of that spring day, and there were a few attempts to relive the moment.

But you can’t remake a classic.

And you can’t get into the school cafeteria without a teacher.

Was This Weird?

Throughout my high school and college years, I worked at a summer camp. It was just the way working at a summer camp was supposed to be. There were girls, we had parties, swam in the pool after hours, and, oh, I guess we were supposed to take care of little kids too, but that was secondary.

I was never as cool as I was when I worked at summer camp.

1987 was particularly fun. For the first few weeks, one of the older women who worked there was hosting her sister and her sister’s kids. The kids also came to camp, one as a young camper, the other as worker-bee, like me.

The worker-bee was a she… and she was beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen at that point in my life. I’m not exaggerating. She was tall, blond, from California, a competitive swimmer, and she was so pretty I couldn’t think straight when she was around.

She was only going to be in my city for two weeks.

I had to work fast.

I’ll spare you the details and fast forward to her departure… She cried, told me she loved me and said she wished she never had to leave.

But leave she did, and as summer high school love goes… out of sight out of mind. We wrote for a bit, talked on the phone from time to time, but she soon forgot me and that was that.

I have recently started a project. All of my life I have loved taking pictures… and I have watched as my poorly protected snapshots from the pre-digital days have deteriorated. So I recently bought a scanner and am going box to box, picking out the pictures I want to save forever, and digitizing them.

Today I got to the summer of 1987 stack. In the pile were a single picture of my summer love and one of her little brother.

I had to “google” her, but there were a gazillion hits. Her name is kind of common. So I “googled” her brother and up came his myspace page.

He doesn’t look anything like he did when he was a 4 year old, but he did have a picture of himself with his sister, and she looked exactly the same.

So I sent him an email saying he wouldn’t remember me, but I just found old old pictures of him and his sister… that I’d be happy to email them to him if he thought he’d like to see them… and to say hi to her for me. That was it, nothing more.

But here’s the thing, and this will lead to another post eventually. When I was in college I had a stalker. It was horrible, and she worms her way into my life from time to time, which is super-creepy.

As a result I’m sensitive to super-creepy, and as soon as I sent the little brother the email I worried that maybe I was super-creepy for taking the 5 minutes to google the little brother of a girl I knew 20 years ago.

So was it weird?

I Can Help… Even If I Don’t Have A Clue About The Problem

One of the things I thought about including in my “Tagged” posting was how my friends have always counted on me for advice, how I’m a good listener, offer good suggestions and tend to make them feel much better about themselves.

It has been this way for most of my life.

When I was in 5th grade, my best friend T was the class stud, and he had a girlfriend. This wasn’t a cute little kid crush. They actually would go into a dark hallway in our school’s basement and make out in the afternoon after class.

I could only imagine what was going on down there. Sometimes they talked about “necking.”

What the hell was that?

Did that mean they rubbed necks? If so, that didn’t sound like much fun.

I was clueless and jealous.

Even though I didn’t know what it all was, I liked girls. I wanted in. Or sort of. Once a cute girl C, asked me if I wanted to go into the dark hall with her. I came up with excuses not to. I was sure I would screw it all up. Better not to even go down that road.

But I digress.

After a couple weeks of making out, T pulled me aside one day. He needed help.

His girlfriend, D, wanted more than he was willing to give.

I put a serious look on my face, my arm around his shoulder, took him into the classroom’s book nook.

“Talk to me.” I didn’t say that, because I was 10, but if I’d been older, that’s what I would have said.

He looked scared.

“It’s okay,” I said. “You can tell me.”

He took a deep breath. “She wants me to french kiss her.”

My God, I thought. “Go on…”

T continued. “I just don’t think I’m ready for that.”

I nodded. I looked him straight in the eye, the way friends do when there’s a lot on the line. “I understand.”

“What should I do?” T was distrought.

I smiled, a comforting grin. He knew I had the answer. He knew I would help him see the solution. All of my mother’s lessons about sex and being grown up were about to pay off.

“T (actually I used his real name)… She needs to respect you and your body. If you aren’t ready to french, then you shouldn’t do it. No one can make you do things like that if you don’t want to. Tell her the truth. That’s all you can do.”

It was solid advice. I had done my work. Well, most of it. There was still one thing left for me to do.

I spent more than two years trying to figure out what the f@#* french kissing was. I was too embarassed to ask… but my imagination… oh boy did I have ideas. None of them made any sense to me then, or now, looking back at my 10 year old mind. The french were sexy people, this french kissing must have been a doozy.

I went to libraries, bookstores, watched movies, eavesdropped on older kids. Whatever it was it had to be big, if T was sweating bullets over it.

It was quite a letdown when I discovered it was tongue kissing. Turned out I’d done it before I knew what it was called.

But from that spring day in 5th grade, I knew I had a talent. I could talk people off the ledge, lead them to the light, help them in their times of need… all while talking out of my ass.

Son, Do You Like Rubbers?

When I was a little boy, my mother was very active with Planned Parenthood. For a while she was on the board of directors.

That’s where my book called Did The Sun Shine Before You Were Born came from. It ran down what sex was, how it made babies. It was pretty straight forward explaining that sex was what happened in bed when mommy and daddy loved each other. It didn’t go into how much fun it is, how it can happen in all sorts of places without beds and how there are plenty of times when love has nothing to do with it.

My mother also taught a sex-ed class at a local private school. She’d come home at night with a box filled with replicas of the male and female anatomies, replicas that you could take apart to see all of the pieces that made up the larger contraptions.

In the another box she had samples of every form of birth control available at the time. As a 6-year-old I could not only name what each device or pill was, I could explain how it worked.

Condoms and diaphragms were simple to understand, I didn’t quite get how pills and hormones worked, and I thought the idea of an IUD irritating the lining of the uterus was creepy.

Now, there are those who will tell you a 6-year-old is too young to know all of those things. I’m not sure why. I had no more urge to have sex than any other boys.

What I did have, though, was a great feeling of responsibilty. Once I did start having sex, I knew what I was doing (birth control-wise), I knew why to do it, I didn’t have any problems asking and using, and I knew I had no excuse for ever coming home with scary news for my parents.

The frankness did lend itself to odd or awkward conversations, some unintentional.

Once in high school, my mother and I were driving somewhere on a rainy day. She asked me “What do you think about rubbers?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You know, rubbers, do you ever use them?”

“Uhhh.”

“I guess not, I’ve never seen you putting them on.”

“Uhhm.”

Awkward silence.

“I’m talking about galoshes.”

Of course, mom, of course.

Spotted

Cosmo and I were out for an evening walk last night. While he stopped for a sniff at a tree, my eyes wandered to a window that looked into a basement apartment.

I was only gazing for a second or two when a young naked woman walked into my field of vision. She immediately looked out the window, where she could see me, not my dog, peeking in like a pervert.

This whole event took no more than 4 seconds from sniff to peek to busted.

She lives half a block away from me, at least I assume she does. Maybe she was visiting her big boyfriend who is now going to be on the lookout for a guy in a big red winter coat who likes to stare into strangers’ windows.

Look, I like naked women as much as the next guy. They’re great.

But how much fun can a guy have catching 4 seconds of a naked woman while standing on a cold street in the middle of the city?

Well, it appears that the answer is not what you might think.

Several years ago my station started to look into a gang of peepers in this city. They knew all of the places to go, all of the prime real estate, to see people (men and women) getting dressed, in and out of the shower, all the stuff we do in our homes, when we don’t think anyone is looking.

Apparently, people might be.

Members of this gang, according to unconfirmed reports, would even climb up fire escapes and walk along rooftops in order to get the best views.

EEEwwww.

Again, I ask: How much fun can a guy have catching 4 seconds of a naked woman while standing on a cold street in the middle of the city?

All I can say is that I’m taking Cosmo on a different route for a while. I don’t want to run into the angry boyfriend… or a t.v. station doing a story on peepers and have them get the wrong idea.