I was pleased to get a request from a British film company, asking me to let them use one of my short videos in a TV show they produce. The fee was modest, but why not? Free mailbox money for me, and they get a non-exclusive license to use the video, which doesn't limit my own use of it at all. And, the money was to be paid in English pounds, which seemed terribly exotic.
The problem was, I didn't get paid. Of course, once they've used the video, it's easy enough for a big company in London to forget about a small operator like me; the money I was owed wasn't enough to warrant my bothering with legal proceedings, so there wasn't really anything I could do but write it off. With, of course, a few I-told-you-so's from my friends.
Even so, I would periodically email my contact person a polite reminder that they still hadn't paid me, and I would always get back a graciously-worded apology, with assurances that it was an unintentional oversight, and that the matter would be speedily resolved. I would usually wait for a month to go by, and then I would send them the next polite reminder. Then I would get another gracious apology, accompanied by a brief explanation of what had gone awry in the accounting department, which had now been resolved, and I would be hearing back from them shortly.
After many months of this, I waited a little longer than usual to send my polite reminder, and to my dismay, the email got bounced back: addressee unknown. Such a shame to lose my contact, after the lovely correspondence we had been having. Well, it was time to move on, I had to admit. But as a last-ditch attempt, I found an address for general inquiries, on the company's website. I wrote To Whom it May Concern, and I briefly explained the problem, and outlined the general details. Against all expectations, I actually got a reply from a staff person: the usual graciously-worded apology, with explanations and assurances. So we were back in business. I was content.
I waited another month, and by now I was persuaded that they had never intended to pay me in the first place, so I thought I would at least have a little fun with it. Writing to my new contact, I fired my best shot:
-------------------
Re: Payment for my video -
Hi Laura.
The Mill of Destiny grinds slowly, but exceedingly fine. Your account team has done a great job so far, unraveling the labyrinthine coils of our stalled business arrangement, concerning the use of my video Hungarian Dance #5 which aired on your TV show [blank blank] in November 2014.
But in fact, I still have not received as much as a ha'penny, nor a copper farthing nor even a clipped brass groat, of the payment specified in our contract. Please inform the powers that be, that I am confidently expecting a satisfactory conclusion to our contractual agreement of ₤200 for their use of said video. The principle of the matter would suggest that this obligation should be honored without further delay.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Best regards,
Len Solomon
---------------------
I didn't hear anything back from them for many days, so I figured that my sarcasm had made them mad. No more polite apologies would be forthcoming. But then, to my astonishment, I received this:
-----------------
Hi Len
I do apologize again that this still has not been paid out to you. We are currently checking with accounts as to if a cheque was sent out but it did not reach you. Can you just confirm your correct address, and also give me the following account information and we can get the payment to you the quickest way:
Account Name
Bank Name
Bank Account Number
Bank Address
Swift Code
Sort Code (if applicable)
Iban number/Routing Number (if applicable)
Kind regards
Laura
-----------------
Now, for the first time, I was angry. This is the exact sort of thing that the Nigerian Prince always asks you for, when he wants to give you 7.5 million dollars because you are the only one he can trust out of all the others. I was honestly puzzled. The film production company had seemed like a real company. And why had they waited all this time to try to spring a scam on me? I wanted to just stop wasting time trying to figure it out, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. Several angry responses occurred to me, then some humorous ones; finally I just decided to give them the benefit of the doubt one more time. Figuring that even if I was being made a fool of, one can never go wrong being a gentleman. So once again, I thanked them kindly for pursuing this matter, told them they had my address correct, but I regretted that I could not provide them with the additional information they requested; a cheque in the mail would be perfectly acceptable.
Wonder of wonders, 2 weeks later I received a check in the mail! Mailbox money! I treasure it, as if it were a fortune presented to me by the Royal Exchequer of the Crown.
Cabin Fever
When I would visit my Mom down in New Jersey in her latter days, or when my brother and sister would, we would need to find places to stay in Toms River. It's a weird feeling having to stay in a hotel, in a town where you grew up. One place that I had always noticed, was The Cedars motel on Rt. 9; the place had always looked picturesque to me; charming little cabins nestled under the trees, each with its softly glimmering porch light. So I decided I would give it a try on this trip. When I pulled up in the evening, there was a No Vacancy sign lit up in red neon, which was discouraging; so I stayed at the usual bland Holiday Inn that night. I phoned the place the next morning, and I got the welcome news that a cabin would be available that night. I made a reservation without delay.
The Cedars Motel, Toms River, around 2000-
The door is stuck. I'm jiggling the key, twisting the door knob, and finally I lean in with my shoulder and give a powerful shove; the door bursts open. It is a bare, shabby room before me; not even an end table by the bed or a chair to put my clothes on. The paint is fresh, though, which is why the door was sticking, and why a powerful smell of turpentine is mixed with the strong odor of disinfectant and decay that greets me.
I am surprised at how sparse the room is. The only furnishing besides the sagging bed is a rickety dresser with a broken TV on it. The TV is not plugged in, and there are a few of its parts lying on top. No phone, either, which is inconvenient, as I don't have a cell phone. I get some tissues from the bathroom, and ball them up to wipe off the top of the dresser, so I can put down my suitcase. The dresser is strangely grimy, and the balled up tissue comes up black. I have to throw the used tissues in the corner, because there is no trash basket, not even in the bathroom. (Actually, it's toilet paper I'm using; there are no tissues.)
I remove two drawers from the dresser, and turn them on end to place by the bed. This makes a cozy little end table, so I have a place to put down my watch and clothes, and a book. That's convenient.
Curiously enough, the bathroom amenities, besides soap, include a new comb, toothbrush, and razor. I would rather they had given me a bath mat, though; the linoleum tiles are warped, with their corners sticking up, which is uncomfortable underfoot. It doesn't matter, because I have to leave my shoes on anyway; the carpet around the bed is wet. It seems that they had been trying to clean the carpet, but there are still grimy tracks through it, and a powerful musty smell like an old dog. The carpet is too wet for walking on in socks.
You might say, why didn't I just leave at that point? Well it was late when I finally checked in that evening, and I didn't feel like going to find another place to stay; I was just going to make the best of it for one night.
Earlier in the day, when I had called about the room, the man had quoted me $55. for the night, but later when I arrived, he informed me that he had forgotten that the summer rates were in effect; it was going to be $75. He was very apologetic; he would let me have it for $65.
Then I took out my wallet to pay, and the man informed me that he can't take credit cards: the machine is busted. He showed it to me. Then he also told me he can't take a personal check either; it's cash only. I finally realized that the usual clientele of this establishment consists of indigents, who are provided with a State Welfare check. Those are good. The man told me that when the credit card machine broke years ago, they just left it like that, since they pretty much never used it anymore.
I did have cash on me, but just a few dollars more than 65. The man generously agreed to waive the sales tax, and make the price 65 even, so I wouldn't be flat busted. What a great deal. He seemed like a nice guy, but I could tell he was wondering, what in the world was I was doing in this place?
So finally I got checked in, and now I find myself lying on the hard bed, in the glare from the naked ceiling bulb. Over my head, the broken smoke alarm is dangling by one wire, and through the thin wall I can hear a man shouting at someone in the next cabin. He sounds drunk and furious. That's surprising, in a nice place like this.
It is late. Eventually, I will have to put on my shoes, so I can get out of bed without getting my feet wet. I'll walk across the sodden carpet to switch off the light. Then I will lie back on the sagging bed, in the glare of red neon gleaming through the thin curtains, and the rumbling of trucks down Rt. 9 will eventually rock me to sleep.
------------------------------
I emailed this story to my brother, right after I wrote it. He had also seen this motel many times, and he had thought it looked interesting too. He emailed back and said, "Thanks a lot for letting my wife see this story. She saw it up on the screen, and she read it. Now she'll NEVER agree to let us stay there!"
Skeptic
When I was 5 or 6 years old, I found a test tube in the back room of our house.
It was nestled in a jar among some old pens, pliers, and odd junk in my mother's collections. I held it up: a real test tube; such a treasure! The sight of it conjured up exciting thoughts of scientific experiments, danger, and unknown worlds. I considered the object for a few moments, and then I put it carefully back where I'd found it.
Later that day, my friend Corky wandered over from next door, and we were playing in the yard when I remembered my discovery. I told Corky, "Wait here. I want to show you something," and I went into the house.
I retrieved the test tube from the back room, took it into the kitchen, and put some water into it. Then I pushed a chair over to the cabinet and got down the little bottles of food coloring, and I put a drop of yellow into the tube, then a drop of red. The test tube now contained a fine and rare-looking orange liquid, which I thought looked rather impressive. This was going to show my friend that I was not to be trifled with, and I carried it outside to the yard where he was waiting.
"Corky, this is a chemical!" I told him ominously, holding the test tube up for him to see.
"No it isn't. You just put some coloring into some water," he said, narrowing his eyes at me in his annoyingly skeptical way. I was astonished at his ignorance.
"It's a chemical," I repeated, a bit weakly.
"No, it isn't."
I withdrew back into the house, stung at Corky's lack of appreciation, and dismayed that he didn't believe me. I was lying, but so? Couldn't he see that this was a real test tube? I poured the useless orange water down the drain.
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It was nestled in a jar among some old pens, pliers, and odd junk in my mother's collections. I held it up: a real test tube; such a treasure! The sight of it conjured up exciting thoughts of scientific experiments, danger, and unknown worlds. I considered the object for a few moments, and then I put it carefully back where I'd found it.
Later that day, my friend Corky wandered over from next door, and we were playing in the yard when I remembered my discovery. I told Corky, "Wait here. I want to show you something," and I went into the house.
I retrieved the test tube from the back room, took it into the kitchen, and put some water into it. Then I pushed a chair over to the cabinet and got down the little bottles of food coloring, and I put a drop of yellow into the tube, then a drop of red. The test tube now contained a fine and rare-looking orange liquid, which I thought looked rather impressive. This was going to show my friend that I was not to be trifled with, and I carried it outside to the yard where he was waiting.
"Corky, this is a chemical!" I told him ominously, holding the test tube up for him to see.
"No it isn't. You just put some coloring into some water," he said, narrowing his eyes at me in his annoyingly skeptical way. I was astonished at his ignorance.
"It's a chemical," I repeated, a bit weakly.
"No, it isn't."
I withdrew back into the house, stung at Corky's lack of appreciation, and dismayed that he didn't believe me. I was lying, but so? Couldn't he see that this was a real test tube? I poured the useless orange water down the drain.
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Occult Knowledge
Sometimes I find myself in the same position as the native who found the rifle.
The native knew what the rifle could do; he had seen it work, and now he was trying everything in his power to make it do that thing. He carefully twisted wads of grass, cuts of bark, and stuffed them into the chamber. He tried using stones, earth, a burning ember; he used incantations and interpretive dance; he prayed; he anointed the rifle with sacred dust, purified oil.
The native spared no effort or ingenuity, but it was all in vain; nothing would induce the rifle to utter its terrifying thunder and lightening: the deadly magic which could slay from a distance and cause his enemies to flee in terror, or provide meat for his lodge.
The native's experience of the world was not sufficient to unlock this particular secret, even if he spent his life studying the workings of that rifle. The simple mystery of gunpowder would forever be concealed from him, in a parallel reality he would never know.
This scenario is from a story I read many years ago. I sometimes feel that it is a metaphor for my own life, as I stumble forward in darkness.
The native knew what the rifle could do; he had seen it work, and now he was trying everything in his power to make it do that thing. He carefully twisted wads of grass, cuts of bark, and stuffed them into the chamber. He tried using stones, earth, a burning ember; he used incantations and interpretive dance; he prayed; he anointed the rifle with sacred dust, purified oil.
The native spared no effort or ingenuity, but it was all in vain; nothing would induce the rifle to utter its terrifying thunder and lightening: the deadly magic which could slay from a distance and cause his enemies to flee in terror, or provide meat for his lodge.
The native's experience of the world was not sufficient to unlock this particular secret, even if he spent his life studying the workings of that rifle. The simple mystery of gunpowder would forever be concealed from him, in a parallel reality he would never know.
This scenario is from a story I read many years ago. I sometimes feel that it is a metaphor for my own life, as I stumble forward in darkness.
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I Said, Beer!
When my son was about 3, he expressed an interest to taste some beer, as I was having a bottle. So I let him try a spoonful.
Apparently, he liked it. A few days later, our family was eating in a restaurant, and I ordered a beer with my dinner. When it came, my little son asked if he could have some, and I told him I didn't think it was a good idea this time. To my astonishment, he began reaching over the table, and calling loudly, "Beeyoo, beeyoo!' in his piping little voice. Many heads in the restaurant turned to see what was happening.
My son is a good, biddable lad, and this outburst took us all by surprise; it was quickly quelled by a stern word or two by myself and my wife, but not before I was mortified to notice the expressions on the faces that had turned towards our table: "Just look at that little boy having a tantrum; calling for beer!" they were frowning sternly; "Now, that must be a nice house."
Apparently, he liked it. A few days later, our family was eating in a restaurant, and I ordered a beer with my dinner. When it came, my little son asked if he could have some, and I told him I didn't think it was a good idea this time. To my astonishment, he began reaching over the table, and calling loudly, "Beeyoo, beeyoo!' in his piping little voice. Many heads in the restaurant turned to see what was happening.
My son is a good, biddable lad, and this outburst took us all by surprise; it was quickly quelled by a stern word or two by myself and my wife, but not before I was mortified to notice the expressions on the faces that had turned towards our table: "Just look at that little boy having a tantrum; calling for beer!" they were frowning sternly; "Now, that must be a nice house."
Requiem for a Rat
-Peter Solomon, Guinea Pig-
I had the mournful task today of cleaning up and putting away all of Peter's things: the kibbles, the hay, the wood shavings, the cage itself; all the reminders of the life of the family guinea pig. For seven years the "little rat" had been with us, with his charming little ways.
The impatient rodent had a way of yanking rhythmically at his hay hopper (it sounded like someone was knocking at the door), if someone had the discourtesy to begin making coffee in the morning before attending to him: a little orchard grass, a piece of carrot, a few scratches behind the ears. He would purr like a cat when you would stroke his soft furry head.
At dinnertime, as soon as someone would open the vegetable drawer in the fridge to get something, Peter would again begin chewing and yanking on the metal bars of his cage. Watching him with amusement, I would comment, "He has very well developed nose parts" (from all that energetic yanking). I would wait just an extra minute before giving him the carrot, or broccoli trimmings.
"He loves those metal bars," I would tease. "The metal must be really good for him."
Or, "He's trying to tell us something! What is it, boy?" He would chew and yank with renewed frustration. Then I would hand him his treat, and he would make a soft murmur of satisfaction as he took it.
But, you know, if I ever offered him my finger to bite, he would only nibble it very gently. He was a generous and sweet-natured creature, in spite of all my teasing. There's a lesson.
He lived a long time for a guinea pig: seven years. For the last few years he was with us, every time I would buy a big bag of wood shavings, or kibbles, or hay, I would think to myself, I wonder if most of this is going to end up not getting used? Well, that's just another thing that I found strangely moving at the end: there wasn't much left over in any of the bags; we had used up pretty much all the current supplies.
When we first got Peter, we couldn't agree on what to call him: Jaw Pickle, Poop Kitty, Stoopid;
we got him for our young boys, and to begin with, I resented having one more thing in the house that I would have to take care of. Well, if I did, it's a burden that I will miss. I keep thinking I hear knocking, and I reflexively look over to where his cage had been. I thought it was going to be a luxury to not have to do anything; but then why do I feel a pang when I look over and see no cage, no little animal that needs my attention?
Well, Peter is with his ancestors now, in that great meadow-grass place in the sky, where no hawks are. He crossed the bridge peacefully in the night, after a brief illness in which he stopped eating. For two days, he just muttered to himself once in awhile, and whimpered occasionally, and refused even his beloved carrots. But even right before the end, I could just hear him purring softly when I stroked his little head.
"Never give your heart," sadly advised Kipling, "to a dog to tear."
Who knew a little rat could do it?
I had the mournful task today of cleaning up and putting away all of Peter's things: the kibbles, the hay, the wood shavings, the cage itself; all the reminders of the life of the family guinea pig. For seven years the "little rat" had been with us, with his charming little ways.
The impatient rodent had a way of yanking rhythmically at his hay hopper (it sounded like someone was knocking at the door), if someone had the discourtesy to begin making coffee in the morning before attending to him: a little orchard grass, a piece of carrot, a few scratches behind the ears. He would purr like a cat when you would stroke his soft furry head.
At dinnertime, as soon as someone would open the vegetable drawer in the fridge to get something, Peter would again begin chewing and yanking on the metal bars of his cage. Watching him with amusement, I would comment, "He has very well developed nose parts" (from all that energetic yanking). I would wait just an extra minute before giving him the carrot, or broccoli trimmings.
"He loves those metal bars," I would tease. "The metal must be really good for him."
Or, "He's trying to tell us something! What is it, boy?" He would chew and yank with renewed frustration. Then I would hand him his treat, and he would make a soft murmur of satisfaction as he took it.
But, you know, if I ever offered him my finger to bite, he would only nibble it very gently. He was a generous and sweet-natured creature, in spite of all my teasing. There's a lesson.
He lived a long time for a guinea pig: seven years. For the last few years he was with us, every time I would buy a big bag of wood shavings, or kibbles, or hay, I would think to myself, I wonder if most of this is going to end up not getting used? Well, that's just another thing that I found strangely moving at the end: there wasn't much left over in any of the bags; we had used up pretty much all the current supplies.
When we first got Peter, we couldn't agree on what to call him: Jaw Pickle, Poop Kitty, Stoopid;
we got him for our young boys, and to begin with, I resented having one more thing in the house that I would have to take care of. Well, if I did, it's a burden that I will miss. I keep thinking I hear knocking, and I reflexively look over to where his cage had been. I thought it was going to be a luxury to not have to do anything; but then why do I feel a pang when I look over and see no cage, no little animal that needs my attention?
Well, Peter is with his ancestors now, in that great meadow-grass place in the sky, where no hawks are. He crossed the bridge peacefully in the night, after a brief illness in which he stopped eating. For two days, he just muttered to himself once in awhile, and whimpered occasionally, and refused even his beloved carrots. But even right before the end, I could just hear him purring softly when I stroked his little head.
"Never give your heart," sadly advised Kipling, "to a dog to tear."
Who knew a little rat could do it?
Hugging the Bowl
I've been hugging a toilet bowl, on and off, for two days. No, I haven't been sick, or drinking.
Let's say your toilet was leaking underneath; it was dripping through the floor and making a puddle in your basement, and you wanted to fix it. You would have to disconnect things, take off the tank, unbolt the contraption from the floor, and at some point you would have to lift it up to move it off the spot. Have you ever tried to lift a toilet bowl? It's damned awkward, actually: you have to sort of hug it. Now you're getting the idea.
When you're putting it back again, having settled it carefully on its wax seal after getting the wobbling bolts to go through their little holes without falling over underneath, you also don't want to over-tighten the nuts because the porcelain is very brittle. I knew this, but even so, as I was carefully snugging down the nuts the first time, I felt a sickening feeling as I turned the wrench; a sudden slackness. It wasn't the porcelain cracking: it was the flange on the ancient cast iron pipe underneath, crumbling away. The bolt was free as a bird.
I was strangely calm. Well, I did swear a blue streak, with a rising note of hysteria in my voice that was a little frightening, but if there's no one there to hear you, did you actually make a sound? But then I thought, I can take a piece of steel bar stock, and with a hacksaw and files, I can make a flange to fit under what's left of the broken cast iron rim of the pipe. So that's what I did, and it worked; it took me about 2 hours. But I must mention: in the meanwhile, since you've lifted and moved the toilet away from its place, there is the dreadful menacing 4 inch hole in the floor; the pipe that goes straight down into the netherworld of the septic tank far below. This hole was just inviting me, for instance, to fumble and drop a tool down it; never to be seen again, or something worse. Your instinct bids you to cover that hole, so I did; I cut a plastic cover out of an old piece of tupperware, and I used it to seal the hideous hole while I was working on the broken flange.
Now, before I relate how I came to install the toilet bowl not one more time, but two more times, I will mention another good reason for keeping the pipe covered while you are working: septage flies. These interesting creatures actually live in the fetid subterranean darkness of the septic tank, flying around above the liquid in the underground chamber, and communicating with the outside world via the vent pipe on the house roof. And you thought you had a bad job. Perhaps you can understand that I didn't want any of these little denizens of the dark to visit me in my world. And in fact, as I worked, I would occasionally see one of these small flies flying around under the cover for a few moments, perhaps contemplating the wondrous light that he could see through the translucent plastic.
When I was done making the new flange, I reformed the squashed wax seal around the hole in the bottom of the toilet, buttering it around with a putty knife, like frosting a cake. When I was satisfied that the wax ring was well formed and would seat properly, I carefully lowered the toilet bowl down over the hole for the second time, getting the bolts to go through their holes without knocking them over. It took a couple of tries, but I got it done, and I felt the satisfying "give" of the wax spreading out and sealing the joint. A perfect job, and I would be very careful tightening down the nuts this time. But something was nagging at the back of my mind. Think carefully, I told myself; is everything shipshape? It ought to be, but think...
NO! That's right; maybe you guessed it: the tupperware cover was still in its place down under there! Not as perfect a job as I could have wished. One more time, I get to bend my back to this fascinating job, and hug the toilet bowl. Off it comes again, and although it's too late now to make a long story short, I finally made an end of it, and as of this writing, there's no more puddle under the pipes in the basement.
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Let's say your toilet was leaking underneath; it was dripping through the floor and making a puddle in your basement, and you wanted to fix it. You would have to disconnect things, take off the tank, unbolt the contraption from the floor, and at some point you would have to lift it up to move it off the spot. Have you ever tried to lift a toilet bowl? It's damned awkward, actually: you have to sort of hug it. Now you're getting the idea.
When you're putting it back again, having settled it carefully on its wax seal after getting the wobbling bolts to go through their little holes without falling over underneath, you also don't want to over-tighten the nuts because the porcelain is very brittle. I knew this, but even so, as I was carefully snugging down the nuts the first time, I felt a sickening feeling as I turned the wrench; a sudden slackness. It wasn't the porcelain cracking: it was the flange on the ancient cast iron pipe underneath, crumbling away. The bolt was free as a bird.
I was strangely calm. Well, I did swear a blue streak, with a rising note of hysteria in my voice that was a little frightening, but if there's no one there to hear you, did you actually make a sound? But then I thought, I can take a piece of steel bar stock, and with a hacksaw and files, I can make a flange to fit under what's left of the broken cast iron rim of the pipe. So that's what I did, and it worked; it took me about 2 hours. But I must mention: in the meanwhile, since you've lifted and moved the toilet away from its place, there is the dreadful menacing 4 inch hole in the floor; the pipe that goes straight down into the netherworld of the septic tank far below. This hole was just inviting me, for instance, to fumble and drop a tool down it; never to be seen again, or something worse. Your instinct bids you to cover that hole, so I did; I cut a plastic cover out of an old piece of tupperware, and I used it to seal the hideous hole while I was working on the broken flange.
Now, before I relate how I came to install the toilet bowl not one more time, but two more times, I will mention another good reason for keeping the pipe covered while you are working: septage flies. These interesting creatures actually live in the fetid subterranean darkness of the septic tank, flying around above the liquid in the underground chamber, and communicating with the outside world via the vent pipe on the house roof. And you thought you had a bad job. Perhaps you can understand that I didn't want any of these little denizens of the dark to visit me in my world. And in fact, as I worked, I would occasionally see one of these small flies flying around under the cover for a few moments, perhaps contemplating the wondrous light that he could see through the translucent plastic.
When I was done making the new flange, I reformed the squashed wax seal around the hole in the bottom of the toilet, buttering it around with a putty knife, like frosting a cake. When I was satisfied that the wax ring was well formed and would seat properly, I carefully lowered the toilet bowl down over the hole for the second time, getting the bolts to go through their holes without knocking them over. It took a couple of tries, but I got it done, and I felt the satisfying "give" of the wax spreading out and sealing the joint. A perfect job, and I would be very careful tightening down the nuts this time. But something was nagging at the back of my mind. Think carefully, I told myself; is everything shipshape? It ought to be, but think...
NO! That's right; maybe you guessed it: the tupperware cover was still in its place down under there! Not as perfect a job as I could have wished. One more time, I get to bend my back to this fascinating job, and hug the toilet bowl. Off it comes again, and although it's too late now to make a long story short, I finally made an end of it, and as of this writing, there's no more puddle under the pipes in the basement.
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Grammar Test
When I was in grade school, we would get questions like the following:
- Correct the error(s) in the following sentence -
"Jack seen Fred fix them cars hisself."
I would always think, who could ever get these questions wrong? Everyone knows where Fred ain't smart enough to fix no car by hisself!
- Correct the error(s) in the following sentence -
"Jack seen Fred fix them cars hisself."
I would always think, who could ever get these questions wrong? Everyone knows where Fred ain't smart enough to fix no car by hisself!
Mystery Fish
Nobody could figure out where the sardines were coming from. They just kept appearing, as if an evil sorcerer were at work.
I was living in a house with a group of people, and we shared a communal pantry. A lot of people came and went in that house, and it wasn't always clear who bought what.
One day, a great stash of sardines appeared in the food closet; there were about 20 cans of them. Nobody claimed responsibility for having bought them, and it was strange to see so many. I shrugged my shoulders along with everyone else.
So a couple of cans of the fish were sampled by several people. My friend Gene was the first. His nose wrinkled as he opened the can; he had a doubtful look on his face as he peered at the contents, but he cautiously tried a bite.
"These sardines are spoiled!" he pronounced, and he just left the remainder on the table for someone else to deal with.
Another person tried opening a new can, with much the same results. It soon became clear that none of the cans were any better; the fish was unpalatable. So the several opened cans got discarded; a stinking mess in the garbage can.
But in the pantry, there remained the large and mysterious stacks of unopened cans. About 20 of them sat around on the shelf for a few weeks. In spite of all the hungry mouths around that house, no one had anything further to do with those sardines.
The question eventually arose of what to do with the stacks of cans; nobody seemed to own them and certainly no one wanted them. I hate to see food get wasted, but we finally agreed that they would just have to be thrown out. This was done with little fanfare, and the mystery was soon forgotten.
But a few days later, what a commotion ensued when an even greater mountain of cans of the same dismal stuff appeared back in the cabinet! Everyone became greatly excited, and questions were flying back and forth.
"Who is bringing this stuff? Was it a friend of yours?"
"Is it a well-wisher, or an evil doer?"
"Can we just waste this food?"
"Even the cat won't eat it. I tried giving him some."
Without much more discussion, the pile of cans went out in the garbage a second time; this time I watched it go. I even saw when the garbage truck came and picked it up. As I watched the truck trundling off, I was grinning a secret smile that nobody noticed.
Several days after this, the mystery took on sinister proportions, when, incredibly, there was a third appearance of Manna from Hell in our food pantry; the biggest pile of cans so far: about 50 of them.
This was truly a profound study in human perplexity. The people were buzzing around like a hive of stirred-up bees.
"They're here again! This is incredibly strange!"
"This is freaking me out."
"We should start locking the front door."
The only problem this time was, as hard as I tried, I couldn't keep a straight face. I was cracking up, and suddenly all eyes were on me.
"Solomon, what do you know about this?!"
The high drama was completely spoiled; I had cracked under the pressure. Yes, I was the culprit;
I myself had been the unwilling recipient of a "gift" of several cases of very old sardines, which had been purchased by a traveling friend from a cannery several years previously. As the aging fish were becoming inedible, she had begged me to take it all, in hopes I would find some use for it.
Well, I had told her, I'd see what I could do.
I was living in a house with a group of people, and we shared a communal pantry. A lot of people came and went in that house, and it wasn't always clear who bought what.
One day, a great stash of sardines appeared in the food closet; there were about 20 cans of them. Nobody claimed responsibility for having bought them, and it was strange to see so many. I shrugged my shoulders along with everyone else.
So a couple of cans of the fish were sampled by several people. My friend Gene was the first. His nose wrinkled as he opened the can; he had a doubtful look on his face as he peered at the contents, but he cautiously tried a bite.
"These sardines are spoiled!" he pronounced, and he just left the remainder on the table for someone else to deal with.
Another person tried opening a new can, with much the same results. It soon became clear that none of the cans were any better; the fish was unpalatable. So the several opened cans got discarded; a stinking mess in the garbage can.
But in the pantry, there remained the large and mysterious stacks of unopened cans. About 20 of them sat around on the shelf for a few weeks. In spite of all the hungry mouths around that house, no one had anything further to do with those sardines.
The question eventually arose of what to do with the stacks of cans; nobody seemed to own them and certainly no one wanted them. I hate to see food get wasted, but we finally agreed that they would just have to be thrown out. This was done with little fanfare, and the mystery was soon forgotten.
But a few days later, what a commotion ensued when an even greater mountain of cans of the same dismal stuff appeared back in the cabinet! Everyone became greatly excited, and questions were flying back and forth.
"Who is bringing this stuff? Was it a friend of yours?"
"Is it a well-wisher, or an evil doer?"
"Can we just waste this food?"
"Even the cat won't eat it. I tried giving him some."
Without much more discussion, the pile of cans went out in the garbage a second time; this time I watched it go. I even saw when the garbage truck came and picked it up. As I watched the truck trundling off, I was grinning a secret smile that nobody noticed.
Several days after this, the mystery took on sinister proportions, when, incredibly, there was a third appearance of Manna from Hell in our food pantry; the biggest pile of cans so far: about 50 of them.
This was truly a profound study in human perplexity. The people were buzzing around like a hive of stirred-up bees.
"They're here again! This is incredibly strange!"
"This is freaking me out."
"We should start locking the front door."
The only problem this time was, as hard as I tried, I couldn't keep a straight face. I was cracking up, and suddenly all eyes were on me.
"Solomon, what do you know about this?!"
The high drama was completely spoiled; I had cracked under the pressure. Yes, I was the culprit;
I myself had been the unwilling recipient of a "gift" of several cases of very old sardines, which had been purchased by a traveling friend from a cannery several years previously. As the aging fish were becoming inedible, she had begged me to take it all, in hopes I would find some use for it.
Well, I had told her, I'd see what I could do.
More Allen Stuff
I've been observing the interesting behavior of my friend Allen, since we were small boys more than 60 years ago.
When we were 9 or 10 years old, our family was over at his family's house for dinner. Just as Allen was sitting down at the table, his younger brother Gene pulled his chair away, and Allen landed with a thump on the floor. He immediately flew into a shouting rage, sitting there on the linoleum, and his mother Charlotte drew him up onto his feet and gave Gene a sharp reprimand. Then she tried to soothe Allen. He was raving in anger, and nothing she could do would stop him, so she finally just grabbed a dishtowel, balled it up and stuffed it into his mouth. She pointed, "Go to your room!"
Without a pause, Allen continued to shout a fluent stream of invective at Gene and the world in general, but now his raving was in a strangely muffled howl through the dishrag. He toddled angrily but obediently out the door and down the hall, still flailing his arms and shouting through the gag. I thought it was very peculiar that it didn't occur to him to pull the rag out of his mouth.
The noise receded and abruptly stopped, with the slamming of his door. Charlotte shook her head with a helpless but amused grin, "That's my boy!"
On the kitchen wall, there was an office phone for the family's landscaping business. This phone was right next to the house phone, and the two looked identical, but their rings were different, to distinguish incoming calls. It occurred to my wicked mind one time to switch the receivers on their hooks. The switch wasn't obvious to look at, because the long cords hung down side by side. It seemed like a harmless prank, and then I forgot about it. A few days later I was there again, and I noticed that the receivers had been put right, so I switched them again.
A few minutes later, I was in the next room and I heard a phone ringing. Allen picked up, and I could hear him saying, "Hello… hello…?" Then, to my mortification, he became furious, and began swearing. "The #&*#-ing phone is &#%-ed up AGAIN!! NOTHING ever works around here!!" He slammed down the phone in a fury.
There was another person in the kitchen with Allen, and I could hear him trying to calm things down. "It's all right," the friend was saying. "The phone's not broken. See? Someone just switched the receivers here."
"Is that all it was?!" Allen shouted, cursing some more. "What kind of IDIOT would keep switching the receivers?! How can we run a *#%-ing business?!"
I slunk away, quite abashed. Of course, the business caller on the line would have been able to hear Allen cursing and shouting, because before Allen hung up again, the live receiver was sitting right there on the other phone's hook. I'll be tortured in hell for this stunt, or sooner, if Allen ever reads this.
Allen nourishes a myth about me, that I will eat anything. This is actually not true at all; I'm very particular about what I eat. The myth began because of an event one day when he came over with our friend Brady, to visit me in my workshop. Earlier that day, I had been eating a peanut butter sandwich, and I had put the half eaten sandwich on a plate near the table saw. Then I did some cutting with the saw, which of course throws up some dust.
When the guys came to my shop a little later, I spied the half-eaten sandwich on the plate. I picked it up, blew off the harmless sawdust and resumed eating it. Then I noticed Brady's reaction; he was green with disgust. His impression was that I had found some ancient moldy food in a corner and had begun carelessly devouring it, after having blown off the accumulated filth. The next day, Brady and Allen excitedly related this story to others, with some interesting embellishments, and thus the myth was born. Whenever Allen would introduce me to someone, he would be sure to tell them, "Solomon will eat anything!" So I would encourage him, saying, it's no big deal.
Allen conceived of a dare; he thought he could stump me by proposing that I eat a tuna fish ice-cream sundae. If I ate it, he would pay for it. That didn't sound so bad to me; it was really no challenge to say, "Sure!"
Accordingly, we went out with some friends to an ice-cream parlor. When the waitress asked me for my order, I said, "I'll have a chocolate banana split, with a scoop of raspberry, a scoop of tuna fish salad, and a scoop of... um..."
The waitress interrupted me, before I could say, "vanilla"; she completely ruined my comic timing.
"Tuna fish?!" she frowned at me.
"Yes. Tuna fish, and... um... a scoop of vanilla."
"You're not serious!?"
"Yes, I am."
The waitress refused to go along with it, and after a little more discussion, she ended up bringing over the manager. The manager listened to the case, and finally responded by saying,
"If she brings it, you're going to have to eat it!"
"No he won't." Allen broke in, excitedly. "No he won't. He'll just have to pay for it."
So the manager gave the nod, and the waitress clamped her mouth tight, and wrote down the order, obscurely annoyed.
Everyone was eagerly watching as the tuna fish sundae was brought out and set before me. By this time, the entire restaurant was alerted, and watching me with rapt attention. I had made sure that I was good and hungry before we went out, and to tell the truth, the sundae didn't taste bad. I've tasted better combinations, but there was nothing disgusting about it, and I ate it up.
But somehow, to Allen this was all very remarkable, and he gladly paid for the sundae. This event gave them all something to talk about for a while, and the myth remained intact, with no very great effort on my part.
Allen's wife affectionately refers to him by the title I gave him once: the "Waddling Encyclopedia".
In some ways Allen is a lot smarter than me, but, as with all enduring friendships, there's a balance there. To my way of thinking, he can be really simple at times.
When we were 9 or 10 years old, our family was over at his family's house for dinner. Just as Allen was sitting down at the table, his younger brother Gene pulled his chair away, and Allen landed with a thump on the floor. He immediately flew into a shouting rage, sitting there on the linoleum, and his mother Charlotte drew him up onto his feet and gave Gene a sharp reprimand. Then she tried to soothe Allen. He was raving in anger, and nothing she could do would stop him, so she finally just grabbed a dishtowel, balled it up and stuffed it into his mouth. She pointed, "Go to your room!"
Without a pause, Allen continued to shout a fluent stream of invective at Gene and the world in general, but now his raving was in a strangely muffled howl through the dishrag. He toddled angrily but obediently out the door and down the hall, still flailing his arms and shouting through the gag. I thought it was very peculiar that it didn't occur to him to pull the rag out of his mouth.
The noise receded and abruptly stopped, with the slamming of his door. Charlotte shook her head with a helpless but amused grin, "That's my boy!"
On the kitchen wall, there was an office phone for the family's landscaping business. This phone was right next to the house phone, and the two looked identical, but their rings were different, to distinguish incoming calls. It occurred to my wicked mind one time to switch the receivers on their hooks. The switch wasn't obvious to look at, because the long cords hung down side by side. It seemed like a harmless prank, and then I forgot about it. A few days later I was there again, and I noticed that the receivers had been put right, so I switched them again.
A few minutes later, I was in the next room and I heard a phone ringing. Allen picked up, and I could hear him saying, "Hello… hello…?" Then, to my mortification, he became furious, and began swearing. "The #&*#-ing phone is &#%-ed up AGAIN!! NOTHING ever works around here!!" He slammed down the phone in a fury.
There was another person in the kitchen with Allen, and I could hear him trying to calm things down. "It's all right," the friend was saying. "The phone's not broken. See? Someone just switched the receivers here."
"Is that all it was?!" Allen shouted, cursing some more. "What kind of IDIOT would keep switching the receivers?! How can we run a *#%-ing business?!"
I slunk away, quite abashed. Of course, the business caller on the line would have been able to hear Allen cursing and shouting, because before Allen hung up again, the live receiver was sitting right there on the other phone's hook. I'll be tortured in hell for this stunt, or sooner, if Allen ever reads this.
Allen nourishes a myth about me, that I will eat anything. This is actually not true at all; I'm very particular about what I eat. The myth began because of an event one day when he came over with our friend Brady, to visit me in my workshop. Earlier that day, I had been eating a peanut butter sandwich, and I had put the half eaten sandwich on a plate near the table saw. Then I did some cutting with the saw, which of course throws up some dust.
When the guys came to my shop a little later, I spied the half-eaten sandwich on the plate. I picked it up, blew off the harmless sawdust and resumed eating it. Then I noticed Brady's reaction; he was green with disgust. His impression was that I had found some ancient moldy food in a corner and had begun carelessly devouring it, after having blown off the accumulated filth. The next day, Brady and Allen excitedly related this story to others, with some interesting embellishments, and thus the myth was born. Whenever Allen would introduce me to someone, he would be sure to tell them, "Solomon will eat anything!" So I would encourage him, saying, it's no big deal.
Allen conceived of a dare; he thought he could stump me by proposing that I eat a tuna fish ice-cream sundae. If I ate it, he would pay for it. That didn't sound so bad to me; it was really no challenge to say, "Sure!"
Accordingly, we went out with some friends to an ice-cream parlor. When the waitress asked me for my order, I said, "I'll have a chocolate banana split, with a scoop of raspberry, a scoop of tuna fish salad, and a scoop of... um..."
The waitress interrupted me, before I could say, "vanilla"; she completely ruined my comic timing.
"Tuna fish?!" she frowned at me.
"Yes. Tuna fish, and... um... a scoop of vanilla."
"You're not serious!?"
"Yes, I am."
The waitress refused to go along with it, and after a little more discussion, she ended up bringing over the manager. The manager listened to the case, and finally responded by saying,
"If she brings it, you're going to have to eat it!"
"No he won't." Allen broke in, excitedly. "No he won't. He'll just have to pay for it."
So the manager gave the nod, and the waitress clamped her mouth tight, and wrote down the order, obscurely annoyed.
Everyone was eagerly watching as the tuna fish sundae was brought out and set before me. By this time, the entire restaurant was alerted, and watching me with rapt attention. I had made sure that I was good and hungry before we went out, and to tell the truth, the sundae didn't taste bad. I've tasted better combinations, but there was nothing disgusting about it, and I ate it up.
But somehow, to Allen this was all very remarkable, and he gladly paid for the sundae. This event gave them all something to talk about for a while, and the myth remained intact, with no very great effort on my part.
Allen's wife affectionately refers to him by the title I gave him once: the "Waddling Encyclopedia".
In some ways Allen is a lot smarter than me, but, as with all enduring friendships, there's a balance there. To my way of thinking, he can be really simple at times.
Primitive Powder
I had this published in Muzzle Blasts, March, 2007 --
I made a very exciting discovery while poking around in the basement of an abandoned house. The house was an antique colonial from around 1810; it was nominally owned by the Park Service, but in fact it had been unoccupied and unattended for many years. The ancient place was in a state of disrepair; and the fieldstone foundation had a crumbling hole on one side. I felt it was only my civic duty to make a tour of inspection of the historic building, and so I contorted my way through the badger-hole in the foundation wall, and I entered the dank earthy basement. What I found among the rough stones of the inside wall, gave me a shiver of excitement.
No, it wasn't a brittle leather sack stuffed with gold coins, that gleamed when you rubbed them with your sleeve. That's what I was hoping to find, of course, but it must have been too cleverly hidden. Also, I didn't even find an alcove that held a moldering oaken chest, bound with iron bands and a hand-forged padlock, filled with minted silver.
None of that, but what I did find, in the cracks between the stones, was an encrustation of powdery grayish-white material; with here and there some translucent brownish crystals. I found it more where there was mortar between the stones, and not as much where the stones had been laid dry. Examining the powdery deposits in the beam of my pocket-light, I thought, "Can this stuff be saltpeter?"
I had some sketchy notions of how saltpeter had been obtained in colonial days, for its use in the manufacture of gunpowder; the king's men would periodically rove through the countryside, breaking open stone walls to collect the saltpeter that accumulates inside them. I also remembered Poe's story, "A Cask of Amontillado," in which two men are deep within the catacombs of an old European city, and one man mentions the white webwork of "nitre" which they could see encrusting the damp stone walls. Nitre is the ancient name for saltpeter, or potassium nitrate. I thought it was a pretty good possibility that that's what I had just found. Gold would have been better, but this was interesting too.
So, I crawled back out of the hole, and I returned with some jars for collecting samples. I collected about 1/2 cup of the crystalline powder from between the stones, and then I headed back to my lab for some experiments.
To refine the samples, I put a stainless steel pot on the stove with about a quart of water, and added the powdery material. I boiled and stirred for a few minutes to dissolve out the soluble salts, let the sediment settle, and then filtered the liquid through a coffee filter. Then I put the clear liquid back into the pot, and boiled it away, which took about fifteen minutes. I was left with a brownish white crystalline residue in the bottom of the pot. This would be the saltpeter, if that's what it was. I scraped the stuff out of the pot with a wooden spatula, and I ended up with about a teaspoonful of the brownish powder.
The easiest way I had to find out if the material was in fact saltpeter, was to go ahead and try to make gunpowder with it. If the material was something else, the worst that would happen is, I'd waste my time making mixed dirt.
First I made some charcoal. Using a propane burner, I heated chunks of willow wood in a covered clay crucible, monitoring the crucible until it stopped off-gassing, then keeping it sealed until everything cooled. The third ingredient of gunpowder is sulfur, and for this I had to cheat and use store-bought from a lab supply, because I don't know of any natural deposits of sulfur in my location.
After grinding the ingredients separately in a mortar and pestle, I weighed them out in the correct proportions, mixed in a few drops of water, and ground the resulting paste in the mortar. Then I spread the black paste on a sheet of glass and left it to dry in the sun for a few hours. When the paste was dry, I lightly crunched it up into granules, about the consistency of very coarse salt. I ended up with about 6 1/2 grams of finished powder. This is about one hundred grains, in firearm parlance; enough for a musket-load, with some left over for priming.
Now came the moment of truth. I put a small amount of this stuff on a metal dish, applied a flame, and Foomph! It flashed up! It wasn't as fast as commercial power, but it actually worked!
In commercial production, the ingredients of gunpowder are milled together for several hours, always being kept moistened to prevent accidental ignition. I milled my batch for only a few minutes, but it performed well enough for proof-of-concept. The samples I had collected in the old basement probably contained a combination of sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate, because my powder burned with a softer, yellower flame than ordinary powder: a sign of sodium.
For my final experiment I wanted to load up my big .68 caliber flintlock pistol to try out the powder, but I didn't have enough powder left for a proper load in that. So I used a .45 cal. caplock pistol, which would work better with a smaller charge, although I would have preferred the flint ignition. I loaded the pistol with about 25 grains, a little under 2 grams, of my concoction, (most of what I had left), then wrapped a .44 lead ball in a greased cotton patch, rammed it down over the charge, and placed a percussion cap onto the nipple.
With the loaded pistol on half-cock, I carried a couple of phone books outside, and propped them against a stump. Then I presented the piece, brought the hammer to full cock, and squeezed the trigger. When I felt that pistol kick and heard the boom, I was quite pleased; I had made functional gunpowder from found materials! I felt I was one step closer in kinship to the ancient ways of our colonial forbears, whose self-sufficiency and resourcefulness I have always admired.
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I made a very exciting discovery while poking around in the basement of an abandoned house. The house was an antique colonial from around 1810; it was nominally owned by the Park Service, but in fact it had been unoccupied and unattended for many years. The ancient place was in a state of disrepair; and the fieldstone foundation had a crumbling hole on one side. I felt it was only my civic duty to make a tour of inspection of the historic building, and so I contorted my way through the badger-hole in the foundation wall, and I entered the dank earthy basement. What I found among the rough stones of the inside wall, gave me a shiver of excitement.
No, it wasn't a brittle leather sack stuffed with gold coins, that gleamed when you rubbed them with your sleeve. That's what I was hoping to find, of course, but it must have been too cleverly hidden. Also, I didn't even find an alcove that held a moldering oaken chest, bound with iron bands and a hand-forged padlock, filled with minted silver.
None of that, but what I did find, in the cracks between the stones, was an encrustation of powdery grayish-white material; with here and there some translucent brownish crystals. I found it more where there was mortar between the stones, and not as much where the stones had been laid dry. Examining the powdery deposits in the beam of my pocket-light, I thought, "Can this stuff be saltpeter?"
I had some sketchy notions of how saltpeter had been obtained in colonial days, for its use in the manufacture of gunpowder; the king's men would periodically rove through the countryside, breaking open stone walls to collect the saltpeter that accumulates inside them. I also remembered Poe's story, "A Cask of Amontillado," in which two men are deep within the catacombs of an old European city, and one man mentions the white webwork of "nitre" which they could see encrusting the damp stone walls. Nitre is the ancient name for saltpeter, or potassium nitrate. I thought it was a pretty good possibility that that's what I had just found. Gold would have been better, but this was interesting too.
So, I crawled back out of the hole, and I returned with some jars for collecting samples. I collected about 1/2 cup of the crystalline powder from between the stones, and then I headed back to my lab for some experiments.
To refine the samples, I put a stainless steel pot on the stove with about a quart of water, and added the powdery material. I boiled and stirred for a few minutes to dissolve out the soluble salts, let the sediment settle, and then filtered the liquid through a coffee filter. Then I put the clear liquid back into the pot, and boiled it away, which took about fifteen minutes. I was left with a brownish white crystalline residue in the bottom of the pot. This would be the saltpeter, if that's what it was. I scraped the stuff out of the pot with a wooden spatula, and I ended up with about a teaspoonful of the brownish powder.
The easiest way I had to find out if the material was in fact saltpeter, was to go ahead and try to make gunpowder with it. If the material was something else, the worst that would happen is, I'd waste my time making mixed dirt.
First I made some charcoal. Using a propane burner, I heated chunks of willow wood in a covered clay crucible, monitoring the crucible until it stopped off-gassing, then keeping it sealed until everything cooled. The third ingredient of gunpowder is sulfur, and for this I had to cheat and use store-bought from a lab supply, because I don't know of any natural deposits of sulfur in my location.
After grinding the ingredients separately in a mortar and pestle, I weighed them out in the correct proportions, mixed in a few drops of water, and ground the resulting paste in the mortar. Then I spread the black paste on a sheet of glass and left it to dry in the sun for a few hours. When the paste was dry, I lightly crunched it up into granules, about the consistency of very coarse salt. I ended up with about 6 1/2 grams of finished powder. This is about one hundred grains, in firearm parlance; enough for a musket-load, with some left over for priming.
Now came the moment of truth. I put a small amount of this stuff on a metal dish, applied a flame, and Foomph! It flashed up! It wasn't as fast as commercial power, but it actually worked!
In commercial production, the ingredients of gunpowder are milled together for several hours, always being kept moistened to prevent accidental ignition. I milled my batch for only a few minutes, but it performed well enough for proof-of-concept. The samples I had collected in the old basement probably contained a combination of sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate, because my powder burned with a softer, yellower flame than ordinary powder: a sign of sodium.
For my final experiment I wanted to load up my big .68 caliber flintlock pistol to try out the powder, but I didn't have enough powder left for a proper load in that. So I used a .45 cal. caplock pistol, which would work better with a smaller charge, although I would have preferred the flint ignition. I loaded the pistol with about 25 grains, a little under 2 grams, of my concoction, (most of what I had left), then wrapped a .44 lead ball in a greased cotton patch, rammed it down over the charge, and placed a percussion cap onto the nipple.
With the loaded pistol on half-cock, I carried a couple of phone books outside, and propped them against a stump. Then I presented the piece, brought the hammer to full cock, and squeezed the trigger. When I felt that pistol kick and heard the boom, I was quite pleased; I had made functional gunpowder from found materials! I felt I was one step closer in kinship to the ancient ways of our colonial forbears, whose self-sufficiency and resourcefulness I have always admired.
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New Doors
My friend Dave called me to do some work on the cabinets in his kitchen. He had some new doors that needed mounting, and so I put some tools in a box and headed over.
After showing me everything, Dave started right in with the kibitzing; he was worried that the wood was hard, and he thought my screws might crack it if I didn't drill the right size pilot holes. "These are new doors." he reminded me.
I told him, "Dave, I have every size drill from a human hair, up to an inch and a half, and that's not counting the hole saws. I think I'll find something that will work for the pilot holes."
"But how will you line the holes up, to get the doors on straight?" he wanted to know. "They have to look good."
"Oh! You're right; that is a good point," I agreed. "I guess I'll have to measure stuff."
"No, I'm serious; I mean, how will you do it?"
"I'll clamp the doors to the brackets, and mark the locations of the holes very carefully,"
I reassured him. "You don't have to worry about it."
"I don't know about using clamps," he told me doubtfully. "Do you have a type of clamp that won't damage the doors?" This was starting to get on my nerves.
"I'll pad the clamps, of course. And I'm not going to do this job unless you go into a different room while I'm working."
So Dave went into the other room with his laptop, to watch ebay and see how his paintings were selling. Back in the kitchen, I fumbled a clamp, and it made a noise. "Are you OK?" shouted Dave from the living room. "How's it going?"
"Don't talk to me, or I'm leaving," I shouted back.
"OK. I'm just checking." Dave subsided back to swearing at the computer, where the ebay people were certainly underbidding his goods, the morons. "Those bastards," I heard him muttering angrily.
I kept working as silently as I could, although the pivoting arms of the corner cabinet were puzzling me. They had a motion that I wasn't familiar with; I couldn't get the clamps to fit, and I wasn't sure how I was going to locate the screw holes. Dave's radar picked up on the silence. "Can I do anything to help?" he called a few moments later.
Now he's finally got me rattled; I can't figure this out. "I can't do it!" I admitted. "I'm going home; you'll have to get someone else; there must be a template or something that they use."
Dave instantly came pattering into the room, full of concern. "You can't figure it out?" he asked. Yes, he had known all along, it would be too tough. "It's OK," he told me. "We tried." Nothing ever works right; Dave knew that much. "I'll have to hire a cabinetmaker," he concluded, with a deep sigh. "It'll be expensive. I'll call Ted."
Ted! I worked for Ted sometimes, too. He's a brilliant cabinetmaker, a mentor to me in that line. I could picture Ted coming into Dave's kitchen, and looking at my unfinished job. Ted would be shaking his head sadly, and he would be thinking, "Leonard, Leonard… " That image was too much for me. I suddenly decided: By gum, Ted's right! I can do this!
I picked up my measuring tape and my square, and I went back to the problem, this time with determination. But now Dave was not so easy to convince. Disaster is always right around the corner in Dave's world. "No, Len. We tried, OK? I don't want you to screw it up. You don't have to do it."
"I'm fine. I'm OK now. Go back in the other room and check your computer. I think they're really screwing you on ebay."
"No, Len. You'll mess it up. These are new doors. You know how expensive these cabinets were?"
I finally persuaded Dave to go away, though he was now extremely uneasy. "What could go wrong?" I shouted cheerfully. That didn't help. I went ahead with my measuring and marked the holes, confident at this point that I had them correct. From the other room, I heard Dave explode with a string of expletives in his Brooklyn accent; apparently, things on ebay had just taken an ugly turn. I began drilling the holes. I knew Dave could hear the sound of my drill, and I could feel him wincing.
"What if you put the holes in the wrong place?" his voice wailed.
"I'll patch it up, don't worry!" I kept drilling.
"No! Those are expensive doors!"
"What do they say again?" I called with demonic glee, "Measure once and cut twice? Oh, damn!"
I went on, "I cut this same board three times, and it's still too short!"
Dave came running into the room. "What board? What are you talking about?" Dave is rarely in the mood to laugh, and this certainly wasn't one of those times. "What do you mean, 'cut the board'?"
"Never mind." I had screwed the mounting brackets onto the doors, nice and snug, and now I wrangled the doors into position in the corner cabinet, then I screwed the pivoting arms onto the brackets. Now came the moment of truth! I swung the doors closed, and they lined up perfectly.
"Cut the board three times and it's still too short!" I cackled, way more relieved than I cared to admit to Dave. "Still too short; get it?" No he didn't get it, but it didn't matter.
"You did it!" he said. "They're perfect! How did you figure it out?" For one moment in Dave's life, all the stress was forgotten. "How did you do it?"
"I have no idea," I told him.
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After showing me everything, Dave started right in with the kibitzing; he was worried that the wood was hard, and he thought my screws might crack it if I didn't drill the right size pilot holes. "These are new doors." he reminded me.
I told him, "Dave, I have every size drill from a human hair, up to an inch and a half, and that's not counting the hole saws. I think I'll find something that will work for the pilot holes."
"But how will you line the holes up, to get the doors on straight?" he wanted to know. "They have to look good."
"Oh! You're right; that is a good point," I agreed. "I guess I'll have to measure stuff."
"No, I'm serious; I mean, how will you do it?"
"I'll clamp the doors to the brackets, and mark the locations of the holes very carefully,"
I reassured him. "You don't have to worry about it."
"I don't know about using clamps," he told me doubtfully. "Do you have a type of clamp that won't damage the doors?" This was starting to get on my nerves.
"I'll pad the clamps, of course. And I'm not going to do this job unless you go into a different room while I'm working."
So Dave went into the other room with his laptop, to watch ebay and see how his paintings were selling. Back in the kitchen, I fumbled a clamp, and it made a noise. "Are you OK?" shouted Dave from the living room. "How's it going?"
"Don't talk to me, or I'm leaving," I shouted back.
"OK. I'm just checking." Dave subsided back to swearing at the computer, where the ebay people were certainly underbidding his goods, the morons. "Those bastards," I heard him muttering angrily.
I kept working as silently as I could, although the pivoting arms of the corner cabinet were puzzling me. They had a motion that I wasn't familiar with; I couldn't get the clamps to fit, and I wasn't sure how I was going to locate the screw holes. Dave's radar picked up on the silence. "Can I do anything to help?" he called a few moments later.
Now he's finally got me rattled; I can't figure this out. "I can't do it!" I admitted. "I'm going home; you'll have to get someone else; there must be a template or something that they use."
Dave instantly came pattering into the room, full of concern. "You can't figure it out?" he asked. Yes, he had known all along, it would be too tough. "It's OK," he told me. "We tried." Nothing ever works right; Dave knew that much. "I'll have to hire a cabinetmaker," he concluded, with a deep sigh. "It'll be expensive. I'll call Ted."
Ted! I worked for Ted sometimes, too. He's a brilliant cabinetmaker, a mentor to me in that line. I could picture Ted coming into Dave's kitchen, and looking at my unfinished job. Ted would be shaking his head sadly, and he would be thinking, "Leonard, Leonard… " That image was too much for me. I suddenly decided: By gum, Ted's right! I can do this!
I picked up my measuring tape and my square, and I went back to the problem, this time with determination. But now Dave was not so easy to convince. Disaster is always right around the corner in Dave's world. "No, Len. We tried, OK? I don't want you to screw it up. You don't have to do it."
"I'm fine. I'm OK now. Go back in the other room and check your computer. I think they're really screwing you on ebay."
"No, Len. You'll mess it up. These are new doors. You know how expensive these cabinets were?"
I finally persuaded Dave to go away, though he was now extremely uneasy. "What could go wrong?" I shouted cheerfully. That didn't help. I went ahead with my measuring and marked the holes, confident at this point that I had them correct. From the other room, I heard Dave explode with a string of expletives in his Brooklyn accent; apparently, things on ebay had just taken an ugly turn. I began drilling the holes. I knew Dave could hear the sound of my drill, and I could feel him wincing.
"What if you put the holes in the wrong place?" his voice wailed.
"I'll patch it up, don't worry!" I kept drilling.
"No! Those are expensive doors!"
"What do they say again?" I called with demonic glee, "Measure once and cut twice? Oh, damn!"
I went on, "I cut this same board three times, and it's still too short!"
Dave came running into the room. "What board? What are you talking about?" Dave is rarely in the mood to laugh, and this certainly wasn't one of those times. "What do you mean, 'cut the board'?"
"Never mind." I had screwed the mounting brackets onto the doors, nice and snug, and now I wrangled the doors into position in the corner cabinet, then I screwed the pivoting arms onto the brackets. Now came the moment of truth! I swung the doors closed, and they lined up perfectly.
"Cut the board three times and it's still too short!" I cackled, way more relieved than I cared to admit to Dave. "Still too short; get it?" No he didn't get it, but it didn't matter.
"You did it!" he said. "They're perfect! How did you figure it out?" For one moment in Dave's life, all the stress was forgotten. "How did you do it?"
"I have no idea," I told him.
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Current Optical Theory
It is well known that one cannot see as well at night, as one can during the day. What follows is a theory which may help to understand this phenomenon.
During the day, the optical beams emitted from the eye pass easily through the rarified aether, and upon reverberation back into the eye, an image is formed. However, as nightfall begins, there is a cascading descent of myriads of tiny darktons. (This is, literally, the fall of night.) These descending darkton particles being dense, they render the aether into a viscous medium which inhibits the passage of eye-beams. Ergo, one's vision becomes less keen at night.
The fall of darktons slows and stops by midnight, while the particles are gradually being absorbed by the ground and other solid objects. (This nightly absorption accounts for why it is impossible to see through a rock.) The rising of the sun, with its stimulating rays, completes the dissolving and absorption of the remaining darktons, and one's eye-beams can once more penetrate through the aether without impediment.
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Jan's Psychotic Plants
I lived for a few years in a large group house with seven other people. On one occasion, I was having some friends visiting overnight, and my housemate Jan was going to be away, so she offered us the use of her room.
Jan's room was next to mine on the third floor of the old Victorian. Her place was filled with life; birds, a dog, and a luxurious profusion of potted tropical plants. I often watered Jan's plants for her when she was away, and took care of the birds. So this was the room where I was going to sleep for the night, while my friends would be using my room. Jan had offered this arrangement, and I felt that it was going to be interesting, to sleep in the jungle among all those plants. At first I had a slight uneasiness about the idea, but I dismissed the feeling.
As it turns out, my night in Jan's place was filled with hellish nightmares: in my tortured dreams all night, the plants were gruesome and hostile; they bent over the bed, writhing and emanating a demonic energy; they were jealous of my intrusion, commanding me get out of that place, or die.
As soon as it was first light, I shook myself awake and got out of that room. I spent a groggy morning in the kitchen before anybody else got up, drinking coffee, calming myself down and letting the unpleasant reverberations slowly dissipate.
I never told Jan that I had had such a dreadful night in her bed. She was a very sweet person, we got along well, and I never perceived any sort of negative energy from her. The whole episode was strange and a bit embarrassing; and that's why I never mentioned it to her.
Some time after that episode, I had another friend visiting. Again Jan was going to be away, and again she offered the use of her room for the night. I had no wish to repeat the experiment myself, but I thought there was no reason not to let my friend Allen use the room. Allen is a plant person; his avocation is cultivating rare plants, and I felt that he would be delighted in the variety and profusion of plants to be found in Jan's "jungle". Jan's room was also the nicest one in the house; a very elegant room filled with arched windows, air and light. I decided I didn't need to mention to Allen about the peculiar reaction I'd had when I slept there, but I'll have to admit, I was curious to see how he would like the room.
As it turns out, Allen was not amused. Amazingly enough, when I met him in the hall the next morning, he looked shattered and wild-eyed. "That was the worst night I've ever spent; I hardly slept at all!" he exclaimed accusingly, as if somehow it was my fault. "I was having horrible nightmares all night!"
Even now I cannot account for it; was it just a coincidence that the same thing happened to us both? Maybe it was my fault that I let him sleep there without warning him, although truthfully, I had no reason to believe that the same thing would happen to him.
After that, I became really curious to know what Jan would make of all this, but I still thought best not to mention it to her. And I never did.
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Jan's room was next to mine on the third floor of the old Victorian. Her place was filled with life; birds, a dog, and a luxurious profusion of potted tropical plants. I often watered Jan's plants for her when she was away, and took care of the birds. So this was the room where I was going to sleep for the night, while my friends would be using my room. Jan had offered this arrangement, and I felt that it was going to be interesting, to sleep in the jungle among all those plants. At first I had a slight uneasiness about the idea, but I dismissed the feeling.
As it turns out, my night in Jan's place was filled with hellish nightmares: in my tortured dreams all night, the plants were gruesome and hostile; they bent over the bed, writhing and emanating a demonic energy; they were jealous of my intrusion, commanding me get out of that place, or die.
As soon as it was first light, I shook myself awake and got out of that room. I spent a groggy morning in the kitchen before anybody else got up, drinking coffee, calming myself down and letting the unpleasant reverberations slowly dissipate.
I never told Jan that I had had such a dreadful night in her bed. She was a very sweet person, we got along well, and I never perceived any sort of negative energy from her. The whole episode was strange and a bit embarrassing; and that's why I never mentioned it to her.
Some time after that episode, I had another friend visiting. Again Jan was going to be away, and again she offered the use of her room for the night. I had no wish to repeat the experiment myself, but I thought there was no reason not to let my friend Allen use the room. Allen is a plant person; his avocation is cultivating rare plants, and I felt that he would be delighted in the variety and profusion of plants to be found in Jan's "jungle". Jan's room was also the nicest one in the house; a very elegant room filled with arched windows, air and light. I decided I didn't need to mention to Allen about the peculiar reaction I'd had when I slept there, but I'll have to admit, I was curious to see how he would like the room.
As it turns out, Allen was not amused. Amazingly enough, when I met him in the hall the next morning, he looked shattered and wild-eyed. "That was the worst night I've ever spent; I hardly slept at all!" he exclaimed accusingly, as if somehow it was my fault. "I was having horrible nightmares all night!"
Even now I cannot account for it; was it just a coincidence that the same thing happened to us both? Maybe it was my fault that I let him sleep there without warning him, although truthfully, I had no reason to believe that the same thing would happen to him.
After that, I became really curious to know what Jan would make of all this, but I still thought best not to mention it to her. And I never did.
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Mind Trestle
"Now, you have to do it again. Walk back across."
"What? I have to do it again?"
"Yes; this time with your other side facing the abyss. just to make sure you didn't miss something important."
"Oh, G-d, look how far it is; I can't do it."
"Yes you can."
Whose voice is this, calling me "you"? And whose voice is it, answering "I"? Conversations with oneself are mysterious. I fixed my concentration on the walkway that I had just traversed; the outside edge of a RR trestle, with a 25 foot plunge to the river just inches from where my feet would be moving.
"Yes, I can," I answered myself. I started walking back across.
The foot-wide ledge along the outside of the tracks was not a highwire, but it was high enough to cause me great anxiety. It was also high enough to kill me if I stumbled and fell. The rusty iron edges of the trestle abutment were just under the water, 25 feet below me.
Of course, a foot-wide path is not physically hard to walk, but if one edge of it is a potentially fatal drop, then a misstep seems much more likely. In fact, the empty space seems to exert a mystical sideways pull, making a faltering step seem more probable.
Why not walk down the middle of the trestle between the tracks? The spaces between the ties gave a view straight down to the water, but that wouldn't be so bad. But this was one of those times when I got the urge to probe my limits, to try to overcome my fears, so as I had been strolling along the tracks and arrived at the trestle, it had occurred to me that I was going to make myself walk the edge, just to prove that I could.
But the contradiction about walking such a path is that the danger must be completely ignored, even while it is acknowledged. The artist Dali described "the exquisite anguish of the empty void." This is what attracts me to, and at the same time repels me from, heights. This "exquisite anguish" is the very thing that I cannot allow myself to appreciate, if I am to successfully negotiate this walk before me.
So that is what I did; I ignored it completely, as I walked the 100 feet of the trestle, along the outside of the rails just inches from the edge. The spaces between the ties along the edge were filled with blocks of wood, making the walkway a flat, though uneven surface. As I walked along it, I thought of nothing but carefully placing my feet with each step, until I was safely across. Only then did I allow myself to look back and contemplate what I had just traversed.
But after making the walk, to my dismay it occurred to me that I was going to make myself do it again, back the other way. Maybe it would be possible, I was thinking, to "unlearn" the irrational vertigo that attacks me in such places; to allow myself more freedom to enjoy the expansive vista, instead of shrinking from it.
No; I discovered that that would not be possible. It was not any easier the second time; once again I had to clamp on the mental "blinders", as I carefully traversed the ledge. I concentrated on each step, and thought of nothing else.
But I did it; I didn't faint, stumble, or get sucked wildly sideways by a mystic force. It was all over, sooner than I expected, and I stepped with relief onto the solid ground.
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"What? I have to do it again?"
"Yes; this time with your other side facing the abyss. just to make sure you didn't miss something important."
"Oh, G-d, look how far it is; I can't do it."
"Yes you can."
Whose voice is this, calling me "you"? And whose voice is it, answering "I"? Conversations with oneself are mysterious. I fixed my concentration on the walkway that I had just traversed; the outside edge of a RR trestle, with a 25 foot plunge to the river just inches from where my feet would be moving.
"Yes, I can," I answered myself. I started walking back across.
The foot-wide ledge along the outside of the tracks was not a highwire, but it was high enough to cause me great anxiety. It was also high enough to kill me if I stumbled and fell. The rusty iron edges of the trestle abutment were just under the water, 25 feet below me.
Of course, a foot-wide path is not physically hard to walk, but if one edge of it is a potentially fatal drop, then a misstep seems much more likely. In fact, the empty space seems to exert a mystical sideways pull, making a faltering step seem more probable.
Why not walk down the middle of the trestle between the tracks? The spaces between the ties gave a view straight down to the water, but that wouldn't be so bad. But this was one of those times when I got the urge to probe my limits, to try to overcome my fears, so as I had been strolling along the tracks and arrived at the trestle, it had occurred to me that I was going to make myself walk the edge, just to prove that I could.
But the contradiction about walking such a path is that the danger must be completely ignored, even while it is acknowledged. The artist Dali described "the exquisite anguish of the empty void." This is what attracts me to, and at the same time repels me from, heights. This "exquisite anguish" is the very thing that I cannot allow myself to appreciate, if I am to successfully negotiate this walk before me.
So that is what I did; I ignored it completely, as I walked the 100 feet of the trestle, along the outside of the rails just inches from the edge. The spaces between the ties along the edge were filled with blocks of wood, making the walkway a flat, though uneven surface. As I walked along it, I thought of nothing but carefully placing my feet with each step, until I was safely across. Only then did I allow myself to look back and contemplate what I had just traversed.
But after making the walk, to my dismay it occurred to me that I was going to make myself do it again, back the other way. Maybe it would be possible, I was thinking, to "unlearn" the irrational vertigo that attacks me in such places; to allow myself more freedom to enjoy the expansive vista, instead of shrinking from it.
No; I discovered that that would not be possible. It was not any easier the second time; once again I had to clamp on the mental "blinders", as I carefully traversed the ledge. I concentrated on each step, and thought of nothing else.
But I did it; I didn't faint, stumble, or get sucked wildly sideways by a mystic force. It was all over, sooner than I expected, and I stepped with relief onto the solid ground.
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A Surprising Visit
Years ago, I was sleeping at the home of a friend, in the historic Colonial harbor town of Marblehead, MA. On this night, I had a vivid dream.
I dreamed that I woke up in the bed, where I was actually still lying on my back, asleep. In my dream, I heard some people outside the bedroom door, and I turned my head to see the door open, and admit a man who walked briskly toward the bed. As he strode towards me, I was aware of every detail of his clothes and person: the square shape of his face, his short bristly salt-and pepper beard, his strong frame in a loose blue sweatshirt and canvas pants, the clear impression that he was a seafaring man.
In three steps he was at the bedside, leaning down with his face inclined towards mine, and I thought, "He's going to kiss me!" I recoiled, startling in the bed, and at that point he saw me clearly, and he recoiled backwards as well, straightening up with an astonished look on his face. In that moment with our eyes fixed on each other, my eyes flew open in reality, and I came abruptly awake.
Now fully awake, I found that I was still looking at the man; his eyes were wide in dismay and confusion. I was thinking, "I'm awake. How can I still be looking at him?" I watched, unmoving, as his frozen image slowly faded away and disappeared.
I lay in quiet amazement for a few more moments. My friend, in whose home I mentioned that I was sleeping, was in fact lying next to me in the bed; her name was Nancy. I turned over and looked at Nancy, assuming that she would also be wide awake at this point, since I had physically startled, and probably cried out "Hey!" just moments before. But she was sound asleep. So I didn't disturb her, and after awhile I fell back to sleep myself.
The first thing next morning, I told Nancy about my experience. She listened to my description with grave attention, and she said, "That sounds like my Bestefar; [Norwegian for] my Grandfather. He passed away years ago, but he comes to check on me from time to time." I felt a little mortified as she told me this; we weren't married, and the man had not been pleased to see a stranger in his granddaughter's bed. "We have a family tradition that he comes to visit us now and then, to make sure I'm all right," she went on. "I would normally be sleeping on that side of the bed."
Later, Nancy showed me a picture of her Bestefar. He was dressed exactly as I had seen him, he had the same square face, but no beard. "He grew a beard and wore it later in life, after this picture was taken," she told me. "He was a sailor all his life."
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I dreamed that I woke up in the bed, where I was actually still lying on my back, asleep. In my dream, I heard some people outside the bedroom door, and I turned my head to see the door open, and admit a man who walked briskly toward the bed. As he strode towards me, I was aware of every detail of his clothes and person: the square shape of his face, his short bristly salt-and pepper beard, his strong frame in a loose blue sweatshirt and canvas pants, the clear impression that he was a seafaring man.
In three steps he was at the bedside, leaning down with his face inclined towards mine, and I thought, "He's going to kiss me!" I recoiled, startling in the bed, and at that point he saw me clearly, and he recoiled backwards as well, straightening up with an astonished look on his face. In that moment with our eyes fixed on each other, my eyes flew open in reality, and I came abruptly awake.
Now fully awake, I found that I was still looking at the man; his eyes were wide in dismay and confusion. I was thinking, "I'm awake. How can I still be looking at him?" I watched, unmoving, as his frozen image slowly faded away and disappeared.
I lay in quiet amazement for a few more moments. My friend, in whose home I mentioned that I was sleeping, was in fact lying next to me in the bed; her name was Nancy. I turned over and looked at Nancy, assuming that she would also be wide awake at this point, since I had physically startled, and probably cried out "Hey!" just moments before. But she was sound asleep. So I didn't disturb her, and after awhile I fell back to sleep myself.
The first thing next morning, I told Nancy about my experience. She listened to my description with grave attention, and she said, "That sounds like my Bestefar; [Norwegian for] my Grandfather. He passed away years ago, but he comes to check on me from time to time." I felt a little mortified as she told me this; we weren't married, and the man had not been pleased to see a stranger in his granddaughter's bed. "We have a family tradition that he comes to visit us now and then, to make sure I'm all right," she went on. "I would normally be sleeping on that side of the bed."
Later, Nancy showed me a picture of her Bestefar. He was dressed exactly as I had seen him, he had the same square face, but no beard. "He grew a beard and wore it later in life, after this picture was taken," she told me. "He was a sailor all his life."
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Green Side Up
That was our joke, when I worked for a lawn crew one summer at Leisure Village. (We called it Seizure Village.) Besides other tasks, we installed sod for new lawns, and to relieve the tedium we would shout, "Green side up!" to each other, as we rolled out the sod.
We were also in charge of maintaining lawns, and the way we zipped around on those big Gravely tractors, we would sometimes give ourselves more work installing fresh sod, because in an instant, you could scalp a nice patch of grass right down to the bone. And being kids, we might tend to laugh like idiots if it happened. However, the homeowners didn't quite see it that way; they were neurotic about their lawns, and intensely competitive with their neighbors, if it came down to the slightest wisp of crabgrass, or heaven forbid a dandelion. They would get furious if we left the least little irregularity in the perfect green carpet, let alone a huge black patch of dirt where grass used to be.
Now let's say you had one of the more finicky homeowners, who had given our boss trouble in the past, concerning the quality of his lawn service. And let's say that this finicky homeowner also had a prize rose bush in full bloom, nestled in an island in the midst of his expanse of perfect green sward. We were warned about the prized rosebush, and we took the warning seriously. We had to take things seriously, because these beasts of mowing machines that we rode, had an open cowl in front, where the exposed edges of the massive knives whirled just inches behind the opening. But let's say, for argument, that that this massive machine were to crash into the said prize rose bush in full bloom, completely shattering the trunk and spreading shredded roses everywhere, you would be right if you assumed that this would cause some dismay to the property owner.
And here's the way it happened, and the way I narrowly avoided getting seriously maimed. My friend John Brady was driving the big Gravely that day, and towing the sweeper behind him. We had to leave the lawn immaculate, of course, so naturally we had to sweep up the unsightly clippings left by our mowers. That day I was operating the trimmer, an ordinary push mower, to trim around the bushes.
In the middle of the lawn of this one house, there was a garden which contained the magnificent rosebush in bloom; the pride and joy of the resident, as we had been warned. I was trimming the bushes next to this garden, and now I had made fresh clippings on a section of the lawn where Brady had already mowed and swept. As he came around the house for his next pass, I motioned with hand signals, over the roar of the tractor, that he should make one more pass through here, so his sweeper could clean up my fresh clippings. Brady didn't understand what I meant, and he motioned to me that he had already mowed there, and he continued on his path around to the other side of the garden. As he approached I kept signaling: "No, this way, this way- go through here."
At the last second, too late, he panicked and heaved the big machine over, to try to go the way I was motioning. Unfortunately, his maneuver swung the machine directly towards me, and in that split-second I leaped up and sideways. I'm not exaggerating to say that the huge cutting maw of the machine chopped past where my feet had just been, while I was still in the air. In any case, there was a loud rending crash behind me, the roar of the machine was suddenly choked off, and I looked back to see the tractor hanging at a forty-five degree angle on top of the wrecked rosebush, and Brady hanging over the handlebars amidst a swirling dust cloud. My first impression was that Brady's eyes were actually rolling around and around like in a cartoon. In any case, he had a most unusual shattered look, worse even than the rosebush; his panting mouth hung slackly open, his eyes were staring and he looked demented. Having just narrowly escaped getting my feet chopped off, I probably had an odd look myself, but all I could think of was how funny Brady looked, hunched over the ruin, and I began to laugh uncontrollably.
As I doubled up in laughter, Brady continued to stare blankly right through me, completely in shock; but gradually his eyes focused, and finally a grin spread across his face. We had just averted what could have been a much more serious disaster, and presently, he too was laughing uproariously. So there we were, cracked up like our wits were astray, as our supervisor came around the corner to find out what all the commotion was about. He froze for a moment at what he saw; his icy look taking in the situation. This quickly put a chill upon our hilarity.
The only thing he said was, "Get the hell out of here before Parker sees you." Parker was the owner of the company. So we slunk away quickly, to occupy ourselves somewhere else. Our long-suffering supervisor presumably made some story to Parker, and Parker presumably made some sort of restitution to the homeowner. What it was, we never found out, nor did we ever ask.
Amazingly enough, Brady and I weren't fired, but I don't think we shouted "Green side up!" so much, for a while.
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Itching Powder- a very improbable mistake
Who put itching powder on their principal's seat when they were in grade school? Just me?
Well, the fact is, I would never have done it on purpose.
In our town, there was a little corner store called The Spot, which sold much more interesting novelty items than you can get today. By saving my milk money for two days, I could take the two nickels and buy a tin of cigarette loads. These were little slivers of wood, covered in a white powder (which was highly toxic lead azide, as I found out years later). It did say on the tin, Do Not Put in Mouth, but it didn't mention why, or that the powder was poisonous just to get on your fingers, which it easily did. Or, that it wouldn't be so good for your victim either, when he inhaled the exploding gasses.
However, what we did know, is that the loads worked really well. You would insert one into the end of a cigarette, and when the unsuspecting smoker applied the match, the load would explode with a ringing crack, shattering the end of the cigarette. I only tried this on my mother once; the shredded bits of tobacco and paper were still fluttering in the air when she rounded on me; she was very free with the back end of a hairbrush for lesser pranks than this, but it was (almost) worth it this one time.
Another item that could be purchased at The Spot, besides whoopee cushions of course, was itching powder. I have no idea what this material was made of; probably asbestos, or shredded fiberglass. In the instructions on the package, the powder was recommended to be dropped down someone's shirt. Boy, didn't we have fun in those days?
Now, the principal of our school, Mr. Stouter, was a kindly, balding man who always had a smile for us children when he saw us in the hall. He seemed to always be on our side, whatever might happen.
For instance, one time Mr. Stouter was called upon by my second grade teacher to reprimand me. The teacher, Miss Skidmore, was a crabby, cross-grained old lady who was always finding something to lose her patience over, and this morning she hauled me down to the office to present my latest crime before the principal.
Here is what I had done: after the morning's recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, and during the Lord's Prayer, when our heads were bowed and eyes closed, I had been attempting to point with my finger at my girlfriend Carol a few rows away.
However, what I was not expecting to see when I opened my eyes, was the glowering, outraged face of Miss Skidmore standing right in front of me. She had observed my peculiar gesture (as a matter of fact, my finger was pointing at her), and had interpreted it as some devilish sort of blasphemy.
"Let us see what Mr. Stouter has to say about this!" she intoned ominously, taking me roughly by the ear. With my face burning with shame and terror, she marched me down to the office.
When we were standing before the Presence, she commanded, "Tell Mr. Stouter what you were doing!"
I told him exactly what I had done, and his face took on a look of serious concern, tinged with bewilderment. To my secret relief, I could see that he didn't share Miss Skidmore's high degree of indignation over my behavior, but it was also obvious that he had to support her for the sake of discipline. So he did his best to give me a speech; telling me I must never do such a thing again, etc., and then he dismissed me back to class. He and I understood each other better than my teacher ever suspected.
So, considering my liking and respect for Mr. Stouter, one would assume that I would never do such a thing as mischievous as putting itching powder on his chair. And I certainly wouldn't have, but it happened anyway.
It was in the following year, third grade. There was a certain kid in my class who had the unfortunate gift of being the one who always gets picked on by the class brats. So naturally, he's the one I picked on, to test a bag of itching powder that I had recently acquired. I had no idea if it worked; I certainly wasn't going to test it on myself.
So, before class one day, I sprinkled a liberal amount of the itching powder on the chair of my classmate Eric, and I sat in my own seat to watch and wait. Unfortunately, of all days, this was the day that Eric did not show up for school, and his chair remained vacant. Then, about 15 minutes after class started, our teacher Miss Lane announced that Mr. Stouter would be visiting our class for awhile, and we were all to be on our best behavior while he was here.
Presently Mr Stouter arrived, beamed his smile of greeting upon the class, and of all confounded bad luck, he chose Eric's desk to sit at, among the several vacant ones in the back of the room.
In helpless dread, I watched as his posterior settled into the anointed seat. After a short while, he began to shift uneasily in the chair, and his expression became somewhat preoccupied. OK, so the stuff seems to work, but this was not good. I could hardly bear to look at him, between guilt, fear and remorse; mostly fear. I did manage a few covert glances, and it was obvious that he was becoming increasingly uncomfortable, trying not to twitch.
But being the deep old file that I am, I gave no hint that I was aware of anything unusual going on. Miss Lane was perhaps a bit surprised when Mr. Stouter's visit ended up being shorter than she had expected; however, he soon rose from his seat, gave us a brief smile, and briskly took his leave.
All of us had noticed that Mr. Stouter hadn't said much on this special occasion, which people found puzzling, even though it did seem that he had approved of our general conduct. In any case, Miss Lane never found any reason to find fault with my good behavior, on this special day.
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Well, the fact is, I would never have done it on purpose.
In our town, there was a little corner store called The Spot, which sold much more interesting novelty items than you can get today. By saving my milk money for two days, I could take the two nickels and buy a tin of cigarette loads. These were little slivers of wood, covered in a white powder (which was highly toxic lead azide, as I found out years later). It did say on the tin, Do Not Put in Mouth, but it didn't mention why, or that the powder was poisonous just to get on your fingers, which it easily did. Or, that it wouldn't be so good for your victim either, when he inhaled the exploding gasses.
However, what we did know, is that the loads worked really well. You would insert one into the end of a cigarette, and when the unsuspecting smoker applied the match, the load would explode with a ringing crack, shattering the end of the cigarette. I only tried this on my mother once; the shredded bits of tobacco and paper were still fluttering in the air when she rounded on me; she was very free with the back end of a hairbrush for lesser pranks than this, but it was (almost) worth it this one time.
Another item that could be purchased at The Spot, besides whoopee cushions of course, was itching powder. I have no idea what this material was made of; probably asbestos, or shredded fiberglass. In the instructions on the package, the powder was recommended to be dropped down someone's shirt. Boy, didn't we have fun in those days?
Now, the principal of our school, Mr. Stouter, was a kindly, balding man who always had a smile for us children when he saw us in the hall. He seemed to always be on our side, whatever might happen.
For instance, one time Mr. Stouter was called upon by my second grade teacher to reprimand me. The teacher, Miss Skidmore, was a crabby, cross-grained old lady who was always finding something to lose her patience over, and this morning she hauled me down to the office to present my latest crime before the principal.
Here is what I had done: after the morning's recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, and during the Lord's Prayer, when our heads were bowed and eyes closed, I had been attempting to point with my finger at my girlfriend Carol a few rows away.
However, what I was not expecting to see when I opened my eyes, was the glowering, outraged face of Miss Skidmore standing right in front of me. She had observed my peculiar gesture (as a matter of fact, my finger was pointing at her), and had interpreted it as some devilish sort of blasphemy.
"Let us see what Mr. Stouter has to say about this!" she intoned ominously, taking me roughly by the ear. With my face burning with shame and terror, she marched me down to the office.
When we were standing before the Presence, she commanded, "Tell Mr. Stouter what you were doing!"
I told him exactly what I had done, and his face took on a look of serious concern, tinged with bewilderment. To my secret relief, I could see that he didn't share Miss Skidmore's high degree of indignation over my behavior, but it was also obvious that he had to support her for the sake of discipline. So he did his best to give me a speech; telling me I must never do such a thing again, etc., and then he dismissed me back to class. He and I understood each other better than my teacher ever suspected.
So, considering my liking and respect for Mr. Stouter, one would assume that I would never do such a thing as mischievous as putting itching powder on his chair. And I certainly wouldn't have, but it happened anyway.
It was in the following year, third grade. There was a certain kid in my class who had the unfortunate gift of being the one who always gets picked on by the class brats. So naturally, he's the one I picked on, to test a bag of itching powder that I had recently acquired. I had no idea if it worked; I certainly wasn't going to test it on myself.
So, before class one day, I sprinkled a liberal amount of the itching powder on the chair of my classmate Eric, and I sat in my own seat to watch and wait. Unfortunately, of all days, this was the day that Eric did not show up for school, and his chair remained vacant. Then, about 15 minutes after class started, our teacher Miss Lane announced that Mr. Stouter would be visiting our class for awhile, and we were all to be on our best behavior while he was here.
Presently Mr Stouter arrived, beamed his smile of greeting upon the class, and of all confounded bad luck, he chose Eric's desk to sit at, among the several vacant ones in the back of the room.
In helpless dread, I watched as his posterior settled into the anointed seat. After a short while, he began to shift uneasily in the chair, and his expression became somewhat preoccupied. OK, so the stuff seems to work, but this was not good. I could hardly bear to look at him, between guilt, fear and remorse; mostly fear. I did manage a few covert glances, and it was obvious that he was becoming increasingly uncomfortable, trying not to twitch.
But being the deep old file that I am, I gave no hint that I was aware of anything unusual going on. Miss Lane was perhaps a bit surprised when Mr. Stouter's visit ended up being shorter than she had expected; however, he soon rose from his seat, gave us a brief smile, and briskly took his leave.
All of us had noticed that Mr. Stouter hadn't said much on this special occasion, which people found puzzling, even though it did seem that he had approved of our general conduct. In any case, Miss Lane never found any reason to find fault with my good behavior, on this special day.
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Laundry Bag / Pipe Bomb -unusual adventures of a 14-year old
1960s- A 14-year-old boy gets stopped by the police, for suspicious behavior. What was he doing?
The boy was riding his bike one-handed down the road in a small town one evening, and with his other arm he was steadying the large canvas sack which was balanced on his shoulder. He had done this many times, and so he was surprised when a cruiser pulled him over with its lights flashing. The boy found the interruption slightly amusing, and he shrugged off the inconvenience with his usual stoicism. It became even more amusing when the officer swaggered up warily, and demanded, "What do you have in that sack?" On demand, the boy was compelled to dump out the sack's contents onto the road, which revealed nothing more than piles of soiled socks, T-shirts, underpants, and the like.
"I told you it was just my laundry," the boy was telling the now bewildered cop.
The boy himself found nothing unusual in carrying his sack of laundry down to the local laundromat, for he was used to being a bit out of step with other boys his age. I know this, because the boy was myself. My mother was who-knows-where at the time, possibly off on one of her weekend jaunts with her acting troupe, or perhaps just working late at her hat-check job in our local small-town night club, where swells from New York would often come down to go slumming for the weekend, and see if the local talent was any different than last time. Details are hazy in my memory, of where my mother was at different times; I just got used to not seeing her around sometimes. Starting back when I was about twelve, I remember my brother and I finding a note and some money on the kitchen table, and taking our bikes down to the food store, and coming back with TV dinners and ice cream pops. We would eat that, and do our homework, get our lunches made and bagged, and get ready for school in the morning. It was all just routine to us.
There were problems though. I once lost a friend, due to my unusual circumstances, and only through mere misunderstanding. I had met another kid when I first started high school, and we found a mutual pleasure in our new acquaintance, talking about life, and music, and all kinds of stuff that we were interested in. He asked me what my phone number was, so we could get together after school. I liked that idea, but I had to inform him sheepishly that we didn't have a phone at home. He found that so unbelievable, that, in short, he didn't believe me. Of course he had no idea of my mother's tendency to run up a large phone bill, and then be unable to pay, so that our phone service would periodically get shut off for extended periods. It was just another one of those strange and inconvenient things that I was used to.
I tried to explain it to my new friend, but he thought I was trying to trick him or fool him; his feelings were hurt and he was suspicious of me from then on. We drifted apart and never became friends. The memory of that misunderstanding still rankles.
Probably most normal boys feel at some time or other, that they have no one that they can tell their problems to. In my case, it must have happened a lot, for I developed some unusual leisure time activities, such as making large firecrackers, and pipe bombs. I used to set off explosions in a vacant lot near my house late at night, just to hide in the woods and watch all the lights in the houses go on, up and down the street. It sounds kind of stupid to say it now, especially in these very sensitive times, but I meant no real harm; I just wanted people to know I was there, even if they didn't know who I was.
Now, picture this same boy getting stopped by the police again, this time carrying not a bag of laundry, but a thick chunk of iron pipe with a plug at each end, and a ten inch section of red fuse sticking out. I was 15 years old, walking down the road with my friend David, in about the same place where the laundry incident happened a year previously. There was a large gravel pit on the edge of the deep woods, behind the shopping center where I used to do my laundry. That's where we were heading, Dave and I. We had not a care in the world, just joy of our newest pipe bomb, and anticipation of the huge boom it was going to make when we got it out there, and lit it up. Now, the cops in my town at that time during the early 60's were actually pretty suspicious, of anything that looked like it was not on the straight and narrow. It was a time of national unrest, and local crime in our town, and I was not unused to being stopped and questioned; for any reason or no reason. Sometimes it just happened when I was riding my bike late at night. Sometimes it was just because I looked like a hippie and they wanted to find drugs. But I never took it personally, and I never got busted for anything.
David, on the other hand, had a real grudge against the cops. For instance, one time we stopped to investigate a local disturbance. A man was raving and yelling by a store, and it turns out he had been sniffing glue and was acting threatening. Dave and I had just been biking by, and we stopped to gawk at the disturbance and try to see what was going on, with all the cop cars flashing and people stopping to get out and look. Within a minute, two cops approached us out of the milling group of people. Of all weird things, they searched Dave and peppered him with snappy questions, and confiscated his pocketknife, while completely ignoring me. My own knife was in my pocket, as it always was, but they only hassled Dave; of course Dave was showing them his usual bad face, and he ended up never getting his knife back. Stuff like that was always happening to Dave, and he was mad at all cops. Me, I didn't mind 'em. Even when I was carrying a large explosive device, it never occurred to me to worry.
So on this one occasion, when we were walking down the road on our way out to the gravel pit with our new pipe bomb, Dave said, "Len, could you please stick that thing up your sleeve? What'll you say about it if the cops stop us this time? 'Oh, nothing, officer. Just a little ol' bomb.' "
Well, I had to admit that Dave was right, there. It couldn't hurt anything to stick it up the sleeve of my coat, so I did, and we had no trouble. We got out into the middle of the gravel pit on that balmy night, and we had a lovely time setting off the bomb under the moon and stars. When the thing went off, it shook the ground with a profound thumping echoing boommm, accompanied by a plaintive whining hum, of shards of iron spinning away into the distance. Then, a moment of silence in the aftermath; Dave and I spellbound with awe. I thought to myself, "I bet they heard that one!"
An unusual experience, perhaps, in the life of a typical young boy, but not that unusual to me.
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Suds
I got voted "Did Most To the School" by my high school senior class, with a corresponding picture in the yearbook. Toms River High School, class of '69.
This title was awarded to me in part because of a prank I had pulled, in which I had poured a quart of bubble bath into the courtyard fountain. I can't remember what gave me the idea to do this, but I bought a large bottle of bubble bath, poured it all into a wide-mouth jar (to ensure a quick deployment when the time came), and I carried the jar to school under my coat. Ducking out of lunch period early, I dashed to my locker to get the jar, then I contrived to walk briskly through the school's outdoor courtyard when no one else was there, dumping the scented goop into the gurgling basin of the fountain.
In a short time, the fountain was foaming up beautifully, and when classes changed after the next period, there was a minor riot outside as students frolicked and threw the billowing foam at each other. Due to these unplanned revels in the fine spring sunshine, many students ended up being late for next period's classes. Not me, though. Although I did manage to be "passing through" after the following period, and I noticed sadly that the foam seemed to be slumping a bit. Even so, the event created something of a buzz that day.
I had confided in some of my friends, and somehow word had spread to those who shouldn't have known. There was an Earth Science teacher, Mr. Smith, who had designed and built the fountain as a project with one of his classes, and it was he who had been lovingly maintaining the fountain. By some means on this day, Mr. Smith was alerted to the identity of the culprit in this prank. So during the last period of the day, Mr. Smith came storming into my class, in front of my astonished teacher and classmates, and hauled me down to the office, there to be judged and sentenced by our stern principal Mr. Donald.
My [fitting] punishment ended up being that I had to stay after school, and bail out the fountain with a paper cup.
This I did, under the baleful glare of Mr. Smith, carrying each cupful of suds a long walk out to the woods behind the school. Eventually, he relented and brought me buckets, mops, squeegees and a hose, to do a proper workmanlike job of the cleanup.
So when graduation time came on, I got the nod for the distinction of "did most to the school", according to the vote of the students. My lovely confederate in the yearbook photo had nothing to do with it. Her name was Patti, and she never gave me any specific reason for why she got voted to share our title, just that she was "sometimes rowdy". The set up in the photo was my idea; I made the "detonator" out of a shoebox, painted black. Not quite visible in the photo, the cable is going under the door, which bears the title, "John Donald, Principal". The old bulldog had a good sense of humor.
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Road Band
The big Indian lunged at me, with a sudden wild swipe which would certainly have laid me flat like a busted reed, if it had connected. I am hardly built for such swipes, but fortunately I am built for speed, and I twisted backwards and away as the maddened lurch missed me by a whisker. I couldn't help breaking into hysterical, adrenaline-fueled laughter, which did nothing to soothe the savage breast of my antagonist. He fairly roared, and hurled himself after me, but I was too quick for him. After a lumbering attempt to catch me, he gave it up; but he kept his baleful glare fixed on me for the rest of the evening, as I and my band mates were loading out our equipment.
The evening was over, and as well as being the attraction, we band mates were also the roadies. The hangers-on at the bar, downing shots before last call, were evenly mixed between drunk Indians and drunk cowboys, and for many of them the evening was still young.
There was a large reservation out in the lava desert near by, Blackfoot and Shoshone, and everything around that was the wide open ranch country of the real Out West. On a Saturday night, the towns would see a large influx of men with nothing on their mind but to find a little excitement. Our job was to keep them dancing, and keep them drinking, and to remind them, don't forget to tip your waitress. And don't throw bottles at the band. Southern Idaho was a wild enough place for a kid from back East, just out of college, and it seemed like more fun than being a music teacher.
This particular encounter with the drunk Indian was nothing; the hulking fellow had been trying to pick a fight with our lead guitar player, Kevin, for no other reason than that Kevin was a big man; this wasn't unusual. Kevin was trying to ignore him, but when the fellow resorted to shoving, I stepped in. I came up behind the man, reached up and tapped him on the shoulder and began circling my fists like an English pugilist, all the while chanting, "C'mon, c'mon!" My intention was joking; I was half his size, and just trying to make him laugh and leave Kevin alone. But to my surprise, he exploded with rage and lunged at me. Yikes! But no harm done, luckily, and he did forget all about Kevin. He kept his eye on me for the rest of the time we were loading out; each time I passed near him, he would swing his head around drunkenly, and make a feint or two to keep me alert, but he wasn't really mad anymore.
This was one of many towns that we played in our circuit; bars were numerous and bands were few in those days. On a Saturday night in some of those places, driving on the sidewalk was not just a metaphor. At least once I actually did see a car bump up onto the curb, narrowly miss a building, and then reel off swerving back onto the road and away.
A bar band in Pocatello in the early 70's didn't have to worry about much besides keeping the tempo upbeat, once the people started to dance. If you tried to play a slow ballad at the wrong time, the people could get ugly in a real hurry. One night, soon after I had joined the band, it was early in the evening when the people had all left their tables and were just starting to get sweaty and rowdy, I decided that I was in the mood to play a slow number that we had just learned. My bandmates assured me that this was the wrong time for it; we needed to play another dance number, but for some stupid reason I insisted. About half a minute into the song as I was crooning, the people were glaring at us with increasing hostility. So we cut that nonsense short and went back to the boogie-tempo. Kevin gave me a significant look. I was learning who was making who dance, here.
Our lifestyle was interesting, for awhile. We were a four piece country-rock band, working full-time. When we really got cooking on a night, and all the bodies on the dance floor would be moving to our rhythm, I would reflect that there were worse ways to be making a living. Here we were, getting paid for doing what we would probably have been doing anyway back in our living room. The four of us shared a house in Pocatello; one hundred bucks a month split 4 ways, and the living was easy. When we weren't working, we were always practicing, and there were always people coming over to hang out at the house to listen, to party, to eat whatever food we had, to leave their empty beer cans lying around. I was the house maid (as well as playing rhythm guitar, or second lead, as Kevin called it), and I was always trying to keep the house in a condition something like what a civilized creature would live in. When I grumbled about the constant mess that I always had to clean up, everybody would protest, "Lenny, we'll help you clean the place up! Relax. We'll help you tomorrow." Uh-huh.
There were some hard cases that would hang at our house. There was one guy that we called Klauser, who looked like he shouldn't still be breathing. He was a generous fellow, and would always offer to share whatever he had going, for instance the case of morphine ampoules he had just stolen from a hospital. I was a little too straight to appreciate this sort of generosity, but the other guys didn't mind it. One night I bought a mess of beets, turnips, spinach, celery, potatoes, and I cooked a huge pot of vegetable soup. Klauser gratefully accepted his steaming bowl of broth and vegetables, with a kind of awe and reverence. I don't think he had seen something like that since he had been a child.
One night, Fleetwood Mac came to Pocatello, to play in the somethingDome at the local college. They were kicking off a nationwide tour in our little backwater town, and it was a really big event for the town. A great many people went, and since it was a night off for our band, we went too. I was excited that I would get to see Christine McVie, who I thought was very fine. The other girl in the band, Stevie Nicks, was actually drunk during the concert. She disrespected the audience; she didn't seem to care about the show, just because we were hayseeds or something. During the show, she kept leaning drunkenly on Christy, who shrugged her off several times, and at one point gave her a very angry look right on stage. It was clear that it was important to Christy to do a good show even if we were just ignorant cowboys, and I loved her even more for it.
My friends and I didn't pay to get in to the concert; we just walked in during the long set of encores. For my part, I stood transfixed by the sight of beautiful Christy McVie, live right in front of me. As they were taking their bows after the last song, I just started walking towards her, as the crowd was dispersing. I was only half-conscious of climbing over a barricade as I moved forward towards the stage. I only had eyes for her; I wanted to speak to her, touch her hand.
As I dream-walked toward the stage, I suddenly felt myself become airborne. Literally. I was up in the air and moving sideways, my legs paddling air like a turtle's when you pick it up by the shell. A giant security guard had come up behind me and lifted me up, and set me back down on the other side of the barricade with my legs still moving. So I just kept them moving in the direction he had put me, towards my laughing friends hooting and shouting at me. Christy never even glanced my way.
So the boys and I lived at our rented house, and we rocked the little bars in town, and then we moved to a different town on our circuit, driving through great expanses of panoramic mountain scenery to get to the next place.
In three years of driving around Idaho, I did see some interesting things. Our bass player, Kuta, was a local boy, and he knew the parents of Evel Kneivel, the stuntman. Kuta showed us their hometown once, and the parents' little grocery store, Kneivel's. We drove out to an awesome stretch of the Snake River Canyon, at the spot where Evel had tried to jump his bike over the canyon in his last big public stunt. (He failed, and he swung down on the emergency parachute, breaking a few bones as usual.)
Awesome canyon views, and then we were off to Sugar City to play for another week in another local bar; another five nights of boogie-woogie all night long. As most boys in a band do, we had big dreams at first. Kevin and I had been best friends since 4th grade back in New Jersey, and we had had visions of glory since we were boys. Al Hat our drummer was also an old NJ friend, and we had often discussed the idea of getting rich and famous. But in reality, our present routine had gotten monotonous. We were always getting to another town much like the last one, staying at motels or campgrounds for a weekend, a week, or two weeks, and then we would be off again, down the long road to the next place. Not much pressure; not much satisfaction either.
I started to miss my home. I would think of my old Grandparents and my Mom, still living near where the big farmhouse used to be, back in New Jersey. For how much longer, would they still be there?
So much for rock and roll; I was lonely. We had had a few shining moments now and then, but it was going nowhere. So at last, having a few hundred frugal dollars in the bank, the fruits of my brief rock and roll career, I changed them to traveler's checks, and told my mates of my decision to leave.
I gave my dear little Volkswagen bug a careful tune-up, changed the oil, and packed my guitar and few belongings into it. Then I pointed East, and was gone.
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The evening was over, and as well as being the attraction, we band mates were also the roadies. The hangers-on at the bar, downing shots before last call, were evenly mixed between drunk Indians and drunk cowboys, and for many of them the evening was still young.
There was a large reservation out in the lava desert near by, Blackfoot and Shoshone, and everything around that was the wide open ranch country of the real Out West. On a Saturday night, the towns would see a large influx of men with nothing on their mind but to find a little excitement. Our job was to keep them dancing, and keep them drinking, and to remind them, don't forget to tip your waitress. And don't throw bottles at the band. Southern Idaho was a wild enough place for a kid from back East, just out of college, and it seemed like more fun than being a music teacher.
This particular encounter with the drunk Indian was nothing; the hulking fellow had been trying to pick a fight with our lead guitar player, Kevin, for no other reason than that Kevin was a big man; this wasn't unusual. Kevin was trying to ignore him, but when the fellow resorted to shoving, I stepped in. I came up behind the man, reached up and tapped him on the shoulder and began circling my fists like an English pugilist, all the while chanting, "C'mon, c'mon!" My intention was joking; I was half his size, and just trying to make him laugh and leave Kevin alone. But to my surprise, he exploded with rage and lunged at me. Yikes! But no harm done, luckily, and he did forget all about Kevin. He kept his eye on me for the rest of the time we were loading out; each time I passed near him, he would swing his head around drunkenly, and make a feint or two to keep me alert, but he wasn't really mad anymore.
This was one of many towns that we played in our circuit; bars were numerous and bands were few in those days. On a Saturday night in some of those places, driving on the sidewalk was not just a metaphor. At least once I actually did see a car bump up onto the curb, narrowly miss a building, and then reel off swerving back onto the road and away.
A bar band in Pocatello in the early 70's didn't have to worry about much besides keeping the tempo upbeat, once the people started to dance. If you tried to play a slow ballad at the wrong time, the people could get ugly in a real hurry. One night, soon after I had joined the band, it was early in the evening when the people had all left their tables and were just starting to get sweaty and rowdy, I decided that I was in the mood to play a slow number that we had just learned. My bandmates assured me that this was the wrong time for it; we needed to play another dance number, but for some stupid reason I insisted. About half a minute into the song as I was crooning, the people were glaring at us with increasing hostility. So we cut that nonsense short and went back to the boogie-tempo. Kevin gave me a significant look. I was learning who was making who dance, here.
Our lifestyle was interesting, for awhile. We were a four piece country-rock band, working full-time. When we really got cooking on a night, and all the bodies on the dance floor would be moving to our rhythm, I would reflect that there were worse ways to be making a living. Here we were, getting paid for doing what we would probably have been doing anyway back in our living room. The four of us shared a house in Pocatello; one hundred bucks a month split 4 ways, and the living was easy. When we weren't working, we were always practicing, and there were always people coming over to hang out at the house to listen, to party, to eat whatever food we had, to leave their empty beer cans lying around. I was the house maid (as well as playing rhythm guitar, or second lead, as Kevin called it), and I was always trying to keep the house in a condition something like what a civilized creature would live in. When I grumbled about the constant mess that I always had to clean up, everybody would protest, "Lenny, we'll help you clean the place up! Relax. We'll help you tomorrow." Uh-huh.
There were some hard cases that would hang at our house. There was one guy that we called Klauser, who looked like he shouldn't still be breathing. He was a generous fellow, and would always offer to share whatever he had going, for instance the case of morphine ampoules he had just stolen from a hospital. I was a little too straight to appreciate this sort of generosity, but the other guys didn't mind it. One night I bought a mess of beets, turnips, spinach, celery, potatoes, and I cooked a huge pot of vegetable soup. Klauser gratefully accepted his steaming bowl of broth and vegetables, with a kind of awe and reverence. I don't think he had seen something like that since he had been a child.
One night, Fleetwood Mac came to Pocatello, to play in the somethingDome at the local college. They were kicking off a nationwide tour in our little backwater town, and it was a really big event for the town. A great many people went, and since it was a night off for our band, we went too. I was excited that I would get to see Christine McVie, who I thought was very fine. The other girl in the band, Stevie Nicks, was actually drunk during the concert. She disrespected the audience; she didn't seem to care about the show, just because we were hayseeds or something. During the show, she kept leaning drunkenly on Christy, who shrugged her off several times, and at one point gave her a very angry look right on stage. It was clear that it was important to Christy to do a good show even if we were just ignorant cowboys, and I loved her even more for it.
My friends and I didn't pay to get in to the concert; we just walked in during the long set of encores. For my part, I stood transfixed by the sight of beautiful Christy McVie, live right in front of me. As they were taking their bows after the last song, I just started walking towards her, as the crowd was dispersing. I was only half-conscious of climbing over a barricade as I moved forward towards the stage. I only had eyes for her; I wanted to speak to her, touch her hand.
As I dream-walked toward the stage, I suddenly felt myself become airborne. Literally. I was up in the air and moving sideways, my legs paddling air like a turtle's when you pick it up by the shell. A giant security guard had come up behind me and lifted me up, and set me back down on the other side of the barricade with my legs still moving. So I just kept them moving in the direction he had put me, towards my laughing friends hooting and shouting at me. Christy never even glanced my way.
So the boys and I lived at our rented house, and we rocked the little bars in town, and then we moved to a different town on our circuit, driving through great expanses of panoramic mountain scenery to get to the next place.
In three years of driving around Idaho, I did see some interesting things. Our bass player, Kuta, was a local boy, and he knew the parents of Evel Kneivel, the stuntman. Kuta showed us their hometown once, and the parents' little grocery store, Kneivel's. We drove out to an awesome stretch of the Snake River Canyon, at the spot where Evel had tried to jump his bike over the canyon in his last big public stunt. (He failed, and he swung down on the emergency parachute, breaking a few bones as usual.)
Awesome canyon views, and then we were off to Sugar City to play for another week in another local bar; another five nights of boogie-woogie all night long. As most boys in a band do, we had big dreams at first. Kevin and I had been best friends since 4th grade back in New Jersey, and we had had visions of glory since we were boys. Al Hat our drummer was also an old NJ friend, and we had often discussed the idea of getting rich and famous. But in reality, our present routine had gotten monotonous. We were always getting to another town much like the last one, staying at motels or campgrounds for a weekend, a week, or two weeks, and then we would be off again, down the long road to the next place. Not much pressure; not much satisfaction either.
I started to miss my home. I would think of my old Grandparents and my Mom, still living near where the big farmhouse used to be, back in New Jersey. For how much longer, would they still be there?
So much for rock and roll; I was lonely. We had had a few shining moments now and then, but it was going nowhere. So at last, having a few hundred frugal dollars in the bank, the fruits of my brief rock and roll career, I changed them to traveler's checks, and told my mates of my decision to leave.
I gave my dear little Volkswagen bug a careful tune-up, changed the oil, and packed my guitar and few belongings into it. Then I pointed East, and was gone.
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Luck 'o the Green
The teeny green, golden-eyed hopper, as big as the end of my finger, looked healthy and was quite active, in spite of what must have been the awkward accommodations of his trip. I first saw him hopping along the counter behind the kitchen sink, and to begin with I was completely dumbfounded. It was a frigid snowy winter night, here in Massachusetts. Can frogs teleport? Then I remembered the kale I had just finished washing and chopping up.
I cornered the little critter and got him to climb onto my hand, with his little splayed sticky-toes, and he sat for a moment and then leaped onto my face. Why, I take that as friendly!
Since it was the middle of winter here, the usual flying and crawling critters, suitable for frog food, were all socked in until spring. I could leave a banana on the counter for two weeks at this season, and not a single fruit fly would appear. So where do I get anything to feed a tiny frog? He is counting on me now, even though that was surely not his original plan.
I dangled a scrap of chicken on a toothpick, and made it twitch enticingly like a bug within striking distance of my unexpected dinner guest. The frog continued to look stonily into space, meditating on who knows what profundities. He didn't seem much impressed by me, anyway.
I clapped the frog into a little glass terrarium I had, misted him with some water, and then thought about what to do. The first thing was, wash the kale again, anyway.
Eating kale:
Crunch crunch, crunch crunch, >squish<
"Say... I wonder what that was?"
No, thankfully, that didn't happen.
But how do I feed the frog? I remembered one cold winter a few years ago, I had been looking for something in the back shed and I turned over a wheelbarrow. Inside the wheelbarrow, I had found a number of adult mosquitoes clinging motionless to the underside of the metal. They winter over under such shelters, moving very slightly if they are touched.
Mosquitoes would be a perfect size for the frog, so I suited up now, and took a flashlight out there to see what I could find. It actually didn't take me long to find several mosquitoes in a similar situation as before, under a plastic bucket. I picked them off with a tweezers and plopped them into a plastic box and brought them inside. They were moving around within a few minutes of warming up, and before they started to fly, I dumped them into the frog's terrarium. One landed and was twitching right in front of the frog. He ignored it. Presently, I had a nice screened terrarium filled with buzzing flying mosquitoes, in my living room. The frog might not have been hungry, but the mosquitoes certainly seemed to be. I really hoped the frog was appreciating all this, but after a few hours the mosquitoes seemed to have all died, stuck to the moist glass inside, and I hadn't seen the frog eat any of them.
Two weeks later:
Bruno the castaway tree frog is doing well, eating two little crickets a day. I've set his terrarium up with a nice pool, a bed of live moss, a branched frond of spruce to climb, and an electric warming rock from the pet store. This same pet store provides little crickets that are conveniently bite-size for the frog. When I dump in a couple of crickets, the fierce predator looses no time in pouncing on his prey, with a lunge that is almost too swift for the eye to follow. I got the crickets the day following my discovery of the frog, but he didn't eat until two days after that. However, he is now settled in and doing fine. He dug himself a cozy hutch among the damp moss, and I see his golden eyes peering out.
When I first set up the cage with the pool, I never saw him go near the water. He's a tree frog, but frogs like water. I thought that maybe he didn't know the pool was there, and I mentioned to my son Jake that maybe I should put the frog into the pool, so that he would know it was there.
Jake replied, "Papa, suppose you were staying in a really nice hotel with a pool. How would you like it if the housekeeper came and grabbed you and threw you into the pool, in case you didn't know it was there?" Good point. Anyway, a few days later, I happened to come by just as the frog was climbing out of the water, looking content, so evidently he discovered the accommodations and found them satisfactory.
But the sad thing about Bruno the Leetle Google-Eyed Tree Frog, is that he will never get married and have a family, unless Bruno is a she, in which case, she never will. Because there's only one of him/her. But considering where he might have landed, he's one lucky frog to have landed in my kitchen.
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You can watch a short video of Bruno catching a cricket:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5MBwn14zR4
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Wing and a Prayer
A year and a half ago, I broke my leg. It's not that uncommon for people to do it, but in my case, it was fairly humiliating as well as being a major ouchie; my last words before the accident were,
"What could go wrong?"
One bad thing about having no fear and demonstrating a fast cornering maneuver on your bicycle, is that when you slide out and bend your leg sideways the way it doesn't bend, after that you will have fear and will always have fear, instead of the feeling of exhilaration and invulnerability you used to have. I used to take a certain corner as tight and fast as possible, to see how far I would coast afterward, compared to my previous attempt. At 60 years old, I suppose it was inevitable that I would screw up eventually.
Well, I wiped out while giving a triumphant demonstration on one of my practice courses, while my wife was watching. Then I was lying on my back, aware that things in my hip area were not in their usual places. I figured by the feel of things, that I had dislocated my hip joint, and I pushed my leg back into place as well as I could.
"Should I call 911?" asked my slightly horrified wife.
"Call 911," I told her. That's the first time I've ever said that, but I had a good reason. I had tried to move my leg, and it had just flopped over; a really bad feeling to know.
Lying helpless on my back, staying as motionless as I could; ambulance coming, being shifted to a stretcher, to a gurney, a receiving room, down long cold corridors to an x-ray room.
"No," I was finally told by a nurse, who had a sympathetic smile, "No, you're not going home tonight. You better forget about that idea." Where I was going, was surgery; which finally happened about 30 hours after the accident.
The good surgeon went in there, bound up and trussed my snapped thigh bone using metal rods and cords, and at last I was put in a recovery ward. I found myself among old people who had broken their hip, doing things like turning around a little too fast while standing in the kitchen when the phone rang, and losing their balance. Well, these are my people now. My body breaks just the same as theirs does.
But soon I found out that most of these people here were in this place because they had come in for elective surgery, not because of an emergency; most of the patients were people who had made plans to be here. Consequently, the place was set up like some grotesque vacation resort.
I've got to give the staff credit for trying to keep the mood cheerful for people in pain. But I wish the social worker who bustled into my room a day after my arrival, would at least have read my chart before she chided me that morning; she said she hadn't seen me much in the social room at the activity sessions! Tut, tut! Well, what I knew and she didn't know, is that I had been in pure survival mode for the past several days; not really in a partying mood at all. Having to use a walker to painfully make my way to the bathroom, hadn't been in my wildest imaginings a few days earlier. Biking, running, doing my comedy shows (which I had to cancel), hopping, juggling: these were the things I had planned.
Two weeks I was in that ward: needles at 6:30 in the morning; no privacy; loud voices perpetually discussing medical issues around the adjacent bed in my room; TV's blaring everywhere; a stoic attempt at cheerfulness on my part. On the morning of my discharge the social worker bustled in again, and gave me a pen with a big pom-pom on the end of it, and a parti-colored guest book to sign. She asked me brightly, "Had I enjoyed my stay?"
This was an unexpected and dumbfounding question. Considering that this had been the most grueling two-week-long nightmare of my entire life; that I was eternally grateful that I was finally leaving here and going back to my home; the answer would have to be: not that much.
But I replied, "I'm truly grateful for the compassion and skill of all the wonderful staff here. I couldn't have done it without their care." Her face fell a little, in confusion; she left the book with me and bustled out. I read some of the entries in the guest book; they were all very upbeat, and I wrote something like, "Keep up the good work!" Then I laid the pom-pom down on the ribbon-bedecked book, and got ready to leave.
I got back on the bike in a little over two months, before I could walk very well yet. I had just gotten off crutches and I could hobble for short distances with a cane. I really missed biking, so I tried it, carefully, and I found I could go a few miles the first time out. It really felt great, though I couldn't push much with the injured leg, and I didn't do any extreme cornering (ha ha). I felt like I was flying.
Flying slowly, with the immediate possibility of crashing and burning, but still, back in the saddle again.
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"What could go wrong?"
One bad thing about having no fear and demonstrating a fast cornering maneuver on your bicycle, is that when you slide out and bend your leg sideways the way it doesn't bend, after that you will have fear and will always have fear, instead of the feeling of exhilaration and invulnerability you used to have. I used to take a certain corner as tight and fast as possible, to see how far I would coast afterward, compared to my previous attempt. At 60 years old, I suppose it was inevitable that I would screw up eventually.
Well, I wiped out while giving a triumphant demonstration on one of my practice courses, while my wife was watching. Then I was lying on my back, aware that things in my hip area were not in their usual places. I figured by the feel of things, that I had dislocated my hip joint, and I pushed my leg back into place as well as I could.
"Should I call 911?" asked my slightly horrified wife.
"Call 911," I told her. That's the first time I've ever said that, but I had a good reason. I had tried to move my leg, and it had just flopped over; a really bad feeling to know.
Lying helpless on my back, staying as motionless as I could; ambulance coming, being shifted to a stretcher, to a gurney, a receiving room, down long cold corridors to an x-ray room.
"No," I was finally told by a nurse, who had a sympathetic smile, "No, you're not going home tonight. You better forget about that idea." Where I was going, was surgery; which finally happened about 30 hours after the accident.
The good surgeon went in there, bound up and trussed my snapped thigh bone using metal rods and cords, and at last I was put in a recovery ward. I found myself among old people who had broken their hip, doing things like turning around a little too fast while standing in the kitchen when the phone rang, and losing their balance. Well, these are my people now. My body breaks just the same as theirs does.
But soon I found out that most of these people here were in this place because they had come in for elective surgery, not because of an emergency; most of the patients were people who had made plans to be here. Consequently, the place was set up like some grotesque vacation resort.
I've got to give the staff credit for trying to keep the mood cheerful for people in pain. But I wish the social worker who bustled into my room a day after my arrival, would at least have read my chart before she chided me that morning; she said she hadn't seen me much in the social room at the activity sessions! Tut, tut! Well, what I knew and she didn't know, is that I had been in pure survival mode for the past several days; not really in a partying mood at all. Having to use a walker to painfully make my way to the bathroom, hadn't been in my wildest imaginings a few days earlier. Biking, running, doing my comedy shows (which I had to cancel), hopping, juggling: these were the things I had planned.
Two weeks I was in that ward: needles at 6:30 in the morning; no privacy; loud voices perpetually discussing medical issues around the adjacent bed in my room; TV's blaring everywhere; a stoic attempt at cheerfulness on my part. On the morning of my discharge the social worker bustled in again, and gave me a pen with a big pom-pom on the end of it, and a parti-colored guest book to sign. She asked me brightly, "Had I enjoyed my stay?"
This was an unexpected and dumbfounding question. Considering that this had been the most grueling two-week-long nightmare of my entire life; that I was eternally grateful that I was finally leaving here and going back to my home; the answer would have to be: not that much.
But I replied, "I'm truly grateful for the compassion and skill of all the wonderful staff here. I couldn't have done it without their care." Her face fell a little, in confusion; she left the book with me and bustled out. I read some of the entries in the guest book; they were all very upbeat, and I wrote something like, "Keep up the good work!" Then I laid the pom-pom down on the ribbon-bedecked book, and got ready to leave.
I got back on the bike in a little over two months, before I could walk very well yet. I had just gotten off crutches and I could hobble for short distances with a cane. I really missed biking, so I tried it, carefully, and I found I could go a few miles the first time out. It really felt great, though I couldn't push much with the injured leg, and I didn't do any extreme cornering (ha ha). I felt like I was flying.
Flying slowly, with the immediate possibility of crashing and burning, but still, back in the saddle again.
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