Sunday Morning Cab Ride

"Aloha," was the word that kept running through his head.
Charlie stood on the curb, looking down the street for the taxi. He didn't ride in taxis much, but today seemed like the day to throw caution to the wind. He thought about the TV shows he had seen where the detectives used the cab driver's records to trace the suspect, usually with the cabbie giving a dead-on description of the guy they had mostly seen through a rear-view mirror. He thought again about where he had spent the night: The Highland Motor Inn, located about eight miles from his house. "My apartment, our apartment," Charlie reminded himself aloud.
Would Violet send the cops after him? He doubted it. Sometimes he left for a while, till things calmed down. When he came back she never acted relieved to see him, just more relaxed. But he had never been away for the night. He had always gone home before.
"Aloha," he murmured again and fingered the silk flower lei around his neck. He wasn't headed anywhere tropical; the lei had been an afterthought as he purchased the rest of his traveling clothes. The canary yellow shirt and white pants shouted a greeting from yards away, but the black bowler hat really set the whole ensemble off. He didn't wear socks, and for the first time in twenty six years Charlie was wearing shoes without laces. He guessed that the laces would just slow him down when he hit Reno.
Wasn't there something else he remembered about Reno? Didn't people go there to get quickie divorces back in the day? Violet would have laughed at that. You'd have to be married to get divorced, Chuck. Nobody else called him Chuck. Once upon a time, that felt like being treated special.
When he looked up again, the taxi was turning the corner. Charlie picked up his bag and met the driver coming around to the open trunk. He handed the bag over - the one he bought to carry his old clothes in, just in case - and smiled at the cabbie, "Aloha!"

Emotional Rescue

"When all hope is gone, Sad songs say so much" - Elton John/Bernie Taupin
This morning as I was out running, listening to my mp3 player, I was struck by just how many sad songs I know. All the words, all the melodies, all the sorrow - and I took the time to transfer them to a digital mode for easy transport.
"If someone else is suffering enough to write it down, When every single word makes sense, Then it's easier to have those songs around" - Elton and Bernie again
Why would I want to purposefully set myself up for ennui and melancholia? As I continued to run with the strains of Pearl Jam's "Black" roaring through my headphones, it occurred to me that I must be giving myself the emotional equivalent of a workout as I continued to work up a sweat in my physical sphere. Anybody can push themselves to the next level while listening to "Gonna Fly Now" or even "Eye of the Tiger." It takes a whole different set of muscles to keep going while "Hasten Down the Wind" is trying to distract you.
Even after the exercise is done, sometimes I'll ask my wife to sit down and listen to the lyrics of a particular song - to see if it's just me. Sometimes a song like Green Day's "Good Riddance" will hang around the radio and become popular without a lot of consideration. It's my understanding that it has become a favorite at weddings, with the refrain of "I hope you had the time of your life." Irony isn't suited for top 40 radio.
"The kick inside is in the line that finally gets to you, and it feels so good to hurt so bad" - Bernie wrote the words, not Elton
I guess we're all just a phone call away from that kind of feeling. Sometimes feeling bad is better than not feeling anything at all.

Rack 'Em Up

I went to a pool hall this afternoon to remind myself of my shortcomings. It's not really a self-esteem issue anymore - I have a fairly evolved sense of the cans and can'ts in my physical world. The whole hand/eye coordination thing has been a sore spot for me since I can remember.
I played a lot of right field. I'm always happier throwing a ball than catching it. Seeing how far or how long I can do something is a better test of my capablilities than how accurate I can be. If I work long and hard enough on a particular sequence of motions, I can usually approximate the look and feel pretty well as long as hitting the target isn't going to be required. Basketball was always kind of a laugh for me, until I figured out that with a hook shot, you really didn't have to be that good, you just had to find your spot. My hook shot was never truly graceful, but it did drop on enough occasions to win a game or two of HORSE.
Back at the pool hall, I tried to apply everything I could recall from watching "Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land" a dozen times in elementary school. I tried to connect what I knew about physics and all the times I watched "The Color of Money." I knew exactly what it should look like - but when the cue slid between my fingers, the result was generally a feeble roll across the table, dropping the cue ball as often as any of the balls I was supposed to hit. If I was looking to hustle anybody, they probably wouldn't have believed my best game enough to try to play me for money.
So this is probably why I continue to revel in spectator sports. I see these athletes as my surrogate hands and eyes. I grasp the innate physical difficulty of turning a double play, or sinking the eight ball off two rails in the corner pocket, but I can't truly conceive of it. I'll continue to work on my game - all of them in fact, since I've got an eight year old who doesn't care what my limitations might be. He just wants to play the game.

Rubber Match

I turned forty-three just about two months ago. I say this now because it gives a reference point for the rest of the story. I had to buy condoms for the first time in a decade last week. Most of the time my wife and I have been together, birth control has been a shared concern, but the options have been primarily of the long-term woman side of things. Condoms were from a breezier, young couple starting out time.
There I was, standing in an aisle in Long's Drug Store. The first thing I noticed was how poorly named the store was in the first place. You can buy lawn furniture there. You can buy two-liter bottles of Coca-Cola (for just ninety-nine cents). You can buy Hot Wheels cars (for the same low ninety-nine cents). You can buy a whole lot of things at Long's Drug Store that are not drugs. Most of the things you can buy at Long's Drug Store are not drugs - nor are they condoms. That is to say that it took me several aisles to discern what category of thing I was looking for in order to find the item I was there to purchase. I didn't have the courage to ask any of the pleasant and courteous staff for help, so I finally narrowed down the possibilities to the back end of the store, where I found a surprisingly large selection.
It made me proud to be an American, standing there in front of the contraceptive selection at my local drug store. In Russia you'd have to stand in line for six or seven hours to be handed something made from old tank parts that you still needed a doctor's note to use. Here in America I was stymied only briefly by the assortment of colors and shapes. Then there was the question of how many - if I bought three was I being too shy? If I bought a dozen was I being a lech? Did I mention that my wife was waiting in the car for me while I made my selection?
I decided on an assortment, and if I bought a dozen. On the way up to the register, I picked up a bouquet of flowers - did I mention that my wife was waiting in the car? There I waited as the lone cashier carefully rang up the items for the lady in front of me. I worked hard on my nonchalance with my flowers and condoms, and then it was my turn. He couldn't get the condoms to scan. The lady behind me tapped her foot. The cashier asked me if I knew how much they were. I told him my guess - I probably would have paid double just to move things along. He asked me if I wanted paper or plastic, and I told him I thought I could get along without a bag.
When I reached the door, the alarm started to beep and the security guard stepped over and asked to see my purchases and receipt. I handed them over and waited while he carried them back into the store and had them carefully removed from inventory. He walked back to where I was standing, bouquet in hand, gave me back my condoms, and said "Thank you sir, have a nice day."
My wife loved the flowers.

In the Box

My Aunt Nell was a very nice lady. I guess I should qualify that: I remember her as a very nice lady. She stood in stark contrast to her sister, my father's mother. That would make her my great-aunt, but that was never really an issue. She made us feel comfortable when we were with her. We referred to my grandmother Esther as "The Great Stoneface of Kansas." There wasn't a lot of play in Esther.
Nell was fun. I learned to eat carrots straight out of the ground in her tiny back yard garden. She did not insist on watching Lawrence Welk and "Hee Haw" when she as babysitting for us. It's not that she was any kind of pushover - when she needed to, she could set her jaw and let us know just how where her line was. And we respected that.
I didn't see as much of Nell after we were old enough to look after ourselves. There were still birthday cards with five dollar bills tucked inside, and a hug with a mushy kiss at the infrequent extended family gatherings. I was surprised by my father's request to attend her funeral. My father's side of the family was a little loose by design, and as I had never attended anyone's funeral, I expressed a good deal of concern about the details. My father assured me that it was a simple enough operation, just a short service, and then a trip to the cemetery - I'd been to the cemetery plenty of times. There was one thing more. He asked me, if it was necessary, to be a pallbearer.
That was the part that got my imagination going. I had never attended a funeral, but I had seen plenty on TV and movies. I knew that there were all kinds of ways for pallbearing to go awry. I told my father that my biggest fear was seeing Aunt Nell's body - especially since all of my memories of her were so active and vibrant. My father reassured me that there would be little or no reason for me to be concerned, since it was a closed-casket service and my cousin Al was almost a sure thing for the last position.
The call came on the morning of the service - Al couldn't make it. I congratulated myself for having the paranoid foresight to go over all the possible embarrassing possibilities. I dressed in what amounted to my best suit and tie, keeping in mind the somber tone with the darkest blue jacket I had and the black tie I had once worn as part of my Blues Brothers costume. When we arrived at the funeral home, my father showed me to a seat at the front in the corner where we sat with four other relatives who I remembered more by reputation than experience. True to my father's word, the casket was closed and I was free to reminisce as the minister spoke of the lively old lady that I knew. As the service concluded, my father nudged me in the ribs - it was time to wait outside with the hearse. Walking solemnly past the casket, I heard the minister say, "And if anyone would like to come up and share one last moment with Nell..."
He opened the box. The lid came open with a faint rush of air that I have imprinted on my memory as tainted with formaldehyde. There she was - or wasn't in the metaphysical sense, and I was standing right next to her. The time that it took my brain to disengage and start moving again was probably only the tiniest of seconds, but felt like days. I didn't see Aunt Nell, and eventually that was the relief. When the pallbearers were asked to come back into the chapel and carry the coffin to the hearse, I was able to do it with a marked sense of detachment. I was moving a box. It was an easy job because I had five guys to help me. I could do it with one hand.
I've been to funerals since. I've only been a pallbearer that one time. Maybe it's like jury duty - a service to your community that no one really wants to do. Many are called, but few are chosen. Lucky me.

Blow Out Back To School Savings!

Having a hard time trying to find a new light bulb for your lamp at Target because of all stacks of binders and ream after ream of wide-ruled filler paper? It's that magical time again: Back To School. Stock up on pencils, pens, markers, crayons, erasers, pen erasers, crayon erasers, compasses, protractors, pocket dictionaries, rulers, spiral notebooks, pocket folders, safety scissors and Elmer's glue. Way back in the olden days, all this stuff was supposed to fit inside a cigar box that would then be stowed next your math book, science book, social studies book, and your leveled reader.
That was the easy stuff. The hard stuff was the school clothes. Due to my consistently panda bear shape, I was afforded a limited selection available in the "husky" section. You might think that thirty-plus years would be enough to lose some of the stigma from this experience, but it seems to run pretty deep. It didn't matter how long I looked with my mother, everything I ended up wearing looked like something you'd see on Peter Brady. Well, a husky Peter Brady. Coupled with this limitation was the onerous exercise of trying the pants on. I still don't like to try pants on. I want to wear those pants with the waist size that is smaller than the length, but that has never quite worked out for me. I remember standing there in the dressing room, a number of near misses balled up on the floor beside me, as another wave came over the transom followed by my mother's voice: "Here - try these."
I tried them all. Eventually we got a few new pair of pants, a bunch of new shirts, and a new pair of jeans for after school. Then there were school shoes. I wore Buster Brown until I got to sixth grade. Each year got a little easier. By junior high, I was able to get away with t-shirt and jeans a couple days a week. Every September I flinched a little less. Now I'm getting ready to go back to teaching fourth grade again, and I need some new teacher clothes. It's that time of year again.

Knot a Saffron Ligature...

My neighborhood is festooned with yellow ribbons. Well, not ribbons exactly, but magnets cut to the size and shape of yellow ribbons and stuck on the back of cars. If the meaning is somehow ambiguous, some of them have careful script writing that reads "Support our troops" while still others have a red, white and blue motif run along the underside of the loop. We support the troops. We buy magnets in the shape of yellow ribbons that say as much.
The sad irony for me is the number of people in our county with sons, daughters, husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, buddies and acquaintances who are the troops - of course we support the troops. They're doing their job. They are protecting us from a madman wielding weapons of mass destruction. Or they are helping us win the war against the terrorists. Or they are participating in a global struggle against violent extremism. No matter what you call it, they're out there 24/7 in Iraq and Afghanistan being shot at while things and people around them continue to blow up. Daily. Brave men and women doing a dangerous job in a dangerous place at a dangerous time.
So we put up the yellow ribbons. Why? Some believe that it has to do with a folk legend that dates back to the (U.S.) Civil War. The song "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon" tells the story of a young lady who wears a yellow ribbon to remind everyone of a boy who is "far, far away," and as a reminder to others that she is betrothed to someone who is "far, far away" (check out the reference to "Behind the door her daddy kept his shotgun. . . "). The song has the same title as a John Wayne movie - how much more patriotic could it be?
There was a book about a man returning from five years' imprisonment who had asked his illiterate family to decorate an apple tree with white ribbons if they wanted him back. In the early 70's there was a story printed in which an ex-convict was watching for a yellow handkerchief on a roadside oak tree, Parsons said. In 1972, Reader's Digest reprinted the story, and ABC aired a dramatized version of it starring James Earl Jones as the ex-con.
Then there's the Tony Orlando and Dawn hit from 1973, "Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Ole Oak Tree," that tells the story of a prisoner being released after "twenty long years." The yellow ribbon was a sign that his love was still waiting for him. On a televised newscast in January 1975, Gail Magruder, wife of Jeb Stuart Magruder, who was convicted in the Watergate scandal, decorated her front porch with yellow ribbons to welcome her husband home from prison.
During the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, yellow ribbons reappeared as symbols of solidarity with our captive countrymen. We put ribbons everywhere to remind us of the 60 Americans held against their will by Iranian extremists (look! A connection at last - extremism!). When the moral ambiguity level got high around the first Gulf War, the yellow ribbons came back out - this time as a symbol of support for our troops. Since then it has become apparent that any significant cause must have a ribbon of its own special hue worn on this or that lapel or Oscar gown to reference one's connection with a cause or concern.
But that yellow ribbon keeps coming back to remind us of our troops in far away places. It does not say "Support Our War" or "Support Our Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism" - it simply asks to support our troops. Okay. I can do that - but considering the connection with people being held against their will in places they didn't want to be - it makes me wonder if there's not a better, less ironical way to share our thoughts with the world.