Men, Women, Cannon Beach, and Chocolate

May 5, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | 3 comments


In honor of this upcoming weekend, I thought I’d write a little story about one of the traditions we used to have for Mother’s day, and something I, as a guy, learned about both women and chocolate.

As a guy, learning about either of these two things, and the interaction between them, can be both a stunning and humbling, if not totally baffling experience.

See, it seems like chocolate affects men a whole lot differently than it does women.  Me? I can take it or leave it.  Now I’ve talked to friends who happen to be female about this whole thing – and the word chocolate is uttered with a reverence a guy might have for – oh, say, the remote… or beer… or both… I don’t  know – all I know is that chocolate holds a place near and dear to every woman’s heart that I know, and none of the men I know really grasp the concept of how important, how heavenly, how earth shatteringly WONDERFUL chocolate can be to the women I’ve talked to.

As is often the case, it’s so much easier to illustrate than to explain, and of course, that takes us into tonight’s story, about Mother’s day, Chocolate, and a gender gap the size of the grand canyon.

We used to go down to Cannon Beach, in Oregon, and stay there for Mother’s Day weekend at a house right on the beach.  It was a neat place, and there were at least 4 bedrooms upstairs, and I think 23 couches and a ping pong table downstairs in a room just a touch smaller than the footprint of the house.

One of the things do aside from walking the beach and going out to Haystack Rock was try to have some fun stuff to eat while down there – and since there was a kitchen in the place, we’d bring food or get some locally to make while we were there.

One year my sister decided that something called Raclette, kind of like fondue – but she had it in her mind that instead of cheese, we’d do it with chocolate instead.  So a bunch of chocolate was melted, and plates of all kinds of things, especially fruit were brought out – and we – well, the guys of us, that’d be my dad, my son, and my brother-in-law and me  – didn’t quite get the whole concept of dipping perfectly good fruit into hot, gooey chocolate, but that seemed to be the thing to do.

So we did.

And I learned something about chocolate that evening.

It turns out that it affects men and women differently.

Those of us with a Y chromosome didn’t quite understand what the fuss was all about with the chocolate, and kind of half-heartedly put our little dishes up onto the grill to melt the chocolate, and then dipped our fruit into it after it was melted.

And I’d have to say, it was okay, but it just didn’t seem like “two great tastes that go great together” – and if we ate much of it at all, we’d eat the fruit, then maybe the chocolate, and pretty much forego the melting part altogether.

But it’s what the chocolate did to us (and I’m speaking of us as in guys) that was so different.  See, by the time we’d gotten to the point where we realized that waiting for the chocolate to melt for the second go around, all the sugar had overloaded our systems, and to a man (and boy) we were slowing down.

In the meantime, as if through a tunnel, we were hearing the women (that’d be, in chronological order, my mom, my wife, my sister, and daughter) laughing and chatting and just having a really good time…

Pretty soon it was clear that staying at the table was going to be a challenge – this was more sugar and/or chocolate than any of us guys had had in a long time.

We were fading, and fading fast.

Meanwhile, on the double X chromosome side of the table, the partying was going on with wild abandon.  Jokes were being told, laughter was clearly the order of the day, and chocolate flowed like – well – um….. Melted chocolate.

The XY members of the group drifted to the living room area, because – well, it was quieter, and tiredness was descending on us like a down comforter.

Meanwhile, at Party Central, those left at the table were now being regaled with stories that brought howls of laughter the likes of which I’d never heard.

For “the guys” – it turned out the living room, which we’d gone to to escape the noise, was still too loud. The call of the down comforter was too strong, and trying to keep our eyes open was a battle that simply could not be won.

The guys, The “Team of XY” all faded off to bed, with a mumbled “Thanks for the nice dinner” as we each shuffled to the bedrooms, resigned to lose not just the battle, but the war.

I put my son to bed, and heard the laughter still ringing in my ears, the sound of three generations of laughter and merriment in the distant background.

And suddenly – it stopped – as they noticed we were all gone.

I couldn’t help it. I could barely keep my eyes open.  In those few moments, my son was already deeply asleep.  I’d just managed to crawl into bed myself before falling there, but the last words I heard before succumbing to the arms of Morpheus, and I don’t remember who said them, were, “Now isn’t it just like those men, leaving us to do the dishes!”

Yup.

Just like those men.

But I blame the chocolate.

Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms out there, no matter which chromosomes you’ve got.

Shock and Awwwwww…

April 28, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | 1 comment


Please note: this story is written in the third person because one of the main characters simply can’t be me, and the other character is definitely not me.

It’s been suggested that I make that particular fact clear up front, so there it is.

Also, the original title, “Static Electricity, Paperclips, and Convex Curves” has been completely been blown away by a friend’s suggestion of the title that you see above.

So with that, we now return you to our regularly scheduled story, already in progress…

Nerds and Girls.

Not only nerds, but socially inept nerds trying to impress said girls…

And of course, that brings us to our story, which happened some years back, less than 20 miles from where I’m writing this now.

By way of introduction, I’m sure there are many, many ways one could describe a nerd, but the common theme I remember noticing at the time was that often nerds were absolutely brilliant when it came to communicating with computers, and at the same time, absolutely unable to communicate with other humans.

Note – this didn’t mean they didn’t occasionally have the desire to communicate with other humans; they just didn’t have the ability to do it effectively.   When it came to male Nerds communicating with female Non-Nerds (anti-Nerds?) – that effectiveness dropped to absolute zero.

As a professor in college was fond of saying, “You will see this material again.”

Enter Stage Left: A software engineer (um… Nerd) working at a rather large software company with a name synonymous with, oh, say, really, really small squishy things.

Seated at stage right: The receptionist for the building our Nerd worked in.

Note: The receptionist is astoundingly attractive, and our Nerd found himself absolutely smitten with her.  He, as often happens with males, wanted to impress her, but none of the small talk worked.  He’d talk about all the esoteric technical things he was good at, and she would smile and nod politely until he finished his attempt at communication for the day.  When he was finished, she’d usually say she had to get back to work, and he’d slowly walk away, trying to hide his dejection, scuffing his feet on the carpet as he went.

This went on for quite a while.

Summer turned into Fall.

Fall turned to Winter, (he was pretty determined) and while the heat in the building kicked on, there was no heat, nor were there even sparks, between our intrepid Nerd and the Beautiful Receptionist.

This was about to change.

One day, as he scuffed his way to the door to get out of the reception area and into the office area, he reached out to open the door and got a horrific shock.

He’d built up a charge of static electricity because of all the scuffing on the dry carpet, and reaching for the door handle completed the circuit, and sparks literally flew.

Anyone having been around computers for a bit knows that static electricity is bad.

Nursing his sore hand, he made his way back to his office, a land of straight lines, of monitors, computers, and keyboards and sat at his desk to think this through.  He put his feet up on that desk, and pondered a bit, trying to figure this spark problem out, and how to solve it, idly bending a paper clip into oblivion as he did so.  He crossed his legs and thought some more, and in the end, poked the paper clip into the side of his shoe.

Somewhere, Thomas Edison’s ghost handed out another light bulb as the brain cells in our Nerd’s head put two and two together.

See, static electricity is created because electricity is generated but has no place to go.  To oversimplify it greatly, clouds rubbing together (think thunderstorm), or shoes rubbing on a dry carpet, can create enough static electricity to make some pretty brilliant sparks.

But if you figure out a way to allow that electricity to bleed off a bit, you don’t have static anything.

And that’s exactly what our nerd figured out.  He left the paperclip stuck in the side of his shoe, with the bent part dragging on the carpet.

He then scuffed his way to the door that had caused him trouble, and reached for the handle.

No spark.

Heh…

He walked away – took the paperclip out and did it again.

Scuff scuff scuff scuff scuff…. <SPARK!>

Ow.

Okay – time to confirm it, to, as they say in software development and testing, “Can you repro(duce) it?”

Paperclip in.

Scuff scuff scuff scuff scuff….

… No spark.  Hmmm…

Paperclip out.

Scuff scuff scuff scuff scuff…. <SPARK!>

Ow.

But his testing was proving that his idea worked.  He wasn’t the first to come up with this idea, but he came up with this on his own, and he was proud.

He had something that would impress people.

He could fire sparks at them at will – and he could turn the sparks on and off with a simple paperclip.

He could impress peop –

Oh…

Wait….

He could impress the receptionist.

He left the office and left the land of the straight lines, and went to the land of the curves, where the curves were all in exactly the right places.  He was both smitten, and a man on a mission.  He was going to impress this receptionist, and she was going to really smile at him now.

So he tried to explain it to her – and it didn’t work.  In fact, it was, as is often the case, easier to illustrate than it was to explain, so he convinced her to come out from behind her desk so he could illustrate it for her.

So while explaining – he scuffed his way over to the door without the paperclip, and touched the handle.

And she saw, and heard, the spark.

Then he did the same with the paperclip back in his shoe, and he touched the handle again.

No spark.

But wait – she seemed interested!  Our nerd was on his way to scoring – uh – something… Even he wasn’t sure what it might be, but he’d never kept her attention this long before, ever.  He was going to show her how brilliant he was, that he could control the spark, and that it wouldn’t spark, that he could (oh, dare he?) touch her, and it wouldn’t spark.

He was going to show her, yeah, that was it.

Actions speak louder than words, right?

So he scuffed, vigorously, from the door all the way over to where she was standing. Oh, this would absolutely prove that his idea worked, that he was smart, that he – that he could impress a – a girl.

He scuffed hard, harder than he’d ever scuffed, just to prove the power of the paperclip…

…which would have proven its power had it been in his shoe and not lying on the floor behind him where it had fallen out.

(Folks, that’s known as foreshadowing)

He got right up to her, and said “see?” and reached out his finger just to point – but it was pointed at her, and, given that he had entered the land of the curves, his finger was a few safe inches from one of them.

…had there been a paperclip.

However, the vigorous scuffing had created such a charge in him that one could say there was a spark between them.

Oh yes, there was a spark…

Just like before, she saw it.

And heard it.

And this time, she felt it.

And it was in the wrong, wrong, WRONG place.

The surprise on our Nerd’s face as he looked at his finger in disbelief – the ‘smoking gun’, as it were was more than matched by the absolute shock (pardon the pun) on the face of our receptionist.

While our Nerd looked back to see what had happened, our receptionist was experiencing a pain the likes of which she’d never, ever experienced, in a – a location which had never experienced such pain.

While she was still processing this, our Nerd found the source of the problem. He’d noticed the paperclip was gone, and retraced his steps to find it on the carpet.  He got it, and came back to her, beaming, holding it up like a trophy, “I found it! I figured out what went wrong!” – and as his eyes focused from the paperclip to her face behind it, the expression that had started off as mild interest, but was rapidly transitioning through pain, a short detour at embarrassment, and then at the moment his eyes finally focused on that face of hers, came out of that detour and arrived fully at rage.

The beaming, triumphant look on our Nerd’s face was frozen completely solid by our receptionist, who turned around, and with her arms firmly crossed, walked back behind her desk, to the Nerd Free zone, and focused on her monitor… her phone, ANYTHING but him.

She couldn’t even look at him.  She wouldn’t look at him.

Our Nerd, his frozen triumphant look thawing into an agonizing realization of what had just happened, was embarrassed beyond belief, and any attempt at apologies were immediately frozen again.

He realized that as attractive as the land of the curves was, it was a dangerous place for someone only used to straight lines…

He sighed the sigh of the deflated, the sigh of the lost, the sigh of the forlorn, and slowly turned back toward the door, twirling the paperclip in his hand.

And as the curtain came down on our little drama, the door, as if sensing what had happened, didn’t even spark as he opened it, going back to the land of the straight lines.

Where things were safe.

Amazing Grace

April 21, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | 1 comment


I’m posting this on Maundy Thursday – the Thursday between Palm Sunday, when Jesus was welcomed into Jerusalem, and Good Friday, when He was killed there.  This is the day when that Last Supper you’ve seen in pictures happened, and later that evening, when Peter, one of Jesus’ strongest supporters and disciples, denied even knowing him – .  Tomorrow, those who celebrate Easter will remember Good Friday, and the crucifixion.  Thursday and Friday are the lowest points of the Christian calendar – but it is Sunday – Easter – when we are shown that Grace can abound, that there is hope. It is through the remembrance of that Last Supper Jesus had with His disciples, what we now call Holy Communion, that through confession and repentance, we find forgiveness, even for those who feel there is no hope, or forgiveness.

The following story, for anyone watching as it happened, took about as long as it takes to sing the verses below – but inside me – I was transported through thousands of miles, and hundreds of years – to places where time, and distance, were absolutely irrelevant.

With that, please, as you may ponder the significance of Easter, I submit:

“Amazing Grace.”

It was Sunday, in a large, old church, in a big city.  The pastor had called for Holy Communion, and as he got out the bread and the – in this case – wine, the notes gently flowed while the organist cleared the pipes to play.  But these weren’t just notes that had come from the organ to our ears, nor were they words that were just now coming from our lips. They had come a great distance, through many years, having been written by a man named John Newton, who was exactly what he said he was in the second line of the song, a wretch.

But the story in the song is one of redemption, of John Newton coming to an understanding that this concept of Grace – in which we are given something we do not deserve.  And the words, written by him in 1779 in England, composed with notes by  William Walker in South Carolina in 1835, came together in this church, on this morning.

The organ sang the first notes out, and old bones and pews creaked equally as people stood, each heading to the aisle to walk to the front to receive Holy Communion, their chance to remember in the symbol of the Bread and the Cup the forgiveness that was theirs because of what Christ had done for them.  Worn shoes shuffled forward on an equally worn carpet as they sang, not with gusto, but with the tired reverence that comes with age.

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

I was one of those shuffling, and heard the voices singing – some gray with years, some with the color of youth, many of them older, first generation Americans, for whom English had clearly been a a second language.

And suddenly, even though I was still shuffling – I felt I wasn’t in this church in this big city anymore.

I was transported to a land of tile roofs and cobblestone streets

A cool mist touches my face as I find myself stepping carefully on a foggy sidewalk.

As I walk, I’m overcome by the wonderful smell of simmering corned beef wafting out of a kitchen window.  I follow the sound of singing around a corner to a church, where the voices and harmonies show a faith and fellowship that has lasted through the ages.

An odd tinkling sound reveals itself to be from a young man, sitting on the sidewalk with a tin cup, begging.  All questions are answered by the scar across his face.  The tinkling comes from the people walking by toward the church, as they put some of their Sunday offering directly where it’s needed.

He smiles and blesses them as they go on.

We shuffled forward a bit:

 T’was grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believed!

I’m confused, for a moment – as I find myself suddenly transported to what is clearly a prison, to a cold, damp cell, with only one small, high window.  A church bell rings in the distance, and the prisoner in the cell has experienced something not all prisoners do.  He’s finally not only understood the significance of the mistake that brought him here, but has experienced a remorse that can only be answered by forgiveness.  This does not mean that there are no consequences to his mistake, but there is forgiveness.  His quiet prayer is as sincere as that from any pulpit, and the light and warmth coming into that dark cell at that moment isn’t just from the sun.

We shuffled on, and started to sing the next verse…

Thro’ many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
’Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

A steam whistle blows.  A locomotive hisses by, slowing for the station, and a young soldier nervously holds onto the open window as his now gray eyes search for the home he left two years ago.  In those eyes are the exhaustion of a thousand battles he’d wanted nothing to do with, and both the longing, and creeping doubt of seeing his family again.

He looks at his battered watch, the strap long gone, and knows that at this time, the Sunday pork roasts will be cooking, wafting their delicious smells out into the street.  It’s always been the first smell he smelled after getting out of the train station.  It’s a symbol of home, and this time, the war over, he should be home for good. 

The train clatters and bumps to a stop.  He gets up, and like all travelers, reaches for his bags and automatically walks toward the nearest exit, his uniform helping to part the respectful crowd of people so he can get through easier.  As he steps to the platform, he stops in the middle of the river of people pouring out behind and around him, and stands on his toes, looking around to get his bearings – so much had been destroyed in the war – and to see if anyone is there to meet him.  He is tackled from one side by his younger brother and sister, with the excitement only younger siblings can have for an older one.  The little brother, as little brothers do, wants to hear all about the battles.  The little sister stands quietly until he kneels to her level.  She hands him a small, soft object in a cloth napkin. It’s a slice of pork roast. THE pork roast. “Mama sagt, dass Du Heim kommen sollst, dass wir alle zusammen mit dir Mittags essen können.”  He shares the slice with both of them, and as his little brother picks up the bags, he picks up his little sister, and they all run across the street to the still standing house, to the kitchen, to his family.

There is no shortage of hugs, no shortage of tears.

He is home.

The melody continued, and we shuffled another step…

The Lord has promised good to me,
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

Again, I am transported – to a sidewalk near a church.  As I stand there, looking left and right, a stooped old woman walks closer, uncomfortably using a new cane to support her.  She passes me by, sobbing softly.  The gold ring on her gnarled left hand tells the story.  It is her first Sunday coming to church alone in nearly half a century, her husband who had sat beside her every Sunday for that many years, who stood at that altar in the radiance of youth and repeated the vows with her – ending with “…until death do us part…” had loved her – for richer, for poorer, in sickness, and in health – and he had fulfilled those vows to the very last one.  He would never accompany her to church again, but church is where she needed to be on Sunday mornings, and church was where she would go.  Someone who is obviously her daughter runs up to her and supports her, saying gently, “Oh maman, je suis sincèrement désolée. Je suis venue dès que j’ai su.” 

The rest of the words are lost, as I hear the sound of voices singing, and feel myself being pulled away again.

We shuffled forward again…

Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease,
I shall possess within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

Again, I find myself near a church, with the bell ringing quietly, but closely.  Only this time I’m in what’s known in some countries as the ‘churchyard’ – and the group of people, all dressed in heavy coats of dark colors to ward off the cold, have come to pay their last respects to one of their own.  It is clear – even without understanding the language, that she was held in high regard by everyone there.  It seemed, given the expressions of some, that they were now both relieved at the end of the suffering she had endured, and confused as to who would take her place, but one thing was certain, she had enriched their lives by her simple existence.  She had enriched their lives by supporting them when they thought they were supporting her. And those looks on their faces told me her transition from this life to the next had been one of peace, of joy, and eventually of rest.

We shuffled forward one last step.

I was getting close to the front of the line now – and as we sang….

When we’ve been here ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun.
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’ve first begun.

I found myself in a large, old church, in a big city.

It was my turn for communion, and as I took the bread, and drank from the cup, that first verse came back to me…

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

Dirty Fingernails, Paint Covered Overalls, and True Friends

April 15, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | by | 1 comment


If you’ve been reading for awhile, you know that a whole LOT of my stories have something to do with my cars in some way, and this one does – albeit peripherally.  It has to do with friendships, Saabs, and cookie jars – and it’s a very honest story.  When I started writing it, I didn’t know where it would go – and then I realized it had a second part – so I wrote that – and the two parts together gave it almost a synergy… So having given you that as an intro – allow me to introduce “Dirty Fingernails, Paint Covered Overalls, and True Friends”

My first car was a 1965 Saab 95.  3 cylinders, two stroke, just like an outboard.  At the time, I was learning so much – and there was so much to learn about it (translation: I knew so little about cars at the time) that for every hour I drove it, it’d take about that much maintenance, or more.  Eventually I got it to be relatively stable – but even so, it was a challenge to own this beastie.

One Saturday, as part of the routine at the time, I’d yanked the engine out of it (yes, “yanked” – you could do that with this car – take all the bolts loose, then grab the exhaust manifold in the right hand, the fuel pump in the left, do the hokey pokey, and yank the sucker out – really). I’d then fixed something on it it, and put it back in, and then driven the car to school on the following Monday.

At the school I went to at the time, a community college – we had a huge cafeteria with round tables for about 10 people, and a pretty regular group of us sat at this one table between classes to study, hang out, have lunch, chat – whatever.

I remember that Monday. I reached across the table for a pencil or something and someone saw that I still had grease under my fingernails that I just hadn’t been able to get completely out from the Saturday before – and this gal just absolutely freaked, then almost threw a pair of nail clippers at me and then went off on telling me that I needed to get new clothes and look better.  This went on for a bit, and it was clear that trying to get a word in edgewise wasn’t going to work at all, so I let her rant for a while.

A really good friend took me aside and tried to help.  He’d known me longer than they had, and tried to kind of help or smooth things out a bit by offering to take me to a fairly upscale clothing store – and I remember thinking,

“…and just WHO is going to pay for all this stuff to make me look acceptable in their eyes?”

I remember thinking they were incapable of seeing through the grease far enough to see why it was there.  Not that I wanted to go to school dirty, but if you’ve ever worked on a car, getting grease under the fingernails is part of the process, and getting it out takes a little longer.  I know now that there are things that can help with that, but I didn’t then.  I also knew at that time that none of them would be able to do what I did – I’d gotten to the point where I could have the engine out in half an hour (well, 32 minutes) – from the time I shut it off to the time it was in the bed of my dad’s pickup truck – and I thought to myself that if I had a skill that would cause a little dirt under my fingernails to remain, I’d take that skill over “looking good for someone for whom that was the defining characteristic of whether I could be their friend” every time.

I left that table that day and never went back.

I studied in the library, not in the cafeteria…

But based on that experience, I decided to try something.

I dressed like crap for a quarter.

On purpose.

I wore old clothes.

I wore overalls I’d painted my Grampa’s barn in (trust me, the barn wasn’t the only thing that got paint on it)

I wore the boots I’d been wearing when I painted the barn (they’d started out black, they now looked like a negative of a leopard… that was an oops…)

I mean, I worked at looking crappy.

If it was nice, unstained, and untorn, I didn’t wear it.

Did I have nice clothes?

Yup.

But that wasn’t the point, at all.  I was going for the seriously crappy look, and I did absolutely everything on purpose.  I wanted to prove something.

And honestly, it was pretty lonely for a bit.  I remember that it was hard to do what I was doing, but I was stubborn enough to do it – and I kept at it.

A few weeks went by, and I found some new friends at the library who were pretty cool people, and who didn’t really seem to give a rip about what I wore, they were just cool folks, so I hung out with them.  I remember one gal, Bonnie, was just gorgeous, and I was just stunned that she’d even be seen with me, but she didn’t seem to care, and it was really, really cool to see that these people didn’t care what I wore, or whether I had grease under my fingernails or not, they just liked me for who I was.

At the end of that quarter, I felt my point had been made, so at the beginning of the next quarter – I dressed a bit nicer – just because by that time, it was getting old, even for me.

And they noticed.

I remember Bonnie asking me what was up, and I told her – and the rest of my new friends. They were kind of surprised that they’d been unwitting participants in an impromptu social experiment, but I was honest with them.  And they now had a friend who they knew, and who they liked, and who also now dressed a little more respectably, and I had friends I knew didn’t care about my fingernails – and – here’s what got me about that…

In that first group, nobody seemed to care what it took to get my fingernails like that – not that I wanted them filthy – but there is zero chance that anyone sitting at that table could have done what I did with a car – any car, much less a 1965 3 cylinder, two stroke Saab…

And that’s what made me mad.

It’s like they were looking at me like a cracked cookie jar.  And they only saw the cracks, not the cookies inside.

Years later, I tried another experiment at another college, and it was almost the same experiment – from the other side.

Some of you guys reading this out there might get this.  Just like in any college, you end up with a lot of friends – male, female, whatever.  The university I went to had – well, far more than its share of nice looking young ladies.  I remember being very shy about talking to them – and at the same time remember feeling quite bad about the – oh – how do we put this politely? – I was feeling rather bad about the feelings this “red blooded American boy” was having about these “red blooded American girls.” – Those feelings tended toward the whole objectifying the young ladies end of the spectrum, and I just didn’t like that in myself.  So I thought about it for a bit, and realized that there was actually an inverse relationship between how well I knew the gals and how “red blooded” I felt about them.  It was almost linear:  The better I knew them, the more I thought of them as a human being and friend, and the less I thought of them as – well, objects.

So I tried to figure out how to solve this problem.  I mean, each of these gals was someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, etc…  And while I was just as full of hormones as the next guy, but I just didn’t like objectifying them that way.  At all.

And I wondered…

How could I stop thinking about all these nice looking young ladies in these inappropriate ways?

…and then I remembered…

I didn’t think of the girls that were my buddies that way…

What if…

And so – I remember picking one gal rather specifically (the gal I was most terrified of because she was the most gorgeous of the bunch, and therefore, I figured, totally unapproachable) – I’d chat with her in the foyer of the building before class (and was late to class more than once – heh – in fact, I remember one time, I’d just told her I had to get up to get to class and saw the whole class trooping down the stairs – I’d missed the class entirely…Well, I was majoring in communication at the time, and by golly, I was communicating… : )

…not that the prof saw it that way, mind you, but still…

One thing led to another, and Yolande and I became friends, nothing more than that, that had never been my goal, we simply became friends.  And while the fact that we were now friends didn’t change the fact that she was drop dead gorgeous one whit – it did change something in me.  I saw her as Yolande, my friend, instead of seeing her – and thinking of her – in ways that would make her feel uncomfortable, and me feel ashamed.  I haven’t seen her in years – but I still remember how well that little experiment worked, and how much fun that friendship was, a friendship that wouldn’t have started had I not wanted to be, as we used to say back then, “just friends.”

And what’s interesting is these two stories go together…

In the first – people were distracted by what they saw – because they didn’t like it, and didn’t bother to look past it to see what was inside.

In the second – I was distracted (oh, Lordy was I distracted – but… I digress) by what I saw – not because I liked it, but because I liked it in ways that I really shouldn’t have in that context – and just like the first one, I didn’t bother to look past the outside to see the person inside.

It’s kind of funny – this story also answers the question one of my college buddies once asked about “Why does Tom constantly have all these gorgeous women around him?”

Well…

Some were buddies to start with just because I just liked them…

And some ended up being buddies because I wanted to just like them.

It ended up being a serious win-win… : )

But it taught me a huge amount about people.

What they looked like, whether it was good or bad, gorgeous or plain, didn’t necessarily translate into what kind of a friend they’d make.

And it taught me to take gentle chances – because often, I found, the people I was scared of talking to wanted a friend just as much as I did.

Bathtime…

April 7, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | 3 comments


Bathtime…

A quiet time, when the cares of the day are soaked away by a warm, relaxing soak in the tub…

…for people without kids, that is…

* * *

When my son Michael was much younger, we used to take baths together, you know, a father-son kind of a thing…

Well, he’s gotten bigger, and unfortunately, so have I, and so getting the two of us in the tub at the same time isn’t as easy as it used to be. So I’ve taken to sitting on the edge of the tub with my feet in it, having taken my shoes and socks off and having rolled up my pants…

That said, one night, many years ago, he was taking a bath, and as is often the case, he called out, “Papa, can you come in here?” (Actually, it was “Papa, kannsch du do hehr komma, bitte?” – he still knows some of his German – Southern German to be clear.)

Sometimes he wants someone to read him a book while he’s in the tub, sometimes he just wants someone to play with.

This time, he wanted someone to play with…

Okay, I thought, what are my options? There was a TV program I was considering watching, that will probably be rerun, and I have the childhood of my little boy, which will not.

It was a no brainer…

So I went in there, and we’ve got some old shampoo bottles there (which make far better bath toys than anything else. You can make boats out of them, submarines, bombs (filling them and then dropping them into the tub – they make a pretty good splash when dropped by a creative 6 year old), and most of all, squirt guns…)

I was planning on just kneeling down beside the tub and playing with him, grabbing one of the shampoo bottles and kind of having a squirt-gun war… But when I got into the bathroom, he said, “Can you put your feet in the tub?”

Well, that would have meant taking my socks off, rolling my pants up, and in general getting ready. He would have had fun, and that would have been that.

On the other hand, I thought, “what if I just get in there with him?”

So, right after he said that, I stepped into the tub, socks, pants and all. He was looking down at the time, heard the splash of my left foot, and saw something just slightly unfamiliar at the bottom of the tub.

A foot.

With a sock on it.

At the bottom of a hole in the water.

Attached to a leg.

With pants on it.

The water splashed back, and he followed the splash and the leg up to the rest of me with this look that was a mixture of, “No, really? and “You’ve GOT to be kidding me” and “WOW!!! This is COOL!!!”

Then he started laughing that wonderful belly laugh that just makes your heart melt…

We had fun…

We found that if you have the shampoo bottles that have the little button on top to push down to get the shampoo out, you can actually take that whole unit off without taking the actual lid off and have a really good squirt gun.

So we did.

…and started squirting at the little lids that were now floating in the tub, the other stuff in the tub, and each other.

Within a minute I was significantly wetter than I’d planned on being.

We called Cindy, who had that, “Oh, you boys…” kind of look on her face…

Oh well…

So we went back to squirting each other…

Now after awhile my pants were pretty darned wet, and it was getting close to “Bedtime for Bonzo”, so I got out, and tried to take the pants off.

Now if you’ve ever tried to take wet pants off you know that it’s a bit harder than taking dry ones off, because they cling to your legs and won’t let go.

Michael watched with amusement as I made this discovery

So there I am, hopping around in the bathroom on one foot, with my very wet socks sklorching every time I hit the floor, part of one semi removed pant leg flying about, splattering water everywhere, and Michael’s laughing…

After flopping and splashing and sklorching and kicking for a very intense minute or so (it was probably less, but it sure seemed that long…) I managed to get my right foot out of the pants leg and onto the floor.

But in that last desperate kick to get my foot out and catch my balance, I very skillfully kicked the pants leg into the toilet.

This couldn’t be happening.

Michael howled.

Had he not been in the tub, he would have been rolling on the floor.

As it was, he was laughing that laugh that you just can’t get from anywhere but a small, happy child.

So, I got me dried off and changed, got him dried off and changed, and then got him bundled off into bed.

Ahh, Bathtime…

Such a relaxing time…

An “Inconvenient Truth” – and how important asking the right questions is.

March 31, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | by | 6 comments


I was on the phone with my mom the other day, and she said a couple of words that I’d never, ever heard from her.

We were all going through a rough time, so she wished us well, she said, “individually and collectively”.

The last time I’d heard those words said like that was in 1978, at Kingsley Field in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and I realized I had another story to write.

Back then I was in Civil Air Patrol, and our squadron, based at McChord Air Force Base, had one of the best military style drill teams around.  We had a group of young men and a few young ladies who could march beside each other, between each other, we could literally march rings around each other. You name it, we could do it, and we looked sharp.  Each state was organized as a “Wing” – and several of these “Wings” made up a Region (several states)

We had Wing drill competitions, (Youtube link as an example) and our reputation was such that the folks at Wing wanted us (McChord Composite Squadron, CAP) to compete simply because they wanted to see what we’d do at the Regional competition.

In fact, now that I think of it, for these Wing competitions, we had to get our uniforms looking absolutely perfect, including the shoes, and we learned how to spit shine them so you could see your teeth in them. At one Wing competition, I’d gotten a brand new pair of shoes that didn’t have any creases in them yet.  I shined them to within an inch of their lives, and then walked carefully out to where we’d go through a very thorough inspection.  The fellow doing the inspecting noticed those shoes with the mirror finish and no creases, and looked me square in the eye,

“Wha’d you use on those shoes, Cadet?”

He said the word “Cadet” with all the affection a cat might have for a hairball it’s trying to cough up. Clearly he’d noticed, but also clearly he thought I’d used a spray shine, which was way faster, way easier, and was definitely considered cheating. Not knowing what else to say, I answered truthfully:

“Kiwi and spit, Sir!”

He wasn’t sure about that response

“Are you mocking me, Cadet?”

I was just being honest…

He’d asked a question.

I answered it…

Truthfully.

He just wasn’t used to seeing shoes without creases – so not only could he see his teeth in them, but he could see his eyes, his nose, heck, if he wanted to, he could even see his nose hairs – really, they were good (the shoes, not the nose hairs).  They’d be that good only once, but once was all I needed, and so to answer his question of whether I was mocking him, I said,

“Sir, No Sir!”

I mean, he couldn’t get me on anything, I wasn’t being disrespectful, I was answering his questions truthfully, so he harrumphed a bit, then turned off to inspect and harangue the next cadet.

Well, we won that competition, and were officially the best drill team in the state.  We were going to Regionals – which was a tremendous honor, and it was held at an airbase in Klamath Falls, Oregon, a place none of us had ever been.

The Regional competitions at the time seemed to be a little more involved than the Wing ones.  They involved the drill competitions as expected, competitions in individual physical fitness, meaning a mile run, and team physical fitness, which was a volleyball game, I believe there was some level of written test or tests, and of course, you were expected to be on your best behavior at all times, because anything, and I mean ANYTHING you did could sway the Judges’ thoughts or ideas about your ability – or eligibility – to compete.

What this meant is that You Did Not Want To Screw Up.

The ride from McChord to Klamath Falls could take well over 7 hours, but with an old Air Force van, and the requisite stops complete with fluid exchanges (for both the vehicles and the passengers) it took a bit longer.

By the time we got there, we had just enough time to get out of our traveling clothes and into our uniforms for a meeting in a classroom, where the schedule would be given, the expectations would be set, and the law, we learned, would be laid down…

We’d just gotten in and were thinking we were pretty cool for making it when we heard the sound of marching.

In the hallway.

Marching?

INSIDE?

That just didn’t make sense.  But as we turned toward the door see where the sound was coming from, the squadron that had won the Nevada Wing competition marched in.

This was clearly not their first competition.

They all had matching flight jackets.

We didn’t.

They all marched to their seats, and stood there…

We hadn’t.

…in those glorious flight jackets…

Which we didn’t have.

…and they were at attention.

Which we weren’t.

We were stunned into silence..

Their commander called out, “Ready, Coats!” and every one of them took off their flight jacket, held it over their left arm, and at the command “Seats!” they all sat down…

As a unit.

Our eyes must have been big as saucers – this was clearly psychological intimidation, and to be honest, right then, it was working just a bit on us, in spite of the fact that we thought they were really pushing this thing over the edge just a bit.  Later, we were all wondering if they did everything in unison, and imagined that same march, only not through a classroom door, but through the men’s room door, followed by the command, “Ready, Zip!”

Nahhhh… not possible…

We knew good, but what we were seeing was more than good, it was just plain arrogant, and we weren’t having any of that.

We’d learned that at some of these competitions, a squadron might send out spies to watch another team practice, and actually steal their moves.  If the team with the spy went first in the competition, the team who’d invented the moves would look like they were the ones stealing them.

With all the talk of honor and stuff that we’d had drilled into our heads, this was just not right – but, as has been said many times over the years, all’s fair in love and war.

And in the inimitable words of Bugs Bunny, “Of course you realize, this means WAR!”

So that evening, we did a quick run through of our routine as far away as we could get from the barracks. It was very, very clear that we were ready, we were functioning as a machine, and we were simply ON.  So on the way back we figured if they wanted to see something, we’d give them something to see.

Now the way it works when you’re marching in a situation like that, is you’ve got one person, the commander, giving the commands, and the rest follow.

And the way the commands work is this: there’s the Preparatory command, which tells you what to do, and then there’s the command of execution, which tells you to do it.  So you’ve all heard “Forward, March!” in movies and the like, well…

“Forward” – that’s the preparatory command…

“March”    – that’s the command of execution…

And instead of “March”, we’d learned to say “Harch” – because when you’re trying to say it really loud without yelling, you can just get more volume into it.  Also, if you ever did something that was different than the standard “Forward, Harch” – (like Doubletime, Harch) – you could always undo that command with “Forward, Harch” again.

You always start out on the right foot, and even if the command was “To the Rear, Harch” – you take one step forward, pivot 180 degrees, and then go on your way, as a unit.

So now that you know all that, remember, we’re marching back toward the barracks we were staying in, (think dormitories, if you’ve never heard that term ‘barracks’) and we just knew that some of the Nevada team would be on the lookout, and we wanted to make sure they saw something, and that what they saw would mess with them just as much psychologically as they’d done with us – just from a different direction.

We had this fellow in the squadron named Ken Meloche.  He was Canadian, and reveled in the whole “for Queen and country” bit – and when he marched, he liked to march like the English did, with their arms and legs swung high.  So just as we came in sight of some of the windows in the barracks, and to mess with the Nevada boys a bit, our commander gave the command,

“Meloche Walk, Harch!”

– and every one of us, without skipping a beat, started walking just like Ken did.

Including Ken.

“Forward, Harch!”

– and we all marched normally again, like a drill team should march.

Heh – this was fun.

We marched for a bit, and could see more of the windows in the barracks – and out of nowhere came a command we’d never, ever heard before in our lives:

“Double to the Rear with Three Hops in the Middle, Harch!”

– and again, without skipping a beat, we did a ‘To the rear, Harch’ – which is just a reversal in direction, but we all took one step, and literally as a unit, did three hops.  I think there were twelve of us there, and I remember hearing the sound of three distinct impacts, we were that in sync.  We took one step forward, then did the next ‘To the rear, Harch’ and tried like heck to keep from grinning from ear to ear… (we tried that double to the rear with three hops in the middle again later – and could never repeat it).

This was just NOT what drill competition was supposed to be like.  It was supposed to be more serious than this.

When the final windows of our own barracks came into view, we heard the command,

“Walk like slobs, Harch!”

And I suppose the best thing that you could liken what we did to that exists in current culture is that we walked, in formation, like a bunch of zombies, knuckles dragging, feet dragging, drooling, the whole bit.

For about 10 steps.

“Forward, Harch!”

And we were back to looking sharp as tacks.

It was great…

If the Nevada boys wanted to mess with our minds, we’d mess right back.

So after we’d had dinner, and gotten into our bunks and everything – there were four of us in each room, and we were all full of spit and vinegar, the night before the competition. One fellow in the room decided that since the body can produce, – let’s just call it a ‘greenhouse gas’ – one that is flammable, he wanted to show us that it could be done.  And in a split second, I found myself taken back to a story my dad told me from when he was a kid.  Well, not so much when he was a kid, but when he was in that ‘no man’s land’ between childhood and adulthood, where bodies grow faster than brains, you know… And in it he’d told me it could indeed be done.  So as background, let me tell you that story from his “young adulthood”, as it affected things a little further down the road in my “young adulthood”.…

So I knew from my dad that “it” could be done.  He’d told me the story of when he was

a)       Young, and

b)      Male

…of how a group of his friends got together to prove that this, um, ‘greenhouse gas’ could be produced by a human, and could be lit.

On fire.

(Note: male… teenager… fire… cue the ominous music)

One of that group of his friends produced some matches, and two separate things happened that changed the outcome of that story forever.

Note: there was no one suggesting that this might, in fact, be dangerous, or that there was a possibility of injury… No, these were young men, with at that age, possibly a single functioning brain cell between them.  That they had to share.  And the fellow with the match was rather modest, so his plan was to demonstrate this flammability factor without exposing any skin – the implication being that this gas could escape through cloth and everything would still work.

That it would work was true, but the cloth also kept a bit of it between the skin and said cloth before it escaped.  This would have been well and good, and had the experiment been successful, there might have been the possibility of some hair follicles being ignited.  Other than that, no problem.

This was under the assumption that the cloth was cotton, or wool, or some natural fiber.

But it wasn’t.

This was back when the artificial fibers that we’re now used to wearing – be they Nylon or Rayon or whatever combination of things we have that make cloth last longer now – were just being experimented with.

And if you didn’t know, Nylon is flammable.

And those pants were made of Nylon.

So when this greenhouse gas came into contact with an ignition source, that which had made it past the Nylon ignited very well.

But remember about the cloth? – and that some would gather inside before making it through?

It did.

Which meant that on both sides of this flammable Nylon was flammable methane.

That was on fire.

The Nylon pants didn’t stand a chance.

They caught fire, and melted, and… let’s just say the area around the source of the methane was tender and blistered for weeks to come.  It’s likely that the ‘modest’ young man had a story to tell his grandchildren years later – and a peculiar scar in a place only his doctor would see once a year.

It was with this story in mind that I suggested to – we’ll call him ‘Bill’ – that maybe getting the layer of cloth away from the – um – source of the methane would be a good idea, and given that I’d told the above story fairly well, including using the words “second degree burns”, “blisters”, and the phrase “his pants were melted to his butt” – ‘Bill’ agreed, and lied down on his bunk on his back, his knees up by his shoulders, trying to arrange things in such a way that the gas would be lit, but other, shall we say, delicate objects in the vicinity would be safe.

It took quite a number of tries with a little Bic lighter that someone had with them, and eventually, the timing, and location of everything was right.  There was “fuel”, there was “ignition” and it really worked.  It was indeed evident that methane was flammable, though not with the full blown cataclysmic flame-throwing display that we’d all been hoping for.  Slightly disappointed, Bill put everything back where it belonged, but there was some evidence of our attempts with the Bic wafting about, and one of the rules that had been laid down early on was that there would be no smoking, no matches, no fires.

Period.

An adult who was supposed to be responsible for safety on that floor of the barracks we were in came storming into the room and absolutely wanted to know what was going on.

We thought we were dead.

This was the night before the Regional drill competition.  We were the best Washington had to offer, and we realized might have just blown it, in more ways than one – so to speak…

The tone in his voice made it clear he was taking no prisoners, and taking no excuses.  He wanted answers, and he wanted them now.

“Have you been smoking?”

Not knowing what else to say, we answered truthfully.

“No sir.”

“Have you been playing with matches?”

Matches? We didn’t have any matches, we had a lighter.

“No sir”

He kept at this for a bit, asking us as a group, then one by one, the same questions.

We told him the truth, every time.

The problem was, he kept asking us all the wrong questions.

He then called his superior into the room, explained the situation, and asked the same questions all over again.  Eventually he said, as if justifying to his superior why he’d even been called into the room:

“I’ve asked them individually and collectively whether they were smoking, or lighting matches, and they all said no…”

They decided that they needed to go talk this over, and about the time they left, we looked at Bill and suddenly realized that this could disqualify us before the competition even started.  The dawning realization of how deep the doodoo was that we might have gotten into – and what we would have to tell the people back home if we were disqualified, was agonizing, but we knew what the right thing to do was.

We told Bill he had to go down to tell the guy everything and straighten it out, and he did.  Well, we don’t know what exactly he told him, but we told him to tell the guy the truth.

And I’m sure, as Bill was trying to explain this whole thing to this stern adult, that deep in that stern adult’s mind was a young man who’d likely done exactly the same thing a few decades earlier.

We were let off with a warning – as long as we <snicker> didn’t do it again….

And somehow, we got away with it…

The problem was, not ONCE had he ever asked us if any one of us was using a Bic lighter to try to light farts with.

We were allowed to compete.

We came in second – I mean, we did really well in the drill competition, and did okay in the volleyball game, and I remember my time for the mile run being okay – a little over six minutes – but my pulse was 228 and my gums were bleeding as I crossed the finish line – so I knew I’d given it pretty much all I had.  The reason we were a little short in the physical fitness part of it was because we were used to the elevation of McChord Air Force Base –a whopping 283 feet.  The 4,000+ foot elevation of Klamath Falls just did a number on us.

I don’t remember what maneuvers we did for the drill competition, really, it was the silly stuff we did that we remembered.  The stuff we got away with.

So… when I heard my mom say “individually and collectively” the other day – the floodgates in my memory opened up, and I realized, “Oh, no… there’s another story there…” – and I told it to her pretty much as you read it above, and she laughed…

© 2011 Tom Roush

Jae…

March 24, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 2 comments


I worked at Microsoft a number of years ago, and at one point, changed jobs and moved from one group to another.   By that time, I knew not only how to do my job well, but how to get things like moving done, who to call, etc., so when it was time to move, I didn’t think much about emailing Facilities and telling them I had some boxes, computers, and phones I needed to have moved from one office in one building to another office in another building, I just did it.

Before that, I’d gone over to the other building, done the interview, got the tour – and was led to an office and told, “Here’s your officemate, Jae.”

Jae, hunched over his keyboard, doing some web development stuff, was in a ratty tank top, old shorts, and a pair of flip flops.

It was a little more casual than the typical Microsoft dress code of the day, but not by much.

Most of the skin that was visible was covered in Tattoos.

What wasn’t covered in tattoos was pierced.

Now understand, this was not how I’d been raised, so it was just a touch foreign to me. Jae had been concentrating pretty heavily on some code, and also had some kind of piercing between his eyebrows, so when he turned around as I was introduced, he just looked livid.

I was terrified.

Had I met him on the street, I would have crossed to the other side.

Fast.

That was the first impression on my end.

On Jae’s end, it was a little different.

When I was sure I’d be taking the new job, like I said, I’d contacted facilities to move my stuff, and they’d come and done just that. In my mind, they were gone.  I didn’t think about them anymore.

On the other end, Jae was busy hunched over his keyboard, and all of a sudden these guys, without saying anything to him, came in with boxes of stuff, hooked up the telephone, brought in computers, hooked them up, brought in a chair, and in general, prepared the place for me.

Jae’s jaw hit the floor.

His first impression, he told me later, was 5 short words:

“This guy knows his s**t”

So when I got there, the office was ready for me, I had an interesting kind of respect for Jae, and though I didn’t know it, he had the same for me.

He worked on the web front end of an internal web site, I worked on the SQL back end of it, and we would often go to meetings where we’d be tasked with some level of work that, given the environment, we just said “Yes” to…

We’d get back to our office, kind of collapse into our chairs, and ponder for a bit.

Invariably, Jae would ask, “You know how to do this?”

“IIIII don’t know how to do this…”

“Alright.  Let’s do it then!”

And we did.

—

Over time, we got to know each other pretty well, and we talked as only office mates can talk.  We talked about our children and our wishes for their future.  Jae came to see my son’s soccer games and we stood on the sidelines, two proud dads.

It was a neat time, going to work having a good friend to share the day with, having a good colleague to – well, be friends with.

At one point, he said something that startled me. “You know, Tom, this isn’t going to last forever.” – and Jae – having gone through the school of hard knocks like few people have, was right.

We did move on.

Jae’d been in the navy, and as such, had the language of, well – a sailor.  He would use words that, in my life, were the equivalent of habaneros like other folks use salt and pepper.  It took a little getting used to, but underneath that capcaisin coated exterior was a heart of gold.

He moved on to another company, and encouraged me to join him.  I did just that, and we stayed there for some time, and then it was time to move again, which we did, and will likely repeat at some unknown interval in the future.

I thought about that first meeting many times – clearly am thinking about it as I write this, and wonder what would have happened had I allowed my initial fear to get in the way of a relationship that I treasure to this day.

Take care Jae, wherever you are.

Blackbirds, Blue Saabs, and Green Porta Potties

March 17, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , | by | 1 comment


So based on Greg’s comment on last week’s story about me ‘embellishing’ things – I just had to put this story up.  It happened in August of 2010, and like a lot of my stories – it started out as an email to a friend, in this case, one who’d told me to go out and do something fun that weekend.

It involved Greg.

And he gave me permission (well, actually, told me I had to) write this story.

So without too terribly much editing, here’s the story/note I wrote to my friend who wanted me to go do something fun, and come back with pictures to prove it…

==

I had a fun morning – went to see the Blue Angels down at the Museum of Flight.

I chatted with my buddy Greg for a few hours in the parking lot of the Museum until the coffee we’d drunk earlier at Randy’s needed a place to go…

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Greg and I had been sitting in my ’68 Saab, sharing stories, and watching the planes at Boeing Field.  One of the stories involved something that had actually happened about 50 feet from where we were sitting right then, it was a story of me talking my way onto the only flying B-29 in the world, but before that, successfully badgering a newspaper photo editor I didn’t know,

…for a paper I’d never seen,

…into holding space on the front page

…for a picture I hadn’t taken yet,

…from a plane I had never been on,

…and was quite literally trying to talk my way onto.

We laughed, and Greg kept talking about my golden tongue and how I could talk my way into anything – using that B-29 as an example.  I needed the laughter.  I’d been feeling a little down about a lot of things, wondering about life and stuff, and recovering from some recent surgery, and Greg’s a very good friend, and did a lot of listening, and a lot of encouraging, for which I’m grateful.

Eventually, the coffee we’d had earlier needed to be dealt with, and since it was still raining, we just drove down toward a row of Porta Potties at the far end of the parking lot.  As we did, we looked around and noticed we were one of only two cars in the formerly crowded lot. We saw that the other car was parked beside the Porta Potties we were heading for, right next to this canopy kind of a thing with a sign on it that said something like “SR-71 Pilot and Author”.

That got us talking about SR-71’s, (there’s one in the Museum of Flight) – and I told Greg about this one mission – the only one I could remember reading about right then, in which one of the pilots had flown from England to Libya, and on the way back out, the plane just flew faster and faster – and they had to hang a left to meet their tanker out by Gibraltar. They did (when you’re flying Mach 3+, that takes a bit of geography) – and the pilot pulled the throttles back over Sicily – and still ended up overshooting the refueling tanker over Gibraltar… (note: if my math is right, that’s about 1,100 miles of coasting – you can read the story here.

We stopped, Greg got out to take care of his stuff, and I took a second look at that sign, “SR-71 Pilot and Author”.

It was still raining, and under that canopy was a fellow, sitting in the only dry chair in the parking lot, surrounded by a bunch of empty, wet tables, all of whatever he was selling was gone – he was just sitting there with his feet up, talking on a cell phone.

Alone…

In the parking lot.

In the rain.

Hmm…

SR-71 pilot?

Well heck, I figured that there couldn’t have been too many of those, I wondered if he knew the guy who’d done that Libya flight Greg and I’d just been talking about.  So while Greg headed off to take care of his business, I approached him – and he motioned he’d be off the phone in a minute, so I waited, and while I was waiting I saw the name on his banner – “Brian Shul.”

Hmm…  I had no idea who Brian Shul was, but it seemed like he must be that SR-71 pilot – or maybe know him.

He ended his call.

“Are you Brian?”

“I sure hope so, been signing his name all day.”

“Say, I was just telling my buddy here about an SR-71 pilot who did a mission out of Libya and ended up overshooting his tanker out by Gibraltar… “

“That’s me.”

“… and I was wondering if you happened to know who that pilot might be…”

“In fact – the whole story’s in my book, would you be interested in a copy?”

My mind was already several sentences past that last one before it came to a screeching halt and processed what I’d just heard.

“He… you… that pilot – waitaminute…”

I had no idea that I’d actually stumbled into one of my own stories – and turned around to see Greg, who’d heard that interaction as he was coming back, and saw his jaw do what mine must have done just seconds before, which was to simply obey the law of the acceleration of falling objects and hit the pavement of the parking lot in just under a second.

You see, one of the things we’d been talking about was how Greg thought I might have embellished some of my stories – and about how easy it can be to do.

But the funny thing is – if I tell a story – well, I tell a story… I don’t think I embellish it, I just tell it. (often they simply didn’t need embellishing, they just needed to be told well).

We talked with Brian for a bit.

I shook his hand.

I bought his book.

He autographed it for me.

Greg took a picture of him and me – beside my very definite “sub-sonic” Saab, because I needed proof to show a friend that I’d done something fun that weekend.

And the funny thing is, Greg and I both learned something that afternoon.

We learned that you never know when you’ll stumble onto – or into a story, and it had become very clear that I didn’t need to embellish a dang thing on this one, because no matter what anyone asked, it was absolutely true that at the very moment I was telling Greg the story of the SR-71,  the very pilot of that plane in that story, was sitting not 100 feet away, under a canopy, in the rain, on the south end of the parking lot at the Museum of Flight, right next to the Porta-Potties.

Supersonic Pilot meets Subsonic Saab

Coincidentally, in the picture above, Brian and I are standing next to my Saab 96, built in 1968. The plane Brian was flying (tail number 960) in the story I was telling Greg, is now down at the Castle Air Museum, right next to Castle Air Force Base, where my dad was stationed, back in 1968.

Old Saabs, Big puddles, and Bad dates

March 10, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | 7 comments


If you’ve been paying any sort of attention, you’ve picked up on the fact that old Saabs have been part of my life since before I could drive them.

The Saab in this story is a red 1967 Saab 96 with an 850cc, three cylinder, two stroke engine in it.  (this is the same car you might have read about here).

When driven gently, the engine, with 7 moving parts, would sound almost as smooth as a turbine.

Of course, if you drove it ‘un-gently’ it sounded like an army of chainsaws.

I was more familiar with the chainsaw sound, to be honest, and just loved the way it sounded when I drove it like that.  It was a contemporary of the original VW Beetle, and kind of like the Beetle, had what they called ‘unibody’ construction – meaning there wasn’t a steel frame to put the car body on.  The VW’s body was bolted to the floor pan, I believe, with 13 bolts, the Saab’s was welded.  The idea on these two was that the car body was built strong enough to essentially *be* the steel frame.

Now because of this, the Saab pretty much operated under ‘Vegas Rules’ – those being “whatever got in the car, stayed in the car” – which meant it required cleaning out every spring after a typical wet Washington winter to the point of taking EVERYTHING out of it and letting everything down to the steel of that unibody construction dry out so it didn’t get moldy or rust or anything like that.

One of the things I noticed one of those times was that at the front of the floor pan, about where you might put your feet, were three holes about two inches in diameter, with stamped metal plugs in them.  The right one was rusted. Both good and bad, it allowed water to drain out, if you were lucky, but also explained the fairly constant wet spot on the floor there.

I figured I’d fix it before fall, and just left everything to dry for a while.

Meanwhile – well, some years back, actually, the pastor of our church had taken us four wheeling, he called it “Stump Jumping”.  I was young and didn’t know if I could do something like that, but he reassured me it was okay to strap myself into an itty bitty Jeep with an ‘ever so slightly’ modified 307 cubic inch V-8.

I also didn’t understand that one of the basic tenets of four wheeling the way he had in mind was to drive like a freaking lunatic.

Wait a minute…

Driving like a lunatic?

I could do that.

And off we went.

Now before we go on, you must know: There were two types of roads on Fort Lewis:

1.       The kind that had been surveyed, graded, paved, and marked by professionals, and had speed limit signs to keep you on the straight and narrow, so to speak….

2.       The kind that were made by a teenager driving an M-60 tank, were ungraded, unpaved, and most definitely weren’t marked (though it’s hard to keep a tank’s passing a secret).  They didn’t have speed limit signs, because the roads were so rough that a sane person didn’t need them.

But we’re not talking about sane people now, are we?

So in doing our four wheeling, there was this one road, out on Fort Lewis, (it’s still there, but flattened out considerably, and they’ve built quite a bit up  around it in the years since this happened) that was smooth enough so you could actually get up to about 40 miles an hour.  At the end of that smoothness was this wonderful “yump” – where, if you were driving sanely, it would fling you up in the air kind of like going over a hump on a roller coaster.

If you were driving a Jeep, or driving insanely, you gunned the heck out of it, caught some serious air, and kept your hands inside the vehicle while you thanked God for seat belts and roll cages.  Anything not fastened down started doing its own little Zero G spacewalk wherever it wanted to.

It’s what you saw during your personal Zero G “Thank God for seat belts” moment that took your breath away.

We’ll get to that in a bit.

Now the roads I was mentioning came in one of two stages: dusty, or muddy.  Rarely did you get one of the roads in that perfect condition between the two, and on this particular stretch you had that little yump that would get anything airborne (heck, if you hit it right, you could get a semi-truck flying)

But there weren’t any semi-trucks on this road.  In fact, while there was evidence of them, there weren’t even any tanks. But it was that evidence that told me so much…  See, those tanks were driven by young men not much older than teenagers, and when driven “properly”, they caught air too.  All 60 tons of them.

You’ve heard the phrase, “what goes up, must come down” right?

That goes for flying 60 ton tanks as well as it goes for anything, so when all that flying armor came back down, still traveling 20-30 miles an hour, the earth moved.

In fact, there was a depression a foot deep where those tanks had landed – about 100 feet long, and about 20 feet wide.

Really, the earth moved.

Now the Saabs of the vintage that I was driving had been used in Rally racing, driven on roads not much different from the logging roads familiar to people out here in Washington, (or tank roads familiar to people growing up near Fort Lewis driving in places they maybe shouldn’t have been driving).  I’d seen pictures of them catching air, driving on two wheels, flipped over on their roofs (yes, really) and they were just more fun to drive right on the edge that way.

Well, given that, one day that summer I decided it’d be fun to take the Saab out to where we’d been four wheeling– or ‘stump jumping’ those years earlier – and do a little ‘rally practice’ and see what would happen if I took it over the same ‘yump’ that we’d gone over with the Jeep.

I figured I’d hit the yump, just like I did in the jeep, catch air, just like I did in the Jeep, and land and rumble through that 100 foot by 20 foot depression, just like I did in the Jeep.

It’s just that when we did it with the Jeep, the road was dusty, and dry, and there was a depression, and when we hit our little Zero G moment, what we saw was a dent in the road to land on from where the tanks had hit.

When I was did it with the Saab, it was after some wet weather, and there was no dust.  The road was damp, and when I hit my little Zero G moment, what I saw ahead of me stopped my heart cold.

Instead of a dent, I saw a puddle about the size of the Pacific Ocean.  Seriously – that huge dent in front of me was now filled with close to a foot of water, it was more than a puddle.  In the brief moment I had, I thought I saw a ‘no fishing’ sign at the edge.  It was just enormous.

The thoughts that blasted through my head right then were fast, frantic, and mostly useless, but they gave me one, and only one option.

I was easily 3 feet in the air at the time of those thoughts.  At that altitude, the wheels, and all they symbolized, were less than useless.

Not good, well, not bad, but it affected all the other decisions that followed.

Steering to the left or right at that moment to try get out of the puddle would have made those front tires into rudders when they hit the water, and landing with the wheels aimed anyplace other than straight ahead would have been more than a touch dramatic and likely rolled the car.

In a foot of water.

Not good.

Hitting the brakes, while useless in the air, would just mean I’d get stuck in the puddle once I landed.

Also not good.

So if left was no good, and right was no good, and slowing down was no good, what option did I have?

Yup…

My only option was to hang on and ride it out.

So I did, and I floored it, just before I hit.

But I wasn’t out of the woods, literally or figuratively, yet.

Now as I hit the surface (and Lordy, “hit” is exactly what it was, this was not a gentle landing), a number of things happened…

The engine screamed, the wheels spun, and the hydrological equivalent of Mount Vesuvius erupted inside the car.

See, that little plug that I was going to fix that spring, and didn’t, chose that moment to give way, and a two inch jet of water shot straight up from the floor, blasted the carpet and floor mats out of the way, kept going up behind the glove box and radio, and continued on inside the windshield on the passengers’ side, all the way up to the roof and the sun visors.

Of course, I was trying to keep the car under control at the time, so didn’t really have too much time to process that little event, but Vesuvius in the car…

Hmmm…

It took a long time for it to dry out after that one.

But it did.

And in the drying out phase after this little event, I found the plug, saw that it was pretty rusty, but given that I didn’t have any others, put it back in and smacked it with a hammer, figuring that would make it stay.

Insert ominous music here…

Later that year, in the fall, I went on a date with a young lady who shall remain nameless.  I just know that I did my best to be a gentleman. I knew her parents were missionaries in the Philippines, and wrote them a note asking about her favorite things.  And one Saturday, I tried to make a day of making some of those favorite things happen.  I took her to her hometown on the Olympic Peninsula, I tried to do some of the things her parents had told me she liked, and I found out that no matter what I did, she was clearly upset.

I had no idea what was wrong.

One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that most men simply want to make the women in their lives happy.  So in this case, I’d spent weeks talking to her parents and friends to find out what she liked, so that I could do just that, make her happy…

For whatever reason, she didn’t want to be happy, no matter what I did.

I was stumped.

By this time it was evening, and the weather outside was cold, and wet, and even though I had the heater on full blast in the car, the atmosphere inside was absolutely frigid.  As we were driving from her hometown to mine, for some reason I went a slightly different way, and ended up on a road I seldom used.

And as I came around a curve on this unfamiliar road, in the rain, there must have been a plugged up storm drain, because in front of me I saw something I’d only seen once before through this windshield.

I saw a puddle.

A big puddle.

But I saw it at the last second, and realized that…

If I tried to swerve now, my unhappy passenger would be even unhappier.

If I hit the brakes, she would be unhappier still.

…and then, in a flash, I realized that given how bad things were, it really didn’t matter what I did, so I held on and floored it.

And our hydrological equivalent of Mt. Vesuvius erupted a second time in the car, only this time there was a passenger in it.  In fact, there was a passenger’s foot just to the left of Mt. Vesuvius, and the water shot straight up and caught her between her leg and the jeans she was wearing.

She was instantly, and I mean *instantly* drenched.  I’d say ‘from head to toe’ but her pant leg funneled most of the water someplace else, and only a little of it got to her head.

Ooooh Lordy… If I thought she was mad earlier, I hadn’t even come close to seeing mad.

Given where we were, I took her to my folk’s place, where she dried off, and then took her back up to Seattle, where she lived.

It was a very quiet ride.

A library might have been quieter, except for the sound of a two stroke engine and dripping water.

Not surprisingly, it was our very last date.

© 2011 Tom Roush

What Heaven must be like…

March 3, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , | by | 4 comments


What heaven must be like.

I’m an airplane nut who’s seen airplanes from the ground once too often.

I’m a cancer survivor who realizes that “someday” is not a day of the week, that life is not a dress rehearsal, and that I have been given a second, and actually a third chance.

I’m a guy who’s spent far too much time working and not enough time playing.

It’s been my dream to fly since I was a little boy, when my dad was in the Air Force, and when times were simpler, and the magic of the skies was still new and still fresh…

And I’d seen sailplanes, here in the states, and in Germany where I spent part of my growing up years, and there was a magic to them, an allure that no other airplane had.  They would fly circles for what seemed like such a long time – and just magically stay in the sky.

I mean, to fly is simple…

Jump.

There, you flew for a second.

Wanna fly longer?

Get a trampoline.

Wanna fly MUCH longer?

Well, now you’re talking wings of some kind – and that’s where things get interesting.

If you want to fly even longer than that – well, now you’re talking engines and propellers.  And when you talk engines, then you need fuel, oil, electricity, a cooling system, and gauges to tell you what they’re all doing – and things get simultaneously a little simpler (to go up, push the throttle(s) forward, to go down, pull back on them), and a lot more complex (in addition to flying, you also have to manage all the systems that have anything to do with the power you have available with that throttle).

Another side effect of having an engine is that it also makes things noisy to the point of often having to wear earmuffs to filter out the noise…

They say that the main reason for the propeller is – well, it’s a fan to keep the pilot cool, because if it stops running when he’s in the air, he starts to sweat, but really – it’s to make the flying thing simple… Push forward on the throttle, go up.

Pull back on the throttle, go down.

So if that engine, whether that’s a piston engine, a jet, or rocket engine quits, you are now officially flying a glider.  A Cessna 152, for example, will go forward about 9 feet for every one foot it goes down.  It might do that at 60 mph. That’s called the glide ratio, in this case, it’s 9:1.  The space shuttle – which is also a glider when it’s coming in, goes forward about 3 feet for every one foot it goes down, so a 3:1 glide ratio, it’s just that it does it a WHOLE lot faster, from a WHOLE lot higher up.

Now aside from those types of planes, there are planes that are designed from the get-go to fly without engines.  They’re called Sailplanes, and the best of them can have a glide ratio where they’ll go forward 60 feet for every one foot they go down.  They are truly, truly amazing works of engineering, craftsmanship, and art.

This means that the space shuttle, for all its engineering brilliance, has a glide ratio a lot closer to that of a crowbar or a brick than that of an actual airplane.

So I made myself a promise awhile back  – I guess you could call it one of the things on my “bucket list” – that I would fly.  There were so many things that kept me from doing it – but the other Sunday, I realized once again, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that “someday” is not a day of the week, and that there is no contract anywhere that says anyone is obligated to give me tomorrow.

Realizations like that tend to be fairly deep.

The events that cause realizations like that are often quite a bit deeper.

But on the day I had this realization, the weather was perfect, and the next two weekends were the last of the season.  I knew I’d be gone on one of them, and had no guarantee of the weather on the second one.

This made the decision relatively easy to make.

I asked my son if he wanted to get out of the house for the afternoon, and with such a perfect fall day, he agreed.  I told my wife and daughter we were heading out for a bit – and I have to say that even though I wasn’t sure that I’d go flying – it seems I was subconsciously setting things up so that my options were never limited.

We drove for about an hour to get to this little airfield (Bergseth Field) out in the middle of nowhere – and on this gorgeous Fall day, they were as happy to see us as we were to be there…

We watched – and the difference between this airport and any other airport I’d been at in a long time was like the difference between a calm pool and a roiling river.

If you wanted to take off, they’d look up in the sky to see if there were any other planes coming in – and then you’d hear them yell ‘Pattern Clear” – and off they went, quite literally taking off from the edge of a cliff.

It seemed that for the exchange of a few little oval pictures of dead presidents, one could buy a ride in one of those sailplanes.  Michael was more interested in me going than in going himself, so the exchange was made, and along with the pilot, I got into the two-seater sailplane, a Schweitzer 2-33.  After I was buckled in, and Michael had handed me the camera, I looked right…

That smile told me I was doing the right thing.

Michael’s smile made this feel like the absolute right thing to do.

…and saw him smile, which told me I was doing the right thing, and that he was simply happy because I was living a dream.

We took off heading west for a bit, swung north, then did a 270 degree turn to the left, climbing the whole way…

Notice I said, “We took off…”

Something to realize is that flying a sailplane is the only type of aviation I’m aware of that has the aerial equivalent of calling a triple-A tow truck as a standard, expected part of the deal.  You don’t take off like a normal airplane, because you have no engine.  So you essentially ‘borrow’ one from somewhere.  Some places have huge winches that launch you into the sky, some will use a car or other vehicle, some even use huge, huge rubber bands, and some will use another airplane – and that’s the one that’s the aerial equivalent of a tow truck.  Very strong, very stable, very reliable.

And that’s the one we used.

As we climbed, near Enumclaw, Washington, the pilot of the tow plane turned toward nearby Mt. Rainier.

I was awestruck.

The "aerial tow truck" took us to 4,000 feet.

I felt a breeze…

After we got up to altitude and the tow pilot had let us go, the pilot sitting behind me asked a simple and profound question…

“Would you like to fly?”

The little boy in me, the one who had wanted to fly for over 40 years, was jumping up and down so hard that the seat belts were strained and the canopy was in danger of cracking.  The 40+ year old man that the little boy was in, sitting in the front seat of an old, but still graceful sailplane, tried to hold down his excitement and said, “Sure, I’d like to give it a shot”.

And for a moment, both the little boy and the man, held the stick for the first time.

We flew.

I flew.

And a breeze blew, and Heaven’s curtain parted for a moment to allow me to peek inside.

I flew!

Wow.

The pilot brought me back into the cockpit by asking if I could keep the wings level, and the nose just below the horizon.  I’d done it often enough in my dreams that it was easy.

He had me turn the plane south, and I learned that when you bank a sailplane to the right, for example, the plane wants to go straight for two reasons, one, it just likes the whole equilibrium thing, and two, the drag and the leverage from the aileron on the “upwing” side pulls that wing back a bit, turning the nose left, not right. I gently pressed the right rudder pedal with my right toe, got the nose going the right way – and I learned what was meant by ‘seat of the pants flying’ – you really do feel it in the seat of your pants.

We turned again, and the pilot complimented me on the turns and asked if I’d flown before.

In Reality?

No.

In dreams and in my mind?

Yes.

The adult in me was soaring – I was above the cares of the world, and nothing else mattered.

But the altimeter unwound just like a timer, when there was no more altitude, our time would be up.  He landed it, and I saw my son smiling as he walked toward us.

That smile again...

That magical moment made for happiness both in the air and on the ground.

His smile matched my own, but for different reasons.  He was simply happy for me to have finally lived that dream.

So was I… So was I…

We talked a bit as we drove home, about life, and the usual things, but my mind kept drifting back up to that blue, blue sky, and I found it hard to keep both feet on the ground when I’d held the sky in my hands.

Up there - you can hold the sky in your hands...

(C) 2011 Tom Roush

Tom Roush

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