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Expensive Pizza, the Circle of Life, and God’s Celestial Feather Duster…

October 29, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , | by | 2 comments


“Love your kids.”

“Huh?”

“Love your kids.”

“I already do.”

“Love… Your… Kids…”

And so began another little journey into understanding a little more about who God is and what being a parent is supposed to be.

I’m not sure why I was told that – I just know that during one of my chats with God (most people would call this ‘praying’) – He said three words…  Very simply, without a clue as to why this time was any more special than any other time.. “Love your kids”

I’ve learned, over time, that if you don’t pay attention to God’s Celestial Feather Duster, you occasionally get acquainted with God’s Celestial 4 x 4.  Having had enough experience with the 4 x 4, and the scars to prove it, I knew that paying attention to the Feather Duster would be a good idea.

So I paid attention.

And a few days after that, on a Sunday, just after church, my phone rang, and it was my daughter, in an absolute panic because she’d been working so hard at putting in practice all the hard lessons she’d learned about finances, and one automatic payment hadn’t been cancelled when she’d done a payment early manually.  Bottom line, if both payments hit at the same time, there wasn’t going to be enough there to cover it, and there were going to be fees – reminders of those lessons she’d been taught in that hard way that we often learn lessons when we’re young.

She had the money – it was supposed to get there on Friday. Problem is, it was Sunday, so she needed to borrow money for 5 days and was willing to write me a check to deposit on Friday.

The thing is, she hates calling and asking for money.  She hates it because it’s clear to her that asking for money means she hasn’t planned properly, and she sees it as a failure on her part, but she gritted her teeth, and picked up the phone, and made a call she didn’t want to make.

That I got just as I was leaving church.

“Love Your Kids…”

So I listened on the phone for a bit, and she explained with that adrenaline fueled desperation sound in her voice that I’ve heard from myself how she was in a place she didn’t want to be and how hard it was for her to be making that call.  I realized the rest of this conversation would be better done face to face, so I went over to her house, and we talked.

On the way I found myself thinking about this whole “Love your kids” thing – and finances, and how parents often find themselves helping their kids through things that they themselves have gone through – it’s that “circle of life” thing… and it took me back a few years to when I was in Grad school…

…where the lessons we learned weren’t all in the classroom.

It was grad school for photojournalism – back in the days of film, when a digital camera cost $10,000.00, and our evening routine was being either in the darkroom or the computer lab.  In this case, it was the computer lab, where we were working on stories for our projects, or layouts, or whatever.  We’d stay there till it closed – usually around 11:00, and for those of us who’d had dinner, 11:00 was pretty late, and we were pretty hungry by then.

Someone actually mentioned this. More specifically, they mentioned that they were hungry for pizza.

We were grad students.

None of us had enough money to buy a pizza.

All of us together, however, did.

Next thing we heard was “Anybody wanna go in on a pizza?”

And it turned out that $2.50 would do a nice job of getting a couple of slices of pizza, which would be enough to make it until the lab closed and we had to leave.

I didn’t have cash, so I wrote a check out for the $2.50, and in 30 minutes or less, God’s own gift to college students, a pepperoni pizza was delivered.

It couldn’t have disappeared faster without a swarm of locusts of Biblical proportions.

And… it was gone.

Or so I thought.

See – it turns out that in a college town, overdrawing your account is considered a slightly worse thing than in a standard, everyday town.  And a certain pizza place that used to deliver in 30 minutes or less categorically refused to put up with that, so no matter what happened, if your check bounced, it went to collections faster than a – well, a pizza delivery driver on commission…

Now financial institutions work wonders with money you don’t have.  In this case, the bank charged me $15.00 for bouncing a check for $2.50.  The collection agency thought they’d jump in, too, and charged me another $15.00.

And they sent me mail to prove it.

I – um – didn’t see that envelope until I got another one in the mail, telling me that they’d be happy to continue charging me another $15.00 a month…

…for the privilege of sending me notes asking for another $15.00 a month…

At this point, that incredible pepperoni pizza – correction, those two slices of pepperoni pizza – had cost me $47.50.

Long story short, once I figured out my finances, I realized I was in what some have described as “deep kimchee”, and I needed help.  My student loan had not come in as expected, so I was living right on the financial edge, and those two slices of pizza had thrown me over it.  I knew I needed help, but to ask for it required an admission that I hadn’t taken care of things like I should.  In the end, I had to make a telephone call to my grandmother, who had lived through the depression, correction – lived through THE Depression, the one in 1929 – not this recession we’ve just gone through, and in her mind, the way you lived was simple:

Use it up.

Wear it out.

Make it do…

…or do without.

You did not waste money.

Period.

So calling her and asking her to help bail me out of this was one of the hardest calls I ever had to make.  She didn’t seem to think that spending money like that was particularly wise (I agreed) – but she sent me some money that helped me get through until that delayed student loan of mine finally came through.

And I thought about all this as I was heading over to visit my daughter, who had actually done something far less silly, but had the same feelings about calling me and asking for money as I did in calling my grandma.

I wanted to make sure that my daughter understood that this kind of stuff happens, people aren’t perfect, and I didn’t want to do anything silly to try to pretend I’m perfect, because I know I’m not.  When I was telling her this story of my past, along the lines of “When I was your age…” she asked, being between jobs, “Does it ever get better?”

I tried to tell her that it does, but at that moment, had to focus my thoughts on the ATM machine – which, for some reason, wasn’t giving me any money out of my checking account…

I tried savings.

Same thing…

This is weird – I know there’s enough money there…

Eventually I found that the card was linked to the wrong account and transferred some to the right place, but what got me about the whole thing was that there really was less money there in the account than I thought.

And it wasn’t there because an automatic payment of mine had gone out that I’d forgotten about.

Which was why we were here in the first place, one generation later.

When I told her that – she just laughed and laughed.

Things do get better – if you’re saving money – you have some stashed away that you can help your kids with.

And somewhere in all of this, I knew that this was one of my chances to “Love My Kids”

And I’m glad I was able to be there for her.

Highway Flares, Greasy Fingerprints, and Hereditary – uh – ‘Wisdom’…

October 21, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , | by | 2 comments


My son has informed me that “to be old and wise, you first have to be young and stupid” – and with that in mind, we’ll start with a story – it’s from my childhood, when I, like most of us, was young and stupid.

Speaking of my son, as he was growing up, I told him “Stupid Things that Papa did when he was Little” stories, in hopes that he wouldn’t do those things.  Now it’s said that tragedy plus time equals comedy, and when hearing these stories of my stupidity in my childhood, he would usually laugh at the tragedy I’d survived, mostly of my own doing. And somewhere in the story there’d be a lesson, and he’d remember it.  Now since I was telling him the stories, it must have meant I’d survived, but still, stupid is stupid.

So, in this case, I was about 16 or so, and I was building a diorama – a model of a burned out, destroyed building that a model tank would be positioned as crashing through.  It involved a bit of plaster, a few small pieces of plywood, and a whole bunch of little wood scraps and such – oh, and the model.  I was trying to make it look like the building had burned, and needed that black smoky look to come out of the windows.

Black… Smoky… the kind of smoke that comes from… oh, what is that yellow/orange stuff?…

Fire, yeah… that’s where smoke comes from…

(insert ominous music here)

Now, was I doing this on a desk?

No…

(that would have been smart, and I wouldn’t have this story to be telling you)

…a modeling table?

No…

(that would have been smarter, as I’d have a place to put all the bits and pieces and let glue dry)

…someplace where I could safely light a match or candle and let the smoke do its thing?

No…

(that would have been smartest, as – well – lighting matches… teenagers… in the house… need I say more?)

I was doing it on the carpet in my room.

Oh wait.  It gets better.

See, I was trying to get a smokey effect…

A match would have been good.

A candle would have been great.

But for some reason, which I must attribute to my Infinite Teenage Wisdom ®, I decided that they weren’t quite good enough and decided to use a highway flare instead of a match.

Oh, just go back and read that again, you know you need to…

Yes, a highway flare...

Upstairs.

In the house.

Over the carpet.

Well – it’s not so much that I really wanted to use the highway flare, but I had it in my hand, and had the cap off, and was idly wondering how much force it would take to get a spark – oh heck – like that would go over as an excuse…

Right…

…did you know that once lit, highway flares are, um, extremely hard to put out?

…and they drip red hot stuff when they’re burning?

…that melts carpets?

Ummmyeah…

Doing the “Olympic torch” run through the house to get it outside just wasn’t going to happen.  I mean, there’s that red hot stuff dripping, In this case, it was a carpet, but if I were running (and who can’t imagine running through the house with a flare like an Olympic torch, the crowds cheering, the – no wait – that was just SO not happening…)  And that red hot stuff would have been dripping on my shoulder, and that would have been, oh, bad… yeah, we’ll just call it bad…  (keeping in mind of course that dripping red hot burning stuff onto a carpet really isn’t on the “good” side of the spectrum).

The more I think about it, the more I realize we’re so far past the border between dumb and stupid that you can’t even see it in the rear view mirror.   I’d had some plaster powder there for the diorama I was making – and out of pure instinct I shoved the flare into that – which, to my delight and surprise, put it out. But the thing that got me, I still can’t believe it to this day, was that mom smelled the smoke, came in, and wondered what was going on.  And my guilty conscience went ballistic trying to defend itself.   Understand, this is a teenage mind going off here – but here was my Infinite Teenage Wisdom ® reasoning:

I argued:

“Just because you smell smoke, and

just because you walk into the room that you can barely see through because of that smoke, and

just because I’m the only one in it,and

you came in through the only door, and

just because I’m sitting there on the floor, with a hot flare sitting beside me and a smoking hole in the carpet, you think I DID IT?”

We pause, reverently, hands over hearts for a moment, as the parents out there realize they’ve heard some variation of this before, both from their own mouths and from their children’s…

“Uh… Yeah…  As a matter of fact, I do think you did do it.”

My mom, bless her, realized that she was not arguing with logic in the slightest, she was arguing with a guilty conscience and emotion, and no amount of logic was going to make it through that.

I have no idea why I was defending myself so much at that time – but I was.  I’m sure I would have said that someone else was using my fingers and put my fingerprints on it had it gotten to that… Dumb, dumb, dumb…

Speaking of fingerprints…

…fast forward about 25 years – I was in my darkroom developing film for a client, and had some hanging up to dry.  My daughter came down, eating some chicken.  I put two and two together and said, “Don’t touch the film.” I then turned back to the enlarger.  Something made me turn around.

One of the strips of film was moving.

The one with some greasy fingerprints that hadn’t been there a moment before.

There was also a very guilty looking 8 year old.

“Didn’t I tell you to not touch it?”

“I didn’t!”

“I can see your fingerprints right there!”

“It wasn’t me”

“We’re the only two in the darkroom!”

And then…

It dawned on me…

I started thinking about fingerprints and realized that I wasn’t the only one who had a stranglehold on denial, and that my son’s comment from earlier was right…

To be old and wise, you have to be young and stupid first…

I just didn’t know it would be hereditary…

My son has informed me that “to be old and wise, you first have to be young and stupid” – and with that in mind, we’ll start with a story –it’s from my childhood, when I, like most of us, was young and stupid.

Speaking of my son, as he was growing up, I told him “Stupid Things that Papa did when he was Little” stories, in hopes that he wouldn’t do those things.  Now it’s said that tragedy plus time equals comedy, and when hearing these stories of my stupidity in my childhood, he would usually laugh at the tragedy I’d survived, mostly of my own doing. And somewhere in the story there’d be a lesson, and he’d remember it.  Now since I was telling him the stories, it must have meant I’d survived, but still, stupid is stupid.

So, in this case, I was about 16 or so, and I was building a diorama – a model of a burned out, destroyed building that a model tank would be positioned as crashing through.  It involved a bit of plaster, a few small pieces of plywood, and a whole bunch of little wood scraps and such – oh, and the model.  I must have been trying to make it look like the building had burned, and needed that black smoky look to come out of the windows.

Black… Smoky… the kind of smoke that comes from… oh, what is that yellow/orange stuff?…

Fire, yeah… that’s where smoke comes from…

(insert ominous music here)

Now, was I doing this on a desk?

No…

(that would have been smart, and I wouldn’t have this story to be telling you)

…a modeling table?

No…

(that would have been smarter, as I’d have a place to put all the bits and pieces and let glue dry)

…someplace where I could safely light a match or candle and let the smoke do its thing?

No…

(that would have been smartest, as – well – lighting matches… teenagers… in the house… need I say more?)

I was doing it on the carpet in my room.

Oh wait.  It gets better.

See, a match would have been good.

A candle would have been great.

But for some reason, which I must attribute to my Infinite Teenage Wisdom ®, I decided that they weren’t quite good enough and decided to use a highway flare.

Upstairs.

In the house.

Over the carpet.

Well – it’s not so much that I really wanted to use the highway flare, but I had it in my hand, and had the cap off, and was idly wondering how much force it would take to get a spark – oh heck – like that would go over as an excuse… Right…

…did you know that once lit, highway flares are, um, extremely hard to put out?

…and they drip red hot stuff when they’re burning?

…that melts carpets?

Ummmyeah…

Doing the “Olympic torch” run through the house to get it outside just wasn’t going to happen.  I mean, there’s that red hot stuff dripping, In this case, it was a carpet, but if I were running (and who can’t imagine running through the house with a flare like an Olympic torch? – but that red hot stuff would have been dripping on my shoulder, and that would have been, oh, bad… yeah, we’ll just call it bad…  (keeping in mind of course that dripping red hot burning stuff onto a carpet really isn’t on the “good” side of the spectrum).

The more I think about it, the more I realize we’re so far past the border between dumb and stupid that you can’t even see it in the rear view mirror.   I’d had some plaster powder there for the diorama I was making – and I shoved the flare into that – which, surprisingly enough put it out. But the thing that got me, I still can’t believe it to this day, was that mom came in and wondered what was going on.  And my guilty conscience went ballistic trying to defend myself.   Understand, this is a teenage mind going off here – but here was my Infinite Teenage Wisdom ® reasoning:

I argued:

“Just because you smell smoke, and

just because you walk into the room that you can barely see through because of that smoke, and

just because I’m the only one in it, and you came in through the only door, and

just because I’m sitting there on the floor, with a hot flare sitting beside me and a smoldering hole in the carpet, you think I DID IT?”

We pause, reverently, hands over hearts for a moment, as the parents out there realize they’ve heard some variation of this before, both from their own mouths and from their children’s…

“Uh… Yeah…  As a matter of fact, I do think you did do it.”

My mom, bless her, realized that she was not arguing with logic in the slightest, she was arguing with a guilty conscience and emotion, and no amount of logic was going to make it through that.

I have no idea why I was defending myself so much at that time – but I was.  I’m sure I would have said that someone else was using my fingers and put my fingerprints on it had it gotten to that… Dumb, dumb, dumb…

Speaking of fingerprints…

…fast forward about 25 years – I was in my darkroom developing film for a client, and had some hanging up to dry.  My daughter came down, eating some chicken.  I put two and two together and said, “Don’t touch the film.” I then turned back to the enlarger.  Something made me turn around and there were some greasy fingerprints on one of the strips of film that hadn’t been there a moment before.  There was also a very guilty looking 8 year old.

“Didn’t I tell you to not touch it?”

“I didn’t!”

“I can see your fingerprints right there!”

“It wasn’t me”

“We’re the only two in the darkroom!”

And then…

It dawned on me…

I started thinking about fingerprints and realized that I wasn’t the only one who had a stranglehold on denial, and that my son was right…

To be old and wise, you have to be young and stupid first…

I just didn’t know it would be hereditary…

Knocking down walls with an old brown purse…

October 14, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | Leave a comment


He was dignified – almost regal, this gentleman pushing his wife in a wheelchair.  Over six feet tall, he was thin, dressed in the clothes of his culture, starting from the perfectly formed turban on the top of his head to what had been a mirror polish on the black shoes on his feet.

He had a long, nicely trimmed beard, evenly split between salt and pepper. His wife was dressed in all the finery of her culture as well.  There was a comfort between the two of them.  They were partners, life partners, and though they may not have said the vows we’re familiar with in the US – they had clearly said, and honored, whatever vows they had shared.

I met them waiting at the doctor’s office, a place where you have to bare your body, so you tend to build walls up around your soul.  We were all hunkered down inside our own guarded little walls, alone with our thoughts and problems, each with our personal list of miracles we wanted from the men and women wearing the white coats. And we were waiting for the elevator to take us there, but it didn’t come.  As the minutes went by, and as we all grew a little fidgety, we started peeking up over our walls a little, and making small talk.

After a few more minutes – I went over to talk to someone about the elevator, as there was a bit of a crowd now waiting, and of course, as soon as I talked to the fellow about the elevator, we all heard this “ding” as it showed up.

I returned to the crowd a hero.  (They thought I’d fixed it – little did they know…)

The doors slid open, and the whole group of us oozed in, filling all the empty and personal space as we tried to get in and turn around to face the door again, all of us, including the gentleman who was trying to get his wife in with her wheelchair.

It turned out the regal gentleman and his wife needed to go to the same place I did, and as we sat there, waiting, she was wheeled off for some tests, and he sat, like so many husbands over history, waiting, with his wife’s old brown purse in his lap.

The incongruity of it was impossible to ignore.

I looked over, and simply couldn’t keep myself from saying it.

“I have to tell you, that purse looks very nice with your outfit…”

It took him a moment to realize that I’d completely knocked my own wall down and was knocking on his.

He smiled, recognized the joke, and laughed – a wonderful, hearty laugh that came out both surprised and delighted, and something made me feel that he hadn’t laughed in some time.  There was a joy to it of finally letting go and being able to laugh at the silliness of his proper, very fine clothing contrasting with that old brown purse.

We stepped through the rubble of the walls between us, and while his wife was getting her tests done, we chatted.  I was getting an x-ray to see if some screws that were holding a few things together were settling in well – and the next thing I knew, he was telling me this story about two screws he’d had – holding the same part of him together.  Turns out that when he was younger – he’d been riding a moped and had what was obviously a bad accident.  He told me that the two screws they used to do things like hold his leg together were three inches long – ironically about the same length as the deck screws that had just been used to rebuild my porch.

That got me thinking – I thought I might want to chat with the fellow rebuilding the porch to make sure he wasn’t missing a couple of three inch ones…

At any rate – we got to talking about screws and how you can acquire them by simply riding around on mopeds (or in my case, hanging around under linear accelerators), and as he told me this story of his youth, I saw, inside that dignified older gentleman, a bright smile, some fun memories, and a sparkle in the eyes of the young man who was still very much alive in there.

We chatted some more – and then they called my name, I got my x-ray so I could see my deck screws, and was going to continue the conversation when I got back, but when I got back, he was gone.

And I didn’t even get his name…

Sigh…

…and now that I think of it, that purse really didn’t go with his outfit, but I couldn’t tell him that…

Fishing, Gorillas, and Cops with – well, just read on…

September 30, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , | by | Leave a comment


A number of years ago I was shooting in Muskegon, Michigan, for the Muskegon Chronicle, and over time discovered that one of the favorite things for local folks to do was to just go down to the lake (Lake Michigan) and watch the sun set.  It was a tradition, it was peaceful, it was pretty.

The clouds in Michigan, or at least that part of Michigan always amazed me, and I realize now that subconsciously, when I had the chance, I shot images that emphasized them…

This one day I went down there, and – oh, you need to know that I was driving a 1979 Ford Fairmont I’d bought in Ohio – with a paint job courtesy of Earl Scheib and Acid Rain, Incorporated.  This thing was as smooth as sandpaper.  My mom tried to wax and polish a little corner of the trunk once after I’d brought it back to Washington and it was like trying to wax a gravel driveway…

She said, “Oh, look, I can see my shadow!” (as opposed to reflection).

I gently cuffed her one…

The reason the car comes into the picture is that it had Ohio plates on it.

I was in Michigan.

The plates had expired.

Put that on the back burner for just a little bit.

I got down to the lake – and – oh, another important thing.  I’d found that shooting with ‘normal’ lenses just didn’t work for me – and found myself shooting with an 18 mm super wide angle lens on one camera body, and a 300 mm telephoto on the other.  You don’t get much more of a spread than that.  I figured that if I was close enough to shoot something up close, I wanted to be right in its face, hence the 18… if I couldn’t be in its face, I needed to reach out and touch it – with the 300.

In this case, I saw a bunch of guys fishing at the edge of the lake – and figured I sure didn’t need the 300 – so the 18 it was.  I was thinking the shot through as I walked closer, and to get him in the shot, along with the sky and the sunset and everything, I’d end up kneeling on the ground and shooting up at him – so I went over and chatted for a bit, then got into position to shoot.

And a police car pulled up.

And Tom, with expired, out of state plates, suddenly got really, REALLY nervous.

I didn’t know what he could/would do – but if there were some problems, they’d have been bigger ones than I was capable of dealing with right then.  So I did the only thing I could think of, and ignored him, figuring he might not think that the car was mine – or something like that.  (note: this would be an example of the application of the Infinite Wisdom of Youth®).

I shot away, and chatted with the fellow, making some nice images with the sky, the clouds, the sunset, the water, his fishing pole, and the silhouette of him…

…and the cop kind of faded from my consciousness.

Until I felt a huge, hairy, gorilla’s hand land on my shoulder from about ten feet up, and a firm voice saying, “Hah! I’ve got you now…”

If I hadn’t already been kneeling, I would have been very quickly.

I was petrified, was it worse than I thought? Had he run the plate to find out that it was registered to me?  What were the ramifications of driving out of state with expired tags?  The fine? The penalty?  A confused, scared storm of thoughts tore through my mind as I tried to figure out how to get out of this one that I wasn’t even sure I was in…

I slowly turned around, to see, much to my horror, that the image my terrified mind had conjured up was right.  The hand on my shoulder wasn’t attached to a gorilla, it was worse.

It was attached to an arm in a policeman’s uniform.

I don’t know what my face looked like but as my eyes worked their way up that sleeve, I saw that the face on the policeman attached to it was smiling.

Was this an evil smile? An “I have you now” smile? I wasn’t anywhere near calmed down by that smile – and I saw he was raising his other hand.  That didn’t make sense, the gun would be in his right hand, and he was raising his left one…

(I cringed)

…which had a little disposable camera in it.

The cop’s smile got even bigger.

“I got you!  I got a picture of you getting a picture of him!”

If I hadn’t been kneeling already (you know…)

The relief that was pouring through my body was like cold water on a dry lakebed.  Cooling, sizzling as it hit the hot surface, it soaked in to cool it to the core.

(Luckily, that’s the only fluid we’ll need to talk about in this story.)

I laughed with the policeman, joked with him a bit about how his lens very likely outclassed mine, and so on.  He promised to have a copy of the print at the paper as soon as it was developed, and true to his word, he did.

As soon as I find that shot – it’s in a box ‘somewhere’, I’ll put it in here.  However, failing that, here’s the “Fishing by the lake” shot…

Oh – one more thing… he never mentioned the license plate….

Fishing at Lake Michigan – and… you never know when you’re being watched.

Transmissions from God…

September 23, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | by | 4 comments


No – not the kind of transmissions you’re thinking about.

These transmissions are  4 speed, on the column… That kind of transmission.

I had some car trouble one day back when I was going to school at Fort Steilacoom Community College (now called Pierce College).  It was payday, (I’d gotten my work study check of $124.96 – gad, WHY do I remember this stuff and still can’t remember where I left my cell phone?) – I got home, planning on cashing it – when my dad, who’d had a 1966 Saab 96 Sport and loved it until it turned into a Flintstone Mobile (the floor rusted out and you could see the road going by through the hole), called me over and read me this ad in the paper.

Saab 96. Runs. 100.00

and a phone number.

Now even back then (about 25 years ago) this was a touch on the cheap side.  But also even back then, Saabs were a lot like Lays potato chips – you couldn’t eat just one… – (you needed another one for parts to keep the first one running) so I called the guy….

“Hey, I’m calling about the Saab you have in the paper…”

“Oh, yeah… Strong engine… STRONG engine…”

Um…. Okaaay….

“Can you tell me a little bit about it?”

“Well – the engine’s got a lot of power.”

Right… got that.

Understand at the time, I’d been used to driving a 3 cylinder, 2 stroke Saab that, as I mentioned in another story, was clearly the result of an illicit liaison between a Sherman tank and a chainsaw, so more power was always better – but there was something about how he was describing this power that piqued my interest enough to realize a couple of things.

  1. He was telling me things he didn’t realize he was telling me.
  2. I was going to have him tell me the rest without him realizing he was doing it.

“Which engine’s it got in it?”

“The V4… Strong engine… STRONG engine….”

I was beginning to see a pattern here…

I asked about the body (I mean, if it’s full of dents, that doesn’t change how it drives, but it sure changes how it looks, bodywork is expensive, and it told me a lot about how well they’d taken care of the car… or not)

And I asked about the glass – in large part because I wanted to know if they’d rolled the car.  The way he was talking – this was a distinct possibility – and so I wanted to check. The thing is, I happen to know that if you roll the car, you’ll likely scrape one side, maybe scrape the roof, but if you hit the roof, there’s well north of a 90% chance that you’ll end up with a diagonal crack in the windshield.  The car’s got a built in roll cage, so it’s not like it would have been toast – but it was information I wanted to know if I were to buy the car.

It was a simple equation… one roll equals one crack, so… innocent sounding question, but the answer would have told me a lot.

You can see what happens when you roll a Saab 96 by watching this little video:

The Saab is – well, you’ll figure it out… trust me.

So depending on how you do it – you can just muff up the body a little bit – but bottom line, that windshield is going to get cracked, so I asked about it.

“Oh, the glass is good, no cracks.”

Okay…

Then he went on about that strong engine again…

Eventually I determined that the body of the car appeared to be good, but the right door might have some issues.  Okay, whatever.

And then, out of the blue – he says, “Oh, by the way, first, second and reverse are gone.”

“Gone?”

“Gone.”

Rrrright…

“STRONG engine… Stroonng engine…”

Gotcha

So… a 1968 Saab with what is very clearly a strong engine, a horked out transmission, good glass…  Well heck –

“Oh, and there’s this banging noise…”

“Banging noise?”

“Yeah, there’s this banging noise when you drive it.”

And he’s still driving it? Heck, it’s only got two gears left…

…and a “banging” to me is the sound of sheet metal.

A “banging noise” is in the higher frequency of sounds.

It is a cheap sound.

A “thunking noise” is not sheet metal.  It is the sound of something internal, like bearings, or worse yet, gears.  It is in the lower frequency of sounds.

You do not want to hear thunking.

It is an expensive sound.

“Banging?” – I press him a little bit on that… eventually it becomes clear that I need to go see this thing.  I mean – for a hundred bucks, the engine’s worth more than that…

So I do a little more asking – kind of a last confirmation of the condition of the body, and he finally pops out with something he’d clearly forgotten.

“Oh, there’s a hole in the driver’s door.”

Right… I can immediately see how easy this would be to forget…

So I’m thinking – given where I grew up (near Fort Lewis or other military installations my dad was stationed at), the hole would be about 3/8 of an inch in diameter, and at the center of a little dent….

I’m thinking it’s the standard military issue bullet hole, I mean: “Hole, comma, bullet…. one each…”  Simple to create, simple to fix.

But just to be sure, I ask, “How big is it?”

So while I’m confidently expecting to hear, “Oh, about 3/8ths of an inch.”

I actually hear, “Oh, about the size of a man’s hand…”

A man’s hand…

What on earth?

Turns out his buddy’d been commuting down to the tideflats in Tacoma with it, and ran a forklift through the driver’s door and one of the tines did indeed make a hole… about the size of a man’s hand… in the driver’s door.

So I got the address of the place, and as dad and I drove out there to find it, we noticed that this was not a neighborhood of manicured lawns and well-tended gardens.   It was more a neighborhood of dead grass, faded plastic toys, and rusting cars.

We found the car sitting in the back of a house that was clearly being rented by a bunch of guys who were associated with some kind of motorcycle club.  The names Harley and Davidson were nailed, sewn, welded, or stapled to just about any object available.  These guys were – how do you say this…

… well, my son once said that while some of his friends had made nasty comments about rednecks, he had absolutely nothing against them because they were so ingenious and so ridiculously practical.  You’ve seen the picture of the redneck whose air conditioning broke in his car, but he happened to have a generator and a house sized window air conditioner handy.  So he bolted the generator to the trunk of his car, mounted the air conditioner in the right rear window, and then, when it was hot, he’d fire up the generator, fire up the air conditioner, and grow icicles in the car.  Not “cool” – but definitely cool.

These guys were the same way.  If they could make it work – it worked.  You’ll see this in a minute.

So my dad and I drove out there, and sure enough – it was a V-4, not a 3 cylinder like my other Saab.

(whoa, cool!)

In fact, not only was it a V-4, but it was a “De Luxe” – (that meant it had a tachometer)

Woohoo! This was looking like it could be fun…

After a bit of looking around, I noticed all the body work on the car was good, just like he said on the phone.

Except for the passenger’s door, which was scraped up pretty bad.

I noticed that all the glass in the car was good, just like he said on the phone…

Except for the windshield.

Which only had one crack in it…

A nice… big… diagonal one that went from top to bottom.

The stories the car was telling me were just a touch different than the stories the owner was telling me.

But I watched, and looked, and after he started it up – I listened.

Oh… my… gosh…

It sounded WONDERFUL.

The three cylinder, two stroke engine in the other Saab sounded like a swarm of seriously irritated hornets.  Powerful? No.  If you heard it, you might look around because you were sure a tree was being cut down by that chainsaw you were hearing.

But this thing – it idled beautifully, had a low rumble, almost a dual exhaust kind of a thing – a little ‘blap blap’ from one side kind of synchronized with a blublap from the other side…  Oh, it was cool… You just didn’t hear that out of a Saab of that vintage… It sounded almost like a couple of gentle Harleys… (Come to think of it – the Harleys had what they called a V-twin engine… the Saab had a V-4 = effectively two V-twins end to end)… But what on earth had they done to this thing?  In fact, how the heck could this thing sound so wonderful?  I knew what kind of exhaust it had… two headers – joined in the front by something Saab had called a ‘resonating chamber’ – and a pipe that went back under the passenger’s side of the car – exiting just under the right…

Rear…

Taillight…

Except it wasn’t there.

If it isn’t clear from what we saw earlier, it turns out these were a bunch of Harley bikers – and after a little chatting, the stories the owner was telling me started to match the stories the car was telling me.

I remember asking, “Has it ever been rolled?” – and later thinking, “How often do you ask the owner of a car you’re about to buy “IF” it’s been rolled – wouldn’t it be obvious?

Well – with this car – it could be done.  Not often, and not without consequences, but it could definitely be done.

What started off as a “Nope, never been rolled” turned into a reluctant “Well, once, a bit…” when I told him the stories the car was telling me.

And then, since we were telling stories, he told me the story about one of their excursions determining precisely HOW strong this engine was, driving up this dry riverbed, they rolled the car and got a bunch of gravel in the engine compartment and broke the motor mounts while cracking the windshield. In doing so, they also blasted the crap out of that original exhaust system.  In fact, there was nothing remaining of it.  But fixing it would have been expensive, and one of the things about redneck ingenuity was that if you could make it work, you would make it work.  And so they’d attached a piece of flex tube down from each of the exhaust manifolds – one on either side of the engine – and they went under the car just like the normal ones had gone, but instead of that resonating chamber, they went back about two feet.

And stopped.

There were a couple of little baffles screwed on the end and that was it.

It was the shortest, smallest, simplest “dual high performance exhaust” I’d ever seen.

I asked if I could take it for a test drive, he agreed, so I got in, fired it up (oooh, that sounded nice) – hit the clutch, and put it in first, let up on the clutch – and….

Nothing.

Engine didn’t slow down.

Gears didn’t grind.

Car didn’t move.

Nothing.

I tried second.

Nothing.

Reverse…

Nothing.

Holy cow…. what the HECK had they done to this transmission?

I shifted it into third, and got it moving, very slowly, and there was this low frequency ‘thunk… thunk. thunk’ that happened with a little jerk about once per tire revolution

Hmmm…

A thunking sound, not what you want to hear – but I managed to accelerate, gently and found that if you drove it fast enough – that thunking sound indeed became a banging sound…

…the sound of a transmission beating itself to death.

So I did the only thing I could possibly do under the circumstances.

I bought the car.

And started it out slowly in third gear –  with the banging –  made it to fourth, and drove the thing home, with dad following me.  Every now and then you could smell gear oil.  This was, to use a technical term, “bad.”  Gear oil is supposed to stay inside the transmission (with the gears, hence the name).

I took the engine out, took the transmission out, and realized the ring gear (part of the ring and pinion set of gears in a gearbox) was missing more teeth than a hockey player.  I found six of them in the bottom of the transmission casing.

Of the ones that were left, forty-six were damaged, all with various cracks or chunks out of them.  Bottom line, that gearbox was in dire need of dental work – which simply wasn’t happening…

It was toast.

But that engine… oh man…  Strong engine…. STRONG engine…

In fact, on top of everything else, the “rolling the car” physics experiments the previous owners had done proving this whole “STRONG engine” concept broke the starter off the engine block.  Note: The starter is bolted on to the engine through a hunk of cast steel about an inch and a half think. This hunk of cast steel had been broken off… and with redneck ingenuity, had been welded back on.

Very… strong…. engine.

By the time I had it all apart – someone gave me another one, ironically, a 1968 Saab 96 Deluxe, with the words, “Here, you can have it if you’ll take it away.”

Um… okay…

The car, however, had one minor issue.

No engine.

In fact, no transmission…

In fact fact… nothing under the hood… at all.

So now I had two Saabs sitting in my parent’s back yard, one with nothing under the hood at all, and one with a STRONG engine, with no way to use the power.

Hmm…

Speaking of power, it was clear it was time to call on some higher power, and so I did the only thing I could at the time.

I prayed.

Now understand that this wasn’t the kind of prayer that was filled with “Oh Lord, it is I, Tom, thy humble servant, beseeching thee for a four speed synchromesh transmission that yea, verily, and forsooth, worketh in my Saab…”

No….

Not the way I prayed….

Ever have a kid whine at you? a kid who really, REALLY wanted something? The kind that was pestering the living crap out of you to the point where you just wanted the noise to go away to the point where no matter what it was, you would give it to them just to shut them up?

That was me:  “God, can I have a transmission? Can I? Can I? Can I? Puleeeeeeeze can I have a transmission?”

…oh, one more thing… “Amen.”

I have to tell you – I have never, ever heard so much nothing coming back from a prayer of any kind.  I mean, even the “God bless Mom and Dad and…” (insert requisite list of friends, relatives, pets both living and dead and so on) seemed to get more of a response than this – even if it was just an echo.

I mean, there’s quiet, there’s silence, and then there’s that stunned silence you get when you’ve heard something totally unexpected and simply can’t think of anything to say.

I think God was up there going, “Are you for real?”

And then… Oh Lordy… He had a sense of humor.  Now the thing was, I didn’t have any other options here… I’d priced out VW transmissions at the time just to get a sense of what a transmission cost, and they were running in the $375.00 range.

I didn’t have $375.00.

I also didn’t have a transmission.

And I had a pile of Swedish steel in the back yard with that fool strong engine, and my parents at the time were pondering things like “How did we get into this mess?” and “How do we get out of this mess?” and “Where do we put this?”…

Right next to a duck, maybe? (you may have to have read ‘They don’t shoot on Sundays’ to get that one)

So I was praying, literally doing that, “God, can I have a transmission, can I can I pulleeeeeze?” thing, in large part because I didn’t know what else to do…

I’d looked for transmissions, and they were rarer than Sasquatches in Singapore.

No Saab transmissions anywhere.

Also, No Answer.

I kept at this for six months.

No answer.

Then one day, the weirdest thing happened.

I was praying – oh let’s get real – this wasn’t praying, this was pestering….

It seemed like God finally got tired of me whining about this fool transmission, and out of the silence I’d experienced for months came this message, so loud, so clear, that I looked around trying to figure out who’d said it.

“One’s on the way.”

“Huh? What? One’s WHAT’s on the way?”

“One’s on the way.”

Uh…

Wait – Fedex?  UPS? I mean, if you’re sending me one, can I have a tracking number or something?

Apparently God didn’t find that one amusing…

“One’s on the way.”

I’m not sure who I could have talked to at the time, but I felt this urgent need to request permission from someone to get weirded out just a touch…

On the other hand, I was praying, for Heaven’s sake (pardon the pun) – what should I have expected?

And then there was that silence again…

I mean, I heard nothing…

Not even a cricket…

I wasn’t sure what to do for a while there.

And then one day, one of dad’s Saab buddies, a fellow by the name of Clark Duncan, came out, totally unannounced, and said, to me, “Hey, wanna go Saab Hunting?”

“Huh?”

“I heard there were some out near Wilkeson and Carbonado, wanna go?”

Wilkeson and Carbonado are two towns close to Mt. Rainier that were – well, not quite in the middle of nowhere, but you could see it from there.

“Um… sure….”

So we went.

There were no Saabs out there at all. So we headed further out – and – well- you’ve heard of the boondocks?  Depending on what part of the country you’re from, past the boondocks is what’s known as the pucker brush, past that is the toolies.  We were on the border of toolies and whatever’s past that.  No one knows for sure.  They’ve never come back to tell us.

And out there, (apologies to Douglas Adams), there’s this wrecking yard… A Wrecking Yard at the End of the Universe…

It was called “Double I Wrecking.”

I mean, this was like any standard issue junkyard, and it came with the standard stuff…

Big Fence…

Check.

Gravel…

Check.

Lots of old metal crap…

Czech. (just seeing if you’re paying attention)

Oil on the ground to the point where it’s either congealed or in rainbows in the puddles.

Check and check…

Oh, and mud.  Have to have the mud.

And puddles…

And cars.

Check… Check… Check…

What are we missing?

Oh – Animals… That standard assortment of vicious animals that keeps people out of the junkyard…

Except whoever ordered this junk yard didn’t check that box.

There was clearly another box labeled “other”

…and the grizzled old fart who was ordering the junkyard chuckled and  wrote in “Geese”

Now if you were to think of something that guarded a wrecking yard – or a junk yard, what type of potentially living organism would your mind conjure up?

I mean, you could come up with something mean, like a pit bull, or a Doberman, or a Rottweiler… Heck, any junkyard dog could work.  You could go one better and get Leroy Brown.

But the person who was filling out the checkbox on the “Standard Junkyard Order Form” had found the box marked “other” and filled in the blank.

When Clark and I got out of the car, we didn’t see a pack of dogs, we didn’t hear an ominous growl, heck, we didn’t even see Leroy.  We were attacked by a herd of wild freaking geese.

Have you EVER been attacked by a herd… herd?… flock? …a bunch of geese?

I mean, they don’t growl, they hiss. They’ve got these long necks that you could grab, but – there were so many of them! Which neck do you grab? It was like trying to wrestle with a plate of spaghetti.

While we were standing there flailing our arms at these necks, looking just exactly like the sissies we were, someone came out of the made to order shack and called them off.

That was the weirdest thing.  I’ve heard people say “Call off your dog!” – but “Call off your geese?”

For that matter, the question of, “Geese can be trained?” popped into my mind, I mean, the only term I’d heard about what you do with a goose was cook it.

And the gooses – er – geese – obeyed… they waddled back through the gate into the junkyard.

Waddled.

And it was a threatening waddle, too, I might add.

Clark and I just stared at each other for a minute.

“Were we just attacked by a herd of marauding watch-geese?”

We couldn’t believe it…

We followed the geese in – daintily stepping around little landmines they’d left behind, and found real humans to talk to.

Now by this time in my search for a Saab transmission, I’d learned that you didn’t just walk in and ask for them, because often the folks working there had no clue what they actually had in their junkyards.  If you went in and asked, “Hey, you got a transmission for a 1968 Saab 96 with a V-4 engine in it?”

They’d just say no.

So over time, I had learned how to ask for things, and how not to ask for things, and in the Wrecking Yard at the End of the Universe, I heard myself say,

“Hey, you got any old Saabs around here?”

If he said no, we’d thread our way through the geese and their landmines again and leave.

If he said anything else, we were in.

“Whatchaneed?”

Ding!

We’re in.

“Well, I’m looking for a transmission for a ‘68 96.”

“Hmmm… the one I’ve got doesn’t have a transmission in it – just has the engine.”

(note – that’s not possible – to just get the transmission out you either take the engine out – or you cut the car in half, but I wasn’t going to be so rude as to tell him he didn’t know what he was doing in his own junkyard, so the transmission had to be there.)

“You mind if I go out and take a look?”

“Sure, help yourself”

…and he gestured in a direction that used up roughly a quarter of a standard compass.

I averaged that out and headed in that direction.  It turned out this had been a station wagon (a Saab 95) – that someone had made into a pickup truck with a welding torch, so everything behind the driver’s door was pretty messed up (read: gone),

I popped the hood, and sure enough, everything under the hood was still there, and I mean *everything*.

And behind the engine in there was a transmission….

I was elated, I was thrilled, I was –

oh…

Confused…

I had no idea what to do now that I’d found it.

I was so used to there NOT being transmissions that I don’t know what to do if there was one…

Um….

I pondered the significance of this situation as I walked back to the “office” with its fake grass for the carpeting…

I mean, I was thinking, and clearly God was up there, kind of chuckling, wondering what I’d do now that He’d dropped a transmission in my lap…

“Well,” thought I, figuring that if a chat with God could result in a transmission, maybe another chat with God could help me actually get the dang thing.

“I know the VW ones go for about $375.00… Maybe I’ll offer him $75.00.”

“Nooooooooo!”

I ducked.

“Uh… don’t offer him 75?”

“Don’t say anything”

Okay, this was now officially weird… First off, I wasn’t quite used to ‘hearing’ God like that – so my weirdometer was getting pretty close to pegged on this.  But regardless, somewhere in the standard negotiation tactics I figured there had to be something about talking… I mean, how do you do negotiations without talking?

So I went in and just tried to tell the guy behind the counter what I’d found, trying to figure out how to tell him that he’d had no idea what he was talking about – but doing it politely, said, “Well, it’s out there, and it does indeed have the transmission in it.”

“Oh, really?!”

“Yup, it’s there… checked it myself…”

All the while I’m thinking – it’d be easier to take the engine and the transmission out – it’s three bolts – disconnect the shifter, the exhaust, and various hoses, and just yank. Used to take me 32 minutes to yank a 3 cylinder engine – I knew how this worked.  It would come out…

So I asked, “How much you want for it? Engine and transmission?”

“Engine AND transmission?”

“Yup”

“Can’t take it out today”

“Don’t care, I’ll take it out.”

This confused him.

“Can’t guarantee the engine’ll run.”

I didn’t care, the engine was just in the way of what I wanted, the transmission.

“Don’t care, I’ll fix it.”

This confused him more.

Most people visiting the Wrecking Yard at the End of the Universe wanted the parts they purchased to work…

This person didn’t care…

This was very strange.

And then he said something that I only much later realized was something Alex Trebek would be familiar with, as it was phrased as a question…

“Sixty dollars?”

“Sixty dollars…”

“Engine and transmission?”

“Engine and transmission.”

“Done deal.  I’ll be back tomorrow.”

I was stunned.

I rode home kind of in a daze – and sure enough, went out there the next day and yanked the engine and transmission out, paid the gentleman $60.00 and brought it home.

I took the two apart, bolted the STRONG engine to the $30.00 transmission, put them in the free car that I’d been given if I’d take it away, hooked the rest of the stuff up, and started it up.

I drove that car for 17 years.

Until…

One day…

As I was leaving work – the transmission made this pop, and then a low frequency ‘thunk… thunk. thunk’ that happened with a little jerk about once per tire revolution

I’d heard this before.  Many years before, and I knew what it meant.

It was not good.

I thought I might be able to make it home – but work was 17 miles from home, through some pretty awful traffic, and some steep hills.

I gently accelerated, and the thunking noise turned into a banging noise, and that $30.00 transmission – after 17 years of work – gently let me know that it didn’t have anything left to give.

Interestingly enough, I was now in the very same position I’d been in many years earlier – lots of power from that “STRONG Engine” and no way to get it to the ground.

I called around and found out that it would cost 1700.00 to rebuild it.

A friend heard of my plight – and said, “Hey, I know of another one that’s for sale up north… I think it’s the same year – same color even…”

I went up there to look at the car.  It was indeed the same year, and the same color.  It had been this lady’s first car – she’d bought it when she was in college, and when she left home – she left the car in her dad’s barn. He retired, and needed something to do, so he had the engine rebuilt.  And he had the transmission rebuilt, and then one day, after he’d gotten so much fixed and done, he called her over from where she lived, 12 miles away, to give her her old car back.  With a father’s pride – he handed her the keys to her car – and what had been his project for the last few years.

But she’d grown past it – and so she drove it from Snohomish to Everett and put a for sale sign on it.

And for $1900.00 I got a car with an engine with 12 miles on a full rebuild… and I’ve driven that car for the last 11 years… When I got it home – I looked at the vin number – and something looked very familiar…

All but the last digit on the VIN number were identical.

I popped the hood of the original one – xxxxxO.

And went back to look at the new one… xxxxx6.

So in the end, two cars that must have been made on or about the same day, but six cars apart, by the same people, had been acquired about 20 years apart, were once again sitting next to each other, in my driveway.

Now not all of my prayers have been me pestering God like this, nor have they all been answered like this – (wait, maybe there’s a lesson there, huh?) but this one was kind of special… and now, with apologies to Paul Harvey, you know the rest of the story…

Just HOW much can you lose in the translation?

September 16, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | by | 1 comment


I suppose I have to rate this one PG or something – just so you’ve got some warning…

When our son was little we taught him the typical songs you’d teach your kid here in America – you know, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” …  “You are my Sunshine”, and of course, the ever popular children’s song, “I’m a Lumberjack and I’m okay”…. (okay, I didn’t teach him all of that one)

But I also taught him some of the songs he would have learned had he grown up where I grew up, in Germany.  Specifically Southern Germany.  More specifically, the “Swabian” part of Germany.

The sense of humor over there is so matter of fact… And it’s old.  Some of the folk songs have their basis in events that may have happened hundreds of years earlier, and that sense of humor is often dry to the point of being dusty.

Also, some of these songs come from the same culture that brought you Grimm’s Fairy Tales…

The original ones, not the Disneyfied ones.

So one of the songs I taught my son was about a fellow getting a ride on a train.

With his wife.

And a goat.

Now before I describe the song to you – you really have to hear it. (click on the word ‘song’ back there). If you don’t understand German – don’t worry – the people singing are singing just like we all did, with joy and gusto.  You might be wondering why by the time we’re done, but… Well, that’s one of the things that might be lost in the translation – which I’ll be doing my best to do, as it were, below – you just need to hear what the song sounds like first.

The one you just heard, if you listened, starts off pretty fast.  The way we used to sing it, we’d start out slow and speed up – like a steam locomotive of the time would – then get faster – and then there’s this refrain, “Trulla, trulla, trullala, trulla, trulla, trullala”, – and then the last two lines of the previous verse are repeated.  It’s also sung in the dialect of southern Germany – which, where I grew up, is kind of like a gentle southern drawl.  (and the one you just heard is definitely authentic) I mean – speaking “Hochdeutsch” (high German – the formal stuff) – you could try to say “I love you” and end up sounding like a cat, hacking up a hairball – so the southern dialect, the Schwäbisch – or “Swabian” dialect – is gentle, laid back, and saying the same thing sounds like a hug.

Needless to say, there’s a difference between hugs and hairballs, so I’ll do my best to translate here.  Note: the dialect is phonetic – so what you see below might not be translatable in, say, Google or other online translation services.

The first verse just tells the story of the first train that went all the way from southern to northern Germany.  This section of track, the “Schwäbische Eisebahn” was a tremendous source of pride in that part of the country when it was built, and the song, as I understand it, almost became a sort of regional “national anthem”.

Auf d’r schwäbsche Eisebahne gibt’s gar viele Haltstatione,

On the Swabian railroad track, there are lots of train stations
Schtuegart, Ulm und Biberach, Mekkebeure, Durlesbach!

Stuttgart, Ulm and Biberach, Mekkebeure, Durlesbach (several of the major stops on the line)

Trulla, trulla, trullala, trulla, trulla, trullala,

Trulla, trulla, trullala, trulla, trulla, trullala,

Schtuegart, Ulm und Biberach, Mekkebeure, Durlesbach!

Stuttgart, Ulm and Biberach, Mekkebeure, Durlesbach

It was a tremendously fun song to sing – I’d sung it growing up – so it was a given that I’d be teaching it to my son as he was growing up.

And then my wife asked the most innocent, and simultaneously impossible question she could ask:

“So what’s it mean?”

Auf d’r Schwäbsche Eisebahne wollt amol a Bäurle fahre,

On the swabian railroad, a farmer once wanted to take a trip
Goht am Schalter, lüpft d’r Hut. “Oi Bilettle, seid so guat!”

He went to the ticket agent, tips his hat, and asks, “One ticket, if you please”
Trulla, trulla, trullala, trulla, trulla, trullala,

Trulla, trulla, trullala, trulla, trulla, trullala,
geht am Schalter, lüpft d’r Hut. “Oi Bilettle, seid so gut !”

…went to the ticket agent/machine, tips his hat, and asks, “One ticket, if you please”

“Well, it’s about this farmer… “

“Okay…”

“…and his wife…”

“okaaay…”

“…aaaaand this goat…”

(Long, LONG pause as I try to figure out how to translate this part that up until that moment had been funny, but now that I tried to translate it into something someone born and raised here in America would understand, I realized that it would absolutely, positively, without a doubt, lose something in the translation…  Just how much was to be determined…)

Einen Bock hat er gekaufet und daß er ihm nit entlaufet,

He bought himself this billy goat, and so it wouldn’t walk off
Bindet ihn d’r guete Ma, an den hintere Wage na.

The good man tied him to the back of the last car in the train.

(unsaid, implied, or left for you to guess is that he was doing

this while loading the rest of his stuff onto the train)
Trulla, trulla, trullala, trulla, trulla, trullala,
bindet ihn d’r guete Ma an den hintere Wage na.

“Well, the farmer ties the goat to the back of the train to keep it from wandering off.”

“Okay…. And?”

This is where it got hard…

“Well… what isn’t actually stated is that he forgets the goat.”

“What – the goat runs off?”

“Well, not exactly…”

“What do you mean, not exactly?”

“Well, the goat’s tied to the back of the train.”

“And the train LEAVES?”

Wie des Zügle wieder staut, der Bauer nach sei´m Böckle schaut

When the train started up again, the farmer went to check on the goat.

(the version I used to sing had a couple of verses before this one where the farmer sits down next to his wife, lights up his pipe, and has a smoke, and it’s at the next stop that he makes the discovery below)
Find’t er bloss Kopf und Soil an dem hintre Wagetoil.

And finds nothing but the rope and the goat’s head still tied to the last car in the train.
Trulla, trulla, trullala, trulla, trulla, trullala,
Find’t er bloss Kopf und Soil an dem hintre Wagetoil.

“Ummm…  Yeah…”

The reputation of an entire culture was on my shoulders as I tried to explain that tying a goat to the back of a train that was about to head down the tracks a tad faster than said goat could run could be seen as rather amusing when looked at the right angle, you know, like the farmer went to town every week on the train, and every week he did the same thing – only this week he did something different, out of the ordinary, not routine… He bought a goat.  He thought about it long enough to tie it to the back of the train so it wouldn’t run off as he was loading his other purchases into the train – and, as we often do, he then went on autopilot once he was on the train and the whistle blew. (how many coffee cups, diaper bags, wallets, or dare I say it, loaded child seats, have you seen on the roof of a moving car?)

Of course, trying to find out exactly what angle in all this would be amusing was the challenge…

‘s packt d’r Baure a Baurezore, er nimmt d’r Geißbock bei die Ohre,

The farmer (in frustration) grabs the goat by the ears
Schmeißt er, was er schmeiße ka, dem Konduktör an ‘n Ranza na.

And throws what he can throw (namely what’s left of the goat) as hard as he can throw it at the conductor

(essentially blaming him for not keeping track of the goat, so to speak)
Trulla, trulla, trullala, trulla, trulla, trullala,
Schmeißt er, was er schmeiße ka, dem Konduktör an ‘n Ranza na.

And while I’m happily singing “Trulla, trulla, trullala, trulla, trulla, trullala” with my son, clapping with him and smiling, the dawning realization in my wife’s mind changed the look of shock on her face into a look of absolute horror.

She was thinking of the song from the goat’s point of view, which, in Germany, especially in agricultural Germany, you really didn’t do much… I mean yes, some of the farm animals kind of became pets, but for the most part, goats were livestock, and farmers managed them.  Livestock lived long enough to either produce or become food. It was pretty simple, pretty straight forward, and pretty practical.

But here in America – especially here in America in an area where you don’t see livestock in much more than a petting zoo – you tend to think of those warm fuzzy little goat like things a little differently, and you might tend to see the whole story from their point of view.

“He left the goat tied to the back of the train, the goat tried to keep up with the train, and – and…”

I had to fill the silence with something…

“Well, yeah…”

“And they wrote a SONG about it?”

“And it’s a HAPPY song?”

“Well, um.  Not for the goat…”

Sigh…

Trulla, trulla, trullala…

🙂

B-52’s, Karma, and Compromises…

June 3, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , | by | 4 comments


Another one of the stories I told Michael about his heritage, this one about his Grampa, his step-great-Grampa, if there is such a thing, and a B-52.

My dad was stationed at Castle Air Force Base in Merced, California in 1967, where the 93rd Bombardment Group was based.  The 93rd at the time flew B-52’s, and they trained pilots and crews both in the planes and with simulators.  They did this 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  When they weren’t flying the airplanes, these pilots and crews were in the simulators, practicing.

And my dad fixed those simulators.

A few hours north of Merced is Santa Rosa, where dad’s mom and stepdad lived.  Dad’s stepdad, we’ll call him “Grampa Bill” fancied himself to be an artist and photographer.  This is a point that could be argued pretty heavily.  And, it turns out, when dad and mom were a young couple and dad was stationed elsewhere, Grampa Bill wanted to take some photographs of mom that could at the very least be described as ‘inappropriate’.  I won’t go into any more detail other than to say that when dad found out, he stormed in to see his commander and asked if he could have some leave so that he could go pour a goodly amount of chlorine into the gene pool.  His commander declined the request, but sent someone to check on mom.  She was fine, but that incident cemented the relationship between dad and Grampa Bill into something very, very simple: Dad hated Grampa Bill, with a passion. And honestly, as I see it, he was right.

Now it’s not that he could have done anything about it overtly, but as the years went by — well, you’ve likely found out at some point in your life, there is this thing that’s known by several names…

Some call it “The Golden Rule”,

Some call it “What goes around, comes around.”

And some call it “Karma.”

And when you find yourself watching, almost from the outside,

…how “The Golden Rule” is turning things toward you,

…and you find that things that have gone around are coming around,

…or, put another way, watching Karma setting up a situation for you – whatever you call it, it’s almost impossible not to smile.

Such was the case with dad and Grampa Bill.

Dad worked with or near airplanes.

Grampa Bill wanted to take pictures of airplanes.

More specifically, he wanted to take a picture of a B-52, taking off.

…and dad could make that happen.

Now the thing was, Grampa Bill didn’t want to get a picture with a little camera he’d be holding in his hand. He wanted to shoot the picture with a camera that looked like a small accordion and came in a small suitcase. It was a film camera, the kind that uses film not in rolls, but in sheets, 4 inches by 5 inches in size.  You had to look through the actual camera, not a viewfinder, and to be able to see the picture you were about to take, you had to have your head under a dark cloth to focus and frame the shot on the ground glass (think frosted glass) in the back of the camera.  This image you saw on the ground glass would be upside down and backwards.  When you were satisfied that it was framed right, you shoved a film holder into the back of the camera by the ground glass and from there on out you couldn’t see through it.  You closed the open shutter and pulled out the slide protecting the film from stray light.  Then and only then was everything set.  If you opened the shutter at that point, the film would be exposed, and you’d have your picture.

It was, as you can imagine, not a fast process, and you can probably figure out that it’s not a camera you would use to take images of, say, moving objects.

Like, say…

A B-52…

Taking off…

Toward you…

But that’s precisely what Grampa Bill wanted to do.

At Castle Air Force Base.

Where dad worked.

Where they flew B-52’s.

And…

…and an absolutely evil plot started festering in dad’s brain.

See, dad knew several things that Grampa Bill didn’t know:

He knew how much of the runway the plane would use up to do a normal takeoff.

He knew that aerodynamically, while most planes take off with their noses pointed to the sky, when a B-52 takes off, the pilot actually has to aim the plane 2 degrees nose down to climb for the first little bit.

More importantly, Dad knew the pilots flying these planes.

Now, if you happen to be standing at the end of a runway – and on the other end there’s a half million pounds of raw power accelerating directly toward you out of a black wall of smoke created by not 1, not 2, but 8 of some of the most powerful jet engines of the time, there’s a good chance you’re going to leave something in your pants as it goes overhead – liquid or solid, doesn’t matter.

If the person you asked to get you to this position knew the pilot, and also had a years long score to settle with you, those chances would likely lean toward the solid, and it would best be time to start digging yourself a hole.

Remember?

Dad worked on the B-52 flight simulators – so he knew, and was acquainted with, all the pilots who trained in them.

And he knew this one.

Dad had explained to the pilot that he’d be out there one Sunday with his step dad, who wanted to take a photo of this takeoff, and as a last request, said to him, “Do you think you could keep it on the ground a little longer this time?”

There was a look between them, and as is often the case, words were not exchanged, in that guy to guy way we men often communicate. But the pilot clearly understood what was meant, and he did indeed agree to keep it down on the ground…

…a little longer.

Every Air Force base has what they call a ‘perimeter road’ – a road that goes around the perimeter of the airfield.  You are not supposed to get any closer to the runway than that road, and even while you’re on it, you’re not supposed to stop once you cross under the flight path.

Dad and Grampa Bill got into one of the Air Force trucks and headed out toward the runway.

Grampa Bill was having trouble believing his good fortune.

Dad turned the truck off the perimeter road and up toward the runway, where there was a sign that started off with, “Authorized Personnel Only” and got significantly more threatening with every word, ending in something along the lines of “Deadly Force Authorized”.

They drove past the sign.

Dad drove Grampa Bill out to the end of the runway to pick out a good vantage point to take the picture from.

Grampa Bill’s excitement grew.  This was better than he’d hoped.  He’d be allowed to get far, far closer than he’d dare dreamed.

In taking him past the signs, dad also took him in past the approach lights at the end of the runway, so they wouldn’t clutter up the picture.

When they stopped, he was almost beside himself. Grampa Bill proudly set up his camera, meticulously judging exposure, focus, depth of field, while 2 miles away, the B-52’s pilot got the his bird into takeoff position.

He’d finished the pre-takeoff checklist with his copilot and pushed the 8 throttles to takeoff power.  The plane shook as the jet exhaust made a black wall of smoke behind it.

It took a few seconds for the thrust to build and the sound to reach the far end of the runway, but once it got there, the deep rumble of raw power stayed, getting louder with each passing second.

The pilot held the plane back with its huge brakes and waited till they and all systems were cleared for takeoff.

He’d told his copilot what was happening, and while they didn’t deviate from the checklists or official cockpit language, they did share a grin under their oxygen masks.

They were given clearance, and the plane started to roll.

Grampa Bill sensed the movement and tried to hold his excitement down.  The ability to stand right at the end of a runway while an airplane, not just an airplane, but the mighty B-52 took off directly overhead was an astoundingly rare treat.

Nearby, Dad stood by, calmly leaning against the front fender of the truck, also conscious of the opportunity of an astoundingly rare treat.

Now depending on its load, a B-52 has a takeoff speed of about 163 mph, and its wings sag when it’s on the ground, to the point where the engineers at Boeing designed extra landing gear out there just to support the wingtips.  As the plane accelerates, those wings start to fly themselves first, before they create enough lift to take the plane up with them.  They have a range of about 22 feet of ‘flap’ at the tips – so as the plane got closer, and faster, and bigger, and louder, those wings started flying,

But the nose was still pointed directly at Grampa Bill.

And his camera…

On the Tripod…

At the end of the runway…

The pilot, a major, kept the plane on the centerline, and felt the yoke slowly come alive in his hands as the 8 engines overcame inertia and brought them ever closer to takeoff speed.

Grampa Bill saw the tremendous contrast between the black wall of smoke, the white and silver plane, and the incredibly bright landing lights and wondered, for a split second, how that would affect the exposure setting on the camera.

The pilot felt the rumbling cease and the plane smooth out as the wheels left the pavement – and then aimed the nose down the 2 degrees, at a small tripod with a black box on it just off the end of the runway, to start the climb.

At that moment, Grampa Bill’s thoughts of exposure, focus, and timing were suddenly replaced with a rather urgent need to decide between liquid and solid.

Beside the tripod, Grampa Bill tried to be manly and stand his ground, but from his angle, the plane just couldn’t climb fast enough, it wasn’t even aimed up – in fact, it looked like it was actually aimed down, right at him. Those 8 engines, inhaling more air in a second than he breathed in a year, looked like they were going to inhale him, vaporize him, and blast the remaining bits into that huge wall of smoke behind the plane.

In the cockpit, the pilot thought he saw movement near the tripod just before it disappeared below his windscreen.

Below, the plane’s shadow passed with the fury of a tornado, the violence of an earthquake, and the heat of a blast furnace.  The jet blast tore the canvas top off the truck they’d driven out to the runway in, knocked the camera and tripod over, and sent them all diving for whatever cover they could find.  (This being an airbase, the only cover available was the truck they’d come out in).

And in the decision between liquid and solid, a compromise was made.

Both.

The last time I saw them, all the pictures Grampa Bill had taken were being stored in boxes in a chest of drawers in the attic.  They’re 4 x 5 negatives – or sometimes 4 x 5 positives.  I’ve looked through them all.

And there’s no picture of a B-52.

I still find myself smiling at that…

And somehow, I think those many years ago, under that truck, his ears still ringing, my dad smiled, too…

(C) 2010 – Tom Roush

(note: here’s a short 2 minute video of several B-52’s taking off – from beside the runway – not at the end of it, and they’re taking of higher than the Major did – but it’ll give you an idea of what it was like.

Plumbing…

April 23, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | 2 comments


Plumbing.

The bane of the homeowner.

A few years ago, I learned that you can’t call the landlord, or the property manager, or your folks. Unless you want to pay the price of a plumber, the job’s yours.

We learned in our house that very small things can cause very large problems.

It all started with the kitchen sink, which has one of those little screens to keep the crud from going down the drain.

Well sometimes it’s easier to flush the crud down the drain than it is to try to pick it out of the screen thing, so I’ve learned that jabbing it with a fork and then giving a good twist means the screen will pop up, the crud will go down, and there will be peace in the world.

There is, naturally, a warning to go along with this, that being that you don’t want things to go down the drain that the screen was meant to trap… So you have to be careful. Twice I had to take the drain apart when a fork or a spoon went down there.

But forks and spoons have built in safety features. They’re straight, and the trap under the sink isn’t, so they stay.

Now imagine, if you will, that you’re running low on dish washing liquid, and to do the dishes you’ve taken the top off the bottle to pour water in and get all the dishwashing liquid out.

Imagine, if you will, that after the dishes were done, the drain seemed to drain a lot slower…

So I figure, hey, there’s something stuck in there… So I pull out the plunger and go at it like I was trying to win a butter churning contest.

No luck.

I pull the drain apart.

Can’t find anything.

I run the snake down.

Nothing.

I put the sink back together and try it again.

Still slow. I mean, if you left it there overnight, it would drain out, but otherwise it would start off fine and then act like it had hit a brick wall, well, more like a rubber wall, because it would go down, stop, and then start slowly coming back up again, almost like an echo.

Hmmmm…

Then the bathroom sink started draining really slow.

So I took that apart…

…and ran the snake down…

— and nothing…

Okay, I’d spent about 8 hours of a weekend under kitchen and bathroom sinks, ripping plumbing out and getting absolutely nowhere.

So I did the ever popular male thing, if it doesn’t work, get a bigger hammer.

I attached a hose to the sink downstairs.

I ran it up to the kitchen sink, and had my 7 year old son Michael go downstairs, with the instructions, “Turn it on when I thump once on the floor, turn it off when I thump twice.”

So Michael the Helper trotted downstairs, all full of pride that he was helping solve this Major Household Problem.

I wrapped a towel around the end of the hose to make a seal, rammed it down the kitchen drain, and then thumped on the floor.

The hose gurgled, and hissed, and burped, and wiggled around as the water came up, and then like a cannon blasted water down

the drain.

I didn’t hear or feel anything give way, I didn’t hear or feel any kind of a plug, or for that matter resistance…

So I thought I’d fixed it.

I thumped twice, and the water stopped.

I pulled the hose out and water started coming back up, like that echo I’d seen earlier, only this time it was much bigger…

Hmmm…

I rammed the hose down again, and thumped…

… and the water started again…

And I kept at it until I heard this little voice from downstairs, “Papa-a-a-a-a? How come the ceiling is dripping?”

Uh – oh…

It was at this point that I instinctively knew what had happened.

The pipes were set up like a T, with the kitchen on the right side and the bathroom on the left side. Whatever was plugging things up was down on the vertical part of the T, and in essence, that one thing was plugging both drains.

You will see this material again.

I ran downstairs, and yes indeed, the ceiling was dripping, right from where the bathroom was.

I ran upstairs, and into the bathroom.

Or what had been the bathroom…

See, when I’d blasted the water down the kitchen sink and it couldn’t go anywhere, Mount Vesuvius erupted in the bathroom sink, cleaning all the crud in the drain on the way out and distributing it evenly all over the bathroom, and of course what didn’t stay in the bathroom went downstairs.

Oh good…

So now the bathroom sink’s full of brown crud, that echo effect has the kitchen sink in the same condition, and I obviously haven’t come anywhere near solving the problem, I’ve only made it worse…

But at least this time I know where the problem is, right?

Right.

So I go downstairs where Michael was, stepped around where the ceiling was still dripping, looked up and saw that there was a cleanout plug on the pipe that had to have the problem.

So I got this huge wrench and reefed on it.

No dice.

Bigger hammer time. (I’m a guy, remember?)

So I put a pipe on the end of the wrench and tried to do a chinup on it.

Of course that’s when it broke loose.

So I got back up on the chair, carefully, and started loosening it to take it all the way off to see where the problem was. Just to be safe, I got a bucket to catch any water that might dribble out. 

While I was loosening it, Michael, who’d gone upstairs, came down, and Alyssa, 12, came over to see what was going on.

The next part happened in slow motion.

As I was unscrewing the last little bit, the water (and black, unmentionable, icky crud) from the kitchen sink, the bathroom sink, and all the pipes in between finally found a place to go.

My face happened to be about 4 inches from that spot.

My eyes, ears, nose, and throat were filled with water so black it was opaque. In the background, through the gurgling, I heard the the sound of two children laughing like only children can laugh.

They still talk about it, and the stains in the shirt are still there.

Oh, and I found the lid to the dishwashing liquid.

Spandex, cyclists, and nailguns

April 20, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 2 comments


A few years ago I worked across the street from a building that was in the later stages of construction.  That meant that all the city sounds, of traffic, of seagulls, of boats, were built on a foundation of construction noise – of saws, hammers, workers, nail guns, and forklifts of various kinds, lifting building materials into the building.

This building was right along the ship canal, in Seattle, where daily, hundreds of stubby working boats earnestly tugged their barges, or huge ships glided (glid?) through with a serious air, or sleek, sexy, expensive yachts knifed through the water, each leaving a special wake all its own.  The wake would hit the rocks at the side of the canal long after the boat had passed.  It was a nice place to sit and think, and have lunch, or just watch the boats…  Between the building that I worked in and this one was a bicycle path.  Being Seattle, there were a lot of bicycle commuters.

One morning, they’d blocked the bike path off for some construction, and all the bikes were coming on the road between the building I worked in, and the one that was under construction across the street. As I was headed into the building, the noise in the background, I noticed this wave – no – wake, just like the boats, but this was not of water, it was a wake of silence heading toward me, and as I turned to see why – I saw this black cyclist coming toward me.  Now when I say ‘black’ – I mean, black helmet, black wraparound sunglasses, black shoes, and black spandex, from head to toe.

I know there are people for whom spandex is a bad thing to wear.  There are people for whom, quite frankly, spandex should be illegal.

I know.

I’m one of them.

But the person riding this bike had every right to wear it.  This spandex was flat where it needed to be flat, curved where it needed to curve, and rippled where it needed to be rippled.  Frankly, it was a testament to the brilliance of whoever invented it, and a testament to the hard work of the one wearing it.

At the same time, it covered every square inch there was to cover, while making quite clear what, exactly, it was covering.

The silence left in the wake of that cyclist was profound.

Saws stopped.

Hammers stopped

Nail guns stopped.

Work… Simply… Stopped.

The cyclist, for a moment, stopped too, as the light at the intersection turned red.

And while it was red, there was – there’s no other way to say it but – complete silence.

It turned green, they cyclist started off, and all the workers, stunned at the complete example of physical perfection they’d just seen pass by, cheered like only construction workers can cheer.

And then, with a smile, they cheerfully went back to work.

What I’d noticed, because I was closer, is that smile was shared – because as the cyclist rode past, the one part that wasn’t covered, broke into the slightest of grins.

Salty Sea Dogs

February 25, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 2 comments


So I’m out for a doctor prescribed walk – down by Shilshole Bay marina on Puget Sound.

As I often do in places like this, I close my eyes and just listen, to see with my ears, and find the waves gently lapping at the hulls of hundreds of sailboats.

There’s a train, with eight locomotives idling on the tracks across the street.

Two seagulls are fighting over a little piece of something or other…

A couple of Canada geese fly by, encouraging each other along with their honks. In the background to the west are the sea lions, occasionally barking…

The lines of the sailboats creak just slightly as they hold the masts straight, and I open my eyes to see that the weathervanes are all in formation, sniffing at the breeze.

Into this nautical environment walk two characters straight out of central casting for Moby Dick. The one on the left has this mop of a beard that’s just asking to be wrung out.

The one on the right has this little cap that makes me think of the skipper on Gilligan’s Island…

The conversation they’re having with their hands draws me in, making me wonder what conversation they’re having with their voices, so I wait, wondering what kind of shipboard drama is being recounted, what story is being remembered, what adventure is being relived.

They get closer, and the story in my imagination are shattered by reality as the only words I actually hear from them are, “…well, have you tried Linux on that system?”

Tom Roush

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