Tag Archive

You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Life’ tag.

Thump. Thump… ThumpThumpThumpThump!

September 1, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | by | 1 comment


In church Sunday mornings – we have a time of prayer – where we say, and pray for and about, what’s on our hearts, whether that’s things we’re thankful for, things we’re worried about, all sorts of things – and just after everyone quieted down one Sunday a while ago and every eye was closed – we all heard the sound of two little feet walking, then running up the aisle.

“Daaaaddddiiiiiiiiieeeeeee!!!!”

About 400 eyes opened at once, and saw a child, being held tightly by her father, a child who’d let nothing get in her way, who ran up and didn’t care who saw her, the one thing important in her life was being with her daddy.

…and it got me thinking.

Isn’t that what prayer’s all about?

Abba… (no, not the group, Abba is Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, for father, or daddy.)

Father…

Daddy?

We’re supposed to be as little children (Matthew 18:3), just like this child, but so often we let all the worries and “wisdom” that comes with being adults get in our way.

I mean seriously, how many times have you tried to pray, and it’s all just gone south – nothing’s working – the words aren’t coming, you feel like your prayers aren’t making it past the ceiling, like there’s this vast chasm between you and God  – and then there are other times when you’re in such a state where you hit your knees in the hallway and skid into the bedroom yelling, “G-o-o-o-o-o-d!” because you’re so messed up you don’t even know what to say or how to pray.

Been there.

Done that.

Need the T-shirt.

(note to self: don’t hit knees in the hallway… it’s carpeted)

But this kid…

Hmm…

Daddy.

Ceilings.

G-o-o-o-o-o-d!

If God’s unchanging – that must mean that the only difference there is us.

Of course, THAT thought got me thinking some more.

Years ago I heard a pastor tell a story about an old couple.  They’d been married for decades, and one day, as they’re on a drive, he behind the wheel, and she leaning up against the window.  Suddenly, the wife says to the husband, a little wistfully, “Why don’t we snuggle anymore in the car like we used to?”

And the husband, with his hands still on the wheel, gently gave the only answer to that question that he could. “I haven’t moved…”

He was in the same spot he always was.  He was just as available for snuggling, but over time,  things got between them, whether it was a drive-in meal, or later a kid, there was a lot of time in the car when the couple wasn’t nearly as close as they had been at the beginning of their relationship.

The husband hadn’t moved, but there was still stuff between them, and they weren’t close enough to snuggle.

And that kid running up the aisle brought it all back – how she’d simply eliminated everything, at a full run, between her and her daddy, so she could be close to him, and snuggle.

My eyes are closed as I write this, remembering…

“Let’s bow our heads in prayer…”

Thump!

Thump!

Thump!  Thump!

Thumpthumpthumpthump…..

“Daddddiiiiiiiiieeeee!!!”

She ran, yes, ran, up to see her Daddy.

And when she got to him, he didn’t scold her for disturbing the prayer.  And just like the prodigal son’s father, he did something much, much better.  He scooped his little girl up and hugged her – while hankies dabbed at some of the 400 eyes who realized what a miracle they’d just been privileged to see.

Tractors, Old Cars, and a Farmer named Harry

August 25, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , | by | 5 comments


Have you ever come up with a snappy answer to a question that you just couldn’t get out of your mouth in time? I generally get my “snappy answers” about a week or two later, having spent the entire time wondering what I should have said, could have said, didn’t say, whatever. I rarely, if ever come up with the *right* answer at the right time.

Except for once, when I was in grad school in, as it was known by the director of the program, “Athens-by-God-Ohio.”

One of the things that we tried to do, as grad students in photojournalism, was to get internships at newspapers. It built up our portfolios, got us to understand the daily pressures of working in a real paper, and so on. It was also a cheap way for the newspapers to get some help, and my first internship was in a small town in West Central Ohio. I’d applied for the internship by sending out the portfolio, the cover letter, the self-addressed, stamped manila envelope, and the whole nine yards, and was completely blown away when I actually got a call telling me that I’d gotten it. I was ecstatic, and I had to call someone to tell them the good news. The first person on the list was my sister (who, as an aside, was instrumental in getting me to start writing these stories down in the first place). I’d been telling her about the challenges in getting an internship (they involved moving to where the internship was, for example) so I called her.

She worked at Seattle Pacific University, and a college student who was her assistant at the time answered the phone.  When I asked for my sister, the student innocently said, “…she’s not here right now, can I take a message?”

And at that moment, God saw the setup for a perfect punch line, chuckled a bit, and actually gave me the snappy answer without making me have to wait two weeks for it.

See, I realized that the name of the town I was in, the name of the town I was going to be in, and what I was doing could make for a wonderfully misleading combination.  So I took a deep breath, and said in my most authoritative and confident voice,

     “This is her brother Tom, I’m in Athens, and I got the internship in Sidney.”

There was an almost reverent silence on the other end of the line for a moment, and then, “Uh, wow. Congratulations – I’ll, uh, I’ll make sure to tell her.”

And so, on Easter Sunday, I got into the car and drove from Athens to Sidney, Ohio, (which was about 150 miles, vs. flying from Athens (the original) to Sydney (the one with the Opera House), which is just under 10,000 miles) and I spent some time as a photographer for the Sidney Daily News, in the little town of Sidney, in West Central Ohio.

Now one of the first things I learned in West Central Ohio is that people were just plain friendly. I don’t know if it was just an Ohio thing or more, but folks in the parts of Ohio I’d visited would just wave at you to say hi, just because you were there – not like where I’d lived in Seattle just before then, where they’d just look at you, maybe.  I learned later on a lot of this just had to do with the proximity of so many people. If there were only a few of you (in the country), you tend to notice each other. If there are massive herds of people (say, in the city), you kind of ignore each other just out of self-preservation – one of the many differences in Country vs. City living.

Now I mentioned that I’d driven to Sidney. 

I’d purchased a 1979 Ford Fairmont from a guy I could barely understand (if you think America has no regional accents, go to Southeast Ohio sometime and try to talk to some of the folks who live back in the “Hollers” and haven’t come out for generations   (Oh, “Holler” – that’s spelled “Hollow” by the way – it’s a valley that kind of stops at one end). Oh my gosh, it was – um ‘different’ – but I digress… 

The car was all straight and everything – in fact, it’s mentioned in another story — it’s the car I drove across the country in.  Come to think about it, it’s also the one I was driving in Michigan when I met the strong arm of the law…

Anyway, back in Athens, as I recall, the very first thing I did after getting the car was to lock my keys in the trunk. Seems the fellow hadn’t told me about the spring to hold the trunk open being broken, and I hadn’t felt the need to check for dead bodies or anything in it, so I bought the car, not having opened the trunk. After he drove off, I unlocked it, opened it, accidentally dropped the keys in the trunk, then dropped the trunk lid on my head as I discovered the broken spring while reaching for the keys I’d dropped.

Yeah… good times…

So one lump on the noggin and $50.00 to a mobile locksmith later I was good, had the keys back, and was literally on the road.

For as old as it was, it got great gas mileage, and I used it to explore Shelby County, where Sidney was, and it was there that I learned there was an etiquette to driving in that part of the country.

See, if you’re on a country road out there, you wave at people as you go by. If you see oncoming traffic, the very least you do is raise a finger (no, not that finger) in simple acknowledgement of the other person’s presence.  It’s a neighborly thing to do, so you do it.

If there’s a farmer (and there are a lot of hard working farmers out there) working in his field, you could be a quarter mile away, driving at 60 mph with your right hand on the steering wheel, the left elbow out the window, holding on to the roof of the car, and literally raise a finger, one finger (the index finger, on your left hand, the one on the roof, just in case you’re curious) and the guy would wave back.

I was just amazed at this, how easy it was to just chat with people you’d never met, how simply nice people were.

So one day I was driving out to get some of what we called “Feature” photos out at a place called Lake Loramie, I’d just driven past one of those farmers, had just waved at him with the index finger of my left hand, just like I mentioned earlier, when the car died.

Stone cold dead.

I checked the gas gauge as I coasted to a stop.  ¼ tank.

Hmmm…

I put my four-way flashers on and carefully pulled over just a little with the last of my momentum (they have some pretty deep ditches in some of those places so I wanted to be careful) and then did the very male thing of propping the hood open and just stood there, with a perplexed look on my face as I tried to figure this out.  I mean, I wasn’t out in the middle of nowhere, but I thought I could see it from where I was, and the car I’d had for about a month was dead.  No symptoms, no rattles, no wheezing, no coughing, no last gasp of any kind.

It was just dead.

Hmmm…

I’d been driving and maintaining cars for a while by that time, and was pretty sure I knew what an engine needed to run…

It needed gas (I had ¼ tank) and

It needed air (I was still breathing, so that part was taken care of)

It needed spark.  (I’d had that). 

I was still standing there trying to figure out what could possibly be wrong when I heard the chugging of a tractor coming out of the field. 

From the dust trail behind him, I could tell it was the farmer I’d just waved to.

He asked what was wrong, and since I’d never had a car quit on me quite like this before, I said, “I think it’s out of gas.”

“Well, let’s take you up to Harry Frilling’s, Harry’s got some gas…”

He untangled a cable off the back of his tractor, wrapped it around the front bumper of the Ford and headed off.

I sat in the car, hypnotically watching the tread on those big tractor tires just a few feet in front of me as we chugged along at a whopping 8 mph, until we pulled into Harry’s farm yard, where the anonymous farmer unhooked the cable and headed off. Harry came out and asked what was wrong, and I told him what I thought the problem was, (that it might be out of gas) but that knew I still had ¼ tank, which made it all a little confusing. We both stood there for a bit, leaning on the fenders, and looked under the hood, in that thoughtful way men look at engines when they don’t have a clue as to what’s wrong…

“Wha’dja say your name was?”

     “My name’s Tom Roush, I’m a photographer for the Sidney Daily News.”

     “Ooooh…. and, uh, where’d ya say you were goin’?”

      “I was just going up to Lake Loramie to get some pictures for the paper.”

He pondered that for a moment, as if trying to decide on something…

     “How long d’you think you’ll be gone?”

I thought – figuring time to travel up and back, find an image, when I had to get back to the paper, plus deadlines and the like… and that left me with…

     “About an hour or so…”

More pondering by Harry.

     “Why don’t you take my car?  Key’s in it.”

Why don’t I take his car…

Why don’t I what???

I looked him in the eye  to be sure – but he clearly wasn’t kidding.

So, I accepted his offer, and took his car, which was much nicer than mine, carefully putting my camera bag on the passenger’s seat beside me instead of just tossing it in like I did with the Ford.

I drove it to the lake, not much was happening, so I stalked some ducks and got a picture of a duck and ducklings, brought the car back, and got some gas from Harry’s tank that he had for his farm vehicles to put in the Ford.  I paid Mrs. Frilling, who was inside, and went off, still kind of amazed at the difference in people from one part of the country to another.

I made the picture, it got into the paper, and life went on.

Weeks went by.

One day I had on my shooting schedule for that evening some kind of award at an event at a hotel in town.  I went, and found it was, ironically, a “Ducks Unlimited” dinner – an organization which I knew nothing about, but figured it was about some kind of conservation of ducks.  Okay, whatever. I figured I’d just show up and shoot the event and get back in time to process the film, mark the shot I thought was best, and then leave it for Mike (the chief photographer) to print the next morning.

So I was standing there at the back of the room, and realized that this award was happening sooner rather than later, and I’d missed the name of the recipient. I wouldn’t have time to get up to the front of the room and would have to quickly shoot from where I was, so I put a telephoto lens (my 180 f/2.8 for those of you who are curious) on the camera (my Nikon F3), along with my powerful SB-16 flash (the same one used in this story) and was just focusing on things when the award and a prize were handed to whoever the recipient was.

And the prize was…

A shotgun…

Wait a minute…

This is Ducks Unlimited… They’re not trying to conserve ducks to keep them alive, they’re trying to conserve them so they can make them dead!

Oh geez…

The things I learned when doing my own shooting…

I was just floored, but I’d gotten my shot, and I had to finish the job, so I noted the suit jacket the fellow with the new shotgun was wearing, and made my way to the front of the room where he was talking with someone.

I waited for a bit, standing behind him, and with my cameras and camera bag hanging off my right shoulder, and my reporter’s notebook in my left hand, I tapped him on the shoulder with my pen.

“Excuse me, sir, my name’s Tom Roush. I’m shooting for the Sidney Daily News and need to get your name for the paper.”

The fellow in the suit jacket turned around, and I saw nothing but a huge smile on his face as a big, meaty hand came down in a controlled crash on my left shoulder, “Why Tom, you know me! I’m Harry Frilling! I loaned you my car!”

And so he had.

I hadn’t recognized him in that suit, but sure enough, it was Harry.

The next morning, I told Mike the story and he, having lived in the town far longer than I had, made an astute observation. “You know, Tom, as big a deal as it was to you to get the picture, it was probably a bigger deal to Harry to have been able to loan you his car.  I’ll bet he told his friends about that for some time.”

I wasn’t sure about that, but like I said, Mike had been in the town far longer than I, and had a good sense of what was important to folks.

Eventually I left Sidney, but I kept that Ford for many years after that. It turned out the problem had been a faulty electronic ignition module and replacing it fixed the problem (I’d never had a car with an electronic anything in it before, which is why it was so baffling to me), and after a trip west across the country, I kept it long enough to bring my son home from the hospital in it.

A number of years later, I looked Harry up, and on a whim, picked up the phone and called him, and introduced myself as the photographer he’d loaned his car to, and asked if he remembered me.

And he did.

We talked and laughed for a while, about how a young photographer and an old farmer met because of a broken down car and a shotgun, about how life had changed for us both over the years, and how good, and important, it was to just get in touch again, and how much that small act of kindness on his part had meant to me.

A few weeks ago, I got back in touch with Mike – and we got to talking, and laughing, telling stories, and just catching up.  We talked about how it’s been over 20 years since I was a photographer at the Sidney Daily News, singlehandedly blowing through their annual film budget in the short time I was there, and then I remembered something, and asked Mike, “Do you remember the story about Harry Frilling?” – and without any other clues, Mike remembered, too, and we both just laughed and laughed… 

There’s a Footnote, or Post Script to this story:

Last week, because this was a story about a real, live person, I did what I always do and tried to find Harry again to ask his permission to write and publish the story.  I didn’t find him, but found and ended up talking to his son.  As it turns out, Harry had passed away a few years ago, and I found out that Mike was right.  It seems that that little story, the one that meant so much to me, that told me about how some folks are inherently just plain good folks, was indeed one that meant something to Harry as well, in fact, it was one of his favorite stories, that he told often, and I was astonished to hear from his son that my – that our – little story was told as part of his Eulogy as people told stories about who Harry was and what he meant to them.

It’s people like Harry who teach us that lifting a finger – figuratively, or literally one finger of one hand – whether that’s lifting it from your steering wheel as you drive by to wave at a farmer and acknowledge each other as fellow humans on the planet, or lifting it to dial the phone to call an old friend to get back in touch with them and see how they’re doing, or dropping what you’re doing and helping a friend do some things he or she couldn’t do otherwise, that ‘lifting a finger’ can make all the difference in the world in someone’s life. 

He also taught me that that one finger, when crashing down onto my left shoulder with the rest of his hand and that smile of his, made me feel like I was the most important person in the world right then.

It’s been, as I said, years, but this formerly young photographer still treasures that smile, that laugh, and is humbled to have known an old farmer like Harry Frilling.

As I thought about this story, and about what became this post script, I realized that after anyone passes away, the material things they’ve accumulated in their lives have to be taken care of or taken over by others.  But when people like Harry pass away, the love and the memories left behind, those are treasures, and they live on.

Special thanks to his son and daughter, who graciously gave me permission to publish this story.

© 2011 Tom Roush

Some things matter, and some things don’t.

August 18, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , | by | Leave a comment


Hey all, another story with some help from my “guest author” – my dad, who left me a couple of stories that I’d convinced him to write before he passed away.  They’re rare because he printed them, before the computer they were stored on was stolen, so these are the only stories I have that he actually wrote.  I think that’s one of the reasons I’m doing my own writing – so my kids can see and read some of the stories that are part of their history and that they’ve heard over the years.

The other day I was watching the news, something I rarely do anymore, and it got me to thinking about relationships, and that got me to thinking of this next, actually, the third of the four stories that he wrote about his times in the Air Force.

Dad’s sweatshirt from Keesler AFB, Mississippi

We have to travel back in time to about 1953, when my dad was in his early 20’s, in the Air Force, and just past basic training at Keesler AFB, in Mississippi, and had been in the technical training as a radio operator (and some things he wasn’t allowed to talk about) that formed the beginning of his career.  If we were to set the stage, we’d have to do so with the understanding that World War II was still very much in people’s minds, the Cold War between the former allies of the United States and the USSR was just ramping up, and the Korean War was in full swing.

Outside of the military, this was just before the whole civil rights thing really got underway, and being in basic training in Mississippi, things became apparent to my dad there that hadn’t been apparent where he’d grown up, in northern California.

At the time, the Air Force was training thousands of new recruits every month, on an assembly line basis at a quantity that was as mind numbing for the recruits as it was for those trying to train them.  While in the outside world (as in ‘Civilian life’) the color of your skin mattered a great deal, and there was prejudice at pretty high levels, especially in the south, inside the military, it didn’t seem to matter so much, as long as you could follow orders, and one day, dad, unaware of what life outside the airbase was like, found out just a touch of what prejudice was really like by seeing it firsthand.

So with that, let’s go to a hot August afternoon down at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi, where my dad and his friend had some rare time off and wanted to leave the base for an afternoon at the movies.  They both left the base with thoughts of the movie, popcorn, and cokes on their minds.

They learned that they had to change their minds.  I’ll let dad tell the rest of the story, unedited, in his own words:

I had a friend down there.  His name was George, and I could see it was a really different experience for him than for me, for he was black and I was white.  I’ve never had that sort of a problem before.  We wanted to see a movie in our free time and I even said I’d pay for it.  We went downtown and went up to the ticket seller, and I offered to pay for the tickets.  She’d let me pay alright, but we couldn’t sit together because of the color problem, so we separated, and he sat in one row and I sat in the next one up.  When we got out of the movie I wanted to take him and buy him a coke, but we couldn’t even do that.  We never went downtown again, though we did keep in touch for several years.

And it got me thinking – I learned something from dad about what was important in friendships.  Years later my wife and I were invited to my friend Al’s wedding.  She’d grown up in a very segregated part of the country, and I hadn’t. (Dad, as mentioned above, had been in the Air Force and we’d been stationed all over the world.)  I had told her about Al, and I’d told her about his friend Oscar, who, with his looks (well north of six feet tall, black, sculpted shoulders, and the last time I saw him, shaved completely bald) was able to use his looks and physique to his advantage in his profession.

As we were heading for the wedding, she asked, trying to remember my description, “Now Oscar’s the black one, right?” –

And I realized that I hadn’t said anything about Al, and had to tell her, “Um, they’re both black, why?”

Where she grew up, things were different.

When she grew up there, things were different.

For me, I’d known Al and Oscar since junior high school, and – well, Al was Al, and Oscar was Oscar.

And the color of their skin didn’t matter a bit.

Of Rats and Men (and little boys)

August 13, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | by | 3 comments


Well, it’s that time of year when the kids visit the grandparents back east, and it got me thinking of the year they did that and I had to do some rat sitting.

See, at the time, the only pets we could have that – well, that you could pet, that no one in the house had any weird allergic reaction to, were of all things, rats.

I know, I know… there’s big, ugly rats, and then there’s – well, small, icky rats… but somewhere in there there are pet rats – and they’re usually white with some spots on them, and we got one for our son, who absolutely adored her.

He called her Sonic, and after a while, she kind of grew on us.  We’d let her out of her cage for some time every day, closely supervised, of course, and she’d run around and we’d train her or play with her, and have fun with her.

One of the things she liked to do was sit on the arm of the couch and either watch me as I read a book, or watch as I worked on the laptop.  I’d have my right arm up on the arm of the couch, and she’d be there, just watching, and then invariably, she would decide that she needed to run across to the other side of the couch, where my wife or son was sitting.

But it’s what she did, EVERY time that eventually just got to me.  She’d run down my right arm, across my hands, and then off to wherever she was going that time. But the constant was that she would piddle on me on the way across the back of my hands, and it became a tremendous source of amusement for the rest of the family, while I was just kind of stewing… After even a little longer, I realized that I was upset, in large part because – well, she only “blessed” me with her piddling, and no one else.  You’d think it would be predictable, you’d think I’d be able to prevent it, but as regularly as it happened, she always figured out a way to make it *JUST* a little different, and I could never catch her without inadvertently propelling her straight up toward the ceiling.

Every time…

She wasn’t too hot on getting frequent flier miles, so I had to be extra careful.

At one point, I realized that the reason I was – well – “pissed off”, is because I was constantly getting pissed on. The evening I came to that conclusion pretty much brought the house down.

Sonic was a dear – if you can think of a rat as a ‘dear’ – to my son.  She gave him hours of amusement, companionship, and friendship, of the kind you can’t get anywhere else.  We learned from her, what exactly a “pack rat” was, because she would literally find things she was interested in, and put them in places only she knew about.

If she could, she’d run off with car keys because they jingled, but most often it would be a receipt, or a scrap of paper, or in the case of my son, she gave him new ways to come up with excuses for his teacher…

“Um… my rat ate my homework…”

And by golly, I saw her do it once, too – he was working on something, laying on the living room floor, with her and some papers, and she found this piece of full sized notebook paper, snagged it in her mouth, and jumped across the living room like she was Pepe Le Pew, and before we could catch her, she’d scampered under the couch, where at some point, she’d managed to chew a little hole so she could get at the INSIDE of the couch, where it was far more comfortable for her.

Right.

So one year, the family went back east to visit grandparents, and I had to stay home and work.  My job was to go to work, come home, let the rat out, play with her, feed her, clean the cage, etc…

No problem… she’s just a rat. I figured, in the immortal words of Jeremy Clarkson, “How hard can it be?”

And… just as they find out on the show, Top Gear, where the quote comes from, I found out, precisely, how hard it could be.

So the night they were to leave, I took the family to the airport, where they flew on a redeye east, into what became the great power outage that gripped the East Coast that year (that’s another story, for another time) – and then I went home…

After I got home, it was late, she was fine, and everything was cool for a couple of days or so, but after one long day, I let her out, played with her a little, and then she, like oh so many females, decided to be coy.  She’d run out to see me, as if to say, “Come get me!” and then when I did, she’d run away… She wanted to be chased, she just didn’t want to be caught. (It’s funny, both Bill Cosby (in his Adam and Eve sketch, if you can find it) and Sir David Attenborough comment on this coyness, even though they’re referring to different species…)

Anyway, back to Sonic the rat, who decided, at that moment, to hide.

Not under the couch, IN the couch.

This was not good.

I tried getting her out.

I tried encouraging her to come out.

I got treats.

I got toys.

It didn’t matter.

She didn’t care.

What got me was that she just disappeared.  She had this penchant for chewing on things, (the couch being evidence of that) and I was well into what would become an 80 hour week at work at the time, so I didn’t have a whole lot of bandwidth to be thinking rationally about a rat that had gotten loose in the house.  I know, some people would have just trapped her, but she wasn’t taking any bait of any kind and since she was our pet, trapping was out of the question.

But making the inside of the couch uncomfortable wasn’t.

I took the cushions off and tossed them aside and started beating on what was left, yelling, making noise, and in general making the inside of the couch a pretty miserable place to be.  I wanted her to think that coming out of the inside of the couch would be a most excellent idea.

She had no ideas of the kind.

In fact, she was quite happy where she was, deep inside the couch.

This had to change.

So I started rolling the couch across the living room.

Understand, the couch had no wheels, which made rolling it – well – a bit different, but I did, truly, roll the couch, (thump, thump thump, across the living room.  It didn’t faze her at all.  In fact, I had to take a breather myself with the couch upside down and her ‘treasures’ from inside scattered all over the floor to listen to where she was.  While I was standing there looking at the it all, off to my right I saw her stagger out from under the couch…

… over to under the love seat, which apparently was her vacation home.

Well, given that rolling the couch had gotten her out of it, I figured that trying it again with the love seat would be just as effective, and so I took a couple of deep breaths and started rolling it across the living room, too.  To be honest, I was mad, I was tired, I had so much I had to do, and just didn’t have time for this, so that kind of narrowed my whole ability to creatively deal with the problem of her getting loose. However, she wasn’t interested in coming out, no matter what I was doing, and I was getting awfully tired, and while I wanted to make her uncomfortable enough to get her out of the couch, dang it, I liked her, and had no desire to hurt her.

After a few rolls across the living room, I figured we’d both had enough, and since I had a long day ahead of me the next day, I had to give up, so I put all the furniture back to where it had been, and went to bed, not sure what evilment she’d get herself into overnight.

I got up the next morning, and was sitting on the couch, already starting my day, when she warily poked  her head out from under the couch I was sitting on, wondering if Armageddon was over.  I reached out, picked her up, petted her (just a bit) and put her in her cage, where she stayed until the family got back.  She was fed and watered, the cage was cleaned, but for her safety and my sanity, it was better that way.

And it’s funny, looking back on it, – well, you’ve seen police shows or heard of reports where the police are called, and they determine that there was “evidence of a struggle.”  Had they stood on the front porch and listened, they would have thought, with the sound of the couch bashing its way across the living room­­, followed by the love seat doing the same, that there were two big guys really going at it in there, and that it was a life and death struggle.

Um… No… it was just me… and Sonic the Rat.

When the family got home, we (Sonic and I) were both glad to see them, but I think Sonic was really glad to see Michael.

We had her for about two years, loved her to pieces, and then she, bless her, went to Rat Heaven (I’m sure there is one.)

And even though I don’t miss getting piddled on, I do miss the little fuzzball that did it.

Puff balls and Pastries

July 28, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , | by | Leave a comment


One of the things I’ve been doing in these stories is writing down history.  I’ve written down a number of stories about my dad and his time in the military.  There are others in the works, but I happened to run across a couple that I’d convinced him to write before he passed away.  They’re rare because he printed them, and then later the computer they were stored on was stolen, so these are the only stories I have that he actually wrote.  I think that’s one of the reasons I’m doing my own writing – so my kids can see and read some of the stories that are part of their history and that they’ve heard over the years.

I’ve been baking artisan bread for the last little while (bakers go back in the family for generations, and my son got me this book which has been absolutely wonderful).  So given that, the other day I was thinking about baking bread, and it got me to thinking of this next, actually, the second of the four stories that dad wrote about his times in the Air Force.

We have to travel back in time to about 1953, when my dad was in his early 20’s, in the Air Force, and just past basic training at Keesler AFB, in Mississippi, and into the technical training (radio operator and some things he wasn’t allowed to talk about) that formed the beginning of his career.  If we were to set the stage, we’d have to do so with the understanding that World War II was still very much in people’s minds, the Cold War between the former allies of the United States and the USSR was just ramping up, and the Korean War was in full swing. The Air Force was training thousands of new recruits every month, on an assembly line basis at a quantity that was as mind numbing for the recruits as it was for those trying to keep track of them, keep them busy, and keep them healthy.

These recruits were resources, and the Air Force had to take care of them by feeding them, giving them shelter, and keeping them occupied when they weren’t busy learning whatever the Air Force had decided they would learn.  On top of all the classes and mental training for the actual skills, there was the physical discipline that was taught by having the recruits do daily calisthenics, and the mental discipline that was accomplished by assigning daily tasks that were simply not optional.

So while they were taking classes in some of the most technical, and classified, jobs and skills available at the time, they were also to take care of themselves and each other in the most basic ways you can imagine.  There were assignments to clean the barracks, mow the lawns, maintain vehicles, buildings and property, and to scrub things till they shined. The person in charge of tasks like this was, in civilian terms, a manager.  In the military, he (at that time and in that place they were mostly “he’s”) was a Sergeant.  Very few recruits ever saw Generals.  All recruits saw Sergeants, and the Sergeant wore the hat of your mother, your father, your elementary through high school principals, your cop, and pastor, and occasionally, your bartender, all in one very crowded body, and your Sergeant could change hats faster than you could blink an eye, so staying on his good side was your greatest mission in life.

Make your Sergeant proud, he’d take care of you.  Embarrass him, and your life would be a living hell.  You would be cleaning bathroom floors with a toothbrush for a month – and it would likely be your own toothbrush you’d be doing it with.

From the Sergeant’s point of view, you’re a hands-on leader, and in the military, as anywhere, good leadership is the key to getting things done.  You depend on your soldiers (or sailors, or airmen, or Marines) to get the job done.

When things don’t get done, there are consequences.

Your job, as a Sergeant, is to make sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that those consequences are so unforgettable so that whatever caused them never, ever happens again.  At the same time, your job is to be in your soldier’s corner, letting them know you support them and will get them what they need to get the job they’ve been assigned done.

In doing that, you want to make sure that if they screwed something up, the screwup is fixed at your level and goes no higher.  You know that if a soldier ends up being called on the carpet in front of their commander, whether that’s a Sergeant or a general, there are only three acceptable answers to questions that might be asked, and those answers were simply, “Yes, Sir”, “No, Sir”, and “No Excuse, Sir.”

Three very important things here.

  1. You never wanted to have to be in a position ask those questions.  It meant something had gone wrong.
  2. You never, ever wanted to be in a position to have to answer those questions.  It meant that you hadn’t been able to fix whatever went wrong.
  3. You never, ever, ever wanted to have to give that last answer.   It meant you were the one who was responsible for whatever went wrong.  It was the equivalent of falling on your sword

And Sergeants, without whom there would simply be no military, were well known for coming up with creative ways of not falling on their swords, so to speak.  Some of the ways problems were “solved” were due to ingenuity borne out of the rare moments when you are faced with the only fate worse than death itself, having to say the dreaded words, “No Excuse, Sir.”

Occasionally, if the situation demanded, things were literally covered up.  This was only done as a last resort when everything else had failed.  It meant you were out of resources, out of supplies, or out of time.

This is important to remember.  The stress of running a huge kitchen like they had at training bases like Keesler was enormous, the time available to feed thousands of recruits was limited, so the kitchens had staff working around the clock preparing food for those three mealtimes when everything had to be ready to go, all at once.  Some in that staff were there full time, others were there as assigned.  This meant there were often people working there who didn’t really understand the significance of what they were doing.  (or not doing, as the case may be)

There were officers in charge of the entire operation, but it was the Mess Sergeant in charge who took care of day to day things in the Mess Hall. It was the Mess Sergeant in charge who made sure the kitchen ran with – well, military precision.  And it was the Mess Sergeant who did everything possible to eliminate all the variables he could, and make sure everything worked, so he could feed everyone coming through the door quickly, efficiently so they could go out and get trained to fight the enemy, whoever that was.

Under no circumstances did he want to stand in front of his commander uttering the words, “No Excuse, Sir”, so he instilled in his underlings a fear far worse than the fear of God; it was the fear of the Mess Sergeant.

So, there’s a lot of background to this story.  Take a deep breath, smell the smell of a big, industrial sized kitchen.  Here you can smell the vegetables being chopped up for the next lunch. Walk a little further, you can smell the aroma of freshly peeled potatoes for tomorrow morning’s hash browns, and hear the stories two young recruits are telling each other about anything but potatoes.  A little further, the steamy vapor coming out of an industrial sized dishwasher tickles your nose, and finally, a bit further on, you can smell the yeasty smell of bread dough rising, mixed with the smell of coffee and cigarettes, and above the constant roar of the fans, you hear a number of 20-somethings laughing and goofing off.

Around you are huge stoves, walk-in refrigerators and freezers, hand trucks to make moving the huge sacks of raw ingredients easier, enormous chromed ovens, and mixers that you could mix enough dough in to feed an – well – an Air Force.  Come with me as we stand off to the side and lean up against the wall and listen for a bit, as a much younger version of my dad tells the story behind a rather strange article that appeared in the paper that week.  It’s below, just as he wrote it.

We had a certain number of KP’s to do as we went through the technical training.  “Kitchen Police” is the full title of the job.  With so many trainees, we had a mess hall row.  Only one of the mess halls had a bakery, and even then I enjoyed the smell of fresh baked goods.   We were assigned to the midnight shift, and were supposed to make rolls.  Lots of them.  One of the KP’s got some flour that wasn’t the right kind of flour we needed and dumped it in the big mixer, then I was left to watch the dough rise while the rest of them had coffee break.  They had a super long break that night, and our KP pusher caught us goofing off. 

I told him it hadn’t risen enough yet.

He started sweating, a lot, for the mess sergeant was due in any time.

There was a growth of bushes separating the places where the men were marched in, so he had all of us KP’s dig holes for the large quantity of dough to be poured and hidden.  We went to work with a will and even covered the pile of dough with the sweepings.  There was a picture in the paper later of the finding of a giant puffball mushroom by the mess hall.

…and, in the inimitable words of Paul Harvey, now you know “The Rest of the Story“

One act of kindness that’s lasted more than a lifetime

July 21, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | by | Leave a comment


One of the things I’ve been doing in these stories is writing down history.  I’ve written down a number of stories about my dad and his time in the military.  There are others in the works, but I happened to run across a few I’d convinced him to write before he passed away.  They’re rare because he printed them, and then later the computer they were stored on was stolen, so there are only four stories I have that he actually wrote.  I think that’s one of the reasons I’m doing my own writing – so my kids can see and read some of the stories that are part of their history and that they’ve heard over the years.

So for today’s post, I’ll actually have a “guest writer” – this is actually kind of hard to write here, but I’m going to introduce you to my dad, Gary, who you may have read about here.

For this story, we have to travel back in time to about 1952, when my dad was about 21, in the Air Force, and not much past basic training.  Back then, in the military, if things didn’t fit their preconceived ideas of what was right, those things got fixed or removed.  It was understandable.  If you were in battle, you had to be 100% capable of doing whatever they told you to do, and if, for example, a toothache kept you from your post, and that post was overrun by your opponent because you weren’t there, then that tooth simply had to go, to save you, and potentially your unit. Dad had been through basic training, where, as with everyone, a lot of stuff got fixed.  But there were some things they decided needed to be removed, and in dad’s case, it was all of his teeth.  So they all came out, and were replaced with false ones.

At the time, dad was pretty close to the bottom of the ladder when it came to seniority, and in the military, there were enlisted men (and in those days, a few women), and there were officers.  In short, there were followers, and there were leaders.  The officers were the leaders, and the good ones took care of their followers.  As a result, there is a culture of respect and honor between the enlisted and the officers, and the enlisted always stood up and honored their officers with a salute, until the officer gave them permission to be “at ease”.  At the time, the lowest officer rank was a 2nd Lieutenant, with a brass bar about an inch long and 3/8ths of an inch wide showing the rank.  A 1st Lieutenant had the same bar, but silver, and a Captain had two silver ones, one beside the other.  They were known, at the time, as Captain’s tracks.

With that introduction, let’s enter a military Barracks, where dad’s sitting on his bunk, with a cigarette butt can in his hands that he was spitting blood into.  The following words are his – unedited.  This is the story of his…

…coming back to the barracks after having had my teeth pulled.  I’d had nine of them out that day and was feeling pretty poorly.   There was no one else in the building, and I heard him come in.  I felt quite self-conscious about having a butt can in my hands and making such a feeble attempt at coming to attention.  He was my commander. A young pilot just back from the fighting in Korea.  He wore the tracks of a captain and I accorded him that honor.  I was weak from shock and blood loss, and staggered as he came up to me.

He asked what the trouble was and I spoke through the rolls of cotton they had stuffed my mouth with telling him I was getting all my teeth out and had had nine done that day.  He looked at me with concern asking if he could do anything for me. 

I told him that a coke out of the next barracks would be heavenly. 

He turned and walked out the door, and came back a few seconds later with the frosty bottle in his hand.

I took the unopened bottle and put it on my jaws where I hurt and dug into my pocket to give him the money for it, but he didn’t want my money. 

He shipped out a week later and I heard he’d gotten killed in a plane crash.

His name was Lemmual Pierson.

I still owe him a dime.

I thought about that young man, my dad, less than half my age now, and that young Captain Pierson – not much older.  It’d be neat to find the family of Captain Pierson to thank them, and let them know how valuable a gift their father, and/or grandfather gave to my dad, a gift that was so valuable it paid dividends almost 60 years later.

Even if it only cost a dime.

Take one teenager, add horsepower, and get…

July 14, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , | by | 3 comments


This is a story about cars.

Well, more than just cars…

One complete car.

Parts of two others.

And me, who used the Infinite Teenage Wisdom ® I was so blessed with at the time.

Wait – a better way to describe “Infinite Teenage Wisdom ®” is “Stupidity beyond comprehension” – and before I get any notes from angry teenagers, read on, and see if you don’t see yourself in this –  (note: don’t try this at home – or, for that matter, anywhere else. )

So aside from me, the cars involved in today’s story were:

A 1965 Saab 95 – with a three cylinder, two stroke engine of a whopping 46 cubic inches. (for comparison: a standard Harley Davidson has almost twice that, about 80 cubic inches, across two cylinders).

A 1956 VW Bug (but mainly the engine – an original 1956, 36 horsepower, 4 cylinder, air cooled, ORIGINAL Bug engine)

And a 1972 Ford Ranchero, with a 390 Cubic inch V8 under the hood, with a 4 barrel carburetor, dual 2 ½ inch exhausts that made a barely passing attempt to muffle the roar of the engine.

It was said it could pass anything but a gas station, and I learned much later, how true this was.  Of course, this was back when I was irritated at gas costing a whole 66 cents a gallon, and refusing to buy it at that price…

The Ranchero belonged to my uncle, and I’d had some trouble with the Saab, the kind that had the engine sitting on the shop floor while we figured out how to drill a rather important broken bolt out of it.

This took a bit longer than expected, and I had to do something that evening, before we were able to get the engine back in the Saab.

You see, I was the cadet commander for the McChord Composite Squadron of Civil Air Patrol, and one of the things I did was teach the younger cadets about anything having to do with aviation, leadership, and in general being a good cadet.

One part of aviation is airplane engines, and so I figured, given that I was trying to restore a 1956 Bug, which happened to have an air-cooled engine of the same configuration as many airplane engines, I’d planned on using it to demonstrate to the younger cadets what an airplane engine might look like.

I’d been gathering parts for the Bug for some time, and had found, for $100.00, an absolutely bone stock, original, 36 horsepower engine actually out of another 1956 bug that had been in a front end collision.  With the gas tank in the front, the car burned, and was a total loss.  The only thing worth saving was the engine, so the owner had taken it out of the car and put it in a garage and there it sat for a couple of decades.  It still had the original distributor cap on the distributor, still turned over, and interestingly, still had oil in it.

To actually, run, it would need to be rebuilt, (the spark plug wires were a little crumbly from the heat of that fire) but you didn’t find engines like this very often, and I was absolutely thrilled to have it.

However, I’d planned on taking it to the Civil Air Patrol meeting in the back of the Saab, and the engine of that car was sitting on the floor of my uncle’s shop.

My uncle, bless him, offered to loan me his Ranchero.

Now understand, I was used to an engine with three cylinders the size of coke cans pulling me along.

The Ranchero’s engine had 8 cylinders the size of small Central American countries, and had about 7 times the power of the Saab.

In fact, let’s just say that the gas pedal on the Ranchero worked really, REALLY well.  In fact, it worked far, FAR better than the gas pedal of any car driven by a teenager should work.

And then there were the brakes.

Oh my gosh, it had disk brakes, 11 inch, Internally Ventilated, Power Assisted, Disk Brakes.

The ones I had in the Saab were little itty bitty drum brakes that I thought sucked – and it turned out I was right… only two of the four brake shoes on the front of that Saab actually worked at the time.

The difference was incredible.

I was used to a certain level of acceleration from the Saab (a speed rivaled by melting glaciers, I might add), and it became very obvious, very fast, that I would have to recalibrate my right foot for the increased acceleration available in the Ranchero.

What was not obvious was that I would have to do the same for the increased deceleration – but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I took the Ranchero home, backed it up to where the VW engine was and then just kind of stood there, trying to figure out how to get the engine up into the back of the thing.  Eventually I got some planks, and slid the engine up onto the bed on them, getting it into the back by myself, and with the engine loaded in the back, I shut the tailgate on the bottom and the canopy gate on the top.

By this time, what with the original problem with the Saab, plus the loading of the engine and such, by the time I put my Civil Air Patrol uniform on and got in the car, I was quite a bit later than I thought I would be, and so I did the rather typical teenage thing.

I tried to turn my uncle’s Ranchero into a time machine.

There was an 8 mile stretch of two lane road that I’d driven many, many times in the Saab, and with the acceleration that it had (imagine that under the hood are three hibernating squirrels (because of the glacier mentioned earlier)  who had NO intention of accelerating the car enough to pass someone that’s going too slow for an impatient teenage driver) I’d learned that if I were driving that Saab, there were only two or three spots on this 8 mile stretch that were actually safe to pass another car in. So my standard process, regardless of impatience, was to fade back from the car I was about to pass and wait until I had plenty of clear space in front of me and lots of clear space in the oncoming lane before I started to pass someone.

When the time was right, I’d floor it to get a running start, staying directly behind the person I was about to pass, because I needed the draft that their car pushing through the air provided to keep my speed up.   I’d then, at the last second, pull out and pass them, assuming everything was clear. If it wasn’t, or if I didn’t get enough speed up, or my timing was off and there was still oncoming traffic by the time I (the passer) got up to the person I was passing (the passee) I’d have to try to abort the pass, and with the brilliantly functional brakes (sarcasm intended) on the Saab, trying to abort a pass at that late stage could be a touch challenging.

I mean, by the time I got to the point of making the decision to pass, I’d be gaining on them at about 10-20 mph, and at the last moment, I faced one of two choices

  1. If there was still no oncoming traffic, I’d pull out and pass them.
  2. If there was oncoming traffic, I’d have to abort the pass, which would give me the following decisions: I could
    1. Rear end them (generally undesirable at that speed)
    2. Whip out into oncoming traffic and risk a head on collision…  (significantly less desirable at that speed) or
    3. Slam on the brakes and hope and pray that I had enough brake shoes making contact with brake drums to actually slow me down to keep from rear ending them.

So there I was, late… impatient as all getout… not in the underpowered Saab I was used to, but in this car that was not my own…

…that had more power under my right foot than I’d ever had in my life.

…that had more braking power than I’d ever had under my right foot in my life.

…and that had more rubber on the road in two of its four tires than I had on all four Saab tires.

Now just between you and me, I’m thinking this is a recipe for disaster, right?

Well, let’s find out…

I made it about 3 ½ miles from home, and on this road it didn’t (and still doesn’t) seem to matter what time of day you’re driving it, there will be someone who isn’t in nearly as much of a hurry as you are… In this case, I was stuck behind someone who insisted on going 50 mph (which was below speed limit).  I was late and impatient, and in my teenage mind, I just couldn’t take any of that, so I waited for a clear spot I’d used in the Saab, hit my blinkers, the gas pedal (oh… my…) and pulled out to pass.

Now one of the things to know about this road is that a lot of it is in shadow most of the day, with occasional little spots where there is sunshine.

I was in that sunshine, passing the car that was driving so slowly, and I was passing him like I’d never, ever passed a car before.

This time, I had room to pass.

This time, I was going way, way faster than the person I was passing.

This time, everything was going to end up just peachy.

I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

…which is when a bright flaming red 1974 VW Bug popped out of the shadows about a quarter of a mile ahead of me.

Understand…

Red…

Sunshine…

Bug…

There’s no radiator on the front of this thing, it’s all bright freaking red.

Like a stoplight.

And it didn’t look like it was a quarter of a mile away, it looked like it was a hundred yards away, and coming at me with a closing speed of about 130 miles an hour (figuring my 75 plus his 55).  I knew, in that moment that I had to do something, and do it quickly.

So I, using my Infinite Teenage Wisdom ®, did what would have made sense if I were driving the Saab, which would have been to stop badgering the hibernating squirrels under the hood and stand on the brake pedal, trying to avoid a head on collision.

But remember, I wasn’t driving the Saab.

I was driving the Ranchero.

And as I said, I was doing about 75 miles an hour – which is fast for that road, (impossible for that Saab) but is also a good passing speed for a short distance, and, well, let’s put it this way:

My body was driving the Ranchero.

My brain was still in Saab mode.

And with that big bright red Bug in front of me, I did the only thing I could possibly think of doing.

I hit those brakes.

…those 11 inch, Internally Ventilated, Power Assisted, Disk Brakes.

With, remember, more rubber on just the front wheels than the Saab had on all four.

The Ranchero went from 75 to about 45 like it had hit a brick wall.

The driver I was passing had to be confused beyond words, I mean, here’s this blur of a car roaring past him, not like he’s standing still, but like he’s going backwards.  He’s expecting to see tail lights any second, but what he saw were brake lights out the side window, the back of the Ranchero kicked up, the nose went down, and then it simply disappeared.

He looked around, and the next thing he knew, it was behind him again, weaving around a little bit, but definitely back there.

What the driver of that car didn’t know was that while the Ranchero had those huge brakes, the classic 36 horsepower 1956 VW Bug engine, the one with the original everything including the crumbly spark plug wires all the way down to the spark plugs, did not.

In fact, it decided to maintain its speed for about 8 feet, at which point it hit the front of the bed of the Ranchero.  It did this by rolling, yes, rolling to the front of the bed, where it sat, wounded and bleeding 25 year old dinosaur juice all over the bottom of the bed while I tried to swerve back into my lane so I didn’t end up squished between not one, but two VW engines (one from the red VW in front of me coming at me, and one from the wounded and bleeding engine behind me).

On top of it all, I was stunned, shocked, embarrassed, and furious at myself for not only not having thought this through, but for doing something so stupid in the first place, but there was nothing I could do but seethe as the person in front of me tootled along for the next 4 ½ miles, definitely below the speed limit.

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson, but remember, I  was operating under Infinite Teenage Wisdom ®, and I knew that when we got to the next intersection, I’d be able to turn left, onto a multi-lane road, and I’d be able to pass him.

Which is exactly what I set out to do when we got there.

The light turned green, the slow driver ahead of me turned left and went into the outside lane.  The rumble of the 390 in the Ranchero turned into a roar as I turned left, cut inside him, and floored it.

I heard all those cylinders firing, I heard the transmission whine, I heard those two exhausts roar, and I heard my 1956 VW Bug engine , its ability to travel completely lubricated now by all that ancient oil between it and the bed of the Ranchero, sliding, trying to make a hasty exit out the back.

Really.

I looked in the rear view mirror just in time to see it hit the closed tailgate and knock it open.

All I could imagine in that blink of an eye was the guy I’d just passed wondering why it hadn’t been enough for me to pass him like that, why he was now being passed by an old VW engine sliding down the road – without even a car attached to it.

I couldn’t let that happen, so with the image of the engine popping open both the top and bottom tailgates frozen in my mind, I remembered just enough of my physics, and did the only thing I could possibly do at the time.

I hit the brakes.

(Yes, those brakes)

Those 11 inch, Internally Ventilated, Power Assisted, Disk Brakes.

Attached to a veritable plantation of rubber…

…and the engine (the VW one) came rolling back to the front of the bed, where it lay, like a prize fighter down for the count.

I pulled over.

I just couldn’t drive any further right then, with the back open and the engine sitting there all cattywompus, so I got out and checked the tailgate.  It was fine.  I shut it to see if it would, actually, shut, (it did) but one look at the engine, and it was a mess.  The distributor cap was broken, the rotor inside the cap was broken, various important fan shroud pieces were now dented and mangled.

I opened the tailgate again and got up in the back, trying to keep myself from slipping or getting too oily in my clean uniform. I managed to manhandle the engine upright, (which is a challenge when you’re trying to keep your shoes and knees out of the oil on the ‘floor’ there – and an even harder challenge when you realize how very little room you have trying to stand up in the back of a Ranchero with a canopy on it). I pushed it all the way to the front of the bed, knowing that hitting the brakes would put it there anyway.  That oil coating the bottom of the bed now really changed things a bit, so I had to be extra careful, and I still had to get to the Civil Air Patrol meeting, where I’d be teaching the cadets about all the exciting things they could learn about aviation, and how important lubrication was in allowing metal parts to move past each other… freely.

Remember, I was the commander, and I was supposed to look sharp, and be calm, cool, and collected..  Having a greasy uniform wasn’t an option, so after getting the engine all upright and everything, I wiped my hands on the only thing available (the ground) and drove, very, VERY carefully out to McChord, to train my cadets.

They learned a little, and I managed to get myself, the Ranchero, and the VW engine home safely.

But I think, as I look back, I learned more.

I learned that impatience can be expensive, and dangerous.

I learned that otherwise intelligent people can do stupid things.

And the cadets, who looked up to me both figuratively and literally, had absolutely no idea, as leaderly as I looked, how fully capable I was of doing stupid things that would boggle their minds, and in my impatient attempt to get there on time, how close I came to not getting there at all.

TEOTWAWKI* (if you’re an arachnid)

July 7, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 1 comment


Yesterday was the morning to end all mornings for a small Seattle spider.

She made the mistake of dropping into my coffee cup…

…and I didn’t notice her until I started pouring.

She was pretty excited there for a bit.

I suppose, for a Seattle spider, that’d be the way to go, drowning in coffee…

 

*The End Of The World As We Know It

Rockets, Styrofoam airplanes, the Fourth of July, and Jimi

June 30, 2011 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | by | Leave a comment


July 4th…

Here in America, it means there are lots of events involving fireworks.  Some of these things are legal, some are not.  Some can be made with good old Yankee ingenuity, and some can be made with a little bit of knowledge of chemistry.  There can be an astounding variation of things, but the bottom line is that they all explode, fly, or make lots of sparks.

And of course, if you do it right, they’ll do all three.

And the thing about my friend Jimi was that if there was any possible way that something could blow up, or fly, or make lots of sparks… he’d figure it out.  It seemed like “The Fourth” for Jimi was a day to celebrate everything – and he went all out on it.

One time – he and I had decided that the big Styrofoam gliders you could get would fly better if they were powered by something stronger than an arm, like, say, a rocket engine. So we found that there was one kind of thing, called a ‘ground bloom flower’ – that, if aimed correctly and taped securely to each Styrofoam wing on this glider, two of them might produce enough thrust to get it airborne.

It turns out that timing the ignition of these things was a pretty major challenge – and that the concept of asymmetrical thrust – that is – one of these things lighting before the other – was not theoretical at all, and the plane, when we did manage to get it in the air, didn’t fly so much as spend its time trying to do a very colorful pirouette to one side, followed by a lurch forward for the split second both “engines” were firing at the same time, followed by a feeble attempt at another very colorful pirouette to the other side as the first engine died and second one lit off.

Was it entertaining?

Heck yes.

Did it fly well?

Uh…. No.

It’s safe to say that it really didn’t fly very well.

It’s also well to say that it wasn’t very safe, at all…

I mean, a highly flammable object, that’s already got a totally unpredictable flight path, combined with devices that are already spewing sparks and flames…

What could possibly go wrong?

<ahem>

In our misguided attempt to actually get the thing to fly, we kept fiddling, and finally got things set so we could try again – and found that where the fuse came out of the ‘ground bloom flower’ wasn’t exactly where the fire and thrust came out.

We were able to deduce this by the large hole the flame had burned in the right wing.  We taped over that and decided a single producer of thrust would work better if we could center it.

So we – after long and hard thinking of all the things that would be illegal to purchase and let fly in Shoreline (where Jimi lived), we realized that model rocket engines would be perfect (and legal) – and bought a few of those, made a self-ejecting holder out of some ductape, stuck a fuse into the engine, lit it, and threw the plane, figuring it’d fly, gracefully, as it should.

Turns out that adding that much thrust to one of those things doesn’t necessarily improve anything in a predictable way – and after even more fiddling, the first one that actually flew did a very tight loop, hit some wires, and came down hard, mostly in one piece.

The next one was a little better, but it was the last one, that I didn’t see, that was clearly the best.

I’d just run into the house to get something, when I heard the rocket engine fire, and I heard Jimi yell.  I heard a thump, the rocket continued to burn, and Jimi laughing like an absolute lunatic.

By the time I got out there, tears were running down his face, he was holding his stomach, and having trouble deciding whether to laugh or breathe.

I looked around and followed the smoke to the hood of his car.  It seems the engine had burned itself out by then – the smoke more of a haze at that point – but before it had done that, the little rocket engine had pushed the plane up high enough so that one wing had hit a telephone wire again.  That spun the plane around 180 degrees, pointed right at the ground. It came down at full power, almost pulled up, but hit and bounced on the hood of Jimi’s little Chevy Nova, getting the nose stuck under one of the windshield wipers.  The little engine that could wasn’t done yet, and continued to burn with the plane trapped by those windshield wipers – finally ending up burning the paint off part of the hood of the car.

Jimi was just beside himself.

I was mortified, and thought that he’d have to figure out how to explain that to the insurance company, but he just wanted to leave it the way it was.  The scorched metal, the blistered paint, was worth far more as a story to him than getting a new hood put on the car ever was.

I’ll always remember that laugh of his – and how much it meant to just hear that childlike joy.

It’s funny – Jimi and I were so much like kids in all of that that neither he, an award winning photographer who never went anywhere without his Olympus cameras, nor I, a budding photojournalist who never went anywhere without my Nikons, took any pictures of the event.

We just laughed and laughed and laughed.

And some memories are best left there, in your mind, as a memory that remains strong, and bright.

I miss him.

For now, just imagine the intense hiss of a model rocket engine, the hollow metallic thunk of some hard Styrofoam on a metal hood, and the sound of two grown men laughing like the little boys that were still very much alive inside us.

Those little boys who had read all the small print on the fireworks and rocket engines… “Use under adult supervision…”

Yeah, we supervised alright.

It was a good day.

Years later, in Jimi’s memory, I decided it was time to share that joy of Styrofoam airplanes, rocket engines, and some adults who still remembered what it was like to be a kid with my son, but that’ll be a story (complete with pictures) for another time.

Have a safe Fourth of July, folks.

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.

Tom Roush

Archives