Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Hail to the New Chief

Today we inaugurate a new president. He has a hurculean task ahead of him and there is an important thing we can do to help him.

Pray?

Well, yes. Except that we're in a "no prayer in schools" phase. So what about good thoughts...positive thinking if you will.

Ever since November, I find myself humming "Happy Days Are Here Again." This song was written in 1929 by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen and I believe it is in the public domain. The chorus goes like this:

"Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
Let us sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again
Altogether shout it now!
There's no one who can doubt it now
So let's tell the world about it now
Happy days are here again
Your cares and troubles are gone;
There'll be no more from now on
Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
Let us sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again"

Ok, it's simplistic.

But so are most mantras.

So, in the ensuing times of struggle (and there will be many), run this little song in your head and we will prevail and you'll feel better.

Thank you, Mr. Obama.

Happy days ARE here again.

Monday, January 19, 2009

A Small Sip From The Apocryphal Chalice

You may remember that apocryphal stories are those stories that are not true.  However, some of us are so taken by their sense of poetic justice that we dispense them thinking if we are diligent in our dispersal, they will become factual to at least some percentage of the receptors and that they will attest to the veracity of the story and it will become true by proclamation.  I suspect propaganda works this way.  

I digress.

Ever since we began warring among ourselves and others, we have found it necessary to take trophies from the people we bested.  We started with the valued possessions of our enemies and moved on (I was going to say progressed, but that would be a shameful thing to think) to making slaves of our foes and then to taking their body parts.  The Plains Indians, ever more civilized than we were, began the practice of counting coup (the "p" is silent).   The idea here was to get close enough to one's enemy so that you could touch him or steal something from him.  The more coup counts that could be documented, the more bravery that could be attributed to the warrior doing the "couping."

As time passed and we Americans became more and more enthralled with firearms, our soldiers began taking firearms from the bodies of our enemies and bringing them home as trophies of war.  Now some of these weapons qualified as heavy artillery, so our military leaders, through the use of regulations, made the act of bringing home enemy ordinance a serious crime complete with commensurate punishment.  It is the story of one man's attempt at sending a military trophy home from the front that we will examine in the following apocryphal story.

Sometime during the second world war, one enterprising GI liberated an enemy rifle and stripped it down to as many small pieces as he could.  He then began sending these parts home to his wife.  You need to know that all mail sent from the war zone was censored in the event that the mail was intercepted by the enemy, so our smuggler could not alert his wife as to what he was doing.

Week after week his spouse received all sorts of parts of various sizes and shapes while having no idea what the end result was going to be.  Eventually, the parts stopped coming.  She spread them all out on the dining room table and correctly surmised that it was some kind of rifle.  So, being the dutiful wife, she took it to a local gunsmith who confirmed it was indeed a rifle and told her that he would reassemble it for ten dollars.  The woman thought that was fair price and in about a week she stopped by the gunsmith shop and picked up the reassembled firearm.  From there she went directly to the post office and mailed the gun back to her husband.

I hope that's true.  Don't you?  

Monday, January 5, 2009

Of Kerosene & Pear Juice

My father kept a glass jug of kerosene in our garage. He used the stuff to clean his fishing gear and small outboard motor parts. The gallon container was tucked in the far right corner of the garage so that it was out of the way and would not be accidentally bumped by the car or the child as he played hide and seek or fort or whatever behind the closed doors in the front of the garage.

One day, my mother asked me to sweep out the garage. I protested loudly, but she appealed to the guilt that exists within people both large and small and soon I was heading toward the garage with a broom. Mom's instructions were simple. "Put everything in the driveway, sweep out the garage and then put everything back in the garage."

Every child charged with a task he or she does not want to perform will devise an "easier" way to do it. So, instead of removing everything from the garage so that I would have a complete and uncluttered field to clean, I moved everything to the back of the garage. I did this reasoning that, (1) I could hide some of the leaf accumulation behind the stuff in the back and (2), it would be easier to redistribute the stuff forward rather than schlep everything out to the driveway and then back from the driveway.

As I pushed my bike into the back corner, the front wheel nudged the kerosene container ever so slightly. It was just a tap with a rubber wheel, but it was just enough to crack the jug and start the flow of kerosene cascading gently toward the door and the piles of stuff I had moved from the sides to the center preparatory to flinging it all to the rear. To this day I don't believe that Kerosene is very viscous, so therefore it must have been my traumatized brain that saw the stuff spreading in slow motion to all corners of the garage. Watching its lava like flow paralyzed me.

Soon my fascination with the molasses like progress of the kerosene was replaced with an urgent need to do something. So I started slogging through the stuff dragging beach chairs, fishing tackle and ruined cardboard toward the door. In record time I had the garage empty and all the parts of our lives that had been relegated to the garage were strewn across the driveway.

Now, what to do about the kerosene? Not knowing anything about water and oil repelling each other, but with full knowledge that kerosene is flammable, I slipped through a basement window that I knew to be unlocked and hauled out the garden hose. I spent what must have been an hour with the hose and the broom washing the kerosene out of the garage, around and through our possessions and into the gutter. There was no rule of thumb to prepare me for knowing how long it takes to dissipate a gallon of kerosene from a garage with a broom and hose.

I was considering calling the police or the fire department when my mother's uncle Fred pulled into the adjoining driveway. He was a rotund bald man who paid me a dime a week during the summer months to get up before he did and roll down the windows in his Buick so that it would be cool when he went drove it to work. I resented him for the pretentious way in which he presented me with the dime each Sunday. The payout was complete with criticism about how early, how late, or how not at all I had performed the task. The only plus to this job was that he did not deduct anything for rainy days. To this day, the sound of morning rain still brings a smile to my face and to my heart.

All of that aside, I was happy to see an adult with whom I could share this disaster. I rushed over to him, and while trying to keep my ten year old heart in its place, I told him what had happened. He gave me the look he reserved for those 90 degree plus mornings when I overslept and agreed to survey the damage. Slowly, he walked by the rubble in the driveway and into the darkness of the garage. He lifted his shiny head and inhaled deeply testing the breeze like a bald lion in a man suit. Then he reached into his pocket and took out a pack of matches. Testing the aroma of the air again, he struck a match and dropped it on the wet floor. I held my breath. The match went out and he pronounced the garage safe for habitation by storables.

To this day, fifty plus years later, I can see him dropping that match in slow motion only this time; we are both vaporized in a fiery ball of exploding kerosene. In this twisted updated version, the police find only some bits and pieces of uncle Fred and me and a few heat fused 1954 dimes.

I've often wondered if Uncle Fred knew what he was doing. I think not. It was years later that I determined that sometimes adults do stupid things. Why? I guess it is because sometimes we just don't think. Sometimes there are things we don't think about because we can never imagine them happening. Several years ago, a friend of mine told me that the plastic that covered one of the family's television screens had become clouded. Upon closer examination, he saw that this plastic protective sun screen with which most portable models of that era were equipped, was not only clouded, but it appeared to have been etched or abraded as if someone had used sandpaper or thrown acid on the screen. After interrogating his children, one of them confessed that she had wiped off the screen with a napkin. Further probing revealed that she had used the same napkin to catch the drippings from a pear she had eaten. The acid in the pear juice had permanently clouded the sun screen of the TV.

So, when we are warning our children of the many dangers that lurk in the world, we must remember to tell them.....now remember, dear, whatever you do, don't wipe down the TV screen with pear juice and don't drop a lighted match into a garage that a ten year old has certified to be free of spilled kerosene.