ONE MAN'S HOME IS ANOTHER'S BOX OF BROKEN WATCHES

This was the first home of my memory. There was heavy, shinny, fringe skirting all of the living room furniture. The kitchen had a wall of plastic sheeting where granddaddy, the weekend carpenter was building an addition onto the back. He worked for the railroad. He once told me that he would wedge a coin in the tracks and whichever way the coin was bent, he’d know if the train was coming or going. There was a big sandbox out back, a wringer washing machine in the shed and a rich, old woman who lived across the road.

a christmas story

gather 'round, friends and family, for the best told and (re) told christmas story there ever was and ever will be. It's not mine, but hell, in this e-lec-tronic era this kinda stuff belongs to us all!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17570326

Wishes to remain nameless....

“What can I get for you this morning?” an energetic guy with a “faux-hawk” hair cut asked from behind the counter.
“I’ll take a Vente Vanilla Latte please” I responded.
“What’s your name?” He asked as he paused with a sharpie in one had and a large ‘seasonally’ festive Starbucks cup in the other.
“Go ahead and put it under Allen” I said. See, I’ve found that over the years many people have a hard time “Capturing” and even "retaining" the correct pronunciation of my name, if you will. “Did you say Justin?” or “Jason?” or my favorite “was that Justin with a ‘D’?” sure. Even people I’ve known for a long time will say “Great Job Justin” So in this setting, being it’s 6:30am and all, I figure it’s much easier to go with “Allen”, as I’ve done many times before.

After he had taken my order I moved off to the side to await the Barista’s magical creation. As the conveyor belt of people advanced one notch, the next gal was asked;
“What can I get for you this morning?
“Um.. sorry…” She started, apparently still not awake yet “um… I’ll have a grande mocha coffee” she said.
“What’s the name?” He asked, again with sharpie in hand.
“Amy” she said again still a little groggy…
“Amy?” The guy asked for confirmation.
“Yes, just put it under Amy, there is a lot more to it than that” She said with a sigh “…but Amy will work, sometimes I wish my name was simpler” she said. I was left wondering what it could be? What was the "long drawn-out version" that Amy would be short for? Maybe it was her middle-name or maybe a made up name just for Starbucks and the occasional reservation at a restaurant?

Maybe I’ll put something on Craigslist in the “missed connections” section … “you were wearing a black business suit, you ordered a mocha coffee, you said your name was “Amy” but it wasn’t your real name, I told them my name was Allen, which is also not my name. What is your real name?

When my coffee was ready they called my name. When I got up to the counter however, there were a couple of other ‘creations’ waiting to be adopted from the kidney shaped floating ‘pass through’ counter. Subsequently I had to spin a couple of the cups until I found the one with my name on it. I found one that read “Alan”… yup….That must be mine.

If you follow something curly home....

Abbzug, re: your comment on Things We Take with Us (concerning your annual birthday perm), maybe Boan was just following that popular mother-daughter look alike trend.

Keeping four eyes on the road

Yea, that last pic was an old one - taken when Barry could still drive without the help of his seeing eye dog!

On the Road Again...............?

Never mind!

Ok, now nicer as a single pic...less frightening...
Is that Boan in her own backyard?

What the hell.....?

What the hell happened to our beautiful picture heading? These pictures just frighten me. What are these guys putting on their heads? I especially liked the feet in the kayak - below the maddy's pic; it seemed so Florida!
Also, I think the coast guard blur shot would be a great retelling heading - looks like a lot of BS and "remember when" is flying in that one!

Things we take with us.

I was so jealous of her cute, whimsical, and whispy butterfly, and soooooo very disappointed with the blob of paint and glitter straddling my nose.

I was ripped off, my friends. Screwed. And for some reason, I remember it to this day. It's funny what you take with you, and what you leave behind.

Come Again?

Last October I was selected by my company for a white-gloved tour of South Korea. It was an amazing experience that I’ll never forget for many reasons. I won’t go into much detail about here but during one of the “Presidential Dinners” a speaker, also a South Korean native, stepped up to the podium to give a speech. I’m not sure what the main point of the speech was or if there was other key points, but at one point during the speech he talked about a recent visit to his Doctor.

He said his Doctor told him that the act of clapping is good for you and that by clapping, similar to “Laughing”, I suppose, it will cause the body to release endorphins and make you feel better.

However, if you’ve ever known a person of Asian descent – you’ll understand that they tend to have a problem with the letter “L”, which they often pronounce with an “R” sound instead. So to 're-tell' the story again, as it was delivered to a room full of people over a very loud microphone – what he really said was:

He said that his Doctor told him that “Crapping” is good for you and that by crapping a lot, it causes the body to release endorphins and make you feel better so that’s why he likes to crap as much as possible and wherever he can. “I love to Crapp” he told us, and he looked very happy to be sharing that with us.

When his speech was over I, like everyone else in the room, clapped.

The Bee Sting and the Slingshot--an eye for an eye

Both Mark and Dustin seemed to have a natural predilection towards mischief.



One summer (or was it two consecutive summers?) Mark was stung in the eye by a bee in a haystack behind Grandpa Gid's shed. In retrospect I have no idea why he had hay bales back there. I mean, he had a nice garden, but hay? Who knows.



Then the summer that all the family was at the BIG 4th of July Allen/Tucker picnic, Dustin got reamed in the eye by a projectile from a 3-man slingshot in the parking lot of Almacs.



I know this of course because a little girl with no little girl cousins is left to hang with the boys; pretending as though she enjoys killing small animals, and throwing spray painted baby dolls down the cellar steps.

This evening as it snows...

. . .I will tell you the story of when & where....of time and space as one....of the summer of 1988.

When I was seven years old my mother took my brother and I back home to Rhode Island; for the first time since we moved. To me, at the age of five (almost six) a year earlier, moving to Colorado was awful. It meant cowgirl boots, stupid accents, and dumb cowboys. I believed that by leaving my magical ocean that I was leaving all that was right in the world. I have days, even now, twenty years later when I feel that same.

So that summer, on the beach, Ethan was a baby. . .I would swim in the frigid Atlantic water and float on my back and taste the salt on my lips. Lisa was like a dolphin, gracefully diving over waves, and I tried my hardest to swim just like her. I would shiver my way out of the water, over to the beach blanket and lay face down as the hot sun warmed my body, dried my skin. And then at ten there was Laura and at sixteen Duke. Always babies, and beach blankets, and warm sun drying salty skin. . .

When someone uses the phrase "Go to your happy place"....that is where I go. Face down on a sandy blanket, with skinny young legs as Laura lays her head next to mine and stares me in the face trying to get me to open my eyes.

Us Versus Them?

In the days leading up to my first marriage, my fiancé and I met with the minister (per his insistence) to discuss the various elements and challenges of married life. We discussed everything from financial decisions, to goals, and then we discussed children.

Now, we both wanted to have children but I expressed some concern about the growing population in schools, over-crowding, etc., and thus thought it would be best if we only had one, maybe two children - but then the minister interjected. As he told it, and I 're-tell' it, he said that often times the uneducated, or 'lower rungs' of our society if you will, reproduce in larger numbers. So in order to combat this growing imbalance, he said - the smart people need to reproduce more or ultimately our society would be overrun by stupid people.

I just wasn't sure which side of that equation I fell into. So as of now at least, I'm stopping at 2 kids.

Turnips & cigarettes

I was about six. It was cool and damp, like it is today. I was standing in a drafty, dilapidated shed with my grandmother. She closed the door behind us. The only light was from the sun shinning between the slats. She was wearing a homemade cotton dress, eating a raw turnip, smoking a cigarette and pitching a whispered fit about my grandfather, calling him all sorts of names. ‘Ole-man’ was one of her favorites. She had a way of spitting it out with a hiss, making it a BIG dirty word. At 6, I must have felt special, being confided in by an adult, a secret conspiracy against my grandfather. Now, I wonder, what the hell was she thinking~

Metaphorically speaking...

I recall a metaphor a good friend of mine told me once. I don't recall what the metaphor was for exactly at the time... but I've found over the years that you can apply it to all sorts of things in life. My friend said that certain things are like a stray dog pooping on your front yard... It poops on your yard, you get mad at it, but it keeps pooping in your yard anyway...but one day, out of the blue, it stops pooping in your yard.. and for some reason you kinda start to miss that dog....

1950's Halloween

I remembered today, while ironing an old shirt with steam rising, that on Halloween night in Ada, Oklahoma, in the front yard of a house, where I once lived and where our grandmother then lived, my brother Donny and I hid behind and old gray Pontiac parked on the lawn. We were shrouded in pillowcases with bandit like slits cut for our eyes. The street in front of that house was high traffic (for that little town) because it lead straight to the college. When a car drove by, we would run from our hiding place and dart toward the street screeching like the small children we were, always rewarded with a honk or two. We had the best time.