Season's Bleatings - 2012

As another year draws its last gasp, we reflect on how our worlds have turned, our victories and our stumbles, and how we might have made a difference.  I, myself, in long moments alone, have pondered these questions, and always arrive at the same destination:  my golf game, in a word, sucks.   Oh, I had brief stretches of greatness, when my drives soared long and straight, my irons released crisp and true, and I could sink long putts with eyes closed.  But, my friends, those stretches were all too fleeting.  Most often, I hacked away at ball and turf like a drunken lumberjack with a dull axe.

Other members of the clan, however, have risen above the fray.  There's Brendan (29) down Grand Rapids way who bought a house with Jodi, his dearly betrothed.  They've torn out things and replaced with new, raked a few leaves, so that today they boast a splendid home to begin a life in marriage.  Yes, my friends, I said the word.  After only a 12-year courtship, in May they'll tie the knot at the zoo in GR where penguins will usher and lions will roar.  Brendan works as a banker, plays tuba for the Holland Symphony, and loves to hunt and fish.  Jodi plies her trade at a public health institute near Lansing and enjoys her toils as a budding gourmet cook. 

Elizabeth (27) is concerned about wrinkles.  She'll be coming around the mountain in May with a master's degree in fine arts from Georgia College.  Her poetry dazzles, and her work has been accepted by the prestigious literary magazine, The Pinch.   And for two years her university has selected her poems as the best for a national writers conference.  Amassing a thesis portfolio plus teaching college freshmen can surely twist a complexion, but to my eyes, her skin looks refreshingly smooth.  Her  boyfriend, Roger, chews with remarkably nice teeth, top and bottom.  He nabbed his master's last year from Georgia College and toils temporarily as an adjunct English perfesser there while he waits for Eliz to make her way around the mountain.

Sue Bohnhorst has become a creature of inflexible habit, I'm afraid.   The other day, for example, she made the bed right over me while I tried to sleep in.  She denied this was a random act of passive-aggressiveness, and chalked it up instead to "chemo brain."   You will recall that Sue underwent 16 months of brutal chemotherapy, 2010 - 2011, and now claims she is affixed to lists and daily chores to compensate for mental slippage.  I suspect this is true as there ain't a passive-aggressive hair anywhere near.  Speaking of which, Sue is grateful to have her hair back again.  And all of us are so blessed with her continued good health with nothing but excellent test results along the way.

And what would a holiday letter be without useless news about our gassy canines?  Dog continues to stand in the middle of the room and stare at us without blinking.  I cannot tell if she worships or pities us.  Brendan and Jodi this year added a puppy to their mix, an exuberant Llewellin Setter named Penny, who is trained to point at delicious upland  fowl. When we first met, Penny reminded me of the coiled snakes that spring in a frenzy from fake peanuts cans.  And there's Elizabeth's dog, Omar, a creature so devoted to his master that he sits on her feet when she is standing, and lies on her head when she is sleeping.

I still rattle around as a social worker in the amazing world of infant adoption. It doesn't really feel like toil, but more of an honor to be thus employed.  Now and then if the spirit moves, I'll muster up a thing for my blog or contribute an article to TROP, an online magazine that Roger and his friends started.  I got a kick out of catching bass from my new fishing boat, but gambling on football this year has been a total bust.  And spring isn't so far off, when once again I'll sharpen my axes and march off to battle with ball and turf.

Merry Christmas!


Comments are welcome at  tombohn2@yahoo.com

Crazy Like a Sheep

Published in Trop Magazine (tropmag.com)


The second time I was absorbed into a mass of humanity, I was living in Ankara, Turkey, circa 1973. A friend had invited me to a concert where some obscure Dutch rock band was performing. When we arrived, a throng had formed in front of the arena doors, and we took our stand in the growing, close-knit crowd. Over the next half hour or so, the crowd multiplied to thousands behind us and pressed forward so that I was encased like a twig in a logjam of Turkish men who desperately needed showers.

When the doors finally opened, the mass of us heaved forward and ebbed backwards so that no one of us had any control over whether he moved hither or yon. There was a current to that crowd, and miraculously, no one drowned or was trampled in the undertow. And like toothpaste, I somehow became squeezed upwards and as this enormous organism slowly was consumed through the entrance doors, my feet never touched the ground.

The object of this hysteria, I came to see, was not so much the blaring rock band itself, but the band’s sexy, prancing, taunting, peroxided lead singer in her skin-tight jeans and platform heels. I was much taken by how the audience was much taken by her. The all-male, all-wide-eyed spectators seemed to experience a simultaneous hard-on. They frothed, leaned in, spellbound—pacing he-wolves smelling heat. And a half hour into the set, the singer seemed to retreat from provocative and sassy, to back on her heels, to very ready to board the next Orient Express and get the hell outta Dodge.

This is the memory that jogs when I see reports of the human swarms that storm and stomp through stores in the wee hours of Black Friday. Theirs is a similar frenzy where the promise of a rockin’ sex fix is the equivalent of a rockin’ shoppin’ fix. But while that band from the Netherlands, and especially their diva out front, took a scary look into the abyss, the purveyors of Black Friday bring it, and bring it again, and bring it to the max. Those customers who are trampled to death and those who miss out on deeply discounted supplies of digital machines are portrayed as tragic casualties of so much friendly fire.

…

The first time I was swallowed by a mob, I was only six years old. It was the last day of school at Jim Cherry Elementary in Alanta, and as I stepped from my classroom with the dismissal bell, I became swept away by a stampede of now-freed children as they raced down the hallways and out of the building. These were the back streets of Pamplona and the bulls had just been released. Outside, there arose a great and hysterical noise as the whole student body raced from the building and shrieked a constant chorus of unbridled joy. And so I ran, and so I hollered, as that contagious ecstasy overcame me as well. The time had come to break those shackles, to ring in a summer of recess and of barefooting day after hot day down the red dusty road to our Georgia swimming hole.

 

That was in the late fifties, when the black kids across the road were segregated from our school, and when we regularly safety-drilled in case the Russians attacked with The Atom Bomb. One of the teachers at Jim Cherry configured his classroom desks in the shape of a Confederate flag, and the principal often used a belt on disrespectful boys. The next year, at seven years old, in broad daylight, I would sneak out of my classroom and run away from that school. No longer could I abide the terror wrought by my stone-faced and withered teacher, always clothed in black.

…

Several blue moons ago, some friends and I went to the Fourth of July fireworks in Traverse City, Michigan. To access the beachfront area where the best views were had, the crowd had to walk through a tunnel under Grandview Parkway. There was no pushing or shoving, but the going got very slow as hundreds of people had to funnel through the dimly lit corridor. When we started through, I felt, suddenly, herded like an animal. Because it seemed so fitting, I, of course, began to baa like a sheep. My friends, in kind, thought this was a pretty funny thing, and they, too, began to baa like sheep. The crowd around us then, as they beheld these eruptions, began to laugh, and also started to bleat. How odd it must have seemed to those people who had just exited the tunnel, that a distressed flock of sheep had just wandered into town behind them. And for a very long time afterwards, the humans who entered the tunnel caught the spirit and bleated like their predecessors before them. Now oriented to a barnyard sensibility, it was a cheerful audience that night that watched the rockets’ red glare, chewing, I imagined, on fresh-cut alfalfa.

 

Something there is that does not love a riotous mob, especially one that lifts you off your feet and takes your breath away. But when push comes to shove, and if the stakes aren’t too dear, the plaintive voice of a sheep, or perhaps a cow, can provide much needed perspective. But if the objective is freedom—pure, sunlit—allow the human stampede its full reward.




Comments are welcome at tombohn2@yahoo.com







 

 

The ABCs of an Election Year

Published in Trop Magazine (tropmag.com)


A is for ambush. America’s corporate-industrial-military-political-financial complex is a fairly large animal. Its trillion-ton head is Manhattan, its girth the million-square-miles of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains; its claws extend through the Bering Strait. It plods at the pace of glaciers, swallows whole cultures in single gulps. In 2008, brazen and unregulated thieves detonated atomic bombs at its base and shocked and knocked the colossus to its side. Now, in horrible theater, the wizards of Washington proclaim villainy upon one another and peddle snake oils that promise to right the capsized beast.

B is for Bert and Ernie. Well, more Ernie than Bert. Remember Ernie in his shower cap as he sang among the bubbles: “Rubber duckie, you’re the one. You make bathtime lots of fun. Rubber duckie, I’m awfully fond of you… woh, woh, bee doh!” Or Kermit in the sweet ballad, “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” Outrageous! Pull the plug on the little shits!

C is for chameleon. These are lizards that are uniquely adapted to their environments; they can change their colors to match those that populate their surroundings, whether pink, blue, red, orange, turquoise, yellow, or green. Their stereoscopic eyes can focus on separate objects at the same time, making it impossible to know where they stand. Chameleons are native to tropical Asian locales, but have been introduced to the Republican Party, where one in particular has become their nominee.

D is for discombobulation. Barack Obama during the first debate seemed to stand there in utter discombobulation. Some of us would have preferred if he had exuded some combobulation, or, at minimum, an aura of bobulation. Al Gore famously suggested that the Prez might have been afflicted with altitude discombobulation. I can vouch for that. One time I climbed Mount Cartier in eastern Quebec. When I got to the top, I lapsed into uncontrollable giddiness and started bobulating my butt off. Believe me: At that altitude, I would have been in no shape to debate even the meekest Republican.

E is for Eleanor Roosevelt. She asked, “When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?”

F is for frijoles. I have discovered that my debate-watching enjoyment is greatly enhanced by eating Mexican food a few hours before the opening handshake. And the meal should include a double portion of frijoles. Once intestinally primed in this manner, the viewer should be able to release their consequent emissions at key moments in speeches to make clear the viewer’s editorial positions. Of course, the sound effects become more meaningful and memorable the larger the living room audience present. A TV viewing area with ceiling fan, needless to say, is recommended.

G is for getting a buzz.  When I was in high school, a bunch of us wrote an "underground newspaper" which we dubbed, RIPT.  The name was a nod to our underground readers that we were in solidarity with them: that we writers, too, loved to get high, to get "ript", as it were.  Back in his days of rebellion, Barry Obama also sat around with his boys, smoking joints, getting hungry, and getting ironic.  Anymore, this is standard initiation for American youth, although there is peril in not breaking from those seductive clutches (he said, speaking from personal experience).

H is for haiku.  These dizzying times beckon for a moment of poetic contemplation:

                            red states and blue states
                            our country is dipped in mud
                            we wear galoshes

I is for Icabod Ickwith.   Mr. Ickwith was an aspiring political candidate who was tarred and feathered and run out of his Rhode Island town in 1821 for making scurrilous stump speeches. Ickwith claimed, "Forty seven percent of the American populace are a bunch of lazy, freeloading, drunken turnip-eaters."  Ickwith was never heard from again, but many believed he wound up a beggar in Utah.

J is for jumpshot.  I've never seen Mitt Romney play basketball, but Obama sure has a smooth jumper.  I'm sure Barack would take the Mittster going one-on-one or in a friendly game of horse.  In a recent Sports Illustrated poll, 98 percent of unlikely voters would like to see the candidates go head to head in a variety of games.  A depressing 20 percent would like to see a "face-off" in "guillotine testing."  Another 20 percent would like to attend a match of medieval jousting, the best two of three.  Given Romney's exposure to the cavalry, swords, and dressage, he clearly would be the jousting favorite.  Romney would win on a horse, while Obama would win at a game of horse.

K is for Kenya.  That country, as we all know, is where Obama's father came from.  My roots go back to a German draft dodger who sailed for America to stay out of the army.  Our last name means "storage house for beans."  Maybe our ancestors were German bean farmers.  Or perhaps our last name was a euphemism, born in medieval times, for folks who were famous for their volumes of gas, or for the distinctive ways they cut the proverbial cheese.  "Oh that Gunter, he is such a storage house of beans."  There is no shame in this.   I have been known to "carry the family torch."  Just ask my wife.  If I had a choice, however, I think I would rather claim lineage from Kenya, the land of long distance runners, than from the land of bloated bean eaters.

L is for limerick.      

                              There was a young fellow named Ryan
                              Who came to our town a-cryin',
                              "When it comes to the budget
                               I can magically fudge it,"
                              And was tomatered in the face for lyin'.

M is for mouthpiece.  While we know that ventriloquists can't really throw their voices, some possess skills so uncanny as to appear almost alien.  I mean, when Mitt Romney stands before a microphone, you would swear that the sound masquerading as his own voice was emanating from his own lips.  Many people are deceived by this.  But if we follow the money before carefully pulling back the curtain, why, right there in their board rooms, in their leather-back chairs, we see the alien ventriloquists themselves.  There they are, counting their millions, creating political dummies, stuffing their shirts, and inserting mouthpieces!  Peek-a-boo, we see you.

N is for nitpicking.   I know a thing or two about head lice.  Back in my earlier social worker days, I spearheaded a project aimed at helping parents eradicate head lice from their children's heads.  (At the time, this seemed a just reward for going to graduate school.)  I am here to report that a louse has a spouse who out of love produce numerous nits that very quickly grow into more adult lovers of each other.  The only hope for lice-freedom, among other things, is to employ a zealous nitpicker.   Comb, comb, comb, pick.  Comb, comb, comb, pick.  But still, the little bastards almost always return.  Head lice, by extension, are the despicable lies spoken by politicians.  You shine a light on them, you comb, comb, comb, and pick, pick, pick them clean.  But in the end, they return to suck blood from the head, and contaminate the public's thoughts and beliefs.  (If you scratched your scalp while reading this, I totally understand.)

O is for Ohio.  Nothing like a little pressure, eh, our buckeyed brethren?  What's it like to become everybody's best friend for a few weeks every four years, only to be forgotten on a November Wedneday like the previous day's garbage?  We look to you Ohio, ol' buddy, ol' chum.  But hey, no pressure.

P is for protest.  In the spring of 1972, when I was a long-haired, anti-war student at Michigan State, I grabbed a bullhorn on the steps of the Administration Building and made an impassioned speech in front of 2,000 fellow students.  Richard Nixon a few days earlier had bombed Cambodia which spawned enraged turbulences across a hundred campuses.  After we shut down traffic on East Grand River Boulevard, we stormed the center of campus to shut down the university's brain center.   Vietnam was genocide.  America was burning children by the thousands.  And now, Cambodia!  Mitt Romney, meanwhile, had attended Stanford and also protested there.  He also heard a call to action.  Romney carried signs that supported the Vietnam War, and did all he could to renounce the anti-war movement.

Q is for quahog.  It is important to give credit where credit is due, and I hereby praise Governor Romney of Massachusetts for presiding over a state that produces such spectacular clams.  The quahog clam is of the hard-shell variety, stouter and chewier than its soft-shell cousins.  When I vacationed in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, in 1981, I frequently ate raw oysters and little-neck clams ("steamers") while overlooking a salt marsh and guzzling beer at Captain Jack's Tavern. "Quahog" also can come in handy for players of Scrabble.  If the Governor had aggressively touted his clam connection, the seafood kind, who knows?

R is for really, really, really rich people.  Rich as a hot vat of triple chocolate fudge.  Rich as owning a private jet, and a yacht, and big-ass bling, and seven bedrooms.   Ritzy rich, rich with blue blood, and rich with justifications for greed.  The finest leather, the oldest wine, that rich American shine.  Gated communities and feel-good fundraisers and looking down the nose.  Way more than rich enough to fill a refrigerator for every hungry child on the face of the earth.  Rich enough to fill those refrigerators a thousand times over. 

S is for stuck-out ears. Barack Obama and Paul Ryan both have ears that stick out, all four of them. And I'd wager that Obama's flaps, if tested, would displace more air and create more lift for flight than Ryan's. Not that there's anything noteworthy about that.  Most voters would probably call an ear contest a draw if the media were to draw attention to it.  For the record, I feel that Ryan's ears are the cuter pair.

T is for tourniquet.  One day a week I work at the courthouse in Bellaire, Michigan. Last winter, a woman slipped on the icy cement steps outside and fell on her forehead. She was assisted into the lobby area as blood streamed down her face from a nasty gash. A group of people came to her aid and, given her critical condition, they were about to call an ambulance. The woman in anguish cried out, "Please!  Don't call an ambulance!  I can't go to the hospital. I don't have any insurance!  I can't pay for it!  I'm begging you!  Please!  Don't call an ambulance!"  But her wound was deep and wide, and because a medic couldn't stop the bleeding, an ambulance was called. She sobbed the whole while as the EMTs prepared her to go, but not from the physical pain.

U is for undecided.  Three weeks before the election, it was announced that 12 percent of likely voters still remained undecided.  Twelve percent!  How could that be?  Are 12 percent of voters locked in their closets?  Is there a third set of wildly different values that neither man represents?  It's not like deciding between shades of beige paint for the family room.  It's not like deciding between french fries or curly fries.  The differences are stark.

V is for a very, very, very good used car salesman.  Mitt missed his calling.  Oh sure, he made a billion dollars by flipping vulnerable companies, but consider what he could have pocketed at Bubba's Used Car Acres.  Mitt could persuade people to buy the fuzz scraped from spoiled cottage cheese.  He could sell out tickets for a cruise ship bound for Des Moines.  And if it ever came to used cars, Mitt could sell out Bubba's inventory on a single Saturday morning in a blizzard.  That man coulda moved some cars!

W is for wedgies and swirlies.  That's right, members of the Congress, we're looking at you.  Until you start acting like grownups, and actually GET ALONG, you can expect your underpants straps up to your necks and your heads plunging the porcelain! 

X is for x-rays.  You have to admire the dental health of modern candidates.  Those perfectly crafted pearly whites must come from many weeks in the dentist's chair.  Ever notice in the portraits of presidents and famous people long-gone that you never see their teeth?  George Washington with his wooden dentures probably had the breath of a turkey vulture.   In the 1800s, even if your mouth was reduced to rotten nubs, your oratory could save the day.  Lincoln's nubs were right down to his gums.  Nowadays you're doomed if you can't flash a Pepsodent smile at every unsuspecting, undecided voter.  Mark these words:  If Obama wins this election by a hair, it will be because his toothy appeal pushed him ahead.  If Romney wins, give credit to his dentist.    

Y is for "Yer Darn Tootin'."  The brilliant "Yes We Can!" unified and brought energy in 2008. But Obama has desperately needed a replacement, and if the campaign had taken my advice, a new slogan would have given him momentum and a margin.  Imagine Obama in an arena packed with 10,000 frenzied fans.  He stands before them with loosened tie and rolled up sleeves:

       Obama:  This is our moment, America!  Are you with me, America?  Is it time to move forward?
       Throng:  Yer Darn Tootin'!
       Obama:  Yer Darn Tootin'!  This is not a country of the few, but a country of the many!  Where we ask the most fortunate to do their fair share."
       Throng:  Yer Darn Tootin'!
       Obama:  And where every American deserves state-of-the art, affordable health care!
       Throng:  Yer Darn Tootin'!
       Obama:  Yer Darn Tootin'!
       
Z is for zombies.  It's exhausting to feel polarized.  It's exhausting to resent.  I drive down my street every day and pass a yard sign that reads, "Take our country back!"  It has become exhausting to consider and then reconsider the posters of such signs, to take such umbrage against such a sea of flawed assumptions.  Wrong, wrong, wrong!   Bad, bad, bad!  Anymore, I feel like the walking dead.  It's exhausting to walk while you're dead.  Let's get a break.  Let's take five.  Even zombies need their rest.




Comments are welcome at tombohn2@yahoo.com


              






 



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In the Beginning

published in Trop Magazine--


In the beginning, at the starter's gunshot of all beginnings, there appeared a bearded and cherry-cheeked giant who wore bright red suspenders. His was the first breath, his the first ray of sun, his the first drop of ocean. This gentle giant created it all: the mountains and rivers, the dusty road down to the lake, and the weather in all its extremes and all its airs in between. He created the pretty blond Dutch girl chasing her runaway goose, the plump and mustachioed butcher with a string of wieners around his neck, the serious boy who rode a unicycle.

At least that's the way it seemed to me, at the age of five, armed with blanket and bear, when my father or mother opened up A Treasury of Children's Stories at bedtime. The book cover showed an enormous and happy giant, relaxed and peering over a mountain to observe the silly people in the valley below. All the colorful characters from their own chapters were there to behold, and the giant took great delight in watching as their audience. To open this book was to celebrate the foibles of these sweetly flawed human beings.  One was too fat and another too stingy. One was too thin and another too grumpy.  The giant loved them all, and I loved the giant for loving them so.

Their creator was invisible to those valley folk, just as God was invisible to me. To exist in such gigantic human form, to step across the land with footprints arriving in adjacent counties, to stand tall among the clouds, why, I felt that this had to be God Almighty himself. And within the ticking of my five year-old skull, those bedtime visits to the Treasury persuaded me that the happy man behind the mountain was the One behind it all.

And so as my family sat down for supper, and together we recited our blessing, to me it was that large bearded fellow I was addressing: "God is great. God is good. Let us thank Him for our food. By his hands we must be fed. Give us Lord our daily bread." And I imagined a wink from above as I dipped a spoon in apple sauce.

I frequently spoke to the giant in those days. Just as the characters in their stories played out their impossible plots to happy endings, I felt I was just such a player within the chapters of my own world, within my own Hundred Acre Wood.   God the Giant was my audience too, and when I was alone after a new and peculiar thing had occurred (and to a five year-old, most things are new and peculiar), I would stop, turn and face that invisible mountain, and remark aloud about the curious and curiouser nature of this wacky wonderland, and especially about the characters who were my family.

I narrated the story to help him understand, and God wholeheartedly agreed that, yes, I certainly had a good grasp of this worldly comedy. That, for example, yes indeed, my little sister certainly was a snot-faced sassy pants. And before I would turn to enter the next scene, God would guarantee that more strange encounters lay ahead.

Such was the secure and comforting company the giant provided me. He was my biggest fan. He felt sorry after my mother swatted my rump for urinating a beautiful yellow rainbow from off our elevated porch outside. He worried with my father down at the lake when I would not be stopped from swimming over the deep and out to the raft. He laughed when I mugged with mouth wide open for the family photograph. And every time I commiserated with him about yet another of the world's bewilderments, he seemed to admire that I was growing in wisdom.

God stayed home during the few times I attended Sunday school. The preacher's son was in my class, a boy who gave off an acrid and bleachy smell.  All the children adored him, it seemed, because he was the preacher's boy.  But in the summer down at the lake, I saw that he was too afraid to wade in above his ankles. These were not my people, and the frightening Old Testament tales were not my stories. Every Sunday morning I complained and complained of a nauseating stomach ache until usually I was allowed to stay home.  The real God rejoiced that I got my way by steering clear of that foreign and troubling place.

I have friends whose five year-old son had similar fits on Sundays. Tim is short for Timothy, and having immersed himself in Japanese monster movies, Tim assumed when he heard about God, that the name was short for Godzilla.  Whenever talk of religion and God entered his ears, sinister images of a fire-breathing, mutant dinosaur came to mind.  A table prayer might have ruined his appetite:  "By Godzilla's hands we must be fed. Give us Godzilla our daily bread." What a queasy insecurity Tim must have felt. That a volcano's fiery eruption might swallow a village in its path: perfectly explainable. But what confusion when learning on a Sunday that God(zilla) created the heavens and God(zilla) created the earth.  "And, Timmy, the most wonderful thing is this: God(zilla) can be found deep inside of you, too."  Perfectly troubling.

I found refuge from monsters and Sunday terrors by seeking the private counsel and audience of an imagined man in red suspenders.  In a long year or two, of course, his image and that sweet time of playing the actor faded away, just as Christopher Robin one day let drop the paw of Pooh.   Those storybook characters were left to sleep on the dark pages of chapters before some other child, armed with blanket and bear, might release them again to the light.

As for the origins of the heavens and earth, the mountains and rivers, and the weather in all its forms: many would approach me over the years with fantastic explanations.  But in the end, the explainers all seemed a bit angry about the subject.  Instead, my spiritual beginnings came as an accidental thing, cast by the long shadow of a gentle giant.  Joy came to be found in all of us, in the characters of the valley, in our sweetly-flawed selves.




Comments are welcome at tombohn2@yahoo.com




    

Runner

My next door neighbor has a dog, a big, bouncy golden retriever named Runner. One day, Runner, having to go, must have been in a quandary. He sat on the property line between his owner’s yard and mine, and must have surmised the following: “My yard gushes with lush green grass, where my master’s little children frolic hither and yon, where their tender bare feet encounter only the silky soft cushion of the finest Kentucky bluegrass, where nary a nasty thing is allowed to grow, and where my master toils day-in and day-out and spends thousands to keep it so.

“Now on the other side, that guy’s yard is fraught with an endless lattice of abandoned mole tunnels and thorny species of weeds that thrive in his sub-Saharan conditions. There is a prodigious crop of quack grass and great expanses of brown nothingness, parched and shimmering in the heat.

“I pledge,” Runner must have continued, “that from this moment forward, I shall dump all my dumps in that guy’s yard.”  Runner then paraded over and promptly put a pile right where he promised he would. And fresh every morning, a heaping and steaming mound, along with the paralyzing rants of a local cardinal family, greet the brand new day.

Runner’s expulsions caused me to harken back to an episode from thirty years ago. Back then I had a small dog named Josephine, a loyal, sweet, smart, and hiddeously ugly beast (many commented that she resembled a walking turd), who on her own would make the daily neighborhood rounds. One morning, I received a telephone call from Bernice across the road, a scowling and wrinkled woman, who relayed unto me a fairly concise message.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Get! Your! God! Damn! Shitting! Dog! Out! Of! My! Yard! Right! NOW!!!”

Oh, the shame I felt!  That I would sully another’s space!  I ran over immediately, and fetched up Josephine who was now in another neighbor’s garden rolling in soon-to-be-spread cow manure. I kept better tabs on Josephine after that, and mailed Bernice a heartfelt card of apology. But Bernice never forgave and avoided all eye contact before I moved away for good.

Canine defecation had created a thunderstorm in the harmonious weather of the neighborhood. I didn’t want to be a Bernice to my neighbors, but then again, I grew quite weary of flinging shovelfuls of Runner’s business into the back forty. Where Bernice responded with foul-mouthed aggression, I let the resentments fester. Oh, sure, I fantasized about hurling said heaps back at the neighbors’ vinyl siding, but I am, well, a timid kind of guy. My therapist advised me to “become more assertive” and “own my feelings” and “protect my space” by using “I messages.” She recommended that I model Goldilocks, that my communications with them should not be too cold or too hot, but, you know, just right and to the point.

And so, as I stood one Sunday morning at the kitchen window and again observed Runner’s ritual squat-and-trot, I knew it was time to act. With heart pounding and a dry mouth, I marched next door to “share my concerns” about Runner’s bowels and his daily misadventures. But when my grinning neighbor and his grinning wife and his wide-eyed children greeted me at their wide-open door, my voice transformed into another’s. Suddenly, I was Bernice in her telephone tirade and I spewed her words that came out as my own.

“Get! Your! Dog!… um… Get! Your! Dog!… um…”

My neighbor responded brightly, “Who? Runner? Why, he’s right here. Where are you, boy?  Runner? Oh, he must be outside. Runner! Runner! Come here, boy!” In a few seconds, the culprit appeared, galloping across their driveway and around to the front door, smiling and wagging, looking all brushed and golden like a champion, like a dog hero on a Wheaties box. And the little children ran out on the porch and strangled Runner with hugs.  One of them picked up a tennis ball and threw it out onto their flawlessly deep green lawn, and they all bounded after it, with Runner in the lead, in a suburban swarm of grassy delight.

You know, I don’t really mind hoisting those accumulated turds after all. One time when I was charged with some piddly misdemeanor, I can’t remember which one, the presiding judge there accidentally referred to me as Mr. Turdhoist.  What a premonition.




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Jellyfish Cruised the Shallows

When I fell into the Atlantic Ocean, my cell phone came tumbling after.  No, I didn't mean to fall into the ocean and, yes, when I did, my cell phone, innocent in my pocket, became a fatality.  After hoisting myself from the sea, I tried desperately to get a signal, but the thing was drowned.  Many important people would be trying to reach me while I was off in Florida, especially my petsitter, Abbie, who promised to keep me updated about Dog.

I admit this is no small thing as Dog means everything to me.  She seems to be the only person who really comprehends.  Over hundreds of tries, she has never been able to chase down a squirrel, but remains resigned to her failures, and after nine years of this, Dog and I share a joyful, and might I suggest, an ironic mixture of gusto and futility.
 
Right there on the beach, I administered mouth to keypad resuscitation.  If cell phones had lungs, the little bastard would have heaved back to life, ringtone ablazing.   But there it sat in my palm, moist with my spit and lifeless in the hot Florida sun.  A beachcomber wandered over and wondered what prize I had claimed now that the tide was heading out.  When she saw what I held in my hand, she gave some advice.

She said a friend of hers brought to life his dead cell phone by burying it in a bag of rice.  Other people have had positive results, she said, by throwing their doused phones in the freezer for a few hours.  So, to cover my bases, I put the phone in a bag of rice and hurled the whole thing in the freezer.  But after a few hours, no dice and no spark. The thing had the conductivity of free-flowing mucus.

At first, I had hope.  I imagined my phone drying out on the beach, sprawled on a pink wash cloth in the pink sun, lazing away the afternoon beneath a cocktail umbrella.  A quick turn on the belly and a thin smear of suntan oil, and Celly would be good as new.  But I faced it -- it was ruined, dead as a doornail.  I imagined it broiling in a pizza oven by a demon chef.  I imagined it as skeet, flung at a shooting range.  I imagined it chopped and mixed with alligator feed at the Alligator Farm down the road.

Welcome, Fatso, to Flori-freaking-da!  I was forlorn as a flatulence fugue in F minor.   I needed to buoy my spirits, to take arms against an Atlantic Ocean of troubles.  I would fight back and stem this tide of despair.   Hence, I dismissed the purple flags, those official warnings that jellyfish or sharks cruised the shallows, and like a conquistador, I marched into the Matanzas Inlet surf to ride the waves that crashed the beach.

The sea was angry that day, my friends, but my brute courage and a will to tame the hurly burly of life's injustices, with its under toads and its slimy and seductive jellyfish, well, I stayed afloat, my friends.  I rode those waves like a locomotive rides the rails!  A throng of beach spectators grew in the safe distance there, and hoisted bincoculars and telephoto cameras and pointed their praising fingers at the brave and solitary body surfer aboard the frithy froth.  It was good to be alive, my friends.  It was good to be alive.

After dreaming the dreams of a pharoah that night, I sat on my Florida veranda with a morning coffee and a chocolate croissant.  Birds sang and the sun was shining.  I opened up the Palm Coast Herald and there, plastered across the front page was a long-distanced picture of a northern being, splayed headlong in the foam.  Atop the picture hung the day's sunny headline:  "Rare Albino Manatee Sighted off Matanzas Inlet."

I spewed latte right onto the sports section.  All right, so I could lose a few pounds.

The article went on to say:  "It appeared the animal was in distress as it kept hurling itself to no avail against the breakers."  And after viewing several photographs of the event, the article noted, one marine biologist speculated that the albino was a cow, determined to join its calves further offshore, driven by her instinct to suckle them.

I pushed the chocolate croissant away.

The only other time I ever had my picture in a newspaper was when I was 12, when I won a blue ribbon at the Tippecanoe County Fair in Lafayette, Indiana, for a prize rooster I raised.   That chicken, whose name was Stanley, by the way, hated my guts and I hated his.  Stanley's life mission was to pepper my epidermus with beak holes, and I have the scars to prove it; scars, it would seem, that resemble propeller wounds on a manatee's hide!

Oh, my friends, how my soul was massacred that morning by the Palm Coast Herald.   Strange coincidence about that place: "matanzas" is Spanish for massacre, and the Matanzas Inlet gets its name from the massacre that occurred there in 1565.  To gain religious freedom, hundreds of French Protestants had tried to settle that country south of St. Augustine, but King Phillip of Spain, the first interloper, would have none of it.  A Spanish captain sailed to Florida with orders to uproot and murder the French, non-Catholic infidels, and when 200 of them were captured on the inlet beach, their executions were certain.  But then, the history goes, the murders were halted by a kindly attendant priest who requested that the Catholics among the French be spared.  Unfortunately, only 12 of the 200 pledged an allegiance to the Pope while some 188 maintained their theological integrity and were summarily slaughtered like chickens.

Now, if I had been one of those French Lutherans, lo those centuries ago, and I had been interrogated by a Spaniard who held a sword to my throat, I imagine I suddenly would have been inclined to speak very highly of Catholics.  "Senor," I might have said. "I have always been an admirer of Catholics, and especially of your Catholic hats.  Might I try one on?"  At least I would have had a shot to live out the rest of my life as a slave, probably shucking oyster shells and killing rattlesnakes.

From my veranda, I heard a faint tinkle.  At first, I discerned it to be a phantom sound wrought by abject humiliation. But it was distinctive, and I scanned the patio for a wind chime.  The sound, though, eminated from within, so perhaps the toilet was running.  I went inside to the kitchen.  Slightly louder now, I could hear the ringing from the refrigerator.

Aha!  I swung open the freezer door, pulled out the bag of rice, and dug from the frozen grain my cell phone, gasping out a sputtering and pathetic ringtone to "Let's Dance".
It was Abbie, my petsitter, and she wanted to tell me all about what happened with Dog.  First, how was my vacation going, well, that's good to hear, and well, she and Dog visited her cousin Francine out on her farm in Antrim County, and as soon as Dog's paws hit the ground, Dog tore out for a chicken, and then Francine's rooster went berserk and attacked Dog, and Dog became totally bewildered and traumatized and turned around and ran back to the car and wouldn't come out again, no matter what.  Dog just cowered in the back seat, but she was okay, just very upset.  That rooster, holy shit, Abbie had never seen anything like it.  Abbie offered to send me a picture of the rooster on her cell phone if I wanted.

Spring break be damned, I headed back to Michigan that afternoon.  Dog would be glad to see me, and we could compare notes about a rooster or two.  And funny, on the night I stopped over in Kentucky, I dreamed for hours about mermaids.  Silent and serene mermaids.




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Loiter at the Goiter

Last week Dog banged her over-sized goiter on the outside door jamb as she went to investigate the constant window-pecking of a demented cardinal.  I'm told it's not really a goiter but an immense fatty mass on her lower neck created by a thyroid gland gone berserk. While the vet pronounced it "benign", the mass has grown to such a dimension that when Dog turns around suddenly, she tends to knock from atop the coffee table adorable figurines into lousy smithereens. Dog's "goiter" is proving hazardous to the decor. Is it right to malign the benign? Should an expensive veterinarian anesthetize Dog and dig out the mass like a bulldozer extracts a dead stump from the dirt?

I recently went in for my second colonoscopy. After my first one four years ago, the concerned doctor said he would like to take a flashlight and again spelunk my inner butt four years hence.  So, for forty eight long months, I had been very much looking forward to Round Two as I had experienced such a magnificent, magical, and prolonged buzz from those drugs administered during Round One. I was told that a second colonoscopy was all about preventing the peskiness of potential polyps, but all I really wanted was to float through another adventure in the Land of Demerol.

It saddens me to report that this second exploration turned into a big, fat dud. The buzz fizzled into nothing more than a snooze. All that sacrifice, all those violent toilet explosions, and what do I get? A long nap on the couch. As for the secondary goal, the possible detection of poisonous polyps, those sons of bitches couldn't find so much as a pucker within eight square blocks of that operating room. Intimate intestinal pictures revealed that my lower innards have the unblemished sheen of a Jaguar in a showroom.

Anyway, I will not have goiter hatchet applied to Dog. Benign is benign and let sleeping goiters lie. Years ago, my doctor persuaded me that Prozac might put a bounce back into my step, and you know, darned if it didn't. Prozac gave me the loveliest sensations -- I felt my tummy was woven with golden lace and actual smiles rose upon my face. But now I learn that placebos have been shown to be just as effective as those happy little pills. It seems my gut felt golden because my doctor, inadvertently, trained my brain to believe it would, just like that demented and imperious cardinal became convinced that its window reflection was about to invade its territory. But without miracles, the shrinking of masses, benign or malignant, human or canine, cannot occur by the power of suggestion.

Dog banged her goiter against the door jamb as she went out to see what all the fuss was about. As usual and before I supplied a placebo, the cardinal had hurled itself against its reflection to destroy the perceived invader. Dog had intervened in this cardinal war about ninety times before, and, as always, she acted as if this were the first time she had ever encountered it. When Dog sniffed around, the cardinal, as always, retreated to a nearby branch and Dog, with problem now solved, headed back inside while banging her goiter against the door jamb. The cardinal would return an hour later, and Dog, freshly alarmed, would wonder what all the noise was about.

The cardinal must have been getting a stiff neck and a bent beak and it's hard for me to relax in front of Seinfeld reruns with Kamakazi Cardinal pounding away. So, I tacked a sheet over the window, and just like that, the bird brain figured it had destroyed its foe.  Silence at last, except for the sound of Dog's goiter banging into things. Yesterday, I'm afraid, I heard a familiar racket across the way. Our next door neighbor has yet to learn the placebo effect of transforming his garage window into a non-reflective surface.

When I was in first grade, my teacher, Mrs. Teroff, would pose to us children a provocative question, and when we couldn't come up with the answer, she would instruct us to "put on your thinking caps."  Following Mrs. Teroff's lead, the twenty five of us would mimic the pulling down over our heads a skull bonnet and then lacing it invisibly under our chins. And just like that, we became a throng of thirsty thinkers and all things cognitive seemed possible. Even Hyperactive Henry would sit still for a moment and ponder away. Thanks to the power of that placebo, that magical thinking cap, more than half of that class would go on to earn Ph. Ds in theoretical physics. Or so I imagine.

Which brings me back to enlarged goiters, demented cardinals, and phantom intestinal polyps.  If you put on your thinking cap, you can decipher one clear thing: when the emperor wears no clothes, he's as naked as a butt during a colonoscopy. But as long as he believes he's shrouded in finery, not even his own reflection can kick him off his cardinal's perch. But as for Dog, there ain't no thinking cap, no placebo, that can reduce that fatty mass. She will always be a one goiter wrecking crew.