Season's Bleatings -- 2013

From my forehead this morning, right on cue, sprang a single crimson pimple.  Like a rooster at dawn, this zit yearly crows, "Time to write the Christmas letter!"  You might think I can see that we are in the Season -- that no one could be that deaf and blind to the rumble and the jingle.  But not so, my friends.  You see, with practiced and monastic devotion, I only dwell IN THE MOMENT.  The world's distractions no longer jar me from the HERE AND NOW.  No, I am so in tune, it's my body tissues which set off alarms when worldly duties call:   A runny nose, for example, means a light bulb needs changing.  Earwax buildup forebodes a leaky faucet.  A canker sore:  it's time to reset the rat traps.  When the pimple pops, I obey.

It's been a banner year, this two thousand thirteen.  There was a wedding, world travel, a master's degree, new jobs, a reunion with long-lost cousins, good health, and tomatoes from the garden. Although Sue, I'm afraid, lapsed further into social deviance and depraved behavior:  She is addicted to on-line fabric shopping, creates quilts and purses, has joined a book club, and, I'm sad to report, now subscribes to HGTV magazine.  Yes, I know... worrisome.  

After a 12-year courtship, Brendan and Jodi got married at the zoo in Grand Rapids.  It took Jodi the full 12 years to finally stomach the idea that Bohnhorst would be her last name.  It was an elegant affair.  There was a cellist playing Bach, white table cloths, ice cubes in the water, air conditioning, a funicular -- all attended by 100 fully-clothed guests.  Elizabeth mastered a creative writing degree in Georgia, then moved with boyfriend Roger to Austin.  There, she nabbed a job as a "personal assistant" to a wealthy heiress from Arkansas who hired her on the spot after Liz recited to her one of Liz's poems.  Meanwhile, her long-eared dog has taken to wearing a rainbow-colored tutu.

With a thousand thanks to friends Dan and Debi, Sue and I traveled to Italy in April and suffocated on pasta and pizza, in piazzas and perfect weather. We promenaded upon Pompeii and Positano.  You can write on my tombstone, "He drove the roads of the Amalfi Coast and did not have a relapse..." With another thousand thanks to cousins John and Inge, and ol' friend Jay, we traveled to California in October and felt right at home in Alcatraz.   We broke egg rolls and fortune cookies with cousins not seen in 42 years.  I had my picture taken on the 18th green at Pebble Beach while mistaken for a harbor seal.  In my defense, the fog had just rolled in.

The 2013 tally:  Squirrels 8, Dog 0.  If you've been keeping track, these numbers tell that Dog has slowed down some.   Or maybe at age 11, she's become philosophical about The Chase, and made her peace with Futility.  As a consequence, the back yard squirrels felt a new birth of freedom this summer as they chattered and mocked me while I hit golf ball after golf ball into my practice net back there.  I had had about a hundred balls lying around, but when I  started to pack up in the fall, I noticed that about half had disappeared.  I privately accused the neighbor children, the little snot-faced thieves!  But the next day when I took Dog for a walk, I discovered dozens of golf balls in the woods off our back yard, half-buried no doubt by those freedom-loving squirrels, apparently for their future harvest.  In an indirect way, this was Dog's fault, her and her sense of futility, and I told her so. And another odd thing: the squirrels had buried only my Titleists.

My pimple has retreated, submerged for another year until this dirty Christmas duty rises again.  Now I can let go of worldly distractions and crawl back inside THE MOMENT.  Maybe I'll just lie there on the floor and stare upwards at our Christmas Ceiling Cobwebs.   Or maybe I'll stare emptily into my laptop screen, yearning that someone, anyone, will "Like" just one of my endless Facebook postings.  Ah, the stillness.  But what's this I feel?  Why, horrors!  It's a hard blue boil erupting on my back!  This feels serious... maybe the basement has flooded.

But before I grab my flashlight and galoshes...  Merry Christmas!  And...  Go Green!








  

The ABCs of March in Michigan

Published in Found Michigan, 03/06/13

Technically, it’s only 31 days. But to your itchy, dry skin, vitamin-D-starved cells, and cabin-fever-battered self-esteem, March might as well be that seemingly eternal last mile of a goddamn winter marathon. The snowbirds—i.e., the smart ones—get the hell out of here; those that stay, it’s amazing we don’t end up eating each other. For some perspective on the month ahead, guest essayist Tom Bohnhorst filed this complete alphabetical guide to navigating Michigan’s most depressing month. Bon voyage.

*    *    *

A is for advancing cases of mucus infiltration. Listen as you take a stroll down any school hallway and you’ll believe you’re at Midas Muffler. Hacking, coughing, the blowing of snot—germs love March in Michigan. The whole state should be quarantined.

B is for Bahamas or Bimini or Bermuda or the bars in Key West. It’s for dreaming dreams of anywhere warm. “B” is for taking your forefinger and twanging your lips while you mutter “buh-buh-buh” as you gaze at a calendar of the Caribbean.

C is for crunchy snow—the kind where, walking across a snow-covered yard after freezing rain, you randomly break through and skin your shin on the icy crust.

D is for dumb ducks. Ducks have wings and they can fly long distances. But Michigan ducks just swim around in circles on half-frozen lakes and ponds. Ducks, what the hell is wrong with you? Get your asses out of here!

E is for eternal, as in the 31 seemingly eternal, drag-ass, stuck-in-neutral days of March. Not 30 days. And certainly not 28. Studies have confirmed that time actually slows down in March. It has something to do with the choral droning of Michigan weathermen, day-in and day-out, with the same dreary forecast.

F is for filth. I bought a black car which looks stunning right out of the spotless auto wash. Stunning for about a block. Within a day, after a few miles of salted sand, slush, dirt, splattered mud, and snow plows, it looks like it’s been on safari.

G is for grey, including dark grey, light grey, greasy grey, grey grey, granulated grey, grey that’s almost white, grey that’s almost black, grey water, grey snow, grey skies, grey hair. And let’s be clear what “G” does NOT stand for. “G” is NOT for green and “G” is NOT for golf.

H is for Hellmann’s mayonnaise, straight from the jar, and everything high fat, high carb, high fructose, bad as hell for you, that I suck down like oxygen because Hellmann’s mayonnaise and its ilk are really really good at keeping the blues at bay. “H” is also for “Holy shit! I just gained 10 pounds!”

I is for… “I” is for… I was going to say, “I” is for igloo, but that would be a cop out. I’ll tell you what “I” is really for… “I” is for: I CAN’T TAKE THIS SHIT ANY LONGER! I can’t. It’s not “cabin fever” anymore; it’s “my cabin needs padded walls.”

J is for jammies. At 9 p.m., my wife informs me that she is going to put her “jammies” on. I ask her if “jammies” is derived from pa-JAW-mas. “No,” she says, “jammies is derived from pa-JAM-mas.” And I tell her I think pa-JAM-mas is adolescent and cutesy, while pa-JAW-mas is adult and correct. And she tells me her whole family always said pa-JAM-mas and, for crying out loud, we used “jammies” with our own children. And I take great exception to that and declare that no way in hell did we—especially I—ever use “jammies” with our own children and that my whole family always said pa-JAW-mas. I tell her that “jammies” sucks. And so it goes for five more minutes before she leaves the room to put on her jammies. I blame this asinine exchange and others like it on March. By the way, it is pa-JAW-mas.

K is for kiss my ass. They say attitude is everything. I’mma wanna tell ya: It sure as hell is.

L is for lack of vitamin D. “L” is for lack of sunshine. It is so rare to see a blue sky in March that when the sun appears, we think we’re having LSD flashbacks. Thousands stare for hours into blinding light-boxes believing they will ward off “seasonal affective disorder.” There’s no such thing, of course, but we allow the masses to huddle together under their unifying diagnosis.

M is for madness, as in March Madness. It’s a great paradox that it takes madness to restore sanity. It takes office pools and online brackets and rooting for Cinderella to keep us from chewing holes in the upholstery.

N is for numbed noses and numbed nuts. And worse than being numb is being numb to our numbness. We swim unaware in an ether of novocaine. We have been so cold for so long, we don’t realize until April that we’ve lost some of our fingers and toes.

O is for “Olly olly oxen free!” I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. I get irritable. March Madness is still a few weeks away. Please forgive me. Come on over and help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge, if you can find anything in there. Probably can’t. Sorry.

P is for potholes. Everybody talks about potholes but nobody ever does anything about them. Except road commission crews. Those guys drive around with their steaming asphalt and fill in yawning hole after yawning hole with their persistent shovels. These are the heroes that battle decay and our winter’s discontent. They save our shocks and springs and prevent car passengers from getting hernias. Bless you, boys.

Q is for quarrelling. Walk through any apartment complex in March and you will hear, behind closed doors, constant explosions of slamming doors and bellowing arguments between lovers. Why then, you might ask, is there such a spike in birth rates in Michigan hospitals in December, nine months later? Three words: make-up sex.

R is for reruns. And God bless their little rerunny plots. Look outside and you’ve got blood-stopping cold in seven shades of grey. Look inside and you’ve got Kramer and George Costanza in HD on the flat screen. It’s a no brainer.

S is for sleet, snow, slush, slippery roads, severe weather, and more miserable S’s than I care to conjure.

T is for traumatic stress disorder (TSD), akin to post-traumatic stress disorder, except there’s nothing “post” about it. It lasts for exactly 31 days. Don’t expect treatment for TSD in March, because psychiatrists are too immersed in their college basketball brackets to deal with the suffering of others.

U is for Unguentine ointment, a winter staple and treatment for dry skin that you’ll be plenty familiar with once you turn 50. When I’m without my Unguentine, I like to rub my back in a door jamb, like a bear rubs its back on a pine tree.

V is for Vaseline Petroleum Jelly. If you run out of Unguentine, Vaseline will work. In March, nobody in Michigan cares if you walk around with Vaseline smeared all over your body.

W is a tie between windshield wiper fluid and “Where’s the remote?” If you have neither, both of these W’s can be a matter of life and death. Which is more important? Finding the remote is much more important.

X is for “X marks the spot” and how frustrating it is when, if you’ve marked your spot in November, try as you might, come March you can’t find any X anywhere because everything is covered in snow. Someone could put an X in a very obvious place outside and still not find which spot X marks. From November through March, all marked spots are useless.

Y is for Ypsilanti, Michigan. Ypsilanti experiences March in Michigan. Therefore, you should feel sorry for it.

Z is for “Zounds!!! A crocus!” The delicate, the precious, the sublime blue shoot of the crocus. It points heavenward through mounds of melting snow, undaunted, uncompromising, the knowing vertical climb of spring. We often see crocuses in March. They have the courage of David as they slay the monstrous Goliath of winter. That battle happens in late March, right as the madness subsides.

###

Tom Bohnhorst is a social worker and lives in Traverse City, Michigan. In 1973, he spent a harrowing night in a Turkish jail. To read more of Tom’s essays, visit his blog: Poopiderum. 

Comments are welcome at:  tombohn2@yahoo.com

Decrepit to a T

Published in Trop (tropmag.com)

I keep encountering old people. As part of my job as a social worker, they come hobbling in, creaky and wrinkled, and settle in to share their tales of woe. Sometimes they carry smells, are grey and bifocaled, and fill their application forms with long lists of medications.

I often pitied these prehistoric specimens before an epiphany spelled the alarm: THESE ELDERS ARE MY PEERS! I MYSELF AM A CODGER OF OLDE!

As proof, this morning when I dropped my wife at the library, she handed me a pack of sugarless cinnamon gum and said, “Here. This will give you something to do while you wait.”

Playing Words with Friends recently, I played an A in front of a word already on the board. Excited and confident, I played ADROOL, as in, “There I was, watching C-SPAN, my head anodding and my chin all adrool.” I felt crushed when this seemingly common state of being was rejected.

My wife must have figured that if I chewed sugarless cinnamon gum while I parked outside, this would prevent my nodding off and soiling the car upholstery with drool. As it turned out, the little gum box was empty. I then took her to mean that I could amuse myself by reading the ingredients of sugarless cinnamon gum. Meanwhile, she could peruse stacks of great literature, each of us according to our talents.
Hey, I may be dumb but at least I’m stupid.

My father just turned ninety and he now wears a bib when he comes to the table. His cranial synapses can get discombobulated, and he might try drinking a bottle of ketchup if you don’t intervene. Before the era of the bib, splotches of dried food would accumulate on his shirts and bathrobe. These telltale and crusty stains I dubbed “splog,” and they became locations of interest for dinner-table discussions. My wife once claimed she saw the Dalai Lama in a mustard stain. When Dad was living with us, we ran up quite the electric bill from the constant washing of his sploggy garments and sploggy lifestyle.

And now, I select which sweatshirt or sweater I wear by which of these possesses the least amount of splog. Drooling is not the least of the woes wrought by my advanced age. Like father like son, I suppose. I went to visit my long-lost brother last winter, and when he greeted me at the airport, dried remnants of navy bean soup adorned the front of his turtleneck. Like baldness, sploggishness runs in families.

Dad’s bib became a fixture at about the time he took a wrong turn. Sitting in his easy chair one evening, he announced officially, “When a man has to urinate, a man has to urinate.” With great exertion, he lifted from his chair, straddled his walker left and right, pointed it down down the hall, plodded forward in slow, tiny steps, and headed straight into the broom closet.

But judge not that my father has let go of life’s important lessons. During a recent hospital stay when yet again his diverticulosis erupted, Dad had this conversation with a nurse:

NURSE: How are we doing today, Ben?
DAD: I’m old! Old and decrepit!
NURSE: Decrepid?
DAD:  Decrepit. With a T.
NURSE: Oh, okay. Well, lay back down on your bed.
DAD: It’s lie back down, my dear. The verb is to lie.

No one has ever taken offense at these corrections, because my father is so dang sweet. He so loves his fellow man. Dad may not remember how many children he has, but if, perchance, you visit him, and you recite the first few words of a Shakespearean sonnet, say Sonnet 29, he will take the cue and proceed without error and without pause:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate.

And so on.

After I realized that I was older than many of the geezers I served, I took to spending long minutes gazing at my face in a close-up mirror. I had to agree: just when a guy starts to think he’s all grown up, the ol’ mortal coil takes a nosedive. It’s like falling asleep on a surfboard, only to awaken miles off shore, the tides of time pulling you outward. And as you try to paddle homeward, the great grasp of momentum only chuckles.

Acceptance can happen. Sometimes I chuckle when I pass by the broom closet. Now I rock in my father’s old easy chair and sometimes a gob of jelly will  seep onto my shirt. I have taken to chewing gum, stick after flavorful stick, my favorite taste cinnamon. It prevents splog, and stops the head anodding, the chin all adrool. And while chomping away, I might recall an old song or poem, and how earlier that day I walked into a room with no clue as to why.



Comments are welcome at tombohn2@yahoo.com