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.

Season's Bleatings

‘Twas the night before Christmas when all through the mouth, I chomped into chicken and a molar went south. This violent and unexpected collision with a thigh bone cracked said tooth all the way down to the root. (Actually, this occurred on the afternoon of October 19, but just trying to keep with some Christmas spirit here.) Days later, I had a merry little extraction, gaily festooned with gaudy gauze soaked in gum blood, and now my dentist and oral surgeon wonder if I might like to spend $2,500 on an implant and crown. I doubt I will. First, the new hole in my mouth makes a terrific storage place for spit wads. Second, I don’t have $2,500.

In a case such as this, what would Jesus do? I’m sure He was never confronted with a quandary such as this. I have a theory about Jesus’s teeth: I believe He dazzled with heavenly pearly whites, and may have even sported a striking pair of buck teeth. Let’s face it: those biblical throngs were a huddling mass of gummers. Ever see a toothy grin in a portrait of Madonna or Her saintly peers? Gummers, all. No wonder the average life span of your average adult was about 28 years. It’s tough to chew your standard mutton chop with dried out gums. No, I think Jesus not only dazzled with his markers for eternal life, but the huddled masses also came to adore His Pepsodent smile, the envy of Jew and gentile alike.

I am proud to announce that both my children have selected partners with excellent teeth. I’m sure that Brendan (28) will get a professional cleaning in the next year because HE’S ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED TO HIGH SCHOOL SWEETHEART JODI GRIFFIN. Not only that, Brendan and Jodi have just purchased a house in Ada, Michigan, that has lots of ROOM FOR CHILDREN. Their words, not mine. Brendan works for Chase Bank, plays tuba with the Holland Symphony Orchestra, and gives tuba lessons at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids. Jodi is project coordinator at Michigan Public Health Institute. Together they could almost afford an implant and crown. They have a terrier named Daphne.

Elizabeth (26) brushes every day, mainly in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she is a graduate student in poetry at Georgia College and State University. As part of her duties, Elizabeth teaches freshman composition to students who are predominately Atlanta suburbanites and text-messaging addicts. She shares life with boyfriend Roger, a fine writer in his own right, and together, I might point out, are NOT engaged to be married. They have a dog named Wendy and a new socialist puppy named Omar, whose long and upright ears lean decidedly to the left.

Dog has a softball-sized goiter on her chest that bounces when she runs. She could use a merry little extraction or a custom-made bra. The goiter doesn’t slow her down as she’s remained consistent in her lifelong quest to destroy squirrels who invade our bird feeders. This year’s score: Squirrels - 816, Dog - 0. And getting together with family, of course, means Dog, Daphne, Wendy, and now that little communist Omar, romp and grovel together as one, swarming from one room to the next, sliding and growling en masse across slippery hardwood floors, slobbering, shedding, and kicking up dander. Humans remain safe by keeping their feet propped up on ottomans. A lively household, this.

And Sue Bohnhorst? What on earth can be said about Sue? Oh, I could tell you that in order to counteract the side effects of chemotherapy, her doctor offered a prescription for medical marijuana, and Sue took him up on it, but soon one drug led to another, and the next thing you know, she’s gone for days at a time, until finally I get a collect call from a phone booth in Butte, Montana, she begging for money, for a bus ticket back to Traverse City, and she would change her ways. But that wouldn’t be right to say. Actually, it was Spokane.  No, no, no… we shall not joke about that which is off limits to joking about.

This is brutal business, this ovarian cancer, this chemotherapy, this exhaustion, this diminishment of form. After the shock and gut ache from The News, a stranger intrudes and enters your lives, and while at first the stranger intimidates, you begin to step around, learn to step over, and finally, to step through the fears that once ruled the day. Sue is doing great. After five months of “phase one” of her clinical trial chemo, she is now working through “phase two” which is more of a maintenance regimen, and not nearly as debilitating. Her strength is returning and her hair has come back silky soft and gray as granite. All markers say positive things, but while we are never out of the woods, this is a pleasant forest we live in. The foundation of Sue’s recovery was built by the tremendous love and support of family and friends. And I could resound with a chorus of Sue superlatives, describing her heroic fight and so on. But she reads this too, and she wouldn’t like it. So I will say this: her hair is very cute.

This Christmas, there will be an empty chair at the dinner table. Sue’s dad, Les Klauer, died in May after complications from a fall in April. He loved Christmas, and we will miss him, especially on this day. Les was 91.

Now, like a miracle, I am newly 60 with a fresh hole in my mouth.  The Detroit Lions, like a miracle, are in contention for a playoff spot.  Newt Gingrich, by a miracle, is the Republican frontrunner.  And up in the air, miraculous winter pigs fly in a perfect V oer this northern land… Hey, these could be lyrics to a new Christmas carol, “Will Wonders Never Cease?”

I think Jesus would pass on the implant and crown, and use the hole for convenient spit wad storage. And I think He would give $2,500 to a poor family who needs food and shelter.

Enough already.  Merry Christmas.




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Tongue of Cow (and other lessons)

November 11 was the birthday of Kurt Vonnegut.  Happy belated birthday Kurt, you dead person you.

In 1999, Mr. V. wrote a piece called "How To Write With Style."  He ended this essay by summing up his seven most important tips: (1) find a subject you care about; (2) do not ramble; (3) keep it simple; (4) have guts to cut; (5) sound like yourself; (6) say what you mean; and (7) pity the reader.

Here now, in my continuous effort to gain your approval, I show that I am a multi-dimensional writer of style.

1. Find a subject you care about.   At the top of the list, I care about Chobani Blueberry Non-Fat Greek Yogurt.  And my care for it is deep.  Chobani yogurt is authentically strained by authentic Greeks who have been straining hard ever since that one Greek ran all the way to Marathon.  Chobani  has two times more protein than other regular crappy yogurts.  The blueberries and the blueberry gop on the bottom, when consumed slowly, causes a sexual tingle.  This explains why the blueberry flavor of the product keeps flying off the shelves.  Meander down a downtown sidewalk and you'll notice that many passersby have a certain smile with a purple stain on their lips.  I am one of those passersby.  I care about Chobani.

2. Do not ramble.   I took my first driving test in a 1959 Rambler coupe.  I was under the influence of cannabis sativa at the time, so technically, I ran a risk for getting arrested for driving while under the influence of drugs while trying to show the State of Michigan that I would be a safe and capable driver.  Chances are I had some pot in my pocket to boot, but the State of Michigan thought I did a fine job in that borrowed Rambler and gave me a driver's license.  I could ramble on in this rambling tale, but Kurt would be proud if I stopped it now.      

3. Keep it simple.  Amen to that Dr. V.!  There is nothing so mortifying in the strands of the soul, nay to the very heartbreak of psoriasis, than to lie supine like the mythical Nell, hog-tied and screeching bloody murder in the perpendicular between railroad tracks, tracks of bloated words, tracks of puffed up and self aggrandizing piffle, tracks that lead like a tedious argument of insidious intent, those railroad tracks that endure the incessant hum and vibration of a thunderous locomotive that vomits an utter vacuousness, that fails to deliver on the dried and salty sprits of spittle of so many arrogant "literary adventurers"!   No, just call the cops.   Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties arrives backwards on his steed. Dudley is just in the nick to save Nell from becoming bloody hamburger under the cow catcher.  All you really need is a good looking cop, a damsel in distress, and a horse that knows the way.

4. Have guts to cut.   Let's face it, it's tough to toss pure gold down the shithole.  Every year I construct a Christmas letter to our beloved brethren, and over the years I have received invaluable feedback as to what's not been informative, what's not been amusing, what's not been appropriate, and especially about what not to do next time.  This year, I've taken a vow to follow this advice.  Per my readers' pleas,  I now have guts to cut.  Here is a draft of this year's version:

"Dear Family and Friends:

We're all fine, except for the bats.

Merry Christmas.

The Bohnhorsts"

5. Sound like yourself.  This is sound advice, I suppose, if you know who in the hell you are.  But I would like to expand on The Gutt's proviso:  "Sound like yourself, but not too much like yourself."  Allow me to illustrate from an experience I had in 10th grade geometry, Lafayette, Indiana, in the fall of 1967.

We were assigned homework assignments and as customary, given time before the bell to work quietly at our desks.  I was bored and decided to pass a note to Mark Garrison, the kid sitting across the aisle from me.  The note read:  "Is that a banana in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"  Mark read the note, gave out a soft chuckle, and quietly passed his response back.  It read:  "No, that's just my enormous tongue of cow that you're always trying to bite."

For some reason, this caused me to chuckle quite out loud in that silent place and in a moment, the outstretched hand of Mr. Hobaugh, our drab and dour math teacher, was at my left.  I handed him the folded paper, he read it to himself, became an even dourer man, and ordered Garrison and me out into that empty and cavernous hallway.  Mr. Hobaugh then handed back the note and commanded solemnly, "Read it.  Out loud."

My voice had not fully changed, and my soft chirping echoed down the hall.  I started out meek and scared:  "Is that a banana in your pocket... or... are you... are you just glad to see me?   No... "

I paused as I began to shake, began to struggle with keeping a cork on the funny monkey in my gut.

"Read!" commanded the teacher.

"No, that's just my tongue... my tongue of cow... my TONGUE OF COW!  my TONGUE OF COW!"  I was a goner.  I doubled over in laughter, out of control, crying helplessly in this supremely absurd moment, now lost to any possible lessons that might come.  Mr. Hobaugh really couldn't deal with this hysterical meltdown and simply pointed us back into the classroom after I caught my breath.  I walked back to my desk, laughing all the way before the bewildered class.  And from that moment on, Mark Garrison and I forged an unspoken bond for life.

This is an example of what I mean by not sounding too much like yourself.  In that delicate and dangerous moment of impending doom, my words "tongue of cow" came echoing back to me, destroyed me, but also provided an odd salvation.  Be careful that you not scrape the innards too closely.

6. Say what you mean.  Here's how I describe the early days of dealing with our new puppy, Dog.   And I mean every word:

Dog is a drum major on four legs with the parading forth of toilet plungers and waving embarrassingly soiled undergarments.  Here are the battle scars of puppy potty training as yellow ovals splotched with paper towels freckle the floors.  They must resemble the oozing sores of biblical lepers.  I've grown accustomed to sidestepping regurgitated Kleenex and the transmuted skeletons of moles.  But it's hard not to love a dog who falls asleep with her head inside a boot.

7. Pity the reader.  I am sorry to put you through all this.  Notice that I did not say that I am SO sorry.  Well, I'm not SO sorry, I'm just sorry.  When the hosts of the Today show take their turns for their inane morning TV segments, Al Roker might say, "And now here's Ann."  And Ann Currie will respond, "Thank you SO much, Al."  They're always SO appreciative of each other or for some guest, Madame So and So, coming on and explaining that to lose weight, a person needs to watch their diet and exercise.  Ann will end by saying, "So and So, thank you SO much."

I try to take responsibility for other people's feelings, for your feelings.  If you are cranky, I did that.  If you are bored, my bad. Therefore, I am sorry to put you through all this.  But then again, you didn't have to visit here, did you?  All right, then. We're even.

Still...  I'm sorry.




Comments are welcome at tombohn2@yahoo.com

Words of comfort head for the sea.

While language experts curl their lower lips and bemoan our ebbing word supply, my four year-old insists on wearing his pajamas tops backwards.  That's because it give him a free hand with which to eee-eee while his other eee-eees his bockie.

This goes to show that while grown-up English words are evaporating from dusty disuse, our children are still getting a decent night's sleep and sometimes infusing new words to boot.  So I'm not too awfully worried.

Trouble is, of course, the words our children introduce rarely make it.  These  silly words are newly-hatched sea turtles, scampering for the ebbing tides, and more often than not, are plucked from the beach by marauding scavangers.  Poor baby turtles -- poor baby words.

But my four year-old Brendan has no intention of relinquishing certain words he has brought with him from, well, a soft-shelled egg under a pile of sand.  In fact, two words survive to this day, and never is their use more vital than at bedtime.

The other night Brendan emerged from his bedroom in his pajamas, and I noticed that his collar was choked over has Adam's apple with the store tag hanging out like a necktie.  This came as a surpirse because the kid has taken himself in and out of pajamas for a couple of years now with an excellent inside-in and rightside-front ratio.

"Uh, Brendan," I said.  "I think you've got your pajama top on backwards."

"No, he doesn't," my wife corrected.  "He likes to eee-eee the tag during stories and in bed."

Which made perfect sense to me.

So while my wife was reading him a tale of Pooh, there sat my enchanted son, the silken tag of his pajamas top held gently and perfectly between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.  And as each page of Pooh was turned, he'd give the tag a rub, and you could hear the faintest sigh of "eeeeeeee."

As is his custom, his left arm cradled a pale yellow blanket and small red Teddy bear.  The blanket he's dubbed his "bockie."  It has a silky border which has been eee'd nearly since egg-hatching day.

And long ago, Brendan chose "Red Bear" as his loved one from his full fleet of stuffed animals.  It was chosen for the preferred silkiness of its rectangular tag -- the lettering, "Made in Korea -- All New Material Consisiting of Polyester Fiber," has been eee'd out since his third birthday.

Sitting there, watching him eee-eee his pajamas top tag with his right hand, and eee-eee his red bear tag with his left hand, I dreamed back to my own days of eee, back when a particular word in my version of the English language had a wonderful power to comfort.  The word was "munga."

That's me sitting there, Linus-like, my mouth yanking on my thumb, my munga hoisted over my shoulder.  Neither Snoopy nor bogeyman nor dread of night could ever pry from me my silk-on-the-cheek munga security.  Nor smoldering fireplace.

I must have eee-eee'd the bejesus out of munga, because when my parents took me to a babysitter one dark and stormy night, my ample blanket apparently had taken on a most odious countenance.  The rag had been eee'd and dragged through the dirt so much, my mother's attempts at keeping it clean must have been abandoned long before.

The babysitter was so mortified by the sight and smell of this frazzled fabric that she immediately threw it in her fireplace where it sort of fried and smoldered.  I was four years-old and not amused.  Munga had been armor against a babysitter I feared.

Nothing but nothing could soothe hysteria upon a coughing tantrum but to fish from the smoke my prized and sizzling munga.  But by this time, the only salvageable section free from blackness and crispness was sooty square of threads about the size of a sheet of toilet paper. 

But this mattered not.  After scissors cut it free, I just eee'd it and eee-eee'd it and coaxed from it every delicious drop of comfort I could coax until my parents might take me home again.  And I am told my beleagured patch of munga was never out of eee-eee's reach for a long, long time to come.

You won't fund "munga" in the dictionary, just as Brendan's "bockie" will one day go by the wayside once he's eee'd his last eee-eee from it.  They're just like my nephew's "diti" and my niece's "pasha" and probably a million other ill-fated words born in the Land of Eee.

No, these words run their brief course for as long as their silky borders lend comfort to a child's cheek or a child's finger and thumb.  For surely, the business of growing up has a lot to do with forsaking emotional crutches at different stages along the way.

So when I learned the English language is losing thousands if words, especially describing words, I wondered whether Brendan's words might have a chance at replenishing the supply, of scampering into the sea of language like heroic baby sea turtles.

"Bockie" will have a long life in the hearts and minds of Brendan's family.  But we all know Father Time, that marauding scavenger, will someday sentence the word to ashes and dust, just like my frittered and forsaken munga.

But something tells me "eee" has a real shot at survival.  Picture this:  A lonely and desperate man takes a stool at a bar and directs the bartender, "You there, right now, give me a double martineee-eee."

Or this:  While a man is walking down a  dark city street, a strange woman approaches and say, "Hey, baby, how about a little eee-eee?"

It could happen.  We may be running out of describers.  But we'll never run out of our need to describe our craving for comfort.


-- from the Traverse City Record-Eagle Summer Magazine, June 26, 1997. 



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Artichokes

My mother coveted the artichoke's heart
But I preferred the leaves,
Dipped one by one in mayonnaise
Then scraped across the teeth.

Mullato men macheted the stalks
In a violent Georgia field.
Before a brown servant steamed them
In a gigantic, blackened pot.

The family of five found peculiar ways
To assault the artichoke center:
My brother plucked from north to south,
My sister dismembered in circles.

My father constructed a wall of green,
A plate of murdered tongues,
His Sherman march surrounded the core
The dinner light yellow and lean.

A feast of leaves, a harvest of hearts
With mayonnaise for flavor.
Atlanta cicadas screamed through screens,
Before Huntley and Brinkley got started.


-- from The Dunes Review, December, 2002



Comments are welcome at tombohn2@yahoo.com

When I Grow Up

I grew up as a child.  And while my peers wanted to grow up to become train engineers, firemen, and cowboys, I  wanted to become a urologist. I never did become a urologist, probably because my father wound up passing his kidney stones even before I was allowed to stay outdoors after the sun went down.  Besides, I later learned that urologists deal with lots of droopy body tubes near other internal parts that look like raw sausages. 

My father passed his kidney-stone-passing talents on to me.  A few years ago I wound up in the E.R. where, in the midst of a kidney stone attack, I vocalized a now-famous screech the likes of which had never been heard before.  That's why a commemorative plaque marks the place where that ear-piercing echo first erupted.  E.R. staff there still refer to it as the "Tomaso Tremolo".  You must admit, this is quite a feat in a theater where screams of pain punctuate the day. 

But the Tremolo was small potatoes compared to the frenzy of suffering I witnessed circa 1958. My mother banished me to the outside patio while Dad lay prone on our couch, convulsing in pain so extreme that it sent me into hysterics.  My mother ping-ponged between attending to my father and trying to shield me from those horrors and persuade me that my daddy wasn't about to die.  Given the experience, you might have expected that I would grow up wanting to become an ambulance driver.  But by the time the medics arrived, I had already run off into the woods to scream at the Georgia clay and weep violently in the willows.

In my current job, I sometimes encounter young men whose career hopes get derailed because they got arrested for beating their wives and girlfriends. Many had grown up wanting to become police officers, to become just like those brave cops who arrived in the nick of time and saved their mothers from further beatings by their drunken fathers.  These boys grew up wanting to save the day with their badges, shiny belts, and their good guns of justice.  But in the end, they were too much their fathers' sons.

If fathers really are to blame for their sons' career choices, it's possible to trace my seeds to another bout of Georgia screaming.  One night when I was about seven, Dad went into the bathroom, and unleashed in that small space and from the bottom of his guts, profound wails that rattled the walls.  These were not screams of physical pain, but convulsions of outrage and anger, primal and deep.  One scream followed another, and on and on they roared.

What's a seven year-old to do?  Why, join right in, of course.  I opened the bathroom door, walked in, and starting screaming with all that my little voice would carry.  My father seemed oblivious to me, and so together we howled, me in my pipsqueak falsetto, he as turned inside out as a man could be.

Unfortunately, this was a warm Atlanta evening and all this happened with our windows wide open.  Our neighbors, the elderly McConnells, who lived next door and enjoyed their evenings relaxing in their screened-in porch, made a hasty retreat back inside.  What must they have thought?  It must have sounded like murder going down in the neighborhood. Either that or an attack of kidney stones.

But my father wasn't one to spew forth and rage against innocents.  Quite the contrary.  He was a gentle, thoughtful, enthusiastic, pipe-smoking college professor who never raised a hand to his children and who gained fame among his students for expounding the value, of giving and receiving hugs.  On that particular night, Dad simply sought the only sanctuary he could find, and let loose his pent-up store of personal agony.  I never learned what it was about, and to my knowledge, he never had another screaming spell after that.

Now that I am all grown up, what have I grown up to become?  Before drifting off to sleep, I did love the distant sounds of those southern freight trains as they rolled through my Atlanta childhood nights.  Such a comfort it was to feel that low and steady note while gazing half awake through the darkened web of dogwood limbs outside my bedroom window.  I did not want to be the man who led the charge, the grimy engineer, the leader of the pack.  Instead, I dreamed of pulling up the rear, the solitary man in the caboose, keeping the lantern lit, feeding the small coal-burning stove, and smoking a pipe just like the one my father smoked.  Before the next depot, all the while, there's the caboosey cricket call, clickity-clack, clickity-clack, clickety clack, the cool tempo of the railroad track. 

The Caboose Man.  I hope that's who I've become.




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