Harold Gets A Ride

Ruth was in a Jiffy store this morning and overheard an old man, loud with frustration, ask the clerk about the bus line that he had just gotten off in front of the building. Apparently the old guy had fallen asleep and missed his stop. He was lost and confused and the clerk was unable to help. The old man stumbled back outside and when Ruth left too, she saw him asking for bus directions from a group of Hispanic men who obviously didn't speak English. The old man walked away, defeated, scared, clueless as to what he should do. Ruth got into her car and pulled up next to him. “Excuse me sir, but I overheard you in the Jiffy store. Where do you live, where do you need to go?' She asked. He told her the street name and she replied: “I know where that is, get in, I'll give you a ride...it's right on my way!” she lied. The old man was stunned.

It must be hard for an old person with little money to live independently in a tough place like LA. Ruth had to tell him twice. “Get in!”

For the entire ride he praised Ruth for her generosity “Good things are going to happen to you, young lady!” he told her. Still incredulous, he asked: “You're not scared?” Ruth told him no, she wasn't scared and didn't bother to rub in the fact that he was a broken down old man of 80 plus years whom she could tie up into a knot in a heartbeat if it became necessary. But she knew it wouldn't be necessary. Arriving at the old man's apartment, he got out of her car, still amazed that someone, anyone, would reach out to a stranger like that. Grateful, and perhaps just a little lighter in his step, he disappeared into the complex where he lived. Ruth headed back to where she needed to go. She felt a bit lighter too, for having spent a brief time with Harold. His name was Harold.

Tastes like Fox!

Here's an important tip for all boys, and for men who never stop thinking like boys, to keep in their bag of tricks. It's free, easy, and works every time. This is what happened the first time I did it...

Meandering slowly down a footpath in the Virginia woods on that breezy Spring day, sharp sunlight knifed unpredictably through the high leaf canopy overhead, allowing moments of intense light to tease our skin with it's warmth. I was a young guy in my early twenties, there with my girlfriend and my mother. All of us were visiting my Grandparents that day, enjoying grandpa's woods. I had invited Mom to walk with us to get some air, taking advantage of the opportunity for the ladies to get to know each other.

As we poked along on a small stone trail, the girls fell behind, lost in the sun mottled colors of a patch of wild flowers that expressed their joy in an explosion of reds and yellows. I took that opportunity to unwrap the Tootsie Roll that I had tucked into my jeans pocket earlier in the morning and pop it into my mouth. A few quick chews made it ready for me to spit out onto a large rock in the center of our path.

Turning quickly back to the where the ladies were lost in those spring flowers, we all continued to poke along, with no particular agenda other than to enjoy the moment. As we approached the rock where my Tootsie Roll sat prominently on display, I was ready for some fun.

Pointing out the spot, I said excitedly: “Oh look, animal droppings! They look fresh too!”

Kneeling down as the ladies hovered overhead, I pushed a finger into the goo. “They're still warm!” Mother said: “Oh Hugh...”

I continued: “I think they're from a fox, some small meat eater anyway. No bug exoskeletons like you see in toad or bat excrement. Definitely a small carnivore. Most likely a Fox.”

Mother and Stephanie stood above me, mute, seemingly impressed by my fecal analysis and repulsed by my finger full of wet animal shit hovering in the air between us.

Without pausing, I popped my finger into my mouth and licked it clean.

Grinning up at them, lips and teeth smeared with wet chunks of brown shit I said: “Yup, it's definitely a Fox. A red female with kits. You can tell from the acidity.”

Both were horrified, speechless, and I like to think, a little bit impressed. Certainly they had bonded in an unspoken agreement that I was deeply disturbed in ways that were new to both of them, Mother and girlfriend, instantly on the same page, knowing without words that this particular son and boyfriend badly needed help.

 Rushing ahead to rinse off in the stream that I knew to be just up the trail, I was grinning like a fool, hardly able to contain my pure joy, giddy in the moment.

Clff Notes

We all want the Cliff Notes in life, just the bottom line. Don't ask me to put in the time, all that work and study...for what? Just tell me! “So after all those years you've spent meditating in a cave, what's the one most important thing you learned?” “How to make a million dollars in less than 90 days.” The top five makeup essentials? What is the master gardener’s secret to growing huge tomatoes?

Hey, I'm not going to reinvent the wheel, so don't expect me to learn by trial and error. I'll just take your word for it.

My father was top of his class at Johns Hopkins and Harvard law. Phi Beta Kappa. Growing up with him was like having a walking dictionary in the house. He was the flesh and blood version of that immense Oxford English Dictionary that he kept on its own wooden stand in the living room next to his Tropical fish tank. Dad rarely interacted with us kids, there was no throwing of the ball out in the yard. His job was to pay the bills,\. Mom was in charge of the kids. So I was understandably stunned as a young teen when Dad looked up from his New York Times crossword puzzle as I was walking through the living room one day when he said to me: “Hugh, I need to speak with you.” It was as if I lived near Mount Rushmore and was used to those faces dominating the landscape and one day George Washington decided to speak...directly to me. Stopping in my tracks, I sat down in a chair across from Dad and braced myself for something epic, the pearls of wisdom that I was about to receive from this man who was all about the intellect. So many years of study served up from master to son. What is the meaning of life? What is the essence of vital understanding that he was now ready to pass to me? In his normal, rather somber way, Dad looked directly at me, all my senses on high alert, ready to catch every nuance, each inflection or hidden meaning.

My father said to me: “Don't pick your face.”

Like any normal 14 year old, I guess I had been doing some work in the mirror.

Ten years later, I learned a similar non-lesson from the Tae Kwon Do master at the Karate school where I ran the business end of things. As you may guess, he had been studying since he was a small child growing up in Korea. The roots of his knowledge stretched back through many generations. Mr Park was the absolute, unquestioned boss...the master. But like Dad, he rarely spoke to me much, or to anyone else for that matter. So on the second Christmas of my employment there I was quite surprised when Mr Park indicated that he had a present for me. My imagination ran wild as he handed me a long, flat box wrapped in gold paper. Was it his first brown belt, earned when he was just a kid? Maybe an ancient piece of parchment that touched on the genesis of Tae Kwon Do itself? Perhaps some kind of Korean certificate of achievement that was only awarded to special insiders?

With great care and respect, I unwrapped my present in front of Mr Park, prepared to see a first ever warm smile of pride for his number one student. Inside the package, nestled in white tissue paper, lay a large pair of stretchy black business socks.

So among other life lessons along the way, I learned from those moments of potential epiphany, that although we may expect the clouds to part and allow the sunshine to illuminate essential truths with crystal clarity, that the ultimate answers we all seek, may come to us in unexpected ways. Perhaps the lesson is still there, but it may well look like a large pair of black business socks.

The Good Stuff...Or Not...

Ruth works as a family assistant and nanny for a guy with ties to the hotel and casino industry in Vegas, NYC, Miami, and a variety of other hot nightspots. Everything is top shelf in his world, and in hers too when she is working. Right now she's in Miami, playing nanny when needed but mostly on standby, living life among the rich & famous. She called to let me know that she plans to rent a car and drive up to St Augustine for a visit on Monday, but first she has to fly down to the Bahamas for the weekend. They will be staying on a private island owned by a friend of her boss.

Maybe the good stuff skips a generation. When I was her age I was driving a cab in Washington, D.C. One of my regular fares, a large woman with poor hygiene, kept her change in her mouth where teeth had once resided. When it was time to pay I would hand her a big wad of paper towels for her to spit the coins into. That's the kind of crowd I ran with.

I was about to point out that I have never even been to the Bahamas, but that's not true. Carla won a four day cruise from some cheap promotion about fifteen years ago. It sounded like a little slice of hell to me but I went along with it to please her. The ship was small, old, dirty and filled to the brim with people who generally fit that same description. Things didn't go well. In fact, I was on the verge of having assault charges filed against me when the entertainment director put his hands on me one too many times, trying to pull me away from the bar and into a circle of large, gaudily sequined women all juiced up into a frenzy, doing the Macarena under a hopelessly outdated mirror ball. Sweaty celebrants stirred up a sickening breeze heavy with the scent of FDS and bad perfume. I escaped up to the main deck, desperate for fresh air, but all I got was diesel fumes as that old tug labored along.

Like I said, I think the good stuff skips a generation sometimes...

Stephanie

Whenever we went somewhere together, Stephanie drove her her hot little convertible. A MG Midget, not much bigger than an amusement park car broken free of its miniature track. 

Small, cute, perfect. Her automotive doppelganger. 

That particular rainy morning we had gotten up early to drive down to Virginia Beach for a bit of fun and sun. The weather channel said it would clear by the early afternoon. Her idea, I was just fine hanging out at my place, but I had spent the week on a carnival ride from hell with my work, so I was seeking vacuous bliss with someone else in charge.

It was hard to see the road that morning, a misty rainy shit of a day. Wind driven water sought the path of least resistance and dripped from the line of rubber lips where the convertible top was clamped down tight to the windshield. Never tight enough of course.

I was really enjoying being the passenger for a change, rolling a joint, kicking back. Normally I was “in charge” of our time and activity. At work it was worse. It was great for her to take the wheel for the day, for her to drive everything, with or without the car. “You decide” I said. Where we were going and what we would do was her job that day, I was along for the ride. Not an easy thing for me to do, I finally relaxed and started to enjoy the letting go. That's when she rounded a tight curve and drove head on into the front end of a big Chevy four door. A fucking boat of a car. Young Stephanie had put a wheel over the edge of the road on the right side, quickly over-compensated, and cut a hard turn to the left, directly into the path of the Chevy.

Stephanie, oh Stephanie, such a sweet little fawn of a girl, smashed that beautiful face of hers into the steering wheel. In an instant, the plastic disk at the center of the wheel broke away and allowed the metal post of the horrifically designed horn mechanism to slice her face open like an ax. From her upper eyebrow line down to the center of her nose she was divided into opposite halves. We hit in slow motion, my legs driving into the glove compartment and dash, molding those to the shape of my knees. The beach towel I had been using to stop the leak at the top of the windshield glued itself to the radio controls like a fresh coat of white paper mâché.

Stephanie hit the wheel hard, bounced back and turned slowly to me with a look of surprise and awe. I could see her brain clearly, beneath specific layers of sinus cavities and bone, cleanly opened by the surgeon of traumatic impact. Her face had been split in half. At first there was no blood, just clean white flesh and bone, layers exposed, a chart hanging on the wall of a cranial anatomy class. I was interested in the anatomy of the horror, taking mental notes, observing the dissection. Time clicked on in mini-seconds dressed, in costumes of eternity. The arterial blood startled me as it began to pump from the center of her face, surprisingly hot spurts ejaculated onto my arms as I held her, for the last time.

Crystal

A petite red head, Crystal is all of five feet tall, no more than 98 pounds. She's a regular at Planet Fitness. She looks 14 but is 32. A married mother of an accomplished 13-year-old daughter who adds a sparkle to Crystal's eyes when she speaks of her. 

Crystal has MS, her muscles don't do what her brain tells them to. She came to PF about two years ago in a wheelchair, extremely overweight and unable to walk. She works out every day. Now, two years into it, she has lost 80 pounds and gets around with only the help of a cane. I often see her on one of the machines, eyes closed, not sleeping but rather, willing. Willing her muscles to relax, to end the horrifically painful body cramps that seize her without warning. She lives with pain every day and although in the long run, her determination and hard work at PF has transformed her, it is an unending struggle. Working out hurts more, much more, than sitting still, but it gets results over time. If she stopped, she would cramp up permanently and be a twisted mess in that wheelchair for the rest of her too short life. So she comes in for a daily dose of excruciating pain, every day, with a smile. 

Crystal never complains when we talk, but I see it when her eyes are closed, sitting alone at one of the workout stations as if in prayer, willing the body to relax and behave, willing the pain to take a back seat, just for now. 

Last week she was laboring along in front of me, wobbling slowly forward, her cane shaking with each step. An invisible switch was thrown, and she crumpled to the ground, a marionette whose strings were cut by an unseen evil. Rushing to her, a friend and I helped her up. She was all smiles as I lead her over to her next battlefield, a leg machine. It was a leg day for her. Helping her onto the machine and adjusting it to fit her tiny frame, she spoke of her daughter with pride, she spoke of having to finish up soon to meet her husband who was coming to pick her up, she didn't say a word about her fall. 

Walking away, as I looked back, Crystal was sitting still, eyes closed, the sweat on her forehead glistening under the harsh florescent lights, willing...

The Chicken Herder

The ever encroaching suburbs flooding out to the West from Washington D.C. washed cow pastures clean and left behind huge McMansions that lined streets with names reminiscent of what they had just replaced...“West Pasture Way or Dark Horse Drive”. Teams of undocumented house framers ran shirtless along high beams unencumbered by safety harnesses, driven by cash at the end of the day to put up houses for the feeding frenzy riding the incoming wave. Houses appeared as if by magic, so close together that owners could reach from a side window to give each other a high five at their cleverness for buying almost identical homes with which to impress each other.

Carla and I tried to stay ahead of the Tsunami moving from Alexandria to Reston on to Ashburn and finally to Lovettesville. I worked on “K” Street in downtown D.C. Commuting all that way by car was insanity, and that intensified as we moved farther out, but the train made all the difference. I caught it in Point of Rocks. Maryland, four miles from our house, and rode it down to Union Station where I could jump on the Metro and ride the two miles more to my “K” street office. That was great.

Catch a nap, read the paper, plant your face in a palm and catch some Zzz, or maybe just sit back and watch the world shoot by at 55 miles per hour, enjoying that lull in between home and work. A peaceful respite with no agenda and no demands on your time.

I especially enjoyed watching the conductor do his thing, punching tickets up and down the isles, answering questions, calling everyone “Sir” or “Mam”. A heavy man in his mid 50”s, a good old boy from West Virginia where the train originated. Born and bred, a country boy. And as indicated by the medals and pins that competed for space on his left lapel, he was a train lifer. His worn dark blue uniform, black shoes, white cotton socks, those pins and that essential round cap with a brim, clearly identified him as such.

Over time, I heard him speak of the buck he shot, its head now adorning his rec room wall at home. His vegetable garden, tomatoes, the wife, his grown kids, Donny Jr and Constance June, now producing “grand-babies” for him to watch on Thursday afternoons. His church and Pastor and chicken dinner Sundays. Damn communists and hippies. Often speaking as if in soliloquy, his volume had been cranked up after competing with 40 years of train noise.

As I sat in my suit and tie among a train full of suits and ties, I admired his Independence, his direct approach, his inability to sugar coat or be politically correct. And there was no question that he put his train full of yuppie passengers on the same scale of importance as pond scum. He could see no value in people who worked in an office all day “pushing papers around”. He herded us every day and seemed to think that we weren't even on the same level as his chickens, just as stupid but unable to lay eggs.

The morning train usually stopped for the early crowd on the fourth car from the rear. That's where the conductor would dismount, put the stairs down and yell “All Aboard!”. He stood inside the car as the line of suits and ties came on board and turned left, toward the front of the train. These kinds of things puzzle me. Why does the engineer stop so that the crowd boards at the fourth car? Why does everyone turn left when they board? It was always the same dance, the window seats went first, isle seats second. Some riders tried to suppress their rising panic, looking wildly up and down the isle rather than confront the fact that they may have to sit in a center seat. But throughout this process, as the seats began to fill, the Conductor repeated his mantra, calling out in a loud voice over and over: “Plenty of seats in the rear folks, plenty of seats in the rear”

One morning I couldn’t suppress my curiosity any longer, wondering why everyone turned left when there were “plenty of seats in the rear” so I stepped back into an empty seat across from the conductor to ask. Of course I was thinking of traffic flow patterns and more efficient ways to direct it. Maybe stop the train at the last car so everyone had no choice but to head toward the front? Maybe send every other person in opposite directions from the fourth car? But why was that necessary? I had to ask.

Standing directly across from him, I looked the conductor straight in the eye as he finished calling out:

“Plenty of seats in the rear folks, plenty of seats in the rear” Yelling back at him, “Why is that?”

Looking puzzled, unhappy for one of the chickens to ask a non-chicken question, he sputtered back: “What?” I continued: “Why are there plenty of seats in the rear? A look of total amazement came over him, his eyes widened at the sight of the stupidest coat and tie chicken he had ever seen. Wishing he was back home, away from this carload of idiots, he managed to yell back at me the obvious: “CAUSE AIN'T NOBODY SET IN THEM YET!”

I could see that it had taken the last of his strength to get that out, wondering how a guy like me could even dress himself or take a bath... much less draw breath while doing it. He was disgusted that it was his job to take train loads of us idiot chickens into town to run things from air conditioned offices filled with Fluorescent lighting. He knew it was a sure sign of the decline of civilization as he had know it.

He was just glad that his fifty years were almost up so he could go home forever with his pension under his arm and herd nothing more than his his own chickens, happy in knowing that at least they lay eggs and none of them wear a suit and tie.