I REMEMBER - the stick of confidence

...I was about seven years old and living in McAlester, Oklahoma.  I was skinny, shy and uncoordinated. I had just gotten glasses (four eyes - four eyes!!!!) and didn't have much self confidence.  One summer day, I fell victim to the neighborhood kids who taunted me and  pushed me around until I couldn't take it anymore and ran home crying.  If it wasn't bad enough already, they chased me all the way home and up to my own front porch.

I ran inside crying to my mother.  The kids stayed on my porch and taunted me through the screen door.  This wasn't the first time this had happened, and it didn't seem there was a solution presenting itself.

Mom told me that if I didn't stand up for myself, no matter how old or big I got, there would always be someone bigger who  would try to push me around and make my life hard.  She told me never to start a fight, but there were times when you had to take a stand and not run away.  The she told me, "today is that day."

She took an old broom handle out of the pantry, handed it to me and said "There are more of them than you---this should even it up a bit.  Now go back out on the porch and tell them that the first kid that sets foot on your porch is going to get whacked."

I was shaking like a leaf when I stepped outside.  The kids saw me and looked at the broom handle and backed off the porch.  It probably looked like I was shaking the stick at them, when in reality I was trying to hold onto it and my hands were shaking like crazy.

Then a wondrous change occurred.  I shook the stick and dared them to come up on my porch and mess with me.  Of course the biggest and baddest kid took me up on it and stepped forward.  I raised the stick and, although I couldn't hit a baseball (which started the "four-eyes" taunting in the first place), I figured that since his head was much larger than a baseball, I stood a good chance of making contact.  As soon as he saw I was ready to whack him, he turned and ran away and all the other kids turned the taunt around and laughed at HIM as he ran down the street.

My life was changed forever.  I felt good about myself.  I never hit anybody with that stick, but I got new respect from the other kids on the block.  They and I both knew the stick was just within reach, inside my front door.  Soon,  I learned I didn't need a "stick."  Sometimes it is just a "look." We all have been on the receiving end of "the look" and have felt the power.


My new level of self-confidence grew considerably after that.  It didn't, however,  improve my baseball ability much, although I didn't always get picked last anymore either.

I REMEMBER-The Shoelace...

…about 45 years ago, breaking my shoelace, and getting a great Zen lesson from my step-dad. John Wesley Welton was a basic, one-layer guy. No frills, no hidden meanings. He said what he meant and meant what he said. He married my Mom when I was fourteen and displaced me as “Man of the Family.” We rarely talked, and this remembrance moment is true to form.

He never asked me about my thoughts, and our “conversations” were mostly sound bites, uttered at me to determine their value and to grasp all their nuances in the fewest possible words. His response to “How are you doing?” was always, “Another Beautiful Day in Californay" (yes, pronounced with a nay at the end, and unfortunately most likely responsible for my infamous blog and same question response of “Another Day in Paradise”). Another of his favorites was, “A Little War is Good for Business, but a Big War is Great for Business.” This was a quick summary of his opinion of Roosevelt’s economic plan. His other great sound bite was “Just do the best you can with what you’ve got"...oddly, a play on Roosevelt’s classic: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

I was seventeen, it was 1965, and I was frustrated. I didn’t like being only seventeen, dependent, no money, living in Rancho Cordova, thinking I was way smarter than practically all adults in my world (after all, I had just read Kafka and Melville) , and anxious to get started building the story of my life. I was getting ready for a date and was running late, and I rushed into the family room to get the family car keys from my step-dad. John had been a Chief Warrant Officer in the U.S. Navy. From someone who had to live with one of those guys, he was the officer-in-charge, who inspected your bunk and uniform and denied you shore leave if everything wasn’t perfect. John gave me a one second glance, said “Your shoelace is untied” and went back to reading the paper.

In my increasing frustration, I yanked on my laces to tie the bow, a lace snapped, and I succeeded in punching myself in the face as hard as person can from that bent-over position. Uttering the favorite expletive of most 17-year old boys, I ripped off my wingtip and threw it against the wall.

John never looked up from the paper, but said: "Don’t replace just the broken one, change both of them or you will regret it. Shoe laces are in my Dopp Kit in my closet.”

Determined to not speak, I silently got the laces, ripped out the old ones, and started the laborious process of re-lacing my shoes. Without putting the paper down, John said: “I broke my shoelaces when I was seventeen, too. It was Sunday, December 7, 1941.”

I stopped messing with my shoes and sat down. My step-dad NEVER talked about being in the war. All I knew was that he was at Pearl Harbor on that infamous date in history, but he would never talk about it.

He continued: “I was seventeen, hated my life and wanted to do something big. I used a fake ID and joined the Navy to get into the Great War. I was stationed at Pearl Harbor and had the world by the tail. My two buddies and I were going to the mess hall that morning and I broke a shoelace getting dressed. I hated being late and they were giving me a hard time. My friend told me: ‘Don’t replace just the broken one, change both of them or you will regret it.’ As I was replacing the laces, one of my buddies yelled: ‘Look at this, some fool has his plane all painted up like a Jap Zero and is buzzing the airfield. He is really going to get his ass in a sling for this.’ Those were the last words he ever said, because the Zero was real and a spray of bullets cut them both down right there in the doorway, plus a bunch of other guys walking to the mess hall. If my shoelace hadn’t broken, I’d be dead with the rest of them and wouldn’t be here now. Sometimes, things that seem like a bad thing at the time, turn out not to be so bad after all.”

That was it. No more discussion. He had nothing more to say, so I snagged the car keys and because the date was more important and I was seventeen, the Zen was lost on me at the time. However, the older I get and the more experiences I have, the stronger that moment gets in my memory.

Here I am, 45 years later, and now I really “get it."

I have since experienced a lot of “Broken Shoelaces”...like losing a job and finding a better one as a result...like losing a relationship and finding a better one as a result...and like getting Cancer and having a better “finish” to my life as a result. “Sometimes, things that seem like a bad thing at the time turn out not to be so bad after all.”

By the way, I was really late for the date. It didn’t work out, and she liked my friend better, anyway.

I REMEMBER...the smells of the fish bait shop in Oklahoma

...…the smells of the fish bait shop in Tishomingo, Oklahoma when I was a kid. I got to stay with my Grandmother Clara Whitlock and Grandfather Roy Whitlock in the summer time when I was between 5 and nine years old. My grandfather and I went fishing a lot (see post from April 23, 2009). My Grandfather was a cool guy. They say that if you are lucky, you will get your 15 minutes of fame in your lifetime. Some get more, some get less. My Grandfather, Roy Whitlock (my dad’s name was Roy George Whitlock) got five hours worth in 1928. He was a banker and was closing up one evening, got robbed, kidnapped, and was immortalized in this book about the notorious bank robberies in the twenties and thirties, as a means of income for the unemployed:

Page 103 from “Cabin in the Blackjacks – excerpts of Pretty Boy Floyd”:

…”Turn of the Stonewall First National Bank came the Following April, 1928. Three men found Roy Whitlock alone. They escaped in a roadster, taking Whitlock. They fled through the Allen oilfields and forded the Canadian River. When they stopped, Whitlock helped them divide the money, $691.70 in all. Each gave him $5.00, and they released him after dark to walk into Sasakwa. Before long the three were in the state prison.”

I remember the bait shop we stopped at before heading off to the fishing hold. That was a very long time ago (like 55 years or so), but I still have very vivid memories, complete with the sounds and smells of Lloyds Dry Goods & Bait Shop. We would drive there in a 1950 Plymouth. It had mohair seats and was incredibly itchy when you wore shorts (kid in the 50’s, summer time Oklahoma heat). We would walk through the main part of the store to the bait area in the back. You could smell it from the front screen door. It wasn’t a bad smell; it just had its own odors. For younger readers, think Disneyland’s ride - Pirates of the Caribbean, at the bottom of the lagoon where the boats launch...kind of damp, dank, musty and you are almost there. If you added dead crickets and crawdads, you would have it just right. There were two or three large concrete tubs (probably cattle water tanks) with aerators running constantly. You could hear the bubbling and motors running, smell the mixture of mossy fish tanks, crawdads, crickets, and earth worms as soon as you hit the front door. This was a great moment…it meant we were going FISHING!! I got a cardboard tub of red worms and my Grandfather got a dozen minnows. I got little hooks for bluegill & perch and he got big hooks for bass. I got a peppermint stick out of the big glass jar up front and he got a shot of something homemade from the back of the store. It was a man’s deal, I got the forbidden candy before dinner – he never mentioned it to Grandma and I never brought up his quick visit to the back of the store with Lloyd.

The afternoon was lazy, warm and forever etched in time down at the swinging bridge over Pennington Creek. It is good to have fond memories so deeply ingrained that the slighted sound or smell can instantly conjure up a 55 year old 15 minute experience.

"What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal." Albert Pine

I REMEMBER...the Irish Pub Crawl

…traveling to Europe in the early 70’s (a lot of my life stories strangely happened in the 70’s) and spending time in Ireland. The pubs were a particularly intriguing phenomenon I had an interest in. Warm, friendly, a local tavern for food, drink and fun.

I was somewhat lucky at darts and Irish pubs harbored dart boards much like American bars have pool tables. I won my fair share of pints, dazzling the locals (who admittedly drank faster and in larger quantities than me…perhaps that was my asset in the competition).

So having met some new found darts & drinking friends at a pub one evening (they were off-duty ambulance drivers- I hope they were off-duty…) we forged a deal. The public taverns closed rather early during the week (so the workers would actually show up to work the next day) – the only bars that stayed open late were the ones inside the nicer hotels for the hotel patrons. They offered to treat me to a “Pub Crawl” (which is a much more apt description than the Americanized “bar hopping”. I observed that there were definite tricks for a successful pub crawl that seemed to incorporate rugby/roller derby moves and teamwork. A good pub crawl needs at least two big, strong, rugby/roller-derby guys that are socially ambivalent to under-breath comments and glares, the money man and the rest of the drinking team. Note: all the best pubs in Dublin were packed and everyone seemed to be speed-drinking, so there is no “getting a drink and going back to your table” – that action is too lightweight to survive. Each bar was packed and several people deep. Alone, I never would have even made it to the bar and if I had and then left – I doubt if I could have made it back for a second beer (pint).

So, the game plan was to have all of us (about six) line up behind the two bruiser “breakers (literally). They would elbow and push their way through the throng until, at last, the biggest and strongest found the bar (zygote!!). He would plant himself there and the second team member would be right behind him fending off all other drinkers to maintain a strong line. We would string out behind the first two, foot to foot, with the money man at the end. This was our fire line- like a bucket brigade with volunteer firefighters (except these guys were medics/ambulance drivers). Money man passes money forward through the line to get to the main bar position holder, who secures the pints and passes them back down the line until we are all properly lubed. This pattern is repeated, to insure an uninterrupted and even flow of suds until a. the money runs out or b. the pub closes ( or in my case, after b. comes c. – the acquisition to your “line” of a tourist with a pass to the after-hours bar in an upscale hotel- good for a couple more hours of drinking).

Note: I have no idea what these guys were talking about that evening (probably beer, women, and tourists) as their brogue got thicker and my hearing got fuzzier as the evening wore on. I remember we laughed a lot, so it must have been humorous.

I pick up accents fairly quickly and when motivated by inhibition, fairly well also. My biggest compliment of the evening was being mistaken for a drunk from Scotland. Hoot, laddy, not so bloody bad, eh?

I REMEMBER...my motorcycle & the stuck throttle

…when the throttle stuck on my motorcycle going through a small town in Northern California in the early 70’s. It was Easy Rider time and I had this beautiful BSA 650, chopped, dark chocolate teardrop tank, with chromed extended front forks and butterfly handlebars, banana seat and it weighed about twice as I did. I loved that bike, but I recall that I loved my perception of my image on that bike more. It was somewhat patterned after the bike Peter Fonda had in the movie, Easy Rider.

It was 1970. I had graduated from Chico State College and having fulfilled my promise to my parents to finish college, I launched on to the “go forth and seek the truth and find yourself” tour [that tour lasted about 15 years until I started my family and grew up]. Haight Ashbury San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Carmel, pretty much anywhere along Hwy 1 was a good ride. I had watched Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson) multiple times and listened to the Steppenwolf album (yes, vinyl) until the grooves wore out. It indeed was a Magic Carpet Ride.

So, I have my hair down to my belt, full beard, sunglasses, a monster bike, way bigger than me (could barely hold it up when I came to a stop) and I am cruising through the back roads out of Chico, Ca. Just as I approached the main street of a small rural community, the throttle stuck wide open on the bike and I was catapulted forward, screaming down the road trying to brake, steer this flaming monster and not crash. Thinking I was a dead man driving, I did not notice immediately the flashing red lights and siren trailing right behind me until I got a few miles out of town, burned the bejesus out of my hand trying to hit the kill switch. I finally coasted over to the side of the road, awaiting my fate, as the police cruiser slammed to a stop behind me in a cloud of dust. The officer was highly agitated. 1970, rural cop, long-haired hippy biker, speeding through his beloved, but small, town blowing through both of the town’s stop signs – I could feel my life slipping away, locked in a dungeon, for years.

Kick-starting (a motorcycle term) my yet to be refined sales career, I apologized profusely, addressing him as “Officer, Sir”. I explained the problem with the stuck throttle. He was quiet for a bit and said: “Let me take this thing for a short ride to see if you are telling the truth.” He was bigger, in authority, and had a gun. I said “Sure.” He was gone almost an hour. Just me standing in the dirt next to the locked police cruiser.

When he cruised back to where I was, he smiled and said: “You were right about the throttle – but I fixed it. You know, I always wanted to have one of these.” He advised me to keep going north and not to come back through “his town” and drove away.

I drove north. I went about 60 miles out of my way to make it home a different way. Sold the bike and bought a new Volkswagen van for me and my black lab with a stubby tale and a red bandana.

I REMEMBER...my sister, onions, turkey and cooking drama

my younger sister, Sharon, and her playful ways she would display her displeasure about me making simple, innocent, constructive suggestions about her kitchen habits.

The three times I recall of note are:

1- the time she and I were helping our Mom unload the groceries from the car. I had already brought in the onions and potatoes and Sharon (about two years old - I was about six) was putting them away in the bottom cupboard next to the refrigerator. On my second trip into the house I didn't see any potatoes or onions out so I asked her where she put them. She pointed at the cabinet and when I looked inside - as the poem says - the cupboard was bare. It is conceivable that she thought she heard a disparaging word (because the clouds were not cloudy all day) from me. Bereft of the proper words to cleverly hide the truth that she had just neatly poked them through a hole in the cupboard wall, dropping all the potatoes and onions to an impossible-to-get-to crawl space under the house, she just sunk her four teeth [two on top and two on the bottom, all in the front like a deranged beaver] into my shoulder blade and hung on until Mom heard my screaming and saved me. When a turtle does that you have to cut their head off to get them unhooked, but Mom wouldn't hear of it. It was just a suggestion.

2-We both survived and got a little older. We still had combined kitchen duties, possibly one of God's tests where what doesn't kill you, will make you stronger. It was Thanksgiving. We didn't have much money, so we were thankful for the turkey. Sharon was thankful for having an underachiever for a brother, so she could look really good compared to her sterling self. I was particularly thankful for the fact that I was the oldest child (by four years) and significantly bigger than my sterling sister.

Not being clever enough to avoid cleverly disguised, seemingly perfect set-ups (sibling harrassment opportunities), I came upon my sister, basting the family turkey, perched precariously on the open knee-high oven door in our 50's, bright turquoise, far-too-small, kitchen.

There was just enough room to squeeze behind her to pass through the kitchen. My sister had commandeered the opportunity to baste the turkey to a perfect golden brown and Mom had relegated me to taking the potato peels out to the trash. In retrospect, I probably could have gone around the kitchen, but the what-could-possibly-go-wrong temptation to casually, ever-so-lovingly, brush past her, took control of my body. As I squeezed behind her (I am absolutely confident I mumbled "excuse me") my "I am peeved with you showing me up to Mom all the time" knee reflexes must have jerked involuntarily and given her the the ever-so-slight shot to the back as I passed by.

This was 50 years ago. I was twelve and she was an evil, evil (did I say evil yet) eight years old. I have this painfully vivid memory of her involuntary Sarah Bernhart [Quote from Wikipedia: "Much of the uncertainty about Bernhardt's life arises because of her tendency to exaggerate and distort. Alexandre Dumas, described her as a notorious liar) acting skills kicking in. As I gave her the quite innocent knee-to-the-back love tap, she instinctively screamed loudly, fell backwards, flinging the turkey, the roasting pan, drippings, etc. across the floor, skidding to a greasy stop at my Mom's feet. No amount of protest on my part could properly explain the huge injustice I received as my clever little sister, writhed on the floor, in the turkey bastings, crying and screaming that I had viciously kicked her in the back. You are probably thinking, geez, it has been fifty years; get over it. You weren't there to see the Mona Lisa smile creep across her face as I was dragged off to the dungeons to be flogged. Note: We ate the turkey anyway. I ate mine standing up.

3. Somehow, we managed to bury the hatchet (just not in each other) and we lived on to another day later that year to combine our fine-tuned culinary skills to make a birthday cake for our Mom, while she took a nap. After all, Sharon had mastered pancakes and I had beaucoup (dj. Many; much: beaucoup money. n. pl. beau·coups also boo·coos or boo·koos. An abundance; a lot.) merit badges for cooking over an inverted coffee can in the wilderness.

We had the cake mix, we had a two part angel-food cake pan, but obviously, had no clear recipe to follow. We were practically valedictorian scholars, and so, boldly moved forth to surprise Mom with a homemade cake. Wrong mix. Wrong pan. No sense of time. After the pan suffered in the oven for about twenty minutes with the only heat coming from just the oven light-bulb, we realized our error. It was quite obvious what we had to do. If a person only had so much time to go from point A to point B and you had gone too slowly in the beginning - the obvious solution would be to go faster with the remaining time you had left, so you would arrive at point B at the right time. The same principal could surely be applied to cooking. Not noticing that half the batter had leaked out of the two-part pan onto the old style, non-self-cleaning oven bottom, we cranked the heat up to broil, to make up for lost time and proceded into the family room to watch "American Bandstand" - with forever young, Dick Clark.

Boy did Mom truly get a cake surprise for her birthday. This was before smoke detectors. I am still not sure if that was good or bad. When charred-cake black smoke
finally filled the house (except where we were in the lower-level family room with the sliding wood door closed) all Hell broke loose with Mom screaming for us to get out of the house, as it was on fire.

It, of course, wasn't. Just the cake - permanently baked and embedded into the pocked, porcelain interior of that poor oven -was a tad over done. I thought for sure my co-cook and I would share the blame on that one, but as I was the oldest (with a fire safety merit badge, no less) and the one that originated the cooking dilemma math formula, once again, I remember bearing the brunt of the responsibility.

My sister and I have lived long enough to fondly remember these childhood traumas with a bit of humor (and much Merlot). Sharon is one of my best friends now and may have slightly different, but deranged, versions of these stories. However, since this my blog, she will just have to start her own, and post her own version, won't she?

I REMEMBER...the Flaming Marshmallow

...having a minor altercation with my sister, Sharon, when I was about twelve and she was about nine. It involves a flaming marshmallow.

But first......being the first born child, with all the inherent rights instilled in that position, I always had a tough time convincing my little sister of the level of reverence and respect that was due me. Maybe, after 50 years, I am beginning to see inklings that she might be coming around. She treats me very well.

In our youth (many light years ago) my little sister, Sharon, had this misconceived notion that she was also in charge and had equal, if not even greater, rights within the family. I fully believed that Mom loved me best. After all, I was the first child, first boy, only boy and my character was overflowing with admirable qualities [such as: I could make the perfectly believable sound of an alien spaceship taking off and landing without taking an extra breath and I had many merit badges in Boy Scouts for cooking on top of a coffee can, etc.]. Sharon also fully believed that Mom loved her best. After all, she was the girl that Mom "really" wanted, someone of the female persuasion Mom could confide in - in ways that boys and men would never appreciate or even know. She was smarter, prettier, cuter and always, without exception, willing to cheerfully help Mom with any project without resistance. Disgusting.

Whereas, my sister probably had some relatively decent qualities, there was an inherent evil that I just could not get my Mom to acknowledge. It was bad enough that Sharon was practically perfect in every way; she was still compelled to accent my occasional slips off the pedestal. I would be engaged in one of my Mom's dreaded "Death by Lecture" sessions for some totally misrepresented indiscretion when my sister would cheerfully (in a Shirley Temple kind of way) "just happen" to skip into the room and announce stuff like "Hi Mommy, I just wanted to tell you that I love you very much and that I just vacuumed the whole house, put my straight A's schoolwork on the refrigerator next to my award-winning artwork, fed Bobby's dog because he forgot to again....and wanted to see if there was anything else I could do to make your life easier, because you know I love you very much!"

Already in trouble for something (that is why I was getting the lecture), it did not enhance my innocence when I would uncontrollably lunge forward to wrap my hands around the neck of the cheerful little bluebird that was, once again, pointing out why Mom should love her best.

Mom couldn't see the tiniest of Mona Lisa smiles on Sharon's face as she skipped out of the room, knowing she had firmly placed yet another brick in the wall separating the good child from the bad child. Perhaps, if my Mom hadn't been busy physically restraining my thrashing, foaming-at-the-mouth, struggle to get to my sister, she could have noticed.

So what about the flaming marshmallow? This was perhaps my crowning moment in my endeavor to somehow "get even" with my sister. We had all gone camping in Yosemite National Park, back in the day, when they still had the Firefall - [this has nothing whatsoever to do with the story, but is a cool memory before environmental regulations - you should have been there, but then you had, of course, you would be old or dead, if you had really seen it - so click on the link for the next best thing].

We were enjoying (for a few fleeting moments) the traditional - go camping and roast marshmallows over the crackling fire. My sister always toasted her marshmallow perfectly - a delicious golden brown glow, spread perfectly over the entire morsel. I hated that.

My marshmallows were more like crusty little charcoal briquettes. I employed the young testosterone technique of roasting by jamming the entire marshmallow-on-a- stick deep into the coals, covering it in its entirety with hot ash and enjoying the ensuing moment when it would burst into flames.

Unfortunately, my sister Sharon picked that moment to, once again, point out to my Mom the difference between her perfectly golden creation and Bobby's "burning-black-thing-from-Hell-on-a-stick". My Mom wasn't fast enough to grab me this time when I leaped over the fire with my flaming sugar-bomb on a stick in front of me. I was a Lancer on a mission with the famous Alfred, Lord Tennyson's epic Charge of the Light Brigade.

That was the last straw. Seeing motive, intent, opportunity, and total disregard for the reprisal I would surely receive later, reflected in my blazing eyes, my sister jumped up [dropping her perfect gold marshmallow into the fire - a small side benefit, I relish to this day] and ran screaming into the dark forest.

Knowing I probably wouldn't catch her, and not being clear on what I would actually do if I did, I whipped my roasting stick in her direction out of frustration. Not planned, but ever so grateful for the result, the still flaming marshmallow slipped from the stick and flew through the darkness and stuck perfectly to the back of my sister's head.

A small hairless spot from the smoldering, melted sugar remained for quite awhile, before the hair grew back on Sharon's head. The endorphins [ The term endorphin rush has been adopted in popular speech to refer to feelings of exhilaration brought on by pain, danger, or other forms of stress, supposedly due to the influence of endorphins.....allowing humans to feel a sense of power and control over themselves...Wikipedia] released from the ecstasy of finally seeing Sharon get her just desserts ["Marshmallows Suzette"] allowed me to endure the resulting pain of the beating and lecture-until-you bleed-from-your-eyes that followed.

Even now, when I am having a down day, I can play that perfect moment mind-video again in my brain...with slow-mo and color...and it never fails to bring a smile to my face.

Epilogue: In the truest sense of Men-Mars/Women-Venus thinking, I have retold that story over and over, many times over the years. Men and boys think it is absolutely hilarious and beg me to retell it. Oddly, I have yet to find a woman that thinks the tale is funny. Mostly, they focus on why I couldn't take direction from my sister and just learn how to properly toast marshmallows and confront my inadequacies and anger-management issues.

After about 40 years, I am sure my sister has not let go of the memory. I fear she is gearing up for some kind of Ninja reprisal. She recently told me she was on vacation at an exclusive resort in Mexico, but I have included photo proof, that it was indeed a Ninja Training Camp for Women Harboring Issues From Their Childhood. I never would have been able to hit that target on the back of her head if she had employed a tree-top, zip-line escape.

I REMEMBER...Sharon and the face cream

…treating my baby sister, Sharon, to her first exotic spa treatment. Well, not exactly. I do remember my mom telling me the story, which will have to be close enough. No one else was there to dispute the story. My mom is no longer with us, and my sister was about 1 year old and that was about 58 years ago, so we will have to go with this version.

If Sharon was about one, that would make me about four or five, as I was either three or four years older depending upon which half of the year we are talking about. The fact that I possibly, perhaps, may have harbored some unresolved issues about being eliminated as the only child and relegated to the status of just the only boy, may have some slight bearing on the story, but I only choose to remember the “caring big brother versions” of all family tales….flaming marshmallows while camping will be another story..banana peels in the toilet will not.

I have four children so I know this next statement to be true. When your kids are too quiet, something is probably wrong. As my mom told it, she was doing laundry, ironing and such and noticed that I wasn’t hanging around getting underfoot, as apparently was my custom. This was early 50’s, small town, Oklahoma. It would have not been uncommon for me to leave the house early and disappear for the day. Not that bad things probably didn’t happen back in the day, but the public just didn’t hear about it much. This was before TV (another story). I could ride bikes with my buddies, play ball, dig in the ditch across the street (yet another story about snakes coming soon), play “Ollie Ollie Oxen Free” with my friends and as long as I came home as soon as the street light came on, I was good to go.

Anyway, none of those things were happening. I was in the house and my mom knew it. My sister was still in a crib, so she was in the house too. My mom slowly became aware of a soft “cooing” sound from the rear of the house. As she approached the master bedroom, she heard the “cooing” sound more distinctly as “oooooh and ahhhhh”. Apparently, knowing that I could come to terms with any sibling rivalry issues, by just showing the love to my sister, there I was mimicking what I thought I had seen my mom do….kind of.

I had found the large jar of Vaseline, but the wrong end of the baby. I had successfully plastered my sister’s head with about a half-jar of sticky petroleum jelly. Her eyes were totally glued shut. Her small amount of hair was matted with globs of glop. Should there be a hue and cry from readers regarding what a terrible thing this might have appeared to be for a small baby…I must point out that she was absolutely loving it.

I am sure that 58 years later, this experience is probably not on her Facebook page (nor mine). She is now a confirmed worldwide adventurist, hiking mountain trails in Peru, ocean sailing, whitewater kayaking, etc. I suspect that she is strangely comforted, when crawling on her stomach in the dark caves of Costa Rica, and her head and face become matted with exotic bat guano, she has odd, but warm recollections of those halcyon days in the crib having her head slathered in Petroleum Jelly. Perhaps only when buried in the mud baths of Calistoga, with only her lips protruding from the volcanic ooze just far enough to reach the straw and little sippy cup of ice water, does she vaguely recall a similar comforting experience, a long, long time ago. If she is strangely concerned, I plead innocent. If she smiles, I will take all the credit.

There is an earlier story of me, BS (before Sharon), plastering my bedroom window sills shut in a similar fashion, but not with petroleum jelly. Sharon is lucky I matured into a more socially acceptable plaster artist.

I REMEMBER...my finger getting stuck in the kitchen table

…getting my finger caught in the tube leg of my parent’s new aluminum/Formica table when I was six. We lived in McAlister, Oklahoma. My mom owned and taught a private kindergarten in our converted garage and my dad was a mailman on the railroad (approx 1953 – the mailmen were on the train in a special postal car and picked up mail along the stops and sorted it as they went along to deliver to the next city down the line).

Like all kids, I had my favorite foods and non-favorite foods. Remembering that this was ‘50’s Oklahoma, some of my favorites were fried catfish with ketchup, ketchup [ketchup went on most everything] and white bread sandwiches [there was only white bread – no choices as I recall), lard and sugar on white bread sandwiches [if you like eating the white stuff –lard and sugar-out of the middle of Oreo cookies – then you would have loved those sandwiches, corn on the cob, fried chicken and hot dogs. There were a multitude of things I didn’t like, as my Mom and Betty Crocker [1953] conspired to provide recipes for such God-Awful dishes like Liver and cream sauce, spinach and vinegar, cottage cheese [ok with lots of sugar and pineapple – but not so much with pepper like my Dad preferred] and of course, the ever popular: lima beans with shredded carrots in lime jello.

It was one of those nights when I was pushing food around in my plate, hoping it would evaporate. [Note: back in the day, kids that didn’t eat their food were told that there were starving kids in China that would love to have it and that you would a) sit there until you finished it or b) go to bed right now and it would still be sitting there when you came back to the table for the next meal]. I almost got out of it once when I suggested that since my Dad was a mailman – why we didn’t just mail the liver and onions to the starving kids in China. Since I hadn’t seen buttermilk (with pepper for my Dad) spew out of an adult’s nose before, I figured I had hit on a solution. It, however, was just a temporary reprieve, until my parents quit laughing and choking. So, there I was one night pushing food around and running my hand around under the brand new, bright yellow, aluminum and Formica dining table my parents had just purchased. [Note: this was when perfectly good imported English oak tables were tossed out to the dump to make way for the sleek new aluminum and Formica furniture – wow – what a wise decision that was] So, finding a little opening in the end of one of the aluminum table tubes, I tried to poke my finger into it. As I had been stirring the cream sauce on the liver with said finger, it slipped right in. Therein was the problem. The finger wouldn’t come out. The more that I struggled with it, the more my finger started to swell making it impossible to remove.

The moment finally arrived when I had to eat or go to my room to await another chance to eat the liver another day, but couldn’t get up. I didn’t want to say why, so I just kept getting deeper in trouble for not getting up. Just as my Dad grabbed me by the arm to jerk me up from the table, I was forced to scream out “My finger's caught in the table”. My Mom and Dad tried squeezing, pulling, 3-in-1 oil (like WD-40), butter, lard, and prayer. Nothing worked. The more we struggled, the more my finger swelled hurt, and the louder I cried. Eventually, my parents had no choice, but to call the fire department. A big red fire engine with lights flashing arrived, attracting all the neighbors. After the firemen quit laughing, they proceeded to try all the firemen tricks, but to no avail. After much discussion, it was decided (over my Mom’s protests) to use a hacksaw and cut the leg off the table. At the time, I thought my Mom’s anguish and protests were for her fear of me getting my finger cut off, but I suspect now that it was truly in anguish over losing her brand new modern aluminum table to a hacksaw.

So, they cut the leg off my Mom’s new table and threw the junked remains into the backyard. They jammed my hand with the six inch aluminum pipe stuck to it into a bucket full of ice for a half hour and voilla’: my finger popped right out. I got to ride on the fire engine with all my friends and was the hero of the neighborhood. My mom eventually retrieved another oak table and mourned the lost “modern” updated model for quite a long time, and oddly enough, never fixed liver and onions again. Our family did, however, endure many more “jello with mixed vegetables” dishes. I have yet to see a Formica/Aluminum table on Antiques Road Show.

I REMEMBER...working for UHAUL

..working for UHAUL company and living in San Francisco, CA. and was the general manager of one of the largest truck rental centers on the west coast. The rental center was in the converted Planter's Peanut factory on Bayshore Blvd. It was one of the largest storage facilities in Northern California. There was a small one bedroom apartment for the manager above the front entrance. See the three windows - that was my living room. When my oldest son, Ian was born, the district manager had some of the storage units removed and added a second bedroom. Very cool. He learned to walk and drive his little walker up and down the hallways of the storage units on the second floor.

All in all, it was one of the best ways to live in San Francisco. The "commute" was riding the freight elevator down to the bottom floor. The view unfortunately was the Bayshore Fwy (Hwy 101). My vehicle was provided and all insurance and gas was paid for. The apartment was also provided for and so was health and life insurance. When Ian was born, all expenses were paid. I was required to wear a uniform daily and it was provided (kind of like being in the military). My paycheck was spent on food and dining out. There are an endless number of restaurants in San Francisco, so that you could dine out every night and you could never live long enough to visit them all.

Some of the U-HAUL stores had been robbed and I was fortunate enough to not have that experience. The closest I ever got to being robbed was one Sunday in August. I was working the store alone. Two rough looking guys came into the store wearing full length leather jackets - the cowboy kind that went all the way down to the floor. Did I mention it was August? It was hot and muggy and when I saw these guys come in, it popped into my mind they were hiding guns and were going to rob me. You just didn't dress that way to go rent a truck. Thank God for an imaginative mind and a backlog of police movies I had watched.

Just as these two characters walked up to the counter, I walked over to the mirrored glass behind the counter and knocked on the mirror and announced loudly. "Hey Larry, I just called the cops to come pick up those shotgun shells we found in storage. They should be here any minute".

There was no "Larry".
There were no shotgun shells.
There were no cops on the way.
In fact, I was the only one in the building, except for my family upstairs.

My prospective clients in the long leather coats turned and left, never saying a word. So, fortunately, I didn't have to find out the hard way why they were there that day. They probably just had overdue parking tickets and didn't want to risk the confrontation with the fictitious pending officers of the law. I had seen an episode of "Sky King" (early 50's TV show about a rancher that always caught the bad guys using his airplane "somehow". He also could "throw his voice" (ha) that would make the bad guys think there was someone outside. That was my inspiration for my "fool the bad guys" trick.

The only other time I had an inkling I was to be robbed was when I was a "manager in training" for U-HAUL at a smaller store in Redwood City in the early 1980's. I was working late one night, closing up the store by myself, when two bad looking dudes knocked on the glass door after we were closed, wanting me to open back up and let them turn a trailer in. There was no way I was going to do that and when they started cursing me, that clinched it...they were not going to be let in. I told them to come back the next day (when there was a full staff around). The next day dawns and I see them pull up in front of the store about 10am. I left the counter area and hid in the shadows of a box display, hoping they wouldn't recognize me. They finish their business, complaining about the guy who wouldn't let them check in the previous night, and left. The guy that waited on them comes running over and says, "Wow, did you see those championship rings? Those guys are with the World Champion San Francisco Niners. That was Eric Wright and Keena Turner". Can you say Pro Bowl / NFL Champions?

So, I guess I have a 50% success rate in recognizing bad guys.

"The Catch" 1982 Super Bowl bound San Francisco 49ers 58 sec. left on the clock..