Alone with your thoughts

I think I'll head out now.  You must have some thoughts you'd like to be alone with.  

Well, actually, you seem to have a lot of thoughts I'd rather you were alone with than sharing with me.  



This is probably one of those times when it's better if you just don't talk.  
That probably happens more often than you think ... and you don't notice, because you just don't shut the fuck up.

Cereal Monogamous

If one remains loyal to just one brand of cornflakes for a lifetime, would that person be considered cereal monogamous?

Doc - Divorce

After a bit, Chipper asked, “So Doc, what ever happened to you and Sandy?  I only met her a couple times, but you two seemed great together.”

“Yeah, we were great.  At least parts of it were great.  We were good friends before we got married, and the friendship stayed good.  We threw great parties together, and had a lot of laughs.  People loved coming and being part of them.  Even when our marriage was falling apart, nobody knew.  We’re both pretty open sharing happiness, but more private with pain. 

When we finally decided to pull the plug, we took some dear friends out to dinner to let them know we were divorcing – so they’d hear it directly from us.  When we told them, they both burst into tears.  My God!  We were reaching across the table to touch them, and reassure them that everything was going to be alright.  It was kind of comical, in a truly loving, bittersweet way. 

“As much as we loved one another—and we did love each other—I was never much of a husband to her, and she was not what I would have hoped for in a wife.  It should have been obvious from the start—in a way it was—but when we met, we were both about as old as you’d want to be to become a parent, and we each liked that the other was ready for that.  Over time, though, our differences drove a wedge between us.  Once you’re close to forty, you’re already pretty set in your habits; you have rigid expectations about what you’ll offer a mate, and what you expect in one.  Our shared love of our daughter kept us together for quite a while, and helped us ignore the inevitable for as long as we could, but we never really got past the differences, and finally decided we each deserved the chance to find a better fit”

“Did it get ugly?” Buck asked, “Because most of my divorces involved flying dishes, loud swearing, and usually at least one 911 call.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Bucky.”  Doc replied, “Rarely even a raised voice – and no real blame either.  Just the kind of deep hurt that sits in your gut, and wakes you up in the middle of the night, wondering if you’ll ever be happy again.

“Sandy has found a great guy.  And I haven’t lost hope there might be somebody out here for me too. 

 “But we’re not kids anymore; hell, we’re not even forty. We’re not looking for somebody to share our transition into adulthood, or to build a family together.  That’s all behind me  The malleability of youth has all been pounded out, and we have become rigid – and overly protective of our wounds. 

In a way we’re like old toys at the bottom of the toybox; some with an arm or a leg missing, hair fallen out and ragged, or a stray spring popping out.  What I’m getting at is we’ve got a lot of miles on us, and we seem to be looking for a mate who can protect us where we’re broken, and maybe needs help where we have help to offer.  It’s a weird-ass way to start out a relationship, but you hear about it working out sometimes.  But for people who are slow to bond—or maybe were hard to fit, even when they were young—the prospects aren’t that bright.”   

Doc - Career Reveal - WFW

They all sat around the campfire, easing into the mountain evening; staring at the flames, sipping on their beers and straight-shots, passing around a pipe, and generally letting dinner settle in.  The light rain earlier woke up the smells of the old-growth forest – fresh sap, and decaying fir and pine needles all along the floor.  It was a magical time of silent pleasures, until the flatulence began.  You might think men in their sixties would be past the humor and novelty of farts – but you would be wrong.  What began as a simple release of pressure soon devolved into a competition, with evaluations in categories ranging from loudness, duration, resonance, and occasional new categories.   You could see the faces of some of the less-prepared guys turning red from exertion, as they tried to advertise a product they just couldn’t release – vaporware, I suppose you could call it.  

After things quieted down a bit, Chipper asked, “So Rip, what’s this about you being a doctor?”

“I’m not”, Rip replied.

“What about that couple we saw in town last weekend, who called you ‘Doc’, and were telling you all about their little girl?  

“Well, I’m not a doctor anymore.  I retired last year.”

Nero jumped in, “Well how the fuck long WERE you a doctor without telling us – your lifelong friends?”

“Look, I’m sorry if you all thought I was concealing something from you.  I just didn’t think it mattered.  I don’t know what half of you do for a living.  It’s not like I could treat any of you – or would want to if I could.  You don’t have the right plumbing.”

“Oh man, oh man!”, began Fogie, “A lady doctor!  That’s even worse!  All the stories you could have shared.  Any one of us would kill to have a job working with bare pussies all day long.  You’re going to have to make up for lost time with stories from the office!”  

“Shit man!  Are any of you starting to see why I kept this to myself?  Do you think my job was a parade of girly models trooping through my office in lingerie each day for my pleasure?”

Red responded, “Dude, if that’s not the case, you have to let us down easy.  Remember the dreams you might be destroying.  And, when you do share, just tell us about the healthy ones … you know, routine checkups.”  

Rip said, “Okay, I know you guys are just fucking with me, but for the record, there’s something called HIPAA.  There’s a lot to it, but the relevant section for tonight is ‘When you treat a patient, you keep your fucking mouth shut about it’.  If you violate that, they don’t let you see patients anymore.”

“But you’re retired, who cares?” Fogey interjected, earning him a laugh from everybody.  

“I think I’d still be in trouble, guys.  Besides, old habits die hard.  When you spend a couple decades respecting people’s privacy, the idea kind of grows on you.”  Rip was ready to change the subject, but added, “Besides, there is nothing titillating about helping people stay healthy—or get better—no matter who, or what parts of their bodies.  You’re there to help people, and you kind of dissociate the patient you see in front of you from anything sexual.  If you guys really need something to stimulate your imagination, I’m sure there are plenty of videos online that will be a lot more effective than any stories I could share—even if I were willing—without violating anybody’s privacy.”

Little Debbie stood up – all six-feet, five of him, and started to unbuckle his pants, “Since you’re a doc, Doc, I wonder if you could take a look at this boil.  It’s right here between my balls and my bunghole.”  

“Fuck you, Deb!” Rip interrupted, “it’s nighttime, in the middle of the Oregon Cascades.  Do you think I brought up exam instruments, just in case one of you wanted to play Show and Tell?  I’m not going to look at whatever the hell kind of infection or infestation you’ve managed to get yourself into.  Besides, I said before, you all don’t have the plumbing for what I practiced – WHEN I practiced.  When you get to town, I can recommend a competent large-animal veterinarian.

“And Chipper, I can’t hardly thank you enough for bringing this up tonight.  Fuck, man!  Will I ever hear the end of this?”

“Fuck you, Doc”, Chipper responded, “You aren’t getting this ration of shit because you’re a doctor (or WERE a doctor).  We’ve been your best friends since grade school, and you kept this from us for … what?  twenty years?  Thirty years?  Yeah, you’ll hear the end of this, but not tonight … maybe not this year.  Honest to God, man!  How fucking arrogant are you.”

“So it’s ‘Doc’ now?  You’re going to start calling me Doc?  Shit!  I’m sorry, guys – seriously sorry.  I really never kept this to myself to keep you all out of the loop, or disrespect you.  It just never felt like something I wanted, or needed, to share.  I had my ‘at work’ life, and my life with my boyhood buddies.  It just never made sense to mush them together.

“I’m going to hit the sack now.  I’ll see you all in the morning.  And, Deb, I’ll see if I can find the name of the veterinarian for you.”  

Father's Day Thoughts

A typical spring Saturday morning growing up found Dad in the driveway, under the hood of his car, leaning in—crescent wrench or ratchet in hand—ready to fix something.  If things were going well, it might be pretty quiet – if not, Dad might share a vocabulary lesson with anybody within earshot.

The raised hood was a signal to the other dads in the neighborhood—Duane Everard, Earl Johnson, or maybe Ray Janni—to come over and shoot the shit for a while.  There was always more than one way to accomplish the task at hand, and there was no sense doing any work until all the options were thoroughly considered. 

We kids started out as tool go-fers; I learned to tell a Crescent wrench from a pair of Vice grips right out of the gate – and got my first lessons in fractions by distinguishing a 9/16 socket from a ¾.  Once we got good at this, we might actually be allowed to tighten or loosen something … under close supervision.

We learned important lessons through this – friendship, self-reliance, and the aforementioned vocabulary lessons. 

My Saturday mornings in the garden are perhaps a bit less instructive.  I chat with my back-fence neighbors, but nobody’s asking or offering advice – and I don’t share much edgy vocabulary.  And I’ve never bloodied a knuckle tying up a tomato plant or a dahlia.  I try to add a bit of drama to my time in the garden by playing movie soundtracks on the Bluetooth, but it’s not quite the same.  And, as for self-reliance, one of my happiest things about the garden is that I don’t have to rely on the produce to survive.  I’m really no better a gardener than I was a mechanic. 

This weekend, I wish you all happy memories of your Fathers.

WFW - Arizona Trip - Junior Year

It was never my intention to break my Mother’s heart or to make her cry.  But I was sixteen, and my friend Roger and I wanted to take a vacation.  It was cold and rainy in Eugene in late December, and rumor had it conditions were more temperate in Tuscon.  I thought my cousin Tommy might be there; he was a hard guy to track down, having lived on the road for at least a couple years.  Seeing him would have been a bonus to a pretty special vacation, but he had already moved on. 

I had laid the groundwork with my Dad for months.  He loved to regale us with stories of his time in the Navy during the Second World War … how he didn’t need a car, because a guy in uniform need only stick out his thumb, and people would go out of their way to get him to his destination.  He made it sound fun, and I encouraged him to talk about it, to eke from him something approaching permission for me to follow his example.  The note I left referenced his stories, and asked politely that he and Mom not report me as a runaway.  

We had made arrangements for a ride as far as San Diego before we left, through a ride-sharing billboard notice at the Odyssey Coffee House in Eugene.  All we had to do was buy a tank or two of gas, and make sure we could afford our own food.  

It was a nice drive down the coast with six passengers arranged in a big station wagon.  Somewhere north of San Francisco, I saw my first hillside that didn’t have trees on it, for any reason other than clear-cut logging.  It confused me at first until they explained that there are hills all over the world that aren’t covered with trees.  Eye opening!  The drive was pretty uneventful, other than being pulled over and questioned with some suspicion in San Luis Obispo.  Since Roger and I were minors, the officer checked our IDs against the five-state alert that is shared for runaways.  We weren’t on it, so he had no reason to hold us.  

As we dropped down into the Los Angeles basin I got my first look at serious industrial air pollution.  We had smoke in Eugene every August, when grass-seed farmers burned their fields after harvest, but this was something different.  From the hillside above, it looked like a huge toilet bowl, way overdue for a flush, with a diffuse reddish hue that seemed to permeate everything.  As we descended into it, it irritated my throat to breath it.  It took two hours to drive through Los Angeles.  I had never conceived of a city that took as long to cross as it took to drive from Eugene to Portland.  

It felt good to leave the L.A. basin.  

When we got to San Diego, Roger and I found our way to Mission Beach.  It was December 31, and as evening approached, we found a place to stash our backpacks, and walked up and down the boardwalk, inviting ourselves to parties.  Strangely, most people let us join them without giving it a second thought.  I tasted my first screwdriver, and saw two men kissing for the first time.  They were wearing Navy white uniforms, and it was San Diego - but it was New Years Eve, so these may have just been costumes.  Because nobody else in the room seemed to react to the kissing, it didn’t affect me either.  I made a mental note, but nothing more.  At the end of the evening, we found our way back to our backpacks, and slept in our sleeping bags beneath some shrubbery, just outside the fence of some kind of carnival.  

The next morning, we headed out from San Diego, this time actually hitchhiking.  On the way, I saw another marvel for the first time.  The desert alongside Interstate 8 glittered in the sun.  I don’t know if it was some kind of mineral crystal embedded in the rocks, or what, but it was spell-binding.  

When we got to Tucson, we found our way to an area of coffee shops and other counter-culture hangouts along a main street called ‘Speedway’.  We settled into one, and waited to acclimate and become part of the local crowd.  

We met this guy on our second day; not another young person, but by an older guy.  He seemed like a hippie-type guy, so we took to him pretty readily.  He said his name was Johnny Christenson, but sometimes made reference to Julius Caesar, and occasionally Jesus Christ - anything with the initials 'JC".  We thought it was pretty cool that this local guy had chosen to adopt us so readily.  We hung out with him throughout the day.  As evening came around, he asked us where we were staying, and when we said we didn’t know, he said he’d set us up with something.  Turns out he was staying at the YMCA, and was happy to get us rooms.  As it turns out, he got me a room, and invited my friend to stay in his room.  It was starting to feel strange to me, and I suggested to Roger that we find another option, but Roger was less a skeptic than I was, and assumed everything was fine.  

In the morning, Roger wanted to get the hell out of Dodge.  We packed up and left, without saying goodbye to J.C., and headed out.  Turns out, Roger had spent the first half of the night fending off this creep’s advances, and the rest of the night zipped up tight in his sleeping bag, not sleeping.  It was a hard-won lesson about not being too trusting, and we were very happy to be on our way somewhere else.  I don’t know if the term ‘chicken-hawk’ was used then, but this guy meets the description – looking for rootless young people, then taking advantage of them.  It didn’t work out for him this time, but he no doubt went right back to it the next day, looking for his next victim.  

We headed north from Tucson that morning, and got to Phoenix about mid-day.  Our last ride was a woman who had a boy not much older than we were.  She let us stay at her place – without any ulterior motives.  It was a very nice difference from the day before.  

When we left Phoenix, our first ride dropped us off in Sun City, a retirement community just north of there.  The grocery store had as many golf carts in the parking spaces as cars – craziest damn thing I’d ever seen.  

That day, we got as far as a town called Kingman, Arizona, then all traffic stopped.  We learned a new lesson about Arizona that night … the place is not uniformly blazing hot, especially at night, and especially the first week of January.  Kingman is in the mountains, and it got well below freezing.  We were lucky to find an abandoned laundromat, so we would at least be sheltered from the not-insignificant wind.  But the cement floor was hardly welcoming.  It was as cold as it was hard.  I had to change positions every few minutes, as the circulation was cut off, and the bloodless body part began to freeze.  I can’t think of a time I have so looked forward to morning.  

The next day, we only went as far as Bakersfield, where a girlfriend from junior high lived with her Dad, who had the distinction of being Buck Owens' private pilot.  They put us up in comfortable beds, fed us a nice dinner and breakfast, and put a little money in our pockets for the rest of the trip … another kindness that a road-kid would never forget.  

It took us a couple more days to get home.  Roger was in a bit of trouble, but all I had to deal with was the guilt of knowing I had scared my mother half to death.  I would continue to hitchhike around the country for another couple years (San Francisco that summer, Wisconsin the next year, right after graduating), but I never left without saying goodbye, and assuring my Mother that I loved her.  

After we got back from Arizona, I learned that my cousin Tommy had left Tucson long before we went down.  He found his way to Texas, where he would die a few months later, at the strangling hands of a jailer in Austin.  

I guess when you’re sixteen or seventeen, you presume yourself ‘bullet-proof’, and really don’t grasp the very real fear that you cause for your parents, and those who love you.  Among the many things that make me grateful every day, it is that my daughter has found much less hazardous ways of exploring.  I still manage to be fearful – less for the adventures she pursues than for the idea that the universe may feel it owes me an unpleasant karmic payback.  

WFW - The Shoe

I wouldn’t say I was a bad kid.  

Not everybody I grew up with would agree with that estimation. 

I grew up smoking cigarettes, skipping school, cussing, fighting, and generally disregarding any rules imposed by adults.  I liked people, but not so much those in authority.  I always had a need to go my own way – and some of the choices I made put me in with a group of mostly feral kids.  We spent much of our after-school time with each other, guided only by our collective ids, with all the folly that came to pass as a result. 

Among former smokers I know, most say that the times they really struggle with urges is when they're in a bar, surrounded by cigarette smoke. The smell and the setting takes them right back to that place in their minds when they began smoking, and the memories urge their body to follow. 

Since I quit smoking about the time I was old enough to go into bars, I don’t share that association.  When we were kids, my buddies and I would swipe cigarettes from our parents, then we’d go swimming at Emerald Park pool.  When we were finished, we’d retire to the woods, take out the cigarettes (which we had hopefully not gotten wet in the locker room), and smoke them.  It was a fun part of my childhood, that brings back fond memories. 

Now, many years later—over forty years since I quit—I rarely have any urge to smoke cigarettes. The one exception is if I’ve been swimming in a chlorinated pool, have some of the residual smell on my skin, and get downwind from somebody else who is smoking.  It is that combination of smells that triggers me.  It is all I can do to not mug them, steal their cigarette, and smoke the shit out of it. 

Another time we really enjoyed smoking was during the 880 – the half-mile run all the Colin Kelly Junior High boys had to do every couple weeks in P.E. class.  The course followed the periphery of the grounds of Kelly, and the adjacent Howard Grade School.  At about the halfway point, the course went past an entrance to Emerald Park (Hmm … that place keeps coming up in this story).  One of us would have a cigarette tucked in his sock, and somebody else would bring matches.  When we got to that point in the course, we’d slip through the fence, quickly light the cigarette, have a couple drags each, then toss it out.  On dry days, we might snuff it, and set it on a fence or a curb to finish later - but in the typical Willamette Valley drizzle, the remainder would have gotten soaked, so we wrote it off as a loss. 

Because of the delay caused by the cigarette break—and the fact that we weren't among the faster runners anyway—we would usually come in a minute or so after the last of the other runners, at least one of whom had typically ratted us out.  Terry Viohl, the P.E. Teacher, would be waiting for us, and just call us out, “Chamberlain, Heldt, Newton!! Into my office!”

Everybody in class knew what was coming next, and could hardly wait.  So they either showered and dressed quickly, or waited to shower until after the show.  We would go into Viohl’s office, and one at a time, be instructed to pull down our gym shorts, bend over and grab our ankles, thus displaying our butts; bare but for a jock strap. 

About the time we assumed the position, the chanting would begin.  Viohl’s office was surrounded by windows, through which all we could see was a mosaic of our classmates' faces, chanting ‘Shoe!! Shoe!! Shoe!!’ – to assure that the corporal punishment would be accompanied by humiliation.  They wanted nothing more than the satisfaction of seeing us cry.  Then Terry (yeah, we were on a first-name basis with Mr. Viohl ... when he couldn't hear us) would reach into the cubby where math teacher Cecil Kribs kept a set of gym clothes.  Viohl would reach in slowly, and with a smile, extract one of Kribs's size 14 Converse—the perfect size to induce terror in the heart of a young teenager—and begin his windup.  As the shoe hit its mark, the crowd outside the windows erupted in paroxysms of schadenfreude.  The shoe really stung, but none of us would validate this punishment with tears.   And no matter how it stung, it didn’t hurt badly enough to counter the pleasure we had gotten from those couple drags off a cigarette.  And it damn sure didn’t prevent us from doing it again the next time we ran the 880.  

I don't really know what was going through the minds of the spectators.  Did they enjoy the spectacle of rebellious kids getting their just desserts?  Did they admire us for taking our punishment 'like a man', and not crying?  I imagine it was some of each.  Few of them expressed admiration directly, but there were a lot of questions about the experience. 

I doubt that anybody who got the shoe had much affection for Mr. Viohl - but time really does heal wounds.  A good friend of mine has stayed in touch with Mr. Viohl, and occasionally does handyman work for him.  He brought me over to Mr. Viohl's house a couple years ago.  He is now in his 80s, and has grown into a pretty genial old man, who is married to a very lovely wife.  By the time we left that day, I had a standing invitation for Friday evening happy hour at their home ... and even posed for a (fully clothed) re-enactment of being administered 'The Shoe'.