Boots On The Ground

I took a walk through my old neighborhood today. This is the place where grew up, from elementary school through post-college, streets that have years worth of my tennis shoe rubber on them, asphalt soaked in the blood of my knees and elbows, streets I don't even know the names of yet that I can navigate in my sleep. I know the area, is what I'm saying.
   But walking it, the way I used to, following the same route I trudged to high school, traversing the same alleys and back ways that took me to my first adult job as a waiter, things started coming back to me. Vignettes I hadn't thought of in years came back fresh as the day they happened, moments in time that helped form who I am today came bubbling up, demanding admission to my conscious mind.
   There was the house where Andrew had been standing outside, waiting for a kid like me to ride by on his bike. 'Mummy, I found a new playmate,' he said. Seriously, he said it like that. I was on my three-speed with the banana seat and the sissy bar, going to Winn's to see if they had any swim fins that would fit me. Andrew and his mother had just moved to town.
   Catching toads in the drainage ditch down the street a ways from Andrew's house (but not with that little weirdo), where the cement ended and the tiny stream took over. It's all paved now, but I know where the mesquite trees used to be, their branches leaning over to sweep the water that ran from a little spring.
   Walking across that same drainage ditch years later in high school with my friend Steve, only to have some kid run up and slug him. A neighbor dispute that spilled over to the kids. Which explained why Steve suddenly wanted to walk home with me the week before.
   My daily, personal Long March from high school, slogging up the hill headed for home, heavy book bag over one shoulder because using both straps was for dorks, watching as people with cars passed me by. I always held out hope that someone I knew would stop and offer me a ride but that never happened. Which is why, when I finally got a car, I would stop and give rides to people I knew, because I remembered how much it sucked to be on foot hoping for help that never came.
   That place I assumed had always been a Home Depot? Nope, they built that after my time. The building I was thinking of was a toy store, a great-big stand alone toy store out in the middle of nowhere. I had forgotten that it was a toy store first, for years actually, before it became the office supply store it is now. But walking towards it through an alley as I would have back in middle school it all came roaring back to me. That's the place where I would buy Micronauts and my sister got whatever lame girl toys she was interested in. Strip malls and parking lots - and a Home Depot - have since grown up around it, and what was once a trail blazing iconoclast of a building is now just another contributor to suburban sprawl.
   It's amazing what comes back to you when you put yourself in the same place under the same conditions as you were back then. I've driven those same roads in a car, even this past week, and I didn't remember that stuff. But being outside, in the cold with my nose running a little, with my legs aching a little, with my fingers tingling a little, brought it all back, just like it happened yesterday. Kind of spooky, actually. But it does make me want to go exploring a little more, so I can remember what I've forgotten.

Ancestral Judgement

Like most Americans, I'm kind of a Heinz 57 of nationalities. I'm for sure Irish and German and English, with probably a little bit of French thrown in somewhere back in the woodpile (yeah, I know...). Parts of my family came over to America centuries back, while other parts came in the most recent European mass migration about 100 years ago. These were men and women who gave up everything - literally - to make a new life. Some succeeded and some, no doubt, could have made a better go of it. But thinking about all these people, this huge unbroken line of hopes and dreams and aspirations and disappointments and tragedies that led to me being right here, right now prompted one question.

   What would my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather have thought about me?

   This is the guy about 160 years back, with my surname, who first decided he wanted to leave the coal mines or tin mines or chimney sweep academy or whatever terrible situation he endured in England and get on a leaky ship to cross the Atlantic packed in steerage with a bunch of his dentally-challenged countrymen. Whether he leapt at the opportunity the first he heard of it or whether he thought about it for a long time before boarding the boat, the fact remains that he did it. He took the gamble, he rolled the dice. He committed.
   He was almost certainly less educated than I am - they didn't know about galaxies or germs or Keynsian economics 160 years ago - but he was arguably far more courageous. So he wins that one. Which would you rather have in your family tree, a bookworm or someone who actually did something?
   Chances are good my modest apartment would seem like a palace to him, with its refrigerator, central air, and large flat-screen TV. And my truck would be a marvel. The internet and e-mail might seem like miracles, or wishes granted by a genie in a lamp. So I'm ahead of him there.
   But what would he think of the way I make my living? Would he think his time in the tin mines had been a vacation in comparison? And with all the opportunities in my world that he didn't have in his, would he wonder why I didn't take the same chances he did? Would he be proud of me or would he be utterly disappointed that I had squandered the gift he'd risked everything to give his descendants? Would he even like me or would he want to kick my ass? Because as tough as I am, that guy could still probably mop the floor with me.
   I think I have an obligation I'm not fulfilling to that guy. I have a responsibility to live up to my potential to prove to him that getting on the ship was the right thing to do.

Just Call Me Sgt. Schultz

I have been trying to re-examine the way I interact with the world. Lately I have noticed that I'm not noticing things, or at least not looking at things with the same kind of critical eye I used to. This is part of growing older, I suppose, but it's also part of growing lazier. Adults are used to having the answers, experience has taught us what things are and what they are not. At least most of the time.
   But I think it's better to stay ignorant sometimes. Or, at the very least, to let go of the idea that I need to have all the answers all the time. I need to be able to pick something up, turn it over and around and upside-down and get to know it for what it is, not for what I think it is.
   Little kids do this automatically. Toddlers, especially, discover something new all the time, every hour of every day. Things that adults know and have dealt with for years are things they've never encountered before. Corners on coffee tables, dust bunnies under the bed, fringe on carpets, tupperware, it's all new, all something to be examined and re-examined, broken and put back together again.
   So that's what I'm gonna do. Break stuff. Metaphorically, of course, some of my stuff would be pretty expensive to replace.
    note: for those of you who have no idea who Sgt. Schultz is, he was a character on Hogan's Heroes, which you can probably catch on Nick at Night. If that still exists, I don't know I don't have cable any more. His motto was 'I know nothing,' which is amazingly Socratic for a TV sitcom Nazi.

You Ever Wonder...?

I've been pondering imponderables again, I have the free time for it. Here are a few.

What did ancient Egyptians use for a nasal decongestant? Did the subject even come up for them? I assume they got colds - they for sure got various plagues - but since they lived in the desert along the Nile I'm not sure they got stuffed up. Maybe King Tut just lived with sinus headache.
   For that matter, what did they do for toilet paper? They had papyrus, but that was for important stuff like government documents, not for wiping. I'm assuming.

If you could read someone's mind, would you really want to? I have trouble going into someone else's bathroom, can you imagine treading through the cesspool of someone else's thoughts? There's some dark, disturbing stuff rolling through my head, but I'm pretty sure it's tame compared to what you're thinking about. Mind reading would be a punishment, not a gift.

Why is being brutally honest when you're a little kid cute and precocious, and doing the same thing when you're really old is curmudgeonly and endearing, but being brutally honest at the ages in between is frowned upon? Why do kids and old people get a pass but I get a whispered admonition to 'be nice?' If I want to tell someone he's dressed like a colorblind clown I can't do it, but if some kid tells me I need to shave it's charming. If I open my mouth in a boring meeting and ask why we're there I get a talking-to from my boss, but if an old lady in line tells me to speed it up everybody chuckles. It ain't fair.

How can people not like dogs? I can certainly understand if someone doesn't like cats, if you die alone in the house with them they'll eat your eyeballs, no loyalty at all. I can also understand not liking birds, lizards, hamsters, what have you. But dogs are special. We grew up with dogs, literally, our evolution and theirs are tied together, they need us and we need them. So what kind of degenerate could not like dogs? Communists, that's who. Lousy fifth-columnists as Red as a baboon's ass. That's right, I said it: if you don't like dogs you're a devotee of a discredited socio-political economic philosophy. What are you gonna do about it?

I understand intellectually how airplanes fly, it's a very simple equation. But it still seems like magic to me. How can a 600,000 pound machine stay in the air? It seems like a violation of natural laws for anything that big to be off the ground, let alone carrying people across the globe. Like seeing an elephant swim, your eyes are telling you it's happening but your brain is screaming at you that it can't possibly be. So cut it out already, it makes me uncomfortable.

Not Cool Any More

This morning I was thinking about what to have for breakfast and I realized that all the options I considered were healthy. Good for me and heart-smart. Special K cereal, apples, a whole wheat English muffin, for God's sake. Time was I would have been looking for cold pizza, or Doritos, or cookies and ice cream. And I would have found them, too.
   What happened to me? When did I finally start listening to my mother?
   Somewhere along the line I became concerned with eating properly, with lasting long enough to see another sunrise. No more living fast and damned be the consequences. If I wasn't so lazy that I like to walk to work, I'd probably live out in the suburbs somewhere, on a cul-de-sac with everybody else, concerned about property values and whether my neighbors mowed their lawn the way I liked.
   I'm not cool any more. And for those of you who know me who might say I was never cool, I say 'shut up,' let me have my moment.
   There's another thing. Back in the day, when I was cool, I used to be able to pack all my stuff and move in 24 hours. Nothing I had that was important to me, or nice, or expensive was more than I could stuff in the back of my truck. That's not the case now. I have nice furniture, appliances, office supplies and equipment. I have an iced tea maker, for cryin' out loud, and I like it. I'm not going to leave it behind.
   I spent ten years as a corporate weasel, and I think some of it rubbed off on me. Either that or I got old. Nah, I'm blaming the corporations. The bastards co-opted me, made me one of them. One of me.
   I have the feeling that the me from eleven years ago would probably want to kick my ass now. And he'd be right.

I Knew I Was An Adult When...

One of my nieces turned eighteen recently, and while she's officially now an adult - she can be in the Army but can't legally drink a beer - I don't know that she's yet had an experience that brings her newfound majority home to her.
   It didn't take me long to know I was an adult. I wasn't even eighteen yet, as a matter of fact. In the summer between my Senior year of high school and my Freshman year of college I was out driving in the Green Machine, my '72 Chevelle. I was about two miles from my home, getting gas at the convenience store, when I noticed one of my car's tires going flat; there was a big-ass nail right through the sidewall. I got on the pay phone (no cell phones back then) and phoned home. My father answered and I told him my plight, that I had a flat tire and I was not too far away. I was hoping, of course, that he would come and rescue me. There was a moment of silence on line.
    "What are you going to do about it?" my father asked.
   I hesitated. "Uh... change the tire?"
   "See you when you get home," my father said then he hung up.

I became an adult that afternoon, changing my own flat tire on a scorching Texas summer day,sweat dripping in my eyes, the sun burning my neck and the backs of my calves. I figured out how to work the jack and I figured out the right and wrong way to turn the lugnuts and I figured out what a miserable, thankless job car repair is. And I not only figured out how to curse just like my Dad, I finally understood why he sometimes found it necessary.
   Scraped my knuckles bloody too. That's man stuff right there.