Oh Dark Thirty

Veterans Day should be more significant to me. The nation has turned troop recognition into a past time but for me it seems strangely impersonal. We were treated differently when I served. We rarely wore our uniforms in public. No one here today knew me then. No one knows my rating or in which branch I served. Only one person all day, a student, addressed me as a veteran even though I was wearing a large ribbon with the word on it. No friend or relative, not even my ex-wife who was my partner in service, dropped a note of recognition. And I can’t think of a decent word to say about my VA treatment. All that said, I don't mind. Tracking Soviet nuclear subs is not what I remember the most. What lives with me is how the experience changed my personal life. Some are good (living abroad), some are bad (discovering epilepsy), some are ugly (standing night watch on the suicide ward on Treasure Island), and some are most curious. Concerning the latter, when I get up early for work and leave the house before there is any morning light, a small part of my guts are back at RTC Orlando. I smell something that is not there...the peculiar odor of the metal paint pens used to stencil our clothing, ditty, and sea bags. My head is a bit heavy as if I pulled the middle watch....wandering alone in the cool, dark air without much direction, waiting for eight bells.

So I guess Veterans Day for some is all about serving our country. At various times today I felt that. But when the alarm goes off every morning at "oh dark thirty" it's way more personal.

"Tattoo, Tattoo, lights out in five minutes." - (uncredited voice)

Got Crabs?

Papaw phoned a man called game warden to tell him he was taking his grandson crabbing on the seawall across from Pleasure Island. I asked my dad who Mr. Warden was and he told me, in an irritated voice, that crabbing was illegal this time of year. The man in charge of wild animals was going to break the law and Papaw would fix a speeding ticket for one of the warden’s relatives. I never asked my dad for explanations. 

Papaw and I drove to the low concrete seawall that protected the town of Port Arthur. He brought three round metal hoops with closed nets. We tied a chicken neck to each net and dropped them into the water. It was so easy. Pull up a net, put the hungry crab into the giant cardboard box, drop the net back in, and move to the next. My hands were too tiny to handle the crabs. It was nice to be with someone that did not call me a sissy for not grabbing animals with claws and attitude. In less than an hour the box was full of crabs pulling each other’s legs off. The clicking noise was eerie. 

We took the giant-box-o’crabs to a tiny Chinese cafe on the aging town square. I had never heard of China or Chinese food. My dad rarely took us to eateries so this was all quite mysterious, exotic, and……nasty. It had bare walls, ragged furniture, unrecognizable odors, and a sticky floor. The kitchen was about as appetizing as a janitor’s closet. Papaw spoke with the diminutive owner/chef/chief bottle washer while his enormous wife moved around the kitchen. He was giving him the crabs in exchange for his aid in getting the non-English speaking Chinese to vote for him in the next election. There it was again, that mysterious recurring theme in Papaw’s world. We were putting the bulging, squirming box onto the only table in the room when one of the prisoners escaped to the floor. The wife screamed and leapt onto the table which promptly collapsed flat as a pancake. Crabs ran sideways in every direction. The clickity-click of hundreds of exoskeletal feet and claws was unworldly. The wife was rolling over the crabs, waving her limbs trying to get up, and screaming in that undiscovered tongue. Most of the crabs managed to run under and behind the ancient appliances. We had to move the ice boxes, gas burners, etc. and drag the angry crustaceans out, one by one. If we didn’t, they would die and stink although I doubt anyone could tell. We counted them for the first time as we put them back into the box. There were seventy blue crabs and this was when blue crabs were still a decent size. After a lot of bowing, again something new to me, we left the kitchen and passed through the dining space. The owner came running after us, holding up a crab which was frantically waving it’s legs, and exclaimed with excitement….seventy-one!!!

An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out. - George Jean Nathan

Stand Out of Their Light

When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: “Only stand out of my light.”

One day my seven year old daughter Roxanne, the namesake of Alexander's Persian wife, came to me with a jar. It was a tiny baby food jar that she had filled with water and a single marble. She asked why the marble looked small on this side of the jar but, when rolled to the other side, it looked larger. I was filled with joy…such a little girl with such a keen eye. Should I attempt a tiny lesson on light and refraction? Too late. Within seconds she was off on another adventure. Someday we will return to the event and celebrate her curiosity. In the meantime, she thinks mostly of dancing and that makes me happy. You never know where a rolling marble will lead them if you stand out of their light.

"If I worked in a big laboratory I would shout "Eureka!" every now and then just to boost morale." - unknown (greeting card)

Buzzards and Mockingbirds

Mrs. Tucker taught 7th grade RWS (reading, writing, and spelling). When I say “taught”, I use the term loosely. She was quite old, drove a beat up shell of a pick-up truck, called us buzzards and towed her books down the hall with a red wagon. Each time the book club took orders she reminded us of her personal ban on "To Kill a Mockingbird.” We were to never ever read that book. We could only guess why. But it showed up on NBC Saturday Night at the Movies and we were beside ourselves. She couldn't stop us! I liked the movie but never figured out her objections. At thirteen, veiled references to sex or race just flew right over my head unnoticed. But in my house I could sense when to let sleeping dogs lie. Asking my parents a question never ended well anyway but queries about this movie would surely produce a calamity.

Mrs. Tucker would empty the wastebasket on her desk and reassemble torn up notes. Anything she did not finish went home in a paper bag. One day a kid threw a wad of paper and she conducted a half hour investigation involving the projectile’s direction, speed, distance, cross winds, and bad seeds to determine who threw it. It was remarkably similar to the courtroom scene in JFK about the magic bullet. Oliver Stone had nothing on Mrs. Tucker. 

She never got out of her seat and always had a half empty six-ounce glass coke bottle on her desk. She wore sunglasses with her elbows on the desk and her head resting in her hands. She told us the sunglasses prevented us from knowing who she was eyeballing. It turns out she was right. But one day the toughest hood in our class, a fellow with two first names, Scott Thomas or Thomas Scott, stood up without raising his hand, sauntered right up to her desk, picked up her coke bottle, hocked up a loogie, spit it into the coke, placed it back on the desk, and casually strolled back to his seat. She was asleep! The class was absolutely breathless. We sat in terror until the end of the period. When the bell rang we stampeded like cattle. It was a miracle we didn’t break bones getting through that door.

Twenty years later, I read the book for the first time and have since read it seven more times.

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing. - Robert Benchley

Forgive Me

By twenty-one I had rebuilt three dead cars from this yard or that barn but had never owned any of them. I bought this one with my own savings. I did not ask permission so there was no advice from my parents, only grim silence. The old ‘66 Mustang only had the straight six, no a/c, no FM or stereo, had junkyard hubcaps (which Sandy called baby moons), and was on its third paint job, a dark turquoise over coral pink over a mystery factory color. I paid $500 cash to a passing stranger from Utah who took six months to mail me the title. I drove it for a year before we married and a year afterwards, with no registration, no inspection sticker, expired out of state license plates, and no insurance. No one ever found out because it couldn’t go fast enough to warrant a traffic stop. When we sold it, the buyer took his son and I on a test drive where I heard a body part fall off the front end! I turned to look out the back window and there was the chrome running mustang bouncing down the street. I turned back holding my breath. They had not noticed it amongst all the other rattling bits. He gave me $450 and I signed the unregistered title over, not knowing that jumping the taxman would prevent him from registering the title in his name. But, it never came back to me. He probably slipped a $5 bill to the clerk.

The things we did that we pray our own kids never have to. God forgives me because he sees all. He knows I drew the hand called trial and error. It’s not a bad deal but it wears me down because it shortchanges the ones I love. I know, it’s not something to worry about. But I pray my then wife has forgotten a few things and I hope my daughters forgive me for asking if they are taking care of business. They can’t see the map in my mind, the one marking where the all bodies are buried. 

I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty - and said 'do the best you can with these, they will have to do'. And mostly, against all odds, they do. - Anne Lamott

The Barber of DeVille

The small barbershop was right out of Andy Griffith’s Mayberry (think Floyd)…..a red and white striped rotating pole, windows with painted words on them, the smell of talcum and disinfectant, wooden venetian blinds, a mirrored wall, glass containers filled with scissors and combs soaking in bright blue Barbicide, and two old fashioned red and silver barber chairs. When it was my turn, the old man put a fancy upholstered board across the armrests for me to sit on, a paper collar around my neck, and a cloth cape. When he was done he brushed me all over with talcum powder. A large framed print of the dogs playing poker and smoking cigars was the coolest art I had ever seen. The coke “machine” on the floor was an antique even for those days. Inside a metal lidded box, the 6 oz. bottles rested in cold circulating water with their necks trapped by a pair of metal rods that snaked back and forth. You slid a bottle around the track until it got to the end where it would let go for a nickel. The use of vending machines was not allowed in my family. But the best thing about a visit to the barbershop was the luxurious blessed cool air from the window unit. I could have sat in that room all day long. I think some of the old men did just that.

The shop closed a few years later so my mom drove me up Telephone Road and dropped me off with the motor running in the middle of a row of bars, dance halls, and strip joints with names like The Owl Lounge, The Four Aces, Roseland, etc. It sounds sketchy, and it was, but the truth is that it was on the same stretch as The Kolache Shop, Wieners (family clothes), the pony rides, and the Santa Rosa Theater. The crusty parking areas had an odd assortment of decrepit pick-ups, town and country family wagons, and Cadillac Coup de Villes that we would call pimped out in this century. My new barbershop was very dark inside. The walls were paneled with fake wood and hung with stuffed fish….real stuffed fish. The barbers and patrons were thirty-something to forty-ish, listened to country music, smoked, drank beer, and were pretty rough around the edges. The coffee table was piled with two kinds of magazines….fishing and detective stories. Some of them showed photos of murder victims at the scene…think of the photographer played by Jude Law in Road to Perdition. One day, I was astonished to discover a photo of my own maternal Grandfather in one of them! He had been the coroner of Jefferson County several years earlier. In those days it was not a medical job in small towns but one that was filled by whoever owned the local funeral parlor or a station wagon in which to transport the occasional corpse. I always wondered what the family of the coroner thought about that. The most fascinating thing was the shady graphic art on the covers of the pulp fiction magazines. They all had the same theme….women with pinup figures, flowing manes, wearing the tattered remains of clothing, tied to something, and being whipped by Nazis. Whaaaaa? Later in life I realized why it was always Nazis. If you are disgusting enough to print sexually violent images but you don't want the public to burn your door down, blame it on a Nazi. Everyone hated them already. It’s not the publisher’s fault, it’s that dang Nazi on the cover. One day I opened one and there was no story inside about Nazis. Thank goodness but still only a small favor for the woman on the cover.

Overall, I had no objections to that shop but forty years later I said, “Mom, we have to talk about your choice of barbershops.” Her explanation, “I just started driving, it was the first barbershop I came across, and no woman in her right mind would get out of the car on that stretch of Telephone Road.” “Ya think?”

I was so naive as a kid I used to sneak behind the barn and do nothing. - Johnny Carson

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company. - Mark Twain

K - i - T - i - R - i - K

Kitirik was our after school children’s TV celebrity. The station's call letters were KTRK. They just put an “i” between all the letters. In the late 50's, Kitirik was to make an appearance at our annual Garden Villas Grade School carnival but could not make it. At the last minute my mom volunteered to "be Kitirik". I have practically no memory of it so I don't know if she presented as a stand-in-mom or they tried to pass her off as the real thing. I'm sure she didn't own any black fishnet (shudder). These photos of the two are a decade apart but at approximately the same age. I've said too much already.

To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone. - Reba McEntire