A Change For Heart

On Monday, I had a minor panic attack when thinking about my upcoming cruise. I had a flashback to my last cruise and the day I spent feeling seasick. I called my doctor and asked for a prescription of the patch. His receptionist told me he needed to see me. Just as I was about to kick myself for waiting so late to get a prescription, the receptionist told my that I was in luck. There was an opening for me the very next day. I told her that he might as well take care of my blood pressure and cholesterol prescription renewals at the same time. I knew they were running out in a few weeks, but I was still holding out for a sudden loss of fifty or eighty pounds before seeing the doctor.

I really hate going to the doctor. Find me someone who likes to hear how they are bigger and fatter each visit, and I will run naked through Ingram Mall. I knew walking into the appointment that my doctor was going to be disappointed with me. I was supposed to be working on my weight, but instead, I had gained my usual summer twenty. Fortunately, that wasn't reflected on the scale. It still showed a slight loss of about four pounds since my last appointment. It was not exactly the big reduction he was looking for.

To make matters even worse, the nurse who was taking my blood pressure, pulse, etc., mentioned that it was time for an EKG. I would honestly rather have a root canal without anesthetic than have one of those. They scare me more than any other medical procedure I have ever been through. That's saying a lot, since I had a camera a mile up my behind last fall. I'm not afraid of the EKG procedure, just what it is looking for. I'm no idiot. I'm a 50-year-old fat man who lost several uncles, one mother, and a grandmother to heart disease. I know my time is coming, especially if I don't do something about my weight.

My blood pressure sky-rocketed, and I was a sopping wet bundle of nerves before the nurse could even get back to the room with the EKG machine. I was sweating so bad, she couldn't get all of those little sticky probes to stick to my chest. She ended up shaving these lovely giant spots on each of my man boobs. They look lovely. Almost like crop circles! Now I have another reason not to take my shirt off at the beach. Anyway, she wiped me dry and finally got the probes stuck to me. Meanwhile, I was flat on my back on that tiny little examining room bed, sweating even more, and barely able to breathe through my stuffy nose.

When she finally finished the test, there was something different about her manner. You know how you look at the flight attendants during a bumpy flight to see if they are nervous? Well, she failed that test. I knew right away there was a problem with my EKG. You guessed it, I started sweating even more. I soaked that piece of white paper they always make you sit on, and pieces were stuck to my back. When she left the room, I tore the whole damned thing off and used it dry myself a little before getting dressed. Then I paced back and forth waiting for the doctor to come in.

My doctor is a really nice guy. He acts like you are his only patient, and devotes plenty of time to you. He started off by asking routine questions. We talked about my weight as expected. He said, "I would like you to lose some weight" and mentioned that my blood pressure was a little higher than desirable. I told him that was because I was freaking out about the EKG. He told me to monitor it over the next week or so to see if it was an isolated thing. I told him that was fine with me, and shifted the conversation back to the EKG. I told him that I could tell the nurse had seen something during the test. He told me that there was an indication that I had had a heart attack since my last appointment. Before I had time to freak out over that, he told me he didn't think I had one. He said that in the area of my heart indicated by the EKG, I would have had way too much pain for a heart attack to go unnoticed. For the second time in a year, I cried in his office. This time they were tears of relief. We won't talk about the last time.

I pulled myself back together, and we moved on to a discussion about the patch. I told him about getting sea sick for a whole day during my last cruise. We had already been at sea for five days before it happened. Josh got hit with it at the same exact time. Anyway, the doctor decided not to prescribe the patch. Instead, he gave me a prescription to use if I do get sick. He said the negatives of the patch outweighed the benefits. That was fine with me. When I wore the patch on my first cruise, it gave me an uncomfortable feeling in my head and eyes.

So, here's the plan. I'm going to go on my cruise and have a good time. When I get back, changes are coming. I bought a diet and exercise record at Barnes and Noble. I am going to get two miles of walking in every day, even if I have to go to Spectrum to do it in the air conditioning. I'm going to count calories and get most of them from unprocessed healthy foods. I am going to focus on a year long goal. Hopefully, Rachel will join me in this venture. Now that Josh is going off to college, healthy meals should be possible all the time. Rachel is smart enough to know the benefits, and Jared will eat anything anyway. If all goes well, I will be a lot farther down the road to good health the next time I see the doctor. This comes with some anxiety, though. I have been at this stage of the game so many times it hurts. Maybe this time all the pieces will come together.

Dancing in the Dark

I remember the first time I heard Bruce Springsteen. It was October of 1980, and I was in Clint something or other's room at Southwest Texas State University hanging out with the first floor guys. It was my second senior year (Don't ask!), and I was their R. A. I did whatever it took to relate to the freshman that year. I remember thinking they were so young. I was a wise twenty-one-year-old man with all the answers, if only they would listen.

I was walking down the hall and noticed the distinct aroma of marijuana coming from one of the rooms. Clint's room was the only one from which music and loud voices seemed to be coming. I knocked on his door and waited a minute or two as they did their stoned best to get rid of the evidence of their pot smoking crime. Finally, they opened the door, and I lied to them about my reason for knocking. I looked Clint right in the eye and said, "I like the music you were playing. Who is it?" Clint and his buddies totally forgot about the pot smoking and gave me hell for not knowing who "The Boss" was. They had just bought the album that day at that combination record store and laundromat that used to be a few blocks from campus.

I sat there in that room and listened to the whole album. I can't explain why, but I had a "Killing Me Softly" experience. (No I was not smoking their dope!) I felt like Bruce
Springsteen had looked into my soul and discovered all of my inner feelings and thoughts and put them on that album. I know that was kind of stupid since, at twenty-one, I hadn't experienced any of the things he sang about. There was just something there that was of the utmost importance to me at that moment in my life. After listening to the album, I said, "I don't want to smell any more pot coming out of your room," and left them with their mouths hanging open and "lay down your money and you play your part, everybody's got a hu-uh-uh-un-gry heart!" playing over and over in my head.

I became a Bruce Springsteen fanatic. I didn't have any money, but I did have a Texaco gas card. I told all the guys on my floor to let me know when they were going to fill up. I would put their gas on my credit card, take their cash, and run off to buy another Springsteen album. I bought them in the order that they had been released, starting with Greetings from Asbury Park. There were songs "about me" on each of them. On Asbury Park, the song "Spirit in the Night" was almost exactly the story of an experience I had at Canyon Lake one night after partying too hard at a club in San Marcos. "4th of July" from The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle said what I wanted to say to Lynda, the girl I thought I was madly in love with at the time, even though the song had nothing to do with my life. I had spent enough time in New Jersey to be familiar with the boardwalk. Maybe that was what helped me relate to it. I was getting ready to graduate and wanted Lynda to give up the party life and move on with me, even though I knew that wasn't in her plans. When Bruce sang "This boardwalk life for me's through... you ought to quit this scene too....Love me tonight, and I promise I'll love you forever," he said everything I wanted to say to her, but couldn't. On Darkness on the Edge of Town, the song "Racing in the Street" seemed to be telling me that it was time to just break out and do it, whatever it was. It was so obvious to me in the lines, "Tonight, tonight the highway's bright. Out of our way, mister, you best keep. 'Cause summer's here and the time is right for racin' in the street."

Well, I graduated from SWTSU in 1981 and moved to Waeldar, Texas to start my teaching career without Lynda. I spent a lot of time listening to my Springsteen albums in my lonely apartment. But, I have to admit that I didn't get Nebraska at all when it came out in 1982. There was absolutely nothing on that album that spoke to me. I started to think that my relationship with Bruce was over. I was growing away from him and experiencing life for myself. I didn't need to sit in my room listening to him tell about his life anymore. The connection was gone, and I couldn't see myself in his new music.

I stayed in Waelder for four years, convinced that I liked being there. I had a girlfriend whom I was ready to marry, until all of a sudden something snapped in my head when she told me she wanted to put a trailer next to her mother's house on the family ranch. I realized that we weren't going to have our own life at all. We were going to continue the life she was already living at home. The only difference was that she would be a married woman. All I was to her was an opportunity to slam a wedding ring on her finger. In fact, within months of our breaking up, she hooked some other sucker and planted him right there in that trailer.

Since I was a free man again, I started spending time on the weekends with my buddy Clay and his wife in Seguin. Clay and I had been in the dorm together and did everything in our power to relive those college days. I think I was just enough of an escape for him as he adjusted to married life, and spending time with him kept me from going crazy all by myself in Waelder, where life was starting to lose whatever appeal it had held for me.

It was during one of those weekends in Seguin when I bought Bruce's album Born in the USA. The magic was back. That album was just what I needed at the time. The song "Dancing in the Dark" was about me. It said everything that I had been feeling since ending my relationship with Caroline, the girl I thought I wanted to marry. Bruce sang, "Message keeps getting clearer, radios on, and I'm moving round my place. I check myself in the mirror. Wanna change my clothes my hair my face. Man I ain't getting nowhere just sitting in a dump like this. There's something happening somewhere. Baby, I just know that there is." I felt a vibration go through my body like an electric shock. I knew right then and there that I was done with Waelder.

The very next day, I told Lorenzo Miles, the principal of Waeldar High School, that I would not be coming back the next year. Everyone thought I was joking. Summer was a long way off, and they thought I would change my mind. What they didn't know was that I was already packing my stuff and taking things to San Antonio on the weekends. My mind was made up. I wanted a social life. I wanted to date a girl and fall in love. I wanted to get married. In fact, when Raquel Escobar, the principal of Loma Park Elementary School in Edgewood, asked my why I had come to San Antonio during my interview, I answered, "To get married." She actually thought I was already engaged. I didn't find the girl I wanted to marry until the next week when Rachel and I both attended new teacher orientation at the school. I'll tell that story some other time.

Without Bruce Springsteen, I wouldn't be the man I am today. I know it sounds ridiculous to say that, but it's true. It was "Dancing in the Dark" that got me to San Antonio. That move led to my meeting Rachel, getting married, buying the house we live in, and having two awesome sons. Had it not been for that song, I would probably be an old lush, still teaching in Waeldar and living in a ramshackle old house with my dog out in the middle of nowhere.

Have you had a chance to hear the album Working on a Dream that came out earlier this year? If not, you really should get it and listen to the song "My Lucky Day". Once again, Bruce seems to be singing what is in me. The song says what I feel about Rachel and my life with her. The refrain of the song goes, "Honey, you’re my lucky day. Baby, you’re my lucky day. Well I lost all the other bets I made. Honey, you’re my lucky day."

It was like living in a cave!

Sorry, GEICO dudes, I feel like a caveman. A few hours ago, a much needed thunderstorm passed through our area and knocked out our Internet service, cable TV, and land line telephones. I waited patiently for about thirty minutes before calling Time Warner to see what was up. I was pretty sure that everyone in our area was affected by the outage, but, after awhile, you start to think that it might only be you. Maybe the cable and telephone companies aren't even aware of the problem. Anyway, I called Time Warner, and, sure enough, the robot lady told me that the service in our area was out, the technicians were working hard to restore it, and the customer service people had no more information about the situation.

Rachel went to our master suite and took a shower. She had to get ready to take Josh somewhere at 6:30. She is a person who can spend five minutes in the bathroom getting ready to go somewhere when she is in a hurry or an hour or so, if she isn't in a hurry. Part of the time she spends lounging on the bed reading in her robe, letting time do its drying magic. Then she moves back into the bathroom and does all that girly stuff like hair, etc. She barely even noticed that the storm had reduced our home to unbearable prehistoric conditions.

Josh went to his room and slept. He didn't know what else to do with himself. I heard him playing his electric guitar for awhile, but that must have gotten boring. He usually rotates between his laptop, Xbox Live, his guitar, and TV. There is no real schedule. In fact, you never know when you will find him doing any of them. I've been woken in the middle of the night by his shouting at the Xbox. Today, he slept so soundly that he didn't even hear his new alarm clock. Rachel bought it for him online. It's guaranteed to wake even the heaviest sleeper. He tested it when it arrived yesterday. The loudest setting hurt my ears and made all the downstairs windows rattle. Hopefully, he won't need it that loud at UT. If he does, the first time he uses it, everyone will run out of the building in a panic. He'll probably get arrested.

Jared spent the time in his room doing who knows what. I don't think he was sleeping. I could hear things banging and clanking every once in awhile. He came out every fifteen minutes and looked at the cable modem to see if service was back on. Rachel told him it would be a good time to read the books on his summer reading list, but he didn't care for that idea at all. Reading is not popular with either of my boys, unless it is something that is entirely of their own choosing. Even though he got to pick a book off the list, it wasn't his idea to have a list, so he will avoid reading any book on it as much as possible.

That leaves me. I am a fifty-year-old man. I've been alive for part of the last six decades. I think I lived in a cave as an infant. You'd think I would just go to my nightstand, grab my latest novel and reading glasses and pass the time reading. Don't kid yourself. I was just as stir crazy as anyone else. I spent the time backing up my computer files to my portable hard drive. Then I tortured myself watching the slide show of photos of Mom that was hiding on there. That led me to start working on a slide show of my trip west with the guys. I even passed time watching all the Flip videos I shot on the trip. After that, I went and checked the mail and watered the one plant that the rain couldn't get to. Unlike Jared, I didn't check the cable modem every fifteen minutes. No, my routine was more like every twenty minutes. I would disconnect the electricity to the modem and wait to see if it would start up. That usually does the trick. I kept turning the TV off to see if the cable would magically be working when I turned it back on.

When I couldn't think of anything else to do, I started writing this. About ten minutes into it, the cable suddenly came back on. The Internet did not. Now, I find myself checking the modem every few minutes, “just in case”. I don't want to watch TV right now. I want to go on Facebook and see what everyone else is up to. I want to check my e-mail and see if there are any messages from my sister. I want to find music for the slide show I started working on. And guess what? I get to go do all of those things right now. All five lights on the cable modem just lit up. Gotta go!!!

Lobster Tale and Other Crustacean Stories

My friend Stacey posted a photo of her eating lobsters in Vermont during her vacation there this summer. It sparked a memory of the time I ate lobsters in Greenville, South Carolina during my vacation a few summers back. Then, as I thought about telling that story, I realized I had a few stories to tell about lobsters, shrimp, crabs, and crawdads, so here goes!

I'll start with the lobster story since it kicked everything off. As I mentioned before, I was on vacation in Greenville, South Carolina. That's where Rachel's big brother, Rich, lives with his wife and children. Rachel's mother moved there from St. Louis a while back, also. You can see Rich's wife and Rachel's older sister, Linda, in the photo above. We call Rich's wife Goose, but her real name is Sarah Lynn.

While we were visiting Greenville, and since Linda had also flown in, Goose and Linda decided we needed to have a lobster dinner. They ordered ten lobsters from somewhere. I would say it was either Legal Seafoods in Boston or from the store in Marblehead that Linda used for seafood when she still lived there. They were not the little one pound lobsters we get at HEB. In Boston they call those chicken lobsters and serve them as snacks in bars. No, these were nice big ones. They came with a nice big price. I remember hearing that with delivery they were somewhere between four and five hundred dollars. Unfortunately, when Linda placed the order, she messed up on the address, and the lobsters were delivered to Greenville, North Carolina, five hours away.

Well, if it had been me, I would have cried over the loss of those lobsters and got out some hot dogs and had a different dinner. Wait a minute! That's a lie. I would never have ordered $400 worth of lobsters to begin with. Only five of us were even lobster eaters that night. Rich was on call at the hospital and couldn't even eat with us. The sisters, however, decided to have the lobsters re-delivered by courier at a whopping cost of $500. When Rich came home for a few minutes to get something, he said, "Those women are crazy. I could have taken you out for lobster in a restaurant for half the price!"

Anyway, the $900 lobster dinner was absolutely delicious. I got to eat two of those huge monsters! The other members of the family (Rachel, Jared, Josh, and my nephew RH) got to eat some delicious pasta dish that Goose cooked up for them. Mix that in with great wine, a very nice dining room, and the company of Grandma Jane, and you had a very nice evening.

Now, set your time machines, and join me in 1975. In my earlier post called "A Funny Story About Mom", I mentioned how she and I had gone to New Jersey during the summer so she could attend the funeral of her uncle. While we were there, she decided to take me crabbing. Crabbing is something we did all the time up there. Mom loved to do it as much as anyone else. Grandpop always had everything you needed but the fish heads on hand. I don't know where he got them from, but he got us some, and off we went.

I can't remember exactly where we went that day. I know it was somewhere where we could crab from a bridge, as Mom didn't do boats very often. We would have been using those square traps that lay flat underwater and slam closed when you pull them up. I preferred using a crab line. That's just a long piece of string with a weight and fish head tied to one end and a stick for winding tied to the other. With a crab line, you wait until you feel a tapping on the line. Then you slowly pull the line in until you see the crab hanging on to the fish head just below the water. You put the net down in the water and scoop the crab up from below. The net's pole isn't long enough to do that from a bridge.

We spent as much time as we could catching crabs that day. The tidal conditions have to be just right. When they change, the crabs stop coming. Anyway, we caught a bunch of them. We were dumping them into a big cardboard box in the trunk of our Chevy Nova. We put a little bit of moist seaweed over them to keep them alive. Grandpop said we should never eat a dead crab, even if we knew it was freshly caught.

When we got back to the motel, I carried all the equipment back to where Grandpop kept it. Then, Mom and I grabbed the box full of crabs out of the trunk and started walking towards Grandmom and Grandpop's apartment. Suddenly, the bottom of the box gave out, and crabs were scurrying all over the motel parking lot. I ran and got crab tongs from the kitchen, and Mom, Grandmom, and I spent about twenty minutes re-catching all those crabs. I wish I could have filmed it. We screamed and squealed and LAUGHED the whole time. It was hilarious.

Later that evening, we enjoyed a great feast of steamed crabs. Grandpop and I cleaned them after they were cooked and dumped the whole pile of them on newspaper in the middle of the dining room table. It was everyone for themselves, except Grandmom. Grandpop always sat there and got a huge pile of crab meat out of the shell for Grandmom before he ever ate any himself. The only bad thing about that feast was when Grandpop reminded us, "That only an idiot would put wet crabs in a cardboard box!"

Back to the time machines! This time we are going to go to Mt. Eden, Texas in 1983. Mt. Eden was a small black community near Waelder at one time. Now, the only thing there are the Mt. Eden Baptist Church and the closed up building of the old post office. I moved out there from downtown Waelder, because it was not quite the fishbowl my apartment across from the school had been. I had twenty-one acres to roam around on with my dog Trooper. There was even a tank with lots of perch and crappie in it.

There was a dry creek that came from the tank and ran the length of the property line. I had explored it many times on hikes with Trooper. It was only about 300 yards from the house. I never saw a drop of water in it until one day after some pretty heavy storms had gone through. The water that was there was amazingly clear. I saw a huge crawdad crawling on the bottom. I was amazed. Where would a crawdad come from? The creek was usually dry.

Mr. Goode, the school board president at the time, rented my house to me. His brother, Jeff, took care of the cattle on my place. He would come to feed them, and usually stopped to chat with me. I asked him if he had known about crawdads in that little creek. He told me that they were in all the area creeks. When it was dry, he claimed they burrowed underground until the water returned. Someday, I'll research that on the Internet. Back then, I took his word for it. I had learned from talking to them that both of the Mr. Goodes were very knowledgeable about a lot of things.

Anyway, I decided I was going to catch some of those crawdads . I figured they weren't that different from crabs. I made a crab line using a chicken neck instead of a fish head. Mr. Hernandez, who owned the grocery store in Waeldar, saved chicken necks and guts from the chickens he barbecued, and gave them to me for fishing bait. I fished all over Waelder on just about every one's property. I brought home about $600 dollars a month back then, and fish was my primary food source. That is, when I wasn't eating fried chicken necks, livers, hearts, and gizzards from Mr. Hernandez!

I took my line, a net, and a folding chair down to the creek and tried catching crawdads. It worked just like I thought it would. Unfortunately, there just weren't that many crawdads there. I saved them in the fridge for a few days until I had about ten of them. But my story isn't about the crawdads. My story is about a snake.

The last time I was down at the creek catching crawdads, Trooper was going crazy barking at something. I just ignored him. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I watched in horror as the biggest water moccasin I had ever seen slithered right between my legs. It went down into the creek and swam in the direction of the tank. The shock of it drove me temporarily insane. I ran all the way back to the house, locked Trooper inside, and got my 22. I ran with it all the way back to the creek and hunted that snake down like a madman. I thought I saw it once and blasted away at it a few times. I'm sure I didn't get it, but man I tried. I was so dang mad that that snake had the audacity to slither right between my legs. Crazy? Yes. I agree.

Okay, I'm going to end with a shrimp story. This one takes place in 1991. When Rachel and I got married, Rich and Goose still lived here in San Antonio. Rich was a surgery resident at Wilford Hall on Lackland AFB. That is part of why Rachel ended up in San Antonio. Anyway, one day, Goose invited Rachel, Joshua (who was not quite a year old yet), and me to lunch. We went to the Café du Vin. It was a nice restaurant over in the space which Milano's Ristorante Italiano‎ now occupies on Wurzbach and Lockhill Selma.

The lunch was nice, I'm sure. I know we would have had wine and taken our sweet time eating while talking and enjoying being together. I can't tell you what we had to eat, except that I definitely had some shrimp. It may have been a shrimp salad or cocktail. I don't remember. What I do remember is giving a piece of shrimp to Joshua. He put it in his mouth, gave us a wide-eyed look of horror, and spit it out with the force of an atomic bomb blast. It sailed through the air and landed on a piece of bread. Unfortunately, the bread was on a plate at the NEXT table. We were really embarrassed, but the guy whose bread was bombed was nice about it. To this day, Josh will not even try shrimp. On some rare occasions, he will eat fish sticks. Other than that, he is just like Rachel. If it lives in water, don't serve it to either of them!

Now, don't think for a minute that I am out of shellfish stories. I have lots left. For example, I could tell you about the time I ate so much at the Boston Sea Party that I almost had to be rushed to the emergency room. I could tell you about the time I went on a Campus Crusade for Christ retreat at Port Aransis, and my buddy Jim and I were the only ones who seemed to know how to peel shrimp when they opened up a huge ice chest full of boiled shrimp and told us to have at it. I could tell you about my trips to Cape May where Grandmom would hand pick the lobsters she would take home and make the most delicious crab-stuffed lobster with. I could tell you about the time I took Rachel on a date to the Dry Dock Oyster Bar only to discover that she didn't eat anything from the sea. I could tell you many more stories, but I won't. Instead, I am going to take my daddy's advice and CLAM UP!

Rocks?

Sometimes, something comes along in life that I just can't figure out. Today, for example, I am totally baffled by the different attitudes people have towards activities which are often considered to be hobbies. I find it humorous that one person can find something exciting while others think it is uninteresting, or even ridiculous.

My dad had a hobby for several years that I never could relate to. He took my old bicycle, attached a laundry basket to the handle bars, and spent hours walking up and down the roads in our area collecting aluminum cans. Trust me, he didn't do it out of concern for the environment, and he sure as heck did not need the money. Just the same, collecting cans was a passion for him. He kept elaborate records of the cans he took into the recycling center. He listed their weight and the money he got for them. For him, it seemed to be a quest to be the world's most prolific aluminum can collector. Mom would simply smile and say, "It gets him out of the house."

My grandmother had a hobby. She collected sailors and fishermen. Not living ones. That was Aunt Stella, and I promised Mom I would never embarrass the family by talking about her in public. The ones Grandmom collected were little realistically hand-carved and painted men. She had lots of them. My favorite was one that actually smoked little tiny cigarettes. The office area of her motel, The Sea Lure, had a large picture window which was divided up like a bookshelf. It was full of her collection. The few that I have now are some of my most prized possessions. I understood Grandmom's hobby, even if I didn't grow up collecting wooden figurines.

A woman I new in another school district was obsessed with antiques. I say obsessed because her rather large old house was more like a museum than a home. In fact, they had to build a modern living room area in a separate building behind the main house. Everywhere you looked in every room antiques where displayed. Tables and dressers were buried under them. Shelves loaded with antique plates, cups, and dolls lined the walls. It was amazing, even though I found it a little kooky.

A friend of my wife collects clocks. She has all kinds of them all over her beautiful home out in the country. In order to enjoy the many lovely sounds they make, she has them set to go off at different times. As you eat dinner at her dining room table, clocks are constantly sounding off, one after the other. At first, I found it a bit annoying. Before long, however, I wasn't even aware of them.

My mother loved to collect cardinals. She had them everywhere in her house. They're still there. Dad says he is going to get rid of them, but when I visit, I can tell that he has lovingly dusted them. She loved them so much that I even tried to find a cardinal urn to hold her ashes. I never thought it was a silly hobby. In fact, whenever I saw something related to cardinals while traveling, I bought it for her. Her friends and other family members also gave her gifts of cardinals.

I guess I collect hobbies. I have sampled many of them over the years. Most don't stick with me for too long. I have been into fishing, knitting, cross stitch, painting, poetry, coin collecting, stamp collecting, Chinese brass collecting, genealogy, book collecting, cooking, ice cream making, yogurt making, pickling, geocaching, and photography among others too numerous to remember or mention. I really get into things for awhile, but eventually they seem to get dropped on the wayside. Even geocaching, a hobby shared with my younger son, seems to be fizzing out, like all my other hobbies. Every once in awhile, I will pull out the primary colored blanket I started knitting eighteen years ago while Rachel was pregnant with Josh and knit a few rows. I'll dust off my Chinese brass pieces and get a brief yearning to go on Ebay for more. I'll add a few family members to the genealogy record my mom left behind. Sometimes, I'll even convince Jared to brave the heat and find a geocache or two. But I really can't claim that any of my hobbies, past or present, are passions.

My buddies, Mike and Jack, are very passionate about rocks. I don't know how that happened. All of a sudden they thought rocks were awesome. The told me how they were going out rock hunting in West Texas during the last spring break. I remember feeling fortunate that I had to take Joshua to Austin and couldn't make that trip. Then last week, we took a crazy four day road trip out west under the guise of picking up Jack's son, Caleb. As part of that trip, we hooked up with a rock expert in Alpine. She took us out to the desert, and the guys spent several hours looking for rocks. I just couldn't get into it. I picked up a few rocks, but I didn't really look for them. Instead, I enjoyed a solitary walk in the desert looking at birds, cacti, and hoping to avoid the rattlesnakes we were warned about. The others found lots of rocks. At our hotel in Del Rio later that night, Mike spent over an hour washing his rocks in the sink. I have to admit that they looked kind of pretty all together like that. Nonetheless, they were just rocks. I like their beer brewing hobby a whole lot more!

Why do some people go crazy about some things while the rest of us think they are uninteresting or ridiculous? What drives some of us to collect things other people would just as soon not have? Why do we look at people with unusual hobbies and consider them weird? I certainly don't have answers to any of those questions. I guess I'll just have to go through life saying a polite, "That's nice", whenever someone mentions a hobby I can't appreciate. But come on guys. Really? ROCKS?

Thirty-three Years Later

Thirty-three years ago, my mother drove me to see my dentist, Dr. Trent, at his office on Bandera Road, way inside loop 410. It was the first Monday of a very hot July. I was going there to have my wisdom teeth removed. Tomorrow, on the first Monday of another hot July, my eighteen-year-old son, Josh, will be taking a ride for the very same reason. He will have his wisdom teeth removed, but his experience will be a lot different from mine.

My dentist removed my wisdom teeth in his office as I watched using a hand-held mirror. The entire procedure took about an hour and a half. My two upper wisdom teeth were fully grown in and came out easily. The bottom two were impacted. Dr. Trent drilled and pulled at them with horrific force. The local anesthetic prevented any pain during the process, but I could feel the jerks and pulls for hours afterwards, the way someone feels the ocean for awhile after stepping off a ship.

I left the dentist with a prescription for some major drugs, which Mom had been sent to pick up during my session with Dr. Trent, and a mouth full of bloody gauze. I wasn't in pain, as the anesthetic had not worn off. Later, when the Novocaine had worn off, there was a lot of pain and my jaws were swelling up pretty bad. When that happened, I was helped to the bathroom, where I rinsed my mouth with warm salt water, took some powerful pain killers, and replaced the bloody gauze with fresh new wads. The meds kicked in, and I spent the night exploring the wonders of La La Land. This became routine for a day or two until healing started coming and swelling started going. Then, the routine became rinse with warm salt water, take a few aspirins, and eat some kind of soft food. The gauze was gone, and the pain was never really there after that first time before the pills.

Josh will not go to his dentist to have his wisdom teeth removed. He will be seeing an oral surgeon instead. At least he'll see him for a few minutes. Josh will be going under general anesthesia and will sleep through the entire ordeal. He will get a first rush of drugs before being asked to count backwards from 100. By 93, he'll be totally under. After, what seems like no time has passed at all to him, a nurse will be coaxing him back to the real world as if nothing ever happened. He'll be under the effects of the pain killers given to him by IV sometime during the surgery. Like me, Josh will leave his procedure with a mouth full of gauze, but his Mom already has his pain killers, and he will go to the car in a wheelchair.

It remains to be seen how Josh's recovery will compare to mine. I have to think that a modern doctor who specializes in this type of tooth removal surgery has to have more skills and better tools for removing wisdom teeth than a regular dentist would have had thirty-three years ago. Josh will still rinse his mouth with warm salt water, but he'll take Vicodin for his pain. I am sure he will appreciate its pain-killing properties, but he probably won't get to go to La La Land to escape any discomfort he feels. At least, I hope that's true, since the information I just read about Vicodin says, "Be careful if you drive or do anything that requires you to be awake and alert." There was no way I could even have walked down the street after taking my pain killers. Drive? Forget about it!

Two Funny Stories

First, I want to share a funny story about my mom. Some of you have heard this one, but I've never documented it in writing, so here goes.

Back in the 1970s, probably 1977, I was a student at Southwest Texas State University. It isn't there anymore. Instead, there's a new university called Texas State in its place. It is a bit puzzling to some of us old SWTSU alumni because this new school keeps calling and asking for money. I always just say, "Sorry, I didn't go to Texas State!" and hang up the phone. Once, they even offered to send me a diploma from the new school for fifteen dollars. It sounded shady to me. Come on, a 15 dollar diploma without ever taking a single class? Anyway, I wandered way off track. I think it's this dang diet I'm on for the cruise I'm taking in a month. The point is, I was living in San Marcos.

One weekend I went to San Antonio to do my laundry and get money. Oh yeah- I was also there to visit my parents. :) When I walked in the door, my mother hollered from the dining room, "Oh, Jimmie, I'm so glad your here!" It made my heart swim a little to be so lovingly welcomed. Then she added, "Come help me".

When I entered the dining room, I found Mom sitting there surrounded by a stack of bills, sheets of paper, markers, pens, and pencils. She was obviously about to begin some kind of project. I asked her what I could do to help. Here is her answer, quoted verbatim. "There is a mistake on my Master Card bill. I have to send them a copy of it with the mistake circled. Should I make the copy in pencil or pen?" I stood there for a second, not sure what I was hearing. Then it dawned on me. Mom was going to draw a copy of her bill freehand! The poor thing was a housewife and had never even heard of a photocopier. She had no idea such a thing existed. I just about died laughing until I saw how upset she was getting. When I explained it to her, she laughed, too. But, I could tell she was embarrassed by the situation. I think that's what motivated her later in life to buy a computer and learn as much as she could about it.

Okay. Fair's fair. I don't want you to think that Mom was the only one capable of such funny things. My dad was, and is, a hoot. He is a very smart man. Both he and my mother always had more common sense than anyone I've ever met. Neither of them was college educated, but they watched the news and read the newspaper religiously. They could discuss any current event on the same level as Henry Kissinger. Just the same, Dad has done some of the out and out dumbest things I have ever seen. Unfortunately, I inherited that trait. For example, once I was showing Tom Macdonald, the library assistant at Carson, how my very expensive glasses had flexible frames. To prove the point I twisted them so much the dang things snapped in half, right at the nose bridge!!!

Anyway, back to dad. I have to tell you that my parents invented the concept of frugality. If you broke something that could be fixed with tape, that is what you did. They had all kinds of tricks for making things last longer. Let me give you two quick examples on the way to the story. Mom would add water to bottled products to get that last bit of stuff. She did this with shampoo and ketchup all the time. She added water, shook the hoohah out of them, and we used watered down stuff for another week or two. If we had holes in our shoes close to the end of the school year (we only got one pair of school shoes per year), Dad would trace our feet on a piece of heavy cardboard and make inserts so our feet didn't touch the ground through the holes.

Now, on to the story... Dad had to shine his boots every day when he was in the Air Force. He even let me do it for him a lot of the time. He used that Kiwi wax polish in the round container. When you were almost out of polish, you would have a ring of it around the edges and a big bare spot in the middle where you could see the bottom of the can. Dad used to save those rings up. Then he would put them in a pan, melt them on the stove, pour the liquid back in the can, and have an almost full container of polish. Personally, I think that was genius. It was like getting one can free for every four or five you bought!

Unfortunately, Dad's polish reclamation project went disastrously wrong one time. It was back when we were living on Elmendorf AFB in Alaska. Dad followed his normal routine, but decided to use a disposable pie tin, so he wouldn't have to clean out the pan after the procedure. He went to the kitchen cabinet and grabbed one of the many Mom had saved from store bought pies. He turned on the gas, lit the burner with that little clicking spark maker we used to have, and put the pan on the stove to melt the polish. Within seconds, the pan was engulfed in flames, and black grimy smoke was filling the whole house! Good old dad had used one of those pie tins with little holes in the bottom. I can still hear my Mom shouting at him to this day.

I have to admit that these stories worry me a little bit. They make me wonder which of my boneheaded disasters my boys will tell everyone about.