Month: November 2012

I woke up yesterday morning wanting to find a niche for my blog.  People blog about all types of things.  Sports, gardening, children, religion, the topics are endless.  So I looked back at the 39 posts I have published since I started this page at the beginning of September, hoping that I could find some kind of a pattern to what I was writing about.  A common denominator that linked all of my posts together.  What I discovered is that I may be the Jerry Seinfeld of blogging.  Just like his TV show was, this blog is about nothing.  There is no theme.  My blogging is like a shotgun blast.  My posts are like pellets flying off into all different directions.  I would like to find a niche.

I began to wonder if I could blog about my day to day activities.  Would there be enough going on there to interest people?  Deep down I don’t think that will work because to be honest my daily activities don’t even interest me that much.  My wife said she thinks I would be more interesting if I tried being in a little better mood once in a while. My head tells me that this might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard her say but all at once my mouth starts moving, seemingly involuntarily, and I say to her, “You have a really good point there Dear.”  For maybe the only time in my life, my mouth spoke without consulting my brain and it came out right.  I’m off to a good start because that’s pretty interesting right there!

Other interesting things I discovered yesterday;

If you cut your ear shaving, don’t plan on going anywhere for a while.  It takes forever to stop bleeding and putting a band aid on your ear just looks stupid.

Pick up after your dogs BEFORE picking up the leaves.  Either that or wear gloves.

You are almost guaranteed of getting a toothache within 24 hours of declining your dentists offer to move up your appointment date.

If as much hair was growing out of my head as it is out of my nose and ears, I would look more like Elvis.  But not the 1950’s or 60’s Elvis.  The 1970’s Elvis who ate too many peanut butter and banana sandwiches and fell off the toilet.

When you bring your car to your mechanic for an oil change there is exactly a 33 and a third percent chance you will need more than an oil change, because that squeaking noise you heard was not oil related.

If you answer a phone call from an unknown number and the person on the other end asks, “Am I speaking with (insert your name hear)?”  Your safest response is, “No you are not.  Can I take a message?”

If you have a dream that you are on a golf course and all of a sudden a chipmunk chases you down the fairway and runs up your shorts, don’t look to the internet for an interpretation of what that dream means unless you are not worried about never being able to fall asleep again.

I learned all of these things in just one day!

Interesting.

It’s that time of year again.  The time when my newspaper delivery person and I always reach an impasse.  He refuses to deliver the paper the way I have requested until I give him a Christmas present, and I refuse to give him a Christmas present until he starts delivering the paper the way I’ve requested.  Quite the conundrum.

The problem originally began years ago when the paper, one that shall remain nameless, decided to take it upon themselves to pound a newspaper box into the ground next to the regular mail box at the end of my driveway.  I made the assumption that the purpose of this blatant violation of my parkway was two fold.  One, because the name of the paper was stenciled onto the side of the box, it would be used as free advertising for their product.  But more importantly to me was that I thought going forward, this is where I could now expect to find my morning paper.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  Here’s one example;

Friday morning I woke up to about 30 mile per hour winds.  I opened the garage door in order to quickly run out and grab the paper and found my front yard looking like it had been used for a portion of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade route.  Paper was everywhere.  It looked like confetti.  One section was laying in the middle of the driveway still in tact.  I rushed over and picked it up.  Thank God, the Sports section!  Wearing only my Western Illinois sweat pants and a scowl on my face I hurriedly attempted to round up the rest of my newspaper, but every time I bent over to pick up a section, a gust of wind would come along and blow it in another direction.  I kept running around my front yard all hunched over, knuckles dragging on the ground and screaming unintelligible profanities as pieces of paper continued to elude me.  If any of the neighbors were watching, it probably appeared to them that a deranged yet strangely domesticated looking orangutan had cleverly disguised himself in his keepers sweat pants and was making a daring escape attempt from the zoo.

With the cold wind blowing, my eyes started to water.  Finally I saw an opportunity to capture a section that through watery eyes I saw plastered up against my neighbors garage.  I straightened up, raced over, and grabbed…..the comics.  I don’t even read the damn comics!!!

This quest was over.  With the ads blowing down the street, the comics crumpled in one hand, the obituaries in the other and the sports section stuffed safely down the back of my sweat pants I gave up and went back to the house.  I quickly realized chasing the paper hadn’t been a total waste of time.  The smile on my wife’s face told me she must have been watching through the front window.  She seemed very amused.  Good for her.

This had to stop.  Something needed to be done.  My first thought, Plan A I called it, was to lay in wait for the newspaper carrier and kill him when he came by the next morning.  With the state of mind I was currently in, I was able to convince myself that this plan would force the paper to hire a new delivery person and I would be able to start a fresh relationship.  Even for me that seemed a little drastic but not something that I was ready to completely rule out.

Plan B was to make yet another call and complain to the paper.  My wife suggested this might be a better place to start before spending all day trying to hatch a murder plot.

News Paper: “Good morning, circulation department.”

Me: “I need another paper delivered please, mine blew away.  The one this morning was thrown onto my driveway unwrapped and if you look out the window you’ll notice that the wind is blowing so hard that I could probably launch a hang glider off the roof of my ranch style home. (Note: Sarcasm does not get you what you want)  Can you have the paper put in the box this time?”

N P: “That’s the carriers job sir.”

Me: “I know.  Can you have HIM put it in the box this time?”

N P: “I can try”

Me: “He works for you correct?”

N P: “Yes”

Me: “Then can it be put in the box or not?”

N P: “I’ll mark it down on your subscription form.”

Me: “By the way, why did you put the box in without my permission anyway?”

N P:  “As a courtesy to our valued customers we set up news paper boxes in order to keep your paper from being damaged during bad weather.”

Me: “Then the paper needs to be placed in the box.  Can you do that for me please?”

N P: “As I’ve already explained.  That’s the carriers job sir.”

I placed my hand over the phone and yelled to my wife, “Sue, I’m going with Plan A.”

I was talking to my kids the other day.  While it’s always been one of my favorite things to do, it is even more special now.  With my daughter becoming a new mom and my son away at college, the chances for us to sit down together and just catch up don’t come along as often as they used to.

Sitting at the kitchen table our discussion turned to memories of when they were young.  We laughed about their sibling arguments and also about the times they needed to put their differences aside and bond together, join forces so to speak, in order to keep a secret from mom and dad.  Like the time they got into a fight and put a hole in my daughters bedroom door.  Their solution?  Hang a Mary Kate and Ashley poster over it.  My wife and I didn’t find out until two years later when my daughter outgrew Mary Kate and Ashley and took the poster down.  My solution?  Put a cork bulletin board over the hole, where it still hangs today.

I asked them to tell me one of their favorite childhood memories.  Before I tell you what they answered let me say this;

We have never been a family of great wealth in the monetary sense.  That’s not a complaint, it is just a way of explaining that we are like so many others, always very close to living paycheck to paycheck.  Even so, we are fortunate enough to have a home that I affectionately refer to as something between a mansion and a shack, and we have never gone hungry.  Also, due to my wife’s insistence, along with her talent for handling our finances, we have been able to occasionally afford some nice family vacations.  Most times we just went on a day trip or a weekend to the Wisconsin Dells.  However, we did squeeze in a few really great trips.  Our last big one coming in 2005 when we were finally able to make it to Disney.

Here is the reason for the brief family history.  When asked what one of their favorite childhood memories was, my kids said this, “Dad, remember when the three of us used to wrestle on the living room floor?”  That was the first thing that both came up with.  Not the trips, but wrestling on the living room floor.

I told this to someone once and she seemed incredulous. “Oh my gosh!” she said, “You spent all that money on trips and your kids thought wrestling on the floor was better than Disney?!”   

To be honest I don’t know that my kids thought the wrestling was better.  What I do know, is that it was the first thing they thought of.  Does that mean our family vacations weren’t fun or worth the cost?  Of course not, families need to get away together.

But today my son and I were sitting in that exact same living room/wrestling ring.  I wasn’t in the best of moods, not angry, just unhappy about some things.  My son sensing that something was wrong said, “What’s bothering you dad?”  I said, “It’s nothing.” and he responded, “C’mon dad, you can talk to me.”

I think that’s what wrestling on the floor with your kids is all about.

Do things ever just pop into your head seemingly out of nowhere?  It happens to me a lot.  Today I thought about the gift my grandfather gave me on Christmas Eve 1963.

Gramps, as I used to call him was my mom’s dad.  Because my grandpa Massaro had passed away before I was born, Gramps was the only grandfather I would ever know.

I was 8 years old that Christmas and as was tradition, my mom, dad, brother and I would spend Christmas Eve with my mom’s side of the family.  Because mom was an only child, the get together was mostly some of her distant cousins, aunts, uncles and of course Gramps.  It was mostly an adult gathering so with my brother and I being two of the few children at the party, it meant that in many ways we were the center of attention, with gifts coming from people we barely knew.  A great aunt giving me a baseball.  An older second cousin giving me some toy soldiers.  An under appreciated pair of winter gloves from a woman who, to my recollection, I had never seen before.  But even the gloves were ok because I was a kid, it was Christmas, and everything was perfect.

I saved my gift from Gramps for last, knowing it would be something special because from Gramps it always was.  His present to me was in a small box.  When I picked it up it had a little weight to it, but not too much.  I turned it around in my hands and gave it a little shake.  My grandfather smiled and said, “Not too hard, you don’t want to break it.”  Now I was really excited.  It might break?  That meant it was valuable!  I remember that I was now being overly careful not to damage whatever was inside.  Unwrapping it, I must have looked like a miniature doctor performing some kind of delicate surgery.  With the Christmas paper finally off, I opened the box and examined what was inside.  It was square, a little bigger than a deck of playing cards, kind of a salmon color with a large silver circle in the center.  Two little dials were on one side and when I rotated one of them I saw numbers from 560 to 1500 roll by.  Oh my gosh, a transistor radio!  It was Christmas 1963 and I was an 8 year old kid who now owned his own transistor radio!  With an ear piece included!

I spent half of the rest of that Christmas Eve showing off my new toy.  No not a toy, a real working radio.  I demonstrated to everyone exactly how the dials worked and where the music came out of that silver speaker in the center.  The other half of the evening was spent listening to my mother beg me to stop telling everyone that the radio Gramps gave me was my favorite gift.  “It’s not polite to tell people you like Gramps’ gift better than theirs.  You might hurt someones feelings.”  I tried my best to stop but I didn’t really understand what the big deal was.  It had to be obvious to everyone that they couldn’t expect to compete with Gramps?  Heck, even the old lady who gave me the gloves must have realized that.  I remember Gramps sitting in the corner of the room, legs crossed.  His eyes smiled at me.

I went to bed that night with my radio tucked close beside me, ear piece in, and the dial, as suggested by my older brother, turned to the Dick Biondi Show on WLS radio 890.

Little did I know, 1963 would not only be the last Christmas I would spend with that group of people but it would also be the last one spent with my grandfather.  I was unaware that Gramps, who was the glue that held this side of the family together, had already begun to get sick and cancer would end up taking him in the fall of 1964.  Without him there to keep it alive, our Christmas Eve tradition crumbled and things would never be the same again.

So why do I remember that gift, what made it so special?  What makes any gift special?  Is it the gift or the giver?  The gift or the circumstances under which you receive it?  Such easy questions to answer yet so easy to sometimes, also forget.

I promise this Christmas, to look into the eyes of the giver before I look into the contents of the box.

I usually don’t post to my blog two days in a row, but with the news about what appears to be the possible demise of Hostess Brands Inc, I began to get nostalgic.  How could I not?  How could any of us not?

If you are an adult reading this, it probably means that at one time you were a kid who’s eyes used to light up at the sight of just about any kind of Hostess snack.

I think that holds especially true for us baby boomers, those of us in our 50’s and 60’s.  We come from a time when it truly was a treat to find out that mom had brought home a box of Hostess Cupcakes (my brother and I used to call them “squigglies” because of the white icing design on top) from her weekly trip to the local supermarket.  If your family was anything like mine, it happened on very rare occasions.  This was the type of indulgence that my brother and I were not often afforded.  Partly due to family income and partly due to mom being conscientious about what we ate, this was considered a treat in the true sense of the word.  My mom’s grocery money was ear marked for very specific items like bread, milk, eggs, and meat.  Not Ho Hos, Snowballs or Zingers.

But isn’t that what made them so special, the rarity of having them?  Do you remember the smile that came to your face when all of a sudden out of nowhere mom would pull a Hostess box out of one of those brown paper grocery bags?  I do.

While the Twinkie and Snowball were probably my least favorite, let me make something perfectly clear; that doesn’t mean I would have ever even considered turning one down if it was offered to me.  If I saw Hostess on the label, I was eating it!  Those treats just didn’t come along everyday.

And by far, my favorite was the Ho Ho.  It was my favorite when I was a kid and it is still my favorite today.  Originally they were wrapped in foil not plastic.  Remember?

It may sound silly, but the excitement I felt as a kid when I saw that shiny silver wrapper is truly a childhood memory that is forever etched in my mind.

So to honor Hostess as one of our childhood memories, let me know what your favorite Hostess snack was when you were a kid.

There are so many things from our childhood that just fade away.  Let’s make this a day to reminisce about one of them.

I got dressed this morning and realized that I am in the fight of my life.  OK, so maybe that’s being a little dramatic, but at the very least I am in a desperate race against time.  Here it is;  Will I be able to find work before all of my clothes no longer fit?

I’ve put on a couple of pounds since losing my job so I thought it might be helpful to find out why.  If I could pin point the reason for my weight gain then maybe I could put a stop to it.  I decided to do a comparison of what a typical day at work used to be like as opposed to my new routine now that I’m home all of the time.  Maybe my eating habits had changed and that’s why I had gained the weight.  Here’s what my comparative study revealed;

When I Worked – 6:00 am – I wake up feeling a bit hungry but have no time to eat.  I grab a cup of coffee for the 45 minute drive to work.  My drive to work ends up taking an hour and a half due to road construction.  I arrive at work aggravated and no longer hungry.
Now that I’m Home – 6:00 am – I wake up feeling a bit hungry.  I turn on my computer and search employment websites for work.  I eat 3 microwavable pancakes with extra butter and syrup.

When I Worked – 9:00 am –  I haven’t eaten yet and am now beginning to get hungry again.  I go to the vending machine and buy a danish for $1.50.  I open the package and see something greenish gray in color that appears to have at one time possibly been a raisin.  With my appetite suddenly gone I throw away the danish and get back to work.
Now that I’m Home – 9:00 am –  The pancakes are like a distant memory and I begin to get hungry again.  A pan of brownies on the kitchen counter catches my eye.  There are two left.  I eat one.  Not wanting my wife and daughter to get into a confrontation over who gets the last brownie I do everyone a favor and eat that one too, washing it down with a cold glass of milk.  Then I go on Facebook.

 When I Worked – 11:45 am – I still haven’t eaten yet and I’m starting to feel really hungry.  I decide to call a local restaurant and order a sandwich for lunch.  Before I can make the call my phone rings.  The boss wants to see me.  I spend the next hour listening to him tell me about the cute thing his son did the night before, followed by another 20 minutes of him asking me how I could be so stupid as to let one of my employees buy ten thousand dollars worth of widgets when we already have a two year widget supply.  I get back to my office at 1:05 and try to remember what I was about to do before I got that call.  I can’t remember so I get back to work. 
Now that I’m Home – 11:45 am – Even though I’ve already eaten twice I’m starting to feel hungry again.  I look in the refrigerator and find left over pizza.  How had I missed that before?  Maybe because it was hiding behind the container of pot roast that I tore into yesterday with my bare hands and devoured cold, as if I were imitating how cavemen ate before fire was discovered.  I eat the pizza and get back to Facebook.

When I Worked – 2:10 pm – I hear happy birthday being sung outside my office.  Past experience tells me that the happy birthday song means cake.  Cake sounds good because I still haven’t eaten and my stomach is beginning to make rumbling noises.  But first I have a 2:15 appointment with the employee who mistakenly bought all of those widgets.  The meeting doesn’t go well and she leaves my office in a huff.  Wondering why I haven’t received any cake yet I find out the birthday celebration was for widget lady. Because she’s pissed about our meeting she refuses to give me a piece.  I get back to work.
Now that I’m Home – 2:10 pm – Bonanza, season 3 episode 18 is one I’ve seen before so I roll off the couch in search of food.  I rifle through the pantry and find a box of chocolate chip granola bars with an expiration date of 8-23-11.  I don’t figure granola can go bad, and because  they’re small but also good for you I have two.

When I Worked – 5:30 pm – Driving home I’m starving.  At a stop light I look to my right and spot a pink Good and Plenty jammed between the car seats.  I pick it up and pop it in my mouth, not realizing just how long it’s been there until it’s too late.  I bite down on it and crack a tooth.
Now that I’m Home – 5:30 pm – I’ve got ravioli boiling in the pot for dinner and decide to eat a piece of Italian bread with butter while I’m waiting for them to finish cooking.  I taste test 3 ravioli to make sure they’re done before removing them from the water.

When I Worked – 6:30 pm – I get home and can’t eat dinner because my tooth hurts too badly.
Now that I’m Home – 6:30 pm – I sit down for dinner.  I have two helpings of ravioli, 3 slices of Italian bread with butter and a Diet Coke.

Beats me.  I can’t figure this weight thing out.

Now that I’ve become a Grandfather, Grandpa,  Papa, Gramps, or whatever my grandson Leland ends up calling me, I need to get over the fact that everyone of those names sounds the same to me as the word old.  Don’t get the wrong idea, I don’t feel old, even if I did wake up this morning with a cramp in my left calf that’s still causing a slight limp five hours later.  That doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with how old I am does it?  Maybe instead of it being an indication of the aging process, I’ll get lucky and find out it’s nothing more than a sign of some serious medical condition that could happen to anyone at any age.  Or maybe it means nothing at all.  Maybe it’s just a really bad cramp.  Did you ever think of that?  I did!

OK, maybe it does mean something.  But so what if I’m starting to feel a little older physically, I’m still young mentally.

Being a grandpa now, and occasionally struggling with the reality of getting older, you might have noticed that I seem to be going through a period of adjustment.  Something I need to understand is that people are happy for me and not making fun of my age when they say things like, “Hi Dale, how’s grandpa doing today?”  I can’t get all sensitive about it and say childish things back like, “Oh just bite me!”  It gives off the impression that grandpa isn’t doing too well and doesn’t want to play nice with others.  See?  I need to adjust my attitude.

The more I get used to my new role, the more I realize there are events in our lives that call for change.  Go away to college and you have to be more independent, get your first job and you have to be more responsible, have your first child and you need to be more mature.  Become a grandparent and what, act like a grandparent?  I don’t even know what that means.  I just know I have so much to learn about this new stage of my life.  Sometimes I find myself doing and saying things that I don’t think are befitting how a grandparent should act and it makes me wonder if I may need to make some changes myself.

For instance, here’s something I can’t imagine a grandfather doing.  Sometimes when I get out of the shower, in an attempt to get motivated into losing a few pounds, I talk to myself.  I grab my stomach on either side so that my navel appears to look like a tiny little mouth and say things like, “Hey, looking a little chubby today aren’t we?  Would it kill you to hit the treadmill once in a while?”

Ok, let’s forget that one.  I just re-read this and realized it sounds like something that maybe I shouldn’t have been doing at any age.

Then how about this?  This is something a grandparent definitely shouldn’t do.  Last Sunday I cursed out three people while pulling out of the church parking lot.  Wait, actually it was only two, I swore at one of them twice. But c’mon, it wasn’t like they didn’t deserve it.  One woman pulled out of her parking spot right in front of me as if I were invisible and I cursed her.  Then some guy comes racing down an aisle and nearly T-Bones me and I cursed him.  Then the same woman who originally pulled in front of me decided to drive just the right speed, SLOW, so that she could make it through the traffic light at the end of the parking lot and I couldn’t.  That’s where I got my two for one curse in.

OK, I just re-read this one too and it sounds like another one of those things that I shouldn’t have been doing at any age.  But give me a break, they were driving like my grandpa!!!!

Oh my gosh, what did I just say?!

It was the fall of 1961 and I had just come off a particularly bad breakup with my former kindergarten teacher.  Sometime over the summer without as much as a phone call or even a letter, Miss Walker had gotten married and become Mrs. Calhoun.

None the less I entered the first grade, head held high determined to put the Walker/Calhoun relationship behind me and move on with my life.

I realized early on that my new teacher Mrs. Sanders wasn’t going to be a suitable replacement.  She was already married, about 60 years old and had an aroma that smelled like a combination of lilacs and moth balls.  Although I was attracted to older women, this was just not going to work.

Then I spotted who every other first grade boy (and probably a number of second graders also) had already noticed.  Laura Lee.  She was not only the cutest girl in the first grade class but most likely the cutest girl in the whole James Giles Elementary School.  Memories of that brazen hussy Miss Walker or Mrs. Calhoun, whatever she was calling herself nowadays, quickly faded as I set my sights on Laura.  It soon became obvious that the competition for her attention would be fierce, when I discovered that even my good friend Billy Fall had entered the Laura Lee derby.

Although my mom, as mothers do, insisted that I was a fine looking boy, my confidence had been damaged by a fickle teacher of 5 year olds, and I was now painfully aware that I was not the best looking kid that God had placed on this earth.  If I was going to have any chance with Laura at all, I would need to find an edge.

Then it happened, Laura’s mother had volunteered to be in charge of a school talent show.  Laura was asking everyone if they would be willing to participate, and when she approached me, I saw my opening and went for it.  Of course I would be in her cute little show, why not?  Count me in.

Having no recognizable talent, my first hurdle would be figuring out what to do.

In the late 50’s and into the 60’s there was a singer by the name of Harry Belafonte who was known as “The King of Calypso.”  He sang Caribbean style music and his big hit was called “The Banana Boat Song.”  You might remember it by its signature lyric “Day-O.”   Somehow, I along with my parents help, decided that this was the number I would perform at the James Giles talent show.

I was nervous, petrified actually, but for one whole week I had Laura’s attention.  Everyday she would ask if I was still in.  Of course I was!  But everyday I grew less and less sure.

The day before the show, I hit the wall.  I realized I wasn’t going to be able to go through with it.  I was too afraid.  I don’t remember the exact conversation but I’m sure it went something like this. “Dad, would you call Laura’s mother and tell her I won’t be in the talent show?”  “You’re six years old son.  You know how to use the telephone.”

My dad had a way of teaching a lesson without getting too wordy and losing the message.  The implication was clear even to a first grader.  You got yourself into this, now get yourself out.  He wasn’t saying that he would never help me again.  He was saying that he would make parental decisions as issues came up.  And on this day, in this circumstance, six years old was not too young to start learning how to be a man.

I called and apologized to Laura that day and did not participate in the talent show.  In fact I never even went to the show to watch.

Now some people will read this and say my dad was too easy on me, that he should have forced me to stay in the show.  Some people will say he was too hard on me, he should have made the call for me, after all I was just a kid.

I say that he handled it with just the right balance of discipline and compassion and I also say that we need more parents like my dad in the world.

Why do I say this?  Because over 50 years later I still remember the lesson.

 

Since being out of work I’ve found myself struggling with and over analyzing decisions that I never used to give a second thought to.  Where once I used to concern myself with problems at the office, I now wrestle with issues like; should I take out the trash the night before pick up or should I make it more challenging and race the garbage truck to the curb in the morning?  Can I have my cup of 8 O’clock coffee now, even though it’s only 7:30, or should I wait a half hour?  After I shower should I put on my sport deodorant so that I can smell like the queen of the Ice Capades all day long or should I go Au Natural?  The amount of decisions I have to make are mind boggling.

But the dilemma that faced me yesterday was particularly difficult because it involved a moral as well as an ethical issue.  Before mowing the lawn, should I rake and bag the leaves…..OR…… because the leaves are from their tree anyway, should I just blow them back into my neighbors yard?  See what I mean?  This isn’t as easy as whether I should use one or two garlic cloves in my chuck roast recipe.  This is a toughie!

To make this choice based solely on how much work each of these tasks will take is a no brainer, a gimme, a can of corn, a simple choice.  Do it the easy way.  Pull out the blower and start blowin!  But my conscience won’t allow me to do that without calling for backup to support my un-neighborly decision.  Time to solicit some input from my wife.

If there is one thing I’ve learned about marriage after 27 years, it’s that the best time to ask your spouses opinion is when you already know that their opinion will agree with yours.  Just like any good lawyer, don’t ask the question unless you know the answer. This was going to be like taking candy from a baby.  We had just had this discussion the other day.  She said, “Dale, you need to mow the lawn one last time but you’ll have to rake the leaves first.”  Then she said, “Actually, you should just blow them into the neighbors yard.  They came from their tree anyway.”  See!  It was her idea to begin with!  I would have never thought of a terrible thing like that on my own!  Now, to seal the deal and make sure there was no misunderstanding, which there wasn’t, I just needed her to confirm that one more time and I would be home free.  In just a few short minutes I would be outside blowing like the north wind.

Before she left for work I played it cool and said, “Sue, I’m going to mow today.”  She said, “You’re going to rake first right?”  Crap, where did that come from?!  I tried to play it off as if she were kidding.  “Why, is the blower broken?”  I joked.  “Don’t blow them onto the neighbors lawn.” she said, “That wouldn’t be right.”  I think I must have blacked out for a minute because the next thing I knew she was getting into her car and backing out of the driveway.

What?!?!  My head was spinning.  I suddenly understood exactly how Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden must have felt when they asked O.J. to try on that black leather glove and Johnny Cochran said, “If it doesn’t fit you must acquit.”  Only now it was my wife saying, “Before you mow, you mustn’t blow.”

Just like Marcia and Chris, I had blown it.  I had asked one too many questions.  I sat at my kitchen table and gazed out the window.  So many leaves on the ground and so many more that still needed to fall.  I stared at that damn tree, wishing it would just somehow go away.  Finishing my coffee, I went to get a rake and caught a glimpse of my axe sitting in the corner of the shed.  Hmmmmm…….Decisions, decisions.