Young and stupid.

It was likely suggested by some parent dazed by their child’s disregard for personal safety and lack of good judgment in the face of the obvious. I’m not saying that those in the older ranks can’t come up with disturbingly inane ideas, I’m just saying that it comes more gracefully to the younger generation and at that age their miscalculations can be dismissed with the above phrase and nobody gets hurt…unless they actually get hurt.

What got me thinking about this was that recently my 18 year old nephew asked me what I thought of the idea  of he and some buddies buying a canoe kit, building the thing and setting sail for their local university where a sea of equally dopey freshmen would be hanging out. Now when he asked me I immediately played the ‘adult’ card and asked him what his mother had thought of the idea. Of course, she thought it was a lousy idea and I chimed in with the “Listen to your mother, she has your best interests at heart”.

Crossing the ravine bridge the hard way

Then I went on to explain a few things that he might never have considered; logistical things like after you and your buddies have anted up for the canoe, who keeps the it? Where do you store it? Will you ever use it again? John Denver built his own airplane and look what happened to him? I felt that I had him fairly talked out of the whole canoe thing.

Then, inexplicably, I went on to tell him a story of a time in my second year in college when a friend and I bought a two-person blow up raft from army surplus, dropped a case of canned beer in the middle of it and set sail down the large river that led to our school. From where we started it was going to cover many miles and would be slow because of those crappy little oars that aren’t much more efficient than paddling with your hands. Anyway, to condense a story that took nearly all day to complete, we ended up discovering where local companies dump their waste, received a sunburn the virtual equal to running into a burning building, found out that there are more mosquito nests than you can count on the banks of the river, beer gets warm quickly and, finally, there are no bathroom facilities on a raft that you can’t stand up in.

In the end, I tacked on a ‘by the way’ that identified my mother as the one who drove us to the park where we put the raft in the water. I knew I was shitcanning my entire ‘good judgment’ argument but I couldn’t stop myself and I think I know why. Somewhere in the recesses of my addled mind lie the thought that young people do ridiculous things because there is, when you’re in the process of expanding the world beyond your parents backyard, a need to test just how far you can go with an idea and still talk about it the next day.

In the late teens everything is still very new and when my friend and I hopped in the raft that day we ended up crossing several things off the list of  ‘never going to do that again’. Fortunately, we didn’t drown, we weren’t swallowed up by toxic waste and we didn’t end up in a burn ward. But what did we learn? Well, principally, that staring at somebody for hours on end makes you, at the end of this torturous period, never want to see them again so be prudent with your time spent with others.

After I hung up with my nephew I started to think back on the litany of dumb moves I’d made when I was younger so here, for your consideration, is a sampling of acts a sane person would never take part in:

1) In my mid-teens I had a homemade go-cart that I would race around our backyard where there was a sharp turn right before a sapling. Nearly every time I took that turn I cut it too sharply (the ruts were there to prove it), dumping the cart over sideways and narrowly escaping a crushed skull by a large metal railing that missed my head by about 2 inches. Proving that I’d learned nothing, I continued to flirt with the same danger repeatedly. Fortunately, the worst damage done was to a defenseless barbecue.

2) Around the time of a particular July 4th I had built an elaborate structure in our backyard out of two by fours and sheet plastic. Then I figured we could camp out back there even in the rain. So when the 4th rolled around I thought it would be a cool idea to seal ourselves in and light sparklers since it was fairly roomy and would light up the place. Fire, especially 2,000 degree flaming magnesium, needs a lot of oxygen but, amazingly, it took me awhile to figure out why me and my buddy had monstrous headaches and sudden nausea.

3) In college, to get from one side of the campus to the other, they had built a 230 foot steel bridge that crossed over a very deep ravine. It was 70 feet to the bottom of the ravine so, naturally, I decided that it would be a great idea to traverse the bridge…underneath the concrete walkway moving from girder to girder just to taunt gravity.

4) When I was in my mid-30′s and living in New York City, on the way back into the city via the New Jersey Turnpike, I saw a plodding turtle crossing the deadly highway and decided that I needed to stop and rescue the thing. Just stopping on the turnpike was insane but navigating the multiple lanes of constant traffic like some daring real-life game of Frogger was truly foolhardy. I eventually snagged the turtle and tossed it into the ditch out of harms way where it probably crawled up the other side and got crushed by the traffic headed the other way. But what was I going to do, give him cab fare home?

In all of these cases I lived to dumb another day and the log of mildly amusing stories can be inserted into various social situations. But, for youth, there’s a commitment to diving head first into life’s dangers and to ignore basic instinct. It’s not safe but it is instructive and if you’re taking mental notes along the way, and observe even a modicum of self-preservation, you’ll probably survive.

And, in the end, isn’t it the length and breadth of life that gives us a fuller experience? Isn’t throwing caution to the wind, on occasion, a good thing? If you’ve never done anything remotely stupid in your time, you either weren’t trying or you grew up in a monastery. Maybe I should call my nephew up and encourage him to build that canoe after all…

Nah. It’s a dumb idea.

I had an elevated opinion of my interests in explosives as something much more high-minded than the annoying, jackass kid screwing around with fireworks that I was. No, I appeared to myself more like a Mr. Wizard (popular TV science kid’s show of the ’50′s and early ’60′s) or the latter day Mythbusters, conducting experiments in the impermanence of matter. I would always say: “What would happen if we…” and then go blow it up.

Stand back from this story, kids, and don’t try this at home.

My two favorite weapons of crass destruction were those deadly old standbys, M-80′s and Cherry Bombs. After all my teen years acquiring those items illegally from Ohio, you’d think I’d be minus a finger or two, or been tagged ‘Stumpy’ by the neighborhood kids but all my limbs and digits remained intact because I also had a healthy fear of their power. Fascination and fear go hand in hand if you have any sense of self preservation.

M-80′s were the acknowledged powerhouse but Cherry Bombs were waterproof (fuse and all) and having that extra special trait opened up a host of possibilities around the water theme. For instance, I liked to put water in various metal containers to see what sort of blast might displace the water to such an extent that it came apart.

Let me be clear. This is a stupid thing for a kid to do. There is a lot of powder in these things and blowing up metal objects is like sitting around in the back yard playing with hand grenades. And yet, I did it, and repeatedly, sometimes doubling the charge. The idea was to dream up a scenario (decide on what to blow up, figure the necessary size of the blast), light the fuse, drop the Cherry Bomb(s) and run fast and hard. I had a big backyard so there was plenty of room to run and still witness the results.

Initially, I blew apart a few metal wastebaskets, spewing water everywhere and ripping them apart at the seams. Then I found an old teapot, small but just big enough to get a Cherry Bomb taped to a small rock (so it sank to the bottom) through its opening. This would be a very confined space so, we theorized, the blast would have a lot of compression and the water nowhere to go; meaning that if we were to stumble on the ‘run away’ part of the experiment, there was a decent chance we could make a trip to the ER.

It exploded with unbelievable force and actually tore apart the metal crimping that adhered the bottom of the pot to the top, leaving a trail of water beads and shooting the dismembered top more than 200 feet in the air. Try as we might, we never found the top half of the pot even though we watched its descent into the vacant field next door. Imagining a Cape Canaveral scenario, we decided that it must have burned up upon re-entry.

Obviously, all of this had nothing to do with celebrating the birth of our nation. Not only that, but the nation, as I knew it on our block, was not kindly toward my pyrotechnic experiments. My next door neighbor, Mr. King, was a really good guy but, unfortunately for him, he was surrounded by a houseful of boys on his right, a houseful of girls across the street and Wernher von Braun on his left. The guy had nowhere to go but down into the bomb shelter and there were several occasions where he expressed his displeasure over my July bombing run.

All these years later, I can sympathize with his shell-shocked plight and wonder why he never played the ultimate trump card and called the police to stop my illegal blasts but, as angry as he would sometimes get, he refrained from sending me into a life of juvenile incarceration. He was a good neighbor and I was a myopic, disrespectful dumb shit. I thought I was entitled to set off nerve-destroying fireworks in my backyard. Isn’t that what we fought for in the revolutionary war…fireworks displays?

While I was constantly fascinated with water explosions (I even tried the lake), I also made forays into buried charges beneath a battalion of plastic army men and machines, and eventually took to the air in a stunning exhibition of the frailty of cheap wood.

My friend, Bobby, and I decided (actually I decided and he assisted) to strap an M-80 onto one of those inexpensive balsa gliders and let the splinters fall where they may. First we rigged the glider, Scotch taping the bomb in place and then I shimmied up the tree around 25 feet or so. From there I would light the fuse and toss the plane into the air while Bobby watched from below. Making a couple of dry test runs (sans lit fuse) we quickly realized that the smaller gliders we were using suffered from the weight of the M-80 so we went back over to the dime store (a couple of blocks away) and got one of the big gliders, not only with a larger wing span and fuselage but a wind-up rubber band propeller to help sustain the flight.

The tree was about 10 feet from the house but I’d be sending it out towards the backyard where there was plenty of room for its eventual destruction. Everything was set and the test run was a complete success so I went back up in the tree, farther up this time, wound the propeller, lit the fuse and let it go. At first, it sailed beautifully out of the tree, sparks flying from the fuse, both of us in delightful anticipation of the great blast.

And then, it turned.

Balsa gliders are notoriously fickle. There was a slight breeze and the plane began to bank and turn back toward the house, right where Bobby was standing. There was a moment where I flashed upon a life behind bars, having killed my boyhood friend with a weapon I devised and delivered from a tree top. Bobby still had those young legs to rely on and took off running but the maniacal suicide plane turned every time he did and the way it followed his every move started to make me giggle because it looked so Buster Keatonish. I know, I know, amuse yourself with a predicament like this and you’re flirting with a trip to hell, but I couldn’t help it. I was both appalled and entertained at the same time.

Finally, Bobby dove out of harm’s way and the glider exploded with a deafening thunderclap and there it was…50 cents well spent. Bobby was a bit shaken but unharmed, declaring that next time he would be the one in the tree and I could run around the yard in fear of the balsa-blaster. But testing was temporarily suspended after Mr. King came out in his back yard to tell me, in more gentile wordage, what a crazy fuck I was and why didn’t I go do something useful.

I’m not an authority on children but, if I’m not mistaken, flirting with danger is pretty routine for a kid, and flaunting authority is a close second. I wouldn’t have been doing my kidley duty if I weren’t tempting fate. Even though he had no children, it’s likely that Mr. King understood that, but I’m sure that tidbit of knowledge didn’t make the noise any more palatable. In his place, I’m calling the police and shutting the ammunition dump down.

I liked Mr. King’s style when he’d finally blow a gasket and had to tell me about it. He was like a cranky Wally Cox and it would just all come spurting out in a stream of frustration which was both instructive and entertaining. As I’ve gotten older and looked into the crystal ball of my future I’ve been practicing some of Mr. King’s classic old style rants and figure I can use them when I’m finally confined to the front porch with nothing to do but bitch at the neighbor kids.

Certainly, my late DNA buddy and me shared much in common. Physical stature: lean and lanky, slightly round shouldered with big hands and long fingers. Our musical tools were the same: drummers both, guitar players both, singers both and adjunct comedians both. My mother tells me that when she sees me perform she sees a lot of him in my performances. I’m only sorry there’s no existing film of him playing because I’d love to have seen it.

Sometimes I feel like my identity is incomplete because I don’t have but the most brief recollection of the being that co-wrote the preface to my life. All the years of screaming “author, author!” yielded next to nothing and I was left to rely on third party anecdotes. You take what you can get.

Fortunately, my mother, who always leans towards sanitizing the text (carefully parceling out the bad parts) has been a bit more matter of fact recently when discussing Larry. That was his name, Larry, or, Lawrence, if we’re being more formal. I have no idea what to call him since I never had a chance to call to him but we’ll go with the Larry moniker for the sake of this story.

Keep in mind that this is not only a third party recollection but a third party recollection once removed since it occurred before Larry met my mother and was something he relayed to her after they were married.

In the mid-forties the big bands were thriving and the sole focus of popular music. Larry was working as a drummer/singer (somewhat of a rare combination) in various local bands (wherever local happened to be at the time). His skill level was good enough to draw the attention of touring big band leader, Les Brown, who happened to catch one of Larry’s gigs in a Detroit nightclub called The Night Hawk.

In town for a tour stop, Brown asked him to come downtown during the day and audition with the band and, as Larry relays it, the gig was all but his for the accepting. Now, it’s easy to see why Larry would tell this part of the story. He was confident in his abilities. He was one of the best players in the area and it was impressive that Les Brown was showing interest in bringing him into the fold.

I suppose the prudent thing would have been to let it go there and make up some fanciful ending but Larry was obliged to answer the “what happened then?” question with the truth.

On his way to the audition he found a 20 dollar bill on the sidewalk. In the 40′s that was not an insignificant piece of change and it looked like luck had not only handed him a big career break but a cash prize as well. I’d like to report that Larry pocketed the loot, went to the audition and had a long and glorious run with one of the great big bands in the country but then I wouldn’t be telling the truth.

No, dear reader, Larry had $20 and, since he had arrived downtown early, figured he’d do a little pre-celebrating by dropping into a bar and grabbing a beer…or two…or whatever the final total turned out to be. Twenty bucks went a long way in those days and on that day it went long enough that he never showed for the audition.

At this point, I hope you’re shaking your head like I am because what dumbshit would blow that kind of chance over a lousy glass of beer? My dad, that’s who, and the entire story spooks me to my core since I am dumbshit’s direct descendant and suddenly I’m psychologically holding his ghost up against my history and wondering, am I like that?

The first thing I asked my mother was, “do you think he was afraid of success?” and she, without hesitation, said, “Yes, he was.”  I have dealt with that issue myself but I can safely say I would never, considering the enormity of the opportunity, have done what he did.

While I find Larry’s story disheartening, the next Quixotic flame-out, via my stepfather, Fred (father #2), is just a case of bad judgment or lack of foresight. I’m not sure which but, in hindsight, another golden opportunity drifted away into the mist of nothingness.

Fred was a pretty good trombone player and worked quite a bit in smaller combos around town but he definitely had the chops, as we say. Before he and my mother were married he made his way out to California looking for band work and ended up with a Los Angeles audition for Lawrence Welk. Welk was in the process of putting together the unit he’d bring to television and Fred had a shot at being part of that.

Unlike Larry, Fred not only showed up on time but got offered the job in the horn section. Now, unless you’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on another planet or plane of existence you’re probably aware that The Lawrence Welk Show was around for a very, very long time. It got picked up by ABC in 1955 and ran in prime time weekends for 27 years.

Twenty-seven years…and still runs on PBS in syndication.

I let that sit there for dramatic effect but, holy crap, 27 years! And on top of that his musicians stuck with him forever because he took care of them with top pay and perks galore. Welk was a pretty straight-laced guy and maybe Fred couldn’t handle the rules and regulations that were going to come his way but he turned down the gig, called home and, in the immortal words that he would be reminded of every Saturday night until he died, said:

“I don’t think it will last.”

I was 3.

While most, if not all, children at that age lack the knowledge and dexterity to handle such a chore, I moved around the kitchen with the grace of Fred Astaire and before long had settled upon a classic menu: eggs, toast and coffee. It was, of course, the fabulous ’50′s and there was no reason to go beyond the basics; just make a good, solid American meal.

I began my project at 5:30am Sunday morning and, having little concept of time, planned on a meal time of 6:30. Also, wishing to make this a semi-formal affair and remembering the old phrase ‘fancy pants’, I went the extra mile and actually put some pants on. Then I went about assembling the necessary food items from the fridge, selecting the proper fry pan, utensils and prepping the toaster.

Finally, I located the can of Maxwell House coffee and tried to deduce how an adult might make a pot of coffee. Pot, check. Coffee, check. Stove, check. Water? I was not sure about the proportion of water to coffee. In fact, I wasn’t sure about the proportion of coffee, period, but went about tossing in an approximate amount along with an approximate measure of water and cranked up the burner to an approximate temperature for an approximate time.

Since the toast was going to be the easiest task (because what 3 year old can’t make toast?) I concentrated on the intricacies of frying eggs in a pan. I’d never had the occasion to do that before but assumed, through my superior intellect, that one had to extract the egg from the shell and then toss it in the pan. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen it done on TV, watched others perform the task, or read a detailed essay in the Ladies’ Home Journal. I didn’t know how hungry everyone would be so I splurged (hell, it’s Mother’s Day!) and cracked open nearly all the eggs in the carton.

When everything was complete to the best of my knowledge, I went to gather my parents, still asleep from their late night adult lives, and while my father appeared a bit resistant at first, I explained my efforts and called upon their celebratory selves to join me in a festive breakfast created as an homage to my mother on Mother’s Day. Slowly, they gathered themselves together to see the good deed I had done.

“Happy Mother’s Day!”, I exclaimed, waiting for the plaudits I knew were to come. My mother replied, “Oh my!”, with almost delirious surprise, but my father only stared at the kitchen with what can safely be termed ‘awe’, which I interpreted as reverently impressed beyond speech.

Sounds good, right?

Now, at this point the story tends to differ between my mother’s recollection and mine but I believe, due to my mother’s advanced age, my account is likely more accurate so here it goes:

Then we all sat down at the table I had properly set between food preparation. I poured their coffee, politely offered fresh squeezed orange juice to any who wished it and served our entrée. I recall them being a bit too voracious to speak through the consumption of such delicious fare but some of the comments went like the following.

Mother: “Son, I am deeply touched by your wonderful gift and amazed at your remarkable skills in the kitchen. You are surely the most talented 3 year old in the world!

Father: “Yes, son, I was always a big fan of yours but this food is almost better than your mother’s…ha,ha! From now on, whenever you want to toss the ball around or spend some quality time, just ask and I’ll be there. Thank you for being you.”

My mother went out to tend to her garden. My father went to work on his stamp collection and I cleaned up the kitchen until it sparkled. What a wonderful start to a great day.

My mother’s version mentioned coffee grounds everywhere on the floor mixed with broken eggs, a hearty pat on my backside for a nice try and my father grumbling something all the way back to bed to sleep off the prior evening’s indulgence, but I don’t think that’s right. I should know, I was there.

Happy Mother’s Day, mom…and, once again, you’re welcome.

1) Ry Cooder – “Yellow Roses”: I’ve had an irrational love for this 1955 Hank Snow classic ever since I started tooling around the streets of Portland, Oregon and playing my 1976 cassette of Cooder’s Chicken Skin Music; caterwauling at the top of my lungs, “But I’ll still love you, though yellow roses say goodbye”. It’s the quintessential broken hearted dirge that is chock full of schmaltz and hang-dog sentimentality and I absolutely cannot tell you why, to this day, Cooder’s version of this song is so permanently lodged in my ever-accommodating mind. 35 years later I’ve finally given into its Trekkian tractor beam and begun performing it live in my act.

2) Aretha Franklin – “Dr. Feelgood” (from Live At Fillmore West): I’ll never forget bringing this great album home from college in about my sophomore year and playing it in my mother’s living room and assuming that she would grasp the unbelievable power of Franklin’s vocals. Instead, she looked up and remarked, “She sure does scream a lot”…Oh.

3) Randy Newman – “Marie”: From 1974′s Good Old Boys, this gem of a song sat in the middle of a theme album about the redneck deep south. It is one of the most hauntingly beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard, ironically surrounding a sad, pathetic. drunken attempt at expressing love. Although, I didn’t quite share the subject’s abject failure, I looked at it in the greater sense as an anthem for people’s often spectacular inability to know how to love another person.

Controversial artist rendering depicting Princess as innocent bystander

4) Gene Pitney – “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence”, Frank Sinatra – “My Way”, Little Eva – “Locomotion”: These three unrelated 45 singles are lumped together by mutual circumstance, as they were all victims of a 1969 heinous, unprovoked, murderous spree by our toy poodle, Princess. In particular, getting over the loss of the Pitney and Eva records was so traumatic that I shunned that vinyl destroyer until her final exit. The fact that she didn’t choke on the shards disproved, for me, the theory of ‘instant karma’.

5) The Tokens – “The Lion Sleeps Tonight“: We had a tunnel that ran under the busy street that led to our grade school. They built the thing because the wee ones were getting routinely mowed down and then, of course, they staffed it with Safety Patrol kids, which was a cool job with a cool belt and about the same authority as hall monitor…keep in a straight line, no talking. I wrangled my way onto the Safety Patrol. This was a long, cavernous, concrete tunnel and when all the kids had finally cleared the tunnel and I was sure I was alone, I sang “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” because the falsetto part sounded awesome in the massive reverberation.

6) Yma Sumac – Legend of the Jivaro & Voice of the Xtabay: Because I had unusual tastes as a kid, in 1958 I brought these two albums into my second grade class for ‘show and tell’. Yma Sumac supposedly had some royal Inca heritage but what was not supposition was her amazing 5 octave voice and the wild, exotic vocals she brought to the Latin American rhythms. I’m not sure what my classmates thought but then I didn’t much care. I just thought they needed to know something outside of the monkey bars.

7) Camille Saint-Saëns – Danse Macabre: I’d always loved the graphic spookiness of this French tone poem and the story it was based on, an orchestral interpretation of the dance of death, complete with the sounds of the skeletons and other assorted creepy crap. When I was a senior in college I talked my sociology prof into letting me run one of the lectures about music and I played this piece after turning the auditorium into complete darkness. While in the dark I went about collecting wallets and purses and ended up with enough money to pay my next semester’s tuition. OK, every thing’s true except for that last part but you’ve got to admit; what a great idea for a fund-raiser.

8) Clyde King – “Wolverton Mountain”: For unknown reasons, since I bought lots of other 45′s there, this song reminds me of Kresge’s dime store when I was a kid. I bought my first single there, “When I Fall In Love” by The Lettermen, but this short-lived country hit brings back vivid images and even the smell of the store. If you had 39 cents, the music world was open for business.

9) Steely Dan – “Pearl of the Quarter”: At my mother’s place during one of my college summer breaks and I heard this song one morning on the radio. Little did I know this was just a gateway drug to the endless genius of Donald Fagen and his ability to mainstream what were essentially jazz chord structures into memorable pop creations. It was brilliantly executed and never replicated.

10) N.E.R.D. – “Hot-N-Fun”: For the past few years I’ve been running a dance party for brain injured adults in foster care. Long after I’ve surrendered the ability to get funky and I’m sitting around wondering where my knee cartilage went, this ‘get your ass up and dance’ bass line will remind me of the wonderful people I worked with and just how cool it is to let your body get lost in the moment. Life is all about the ‘groove’ and this song has a great one.

Toby was about 13 at the time we got him, and I think that his former owner would have been happy with the fact that a child was there to play with him and that my mother was willing to cater to his preferences. Toby was a fairly gentle dog and I liked him but Mrs. Smith had spoiled him as to his habits regarding cuisine.

Anti-family-terrorist exercises with Toby

Dog food in a can or bag, or any other such container was rejected outright and Toby would pull a prison-like hunger strike and just walk away whether he was famished or not. It would have been so much more authentic if we’d sewn him a little orange jump suit and stenciled some random numbers on it. Then he could have played the part to the max and we could have taken the suit in as needed in relation to the number of days he ignored dog food.

But, no, my mother thinking that since we’d accepted responsibility for Toby we’d also be obliged to keep him alive, so she acquiesced to his demands which were a tad unusual. Apparently he’d been raised on only two food items: candy corn (you know, the little goofy orange things at Halloween) and fried liver.

The liver had to be prepared fresh from the butcher, straight to the dish, so every single night my mother had to whip out the frying pan (he wouldn’t eat it raw) and have that lovely fried liver aroma floating through the kitchen. When I was a kid I sort of liked liver and onions but I think that having it hit me in the face on a daily basis ended any future interest.

So Toby got his liver and then we were supposed to toss him a few candy corns whenever he or we were in the mood. That dog could knock down candy corn like a Jello-shooting college student at a frat party, basically making him a sugar/liver junkie. I don’t know if that contributed to the ‘incident’ since he was a relatively calm dog but we can definitely establish that he was into guarding his ‘interests’.

My dad (father #2) and Toby got along pretty well but one night around 2am, as was not unusual, dad stumbled in from yet another alcohol fest at Club 99, pretty well smashed and reeking of beer and cigarettes. From previous stories you can see that my dad’s demeanor completely changed when besotted and I’m only guessing here that this contributed to Toby’s confusion at just who was coming in the front door.

To compound the problem the house was completely dark and my dad couldn’t find the light switch. To make things worse, Toby had cataracts so I’m assuming that seeing things in the dark wasn’t the first sensory radar he counted on. Anyway, my dad barely slurred the “Hi, Tob…” when Toby lunged like a lion on a gazelle and locked down sideways on my dad’s jaw, piercing both cheeks and drawing blood.

After my mother got the light on and the mistaken identity revealed, I’m assuming that Toby felt some remorse but maybe not. Maybe he was making a statement about my dad’s behavior and, not being able to put it into words, could make his strident point and pretend that it was an accident. “Hell, it was dark…could have been a burglar for all I knew…I didn’t know what I was doing…I was hopped up on candy corn”, he might have said in his faux defense.

Pure conjecture on my part.

Fortunately, we knew that Toby had received his rabies shot so there was no worry of my dad having to go through the painful array of rabies shots that are sometimes administered after a dog bite. Nevertheless, Toby had made his mark and it must have left him in a real sour mood because he started getting snippety with the neighbor kids, even leaving a dental impression on my neighbor friend, Mike.

After a couple of years, Toby retired to the great doggy beyond but, I must say, after he took out the drunken version of my dad I felt a little safer at night knowing that if you didn’t belong in my house, Toby would take care of things.

Note to Toby (wherever you are): if you happen to run into my dad you might want to fashion a little apology but it’s totally your call, ‘awesome defender of the realm’.

Since I’ve become quite a fan of randomness, here are several of mine in no particular order:

1) Chris Montez – “Let’s Dance”: Me and a buddy were always looking for a place to ‘camp out’ since that gave us the go ahead to talk the puberty talk and speculate on what we would do if we did have a girlfriend, but mostly it was an excuse to stay up late until we conked out in mid-sentence. I was about 11 when my mother’s boyfriend parked his unseaworthy Cabin Cruiser reclamation project in our backyard so we camped out in that thing and listened to Chris Montez swamp the AM airwaves all night. That organ riff will be in my head forever.

2) Joni Mitchell – “Shades Of Scarlett Conquering”: In my mid-twenties and outside a Portland, Oregon cafe/club, flat on my back on the floor of my open doored van, headset on and blubbering like a baby because my then girlfriend was doing a boy tour of the club which didn’t include me. What a wuss. A little more maturity and I would have been doing the same thing myself but oh, poor me….what a wuss. “Shades…” may have been a curious song to use as a ‘blubbering’ catalyst but nobody writes angst like Joni and this was a good one. Did I mention, what a wuss?

3) Roy Orbison – “In Dreams” and The Entire Catalog: About 9 or 10, in my babysitter’s basement listening to 45′s and discovering the unbelievable magic of Roy Orbison thinking, WTF (maybe not that exact abbreviation), who sings like that? These records belonged to the older brothers in their family but they were a revelation to me. Orbison had these curiously nerdy looks and a sonic voice that went on to haunt me for another 50 years. When “Blue Bayou” came out in ’62 I used to put my transistor radio under my pillow at night and wish to hell I could sing like that. I woke up with a lot of dead batteries.

4) Ray Charles – “Ruby”: I spent tons of time in the rec room of our basement sitting on the couch listening to records and day dreaming. I did it so much I could have qualified as Howard Hughes’ Vegas roommate. If there was ever an anthem for my self-reflection dungeon time it was Charles’ achingly brilliant version of this song that I bonded with.

5) Richard Wagner – “Ride of the Valkyries”: One of the great favors my dad (father #2) did through my elementary school years was to leave an eclectic collection of records in the basement for me to find and absorb. I may have had little of him but I had plenty of what he was about. Frankly, “Ride of the Valkyries”, the musical vision of the mad warrior chicks on horses, flying out of the heavens used to scare the shit out of me but it was a cheap thrill I loved. Years later when they used the piece during the helicopter gunship scene in the movie, Apocalypse Now, it was the Vietnam war that was scaring the shit out of me.

6) Tommy Dorsey – “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You”: Speaking of my dad (father #2), this song always triggers immediate flashbacks to him; the smell and touch of him, the kind parts of him, the talents he possessed are all unleashed from this recording. I recall sitting in the legendary Stanich’s Tavern in Northeast Portland some time in the late seventies and while everybody knocked down their Stanich burger and brew I melted into the jukebox for 2 or 3 minutes or so. It doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing.

7) Edgar Winter’s White Trash – “Save Our Planet”: I was working at a college radio station when I discovered this soul/blues/R&B/Rock and Roll/gospel masterpiece and I’ve never listened to another album that sustained such raw energy and, by random association, captured how intense my personal motor was running at the time. There was a period of time during those school years where I rode this album like a surfboard from one crazy-ass endeavor to another. I just listened to it again just now and I think I need a nap.

8) Bobby Day – “Rockin’ Robin”: We’re talking the 1957 original here and it was a song that my next door neighbor, Madelene (in her late teens at the time), loved. Now I had a kid crush on Madelene so discovering that she liked this song turned it into something else entirely. I was about 9 or 10 and she’d come over to watch me on occasion and in an effort to please I’d play that 45 over and over and even embellish it by playing my drum set live along with the record. I set that record on the dedicated 45 player and it played in constant repetition until the grooves turned white and the record eventually disintegrated into dust…pretty much as people do.

9) Doris Day – “Que Sera Sera”: I cannot think of this 1954 ditty without thinking of my mother who hauled it around the house like she owned it, waltzing from room to room trying to find ways to stylize it more like Doris. I, on the other hand, being a 6 or 7 year old prankster, was lying in wait behind the hallway pillar until she’d come crooning by and I’d jump out and scare the Doris Daylights out of her. I’m still making up for that one.

10) Curtis Mayfield – “Choice of Colors”: This is a dual purpose piece that established 2 very prominent memories. First of all, my dear lifelong friend, George, and I were nuts about this song in high school, especially what it said about humanity and racism. Secondly, in the late eighties my girlfriend and I were lying in bed late at night tossing songs to each other and I kicked out “Choice of Colors” and she proceeded to sing every last lyric. That was when I knew I loved her without reservation and began the lobbying effort to marry me.

Well, that’s just a scant 10 of mine…if the mood strikes, perhaps you’d like to share 1 or 2 in the reply mode below?

I looked forward to it because I loved the decorations, the ritual of trimming the tree and the holiday accoutrement that would bring the whole house into the season. This was a solitary endeavor that didn’t include my mother because the idea was to surprise her when she returned home, usually on a Saturday night after a date, coming into the driveway and getting that first glimpse of the neon picture window.

As much as I enjoyed the doing, I enjoyed the element of surprise because I worked it from the ground up so there was no hint of what to come. After we’d finally retired that magnificent specimen of the late ’50′s and early ’60′s, the aluminum tree with the ever revolving color wheel, there would be no tree waiting in the wings and so no giveaway as to what, when or how.

From the time I was old enough to manage the entire operation I got hold of her schedule, waited until she left and began the process by hiking to any nearby tree seller, buying something I could manhandle and, with no car at my disposal, would drag the tree however many blocks back to my house through the snow. Youth served me well in those days because if I tried that today, they’d find me the next morning, face down, having made at least a valiant effort before the coronary.

That’s why now we just take it out of the box.

The other thing to take into account were the dimensions of the tree stand which I had to visualize in my head because the damn thing was made out of cast iron and would be like hauling a boat anchor and a tree and, youth or not, I wasn’t up for that. So, as I usually do with everything (tape measure be damned), I eyeballed it and then matched the picture in my head to the prospective tree and usually came out remarkably close. Also, I had to get the height right but that was a much easier task.

After pulling the sacrificial vegetation into the garage I got a hacksaw and made the angle cut on the base so it could suck up water once in the stand and then left the inevitable trail of pine tears as I dragged it up the stairs, into the living room and up on the stand. I put plastic down on the carpet under the stand and filled it with water and added sugar to hasten its consumption, keeping it fresh for the duration.

I was like an anal retentive Martha Stewart (seems redundant, doesn’t it?) and followed my own setup protocol by the book every year. The only difference between Martha and me was that all the narrative took place in my head, the melting pot for nearly everything I did growing up.

Tree skirt, lights, ornaments, icing, in that order and, voila, the tree filled the picture window like a Christmas TV special just waiting for my mother to get the first glimpse as she pulled in later that night. After that, it was on to the wild cards; the various figurines, lighted hangings and occasional snow spray window stencils (although I abandoned that after awhile since it was such a bitch to get it off the window after the season was over).

My favorite tchotchke was a foot and a half high plastic snowman (looking a bit like Frosty) singing carols from an open book and illuminated by an appliance size light bulb in the back. I loved that crazy ass thing and still wish I had it but it’s run off, just like Frosty, never to be seen again. But while it was in my rotation it was the knickknack of all knickknacks, displayed prominently on top of the television set. There was something about the ethereal glow that it gave off that really sealed the deal on the feeling of Christmas.

After I’d spent the entire evening getting everything just Martha-perfect I was ready for the unveiling and so I waited…and waited…and waited a little more until she pulled in and walked in the front door. And there I was poised in front of my creation like Betty Furness hawking a refrigerator and just as pleased with myself as could be.

I turned that attic box of shit into a wonderland, all by myself and, every year, I was pretty proud of my work. Of course, my mother was always surprised (or faked it well) and complemented me on the arrangement but, thinking back on it now, it feels like a lonely affair. I don’t think I acknowledged that to myself way back then but, in truth, I was taking a communal celebration and internalizing it.

I’m not trying to romanticize what I never had but I think families, as completely bonkers as they’re capable of being, do feed our need for a shared experience, and maybe it’s worth walking through a minefield to achieve that. My childhood reflects none of that and so, as my wife so often laments, I have missing parts to my social machine. Sometimes I don’t communicate effectively because I’ve already talked it over with myself and we’ve come to an agreement, but maybe that’s not the best way to celebrate life because you can end up with nothing more than your own reflection.

Now, at Christmas time these days, when I’m with my fabulous niece and nephew and the large cast of kooky characters in my wife’s family, it can turn into a dysfunctional circus to be sure, but I also think how much it all takes me out of the twisted lump of synapses in my noggin and makes me a part of something larger than myself. That’s something I never knew growing up.

The other night, watching the TV comedy, 30 Rock, Tina Fey’s character had a very funny reaction to the chaos of her boss’s family Christmas dinner party, an event she was using to avoid spending Christmas with her own relatives:

“You know what I learned tonight? As hard as you try, no one can escape the horror of Christmas so it might as well be with your own family. I’m going to go get a bus to White Haven now and I should be home just in time for Aunt Linda to try to prove that she’s sober by holding someone’s baby while cooking.”

So, even though you may have constant feelings of flight and may want to run screaming from family gatherings, think of the example of my little half-baked celebration spent alone. Christmas was meant to be shared not incubated so get a bus ticket and put yourself in harm’s way…

It’s Christmas again.

Well, no, not really because at that point in the evening he was inebriated within an inch of passing out and I don’t believe that slurring counts, does it? Not to mention that he was now willing to endanger his child by taking me home in his high-riskmobile. Is that love or expediency?

My mother made many mistakes but I wonder if my dad could technically be held accountable for mistakes when making them would have assumed that he had some cogent parental design in the first place. What I think he did effectively was objectify me. He treated me like ‘a son’, and I mean that in the most clinical way possible. ‘He is my son, therefore I will act as his father’. He probably didn’t think it exactly that way, and he might have even convinced himself that he loved me, but he had no capacity to show it. Consider the following recycled responses to me over the years:

When he was still living with us before the divorce (age 9 and earlier), he refused to discipline me because he told my mother that he didn’t “want to look bad”. Since anyone with half a brain understands that reasonable discipline is an act of love, albeit a difficult one, it was a monumental show of narcissism that forced him to make my discipline all about him.

When I was 13 and beginning to play guitar and sing I’d want to go over to his house and play for him and, for a while, tried doing that but his comments were always removed from my performance; “the song wasn’t very good” or “the Beatles couldn’t hold a candle to the big bands” or “groups these days don’t know how to end a song without fading out”. But none of his blather had anything to do with me. Because he was a skilled musician I would have welcomed his critique in any way, good or bad, but none ever came. It’s a miracle that I knew I was talented because that was never reflected from him.

If I were visiting, about halfway into the beer blitzkrieg he would take my hands and, holding them in his for examination, he would tell me how beautiful they were. “Look at your long fingers and the size of your palms…such beautiful hands”, he’d say, like he were describing a painting. During those times I felt like they were someone else’s hands because his poetry had an odd distance to the boy sitting across the table from him.

When I started playing high school football and running track I was dying to get him to see me in a game or meet but, for the entire time I was there he only attended one event and that was when I got my letter and they requested that fathers be in attendance. He reluctantly went (I could feel that) and afterward at Bob’s Big Boy restaurant, he talked about how my football coach didn’t know how to use me, that with those hands of mine (here we go again) I should be a wide receiver instead of a defensive end. “I’m going to talk to him if I see him.” I was thinking ‘please don’t’ but during a late game lift home from my coach one evening, he mentioned that he’d run into my dad and was lectured on how to use me. I was incredibly embarrassed because I knew how strange and disconnected it must have sounded. Add to the fact that he never even saw me play a down and how would he know if the coach were misusing me or not?

During track season, the father of my teammate, Gary, took to showing up at practices and I’d see them talking over by the stands between runs. Some of the guys would poke fun at Gary for having his dad hanging around so often but I envied him. I could see, even from 50 yards away, that Gary’s father was there because he cared about his son and wanted to be involved in some way.

Many years later, in the mid-seventies after my dad had been dead for a few years, I had a dream about him one night. I rarely have a dream so vivid that I wake up feeling that something transcendental has occurred, but this dream burrowed so deeply into my psyche that I can still recall the sensation even as I write this today.

In the dream, against some sort of Dali-inspired backdrop, he met me and we sat down and he took my hands in his but it was different this time. He looked, not at my hands but into my eyes, with a look of understanding that was completely absent of his usual failings. He was looking at me in a way that spoke directly to me, and yet he never said a single word. We sat there like that, speechless, for what seemed like hours and at the end we stood up and he left and I never dreamt about him again.

That was the only time I knew he loved me.

These, by all reason, shouldn’t necessarily be joyful accounts because of their scarcity but sometimes we take what we’re given and can either rail against their ineffectualness (which I’ve done thoroughly in this blog) or embrace the small moments…the simple gifts.

Although this isn’t much of a list, for the sake of useless order, I’ll number them:

1) For a short time my mother was taking courses at the local community college and my dad was left to hang with me. There’s no question he would have preferred Club 99, the watering hole around the block but, left no choice, he and I did our Friday ‘Guys Night In’ when I was 6 or 7 years old. Of course, the scheduling of events were purely his but I didn’t give a shit. I was just happy that we were having ‘events’, period.

Partially because I always requested it and partially because it was his culinary specialty, we made popcorn in this old iron pot and it always came out great. His skill with constantly shaking the pot over the burner, with almost perfect timing, turned out the best popcorn I ever had. I remember that around the same time, Jiffy Pop, the prepackaged aluminum clad popping corn bubble came on the market and, although we gave it a trial run, it ended up right where it belonged, in the trash, because it couldn’t hold its own against my dad’s cast iron pot technique. I was not a fan of his other passion, pickled pig’s feet, because it was a conceptual turnoff but his popcorn and its drizzled butter were an in-house delicacy.

Then we moved on to the trusty black and white set where Gillette’s Friday Night at the Fights ruled the evening and my dad’s favorite fighter, Dick Tiger, dominated the Friday agenda. This was in a time when fighters fought early and often rather than negotiating the possibilities for months on end. If, for some reason, we were still going when the fights ended we might indulge in a little Peter Gunn action. This dark, film noir-type TV wasn’t really children’s fare (past my normal bedtime) but I got into it and understood as much as my kid brain could handle.

2) On Saturday mornings I always got up early to watch cartoons. Since it was Saturday and they were on so ridiculously early (6:30 or 7), this activity usually precluded adults from joining in, but I was always wanting my dad to watch cartoons with me. One morning, in my never ending quest, I pestered him out of dreamland and into the living room in such a stupor that he probably didn’t even know where he was.

At first I thought he might be angry and sullen but, to my surprise, he was suddenly laughing at Heckle and Jeckle (the two wise-cracking crows) right along with me. I was kind of shocked that I could even get him out of bed but now he was sitting there and we were having fun together. Then I pulled out the Oreos and a couple of glasses of milk and we dutifully plowed through the package.

He probably should have realized what a dangerous precedent this was because now I knew he enjoyed himself (even though he only lasted a half hour and then back to bed) and I was emboldened to drag him out of his slumber in subsequent Saturdays. Even though he mostly blew me off, considering he likely went to bed around 3am, every once in a while he’d appease my request and make a brief, but memorable, appearance.

3) Early in the evening, before he’d slip away for the remainder of the night, and while I was still light enough, he’d hoist me up on his lap and we’d snuggle for a few minutes. His specialty was tickling me in the crook of my neck with his day’s growth of beard stubble. This is a classic guy’s goto move and it worked because I’d giggle and squirm and, generally, appreciate the attention. Then he’d read me the jokes out of the Reader’s Digest because there were enough of them at a 6 year old level and because he never turned down the opportunity to entertain.

It’s remarkable how strong that feeling still remains and how many of those goofy jokes I can still recall (why did the man throw the butter out the window?*) but that’s the power of those small moments on a child. What sometimes passes as a inconsequential in an adult can be monumental for a child.

But none of the particulars ever mattered…none of them. I loved them all for a singular reason. I could look over and see my dad eating popcorn with me. I could see him enjoying something and he was doing it with me. Later on I tried to figure out why the barflies at Club 99 might be more interesting than me, but booze was his daddy and I’d have to wait for adulthood to understand that.

(*to see a butterfly!)