When I was at the peak of my ‘Trick or Treat’ powers, primarily the grade school years, neighborhoods far and wide opened up like candy dispensaries. It wasn’t just a particular street or area that opened up its doors but every street and nearly every door. As long as you could keep walking was how much bounty you came home with and we didn’t use conventional bags or those plastic pumpkins because that limited the size and poundage of what we could carry. Instead, the large-scale operators like myself used pillow cases. By the end of the evening, if...
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My step-dad (father #3 if you’re counting) has been in my life since 1972 and when I dare to count the years, which I often don’t, it adds up to a majority of my adult life. On Sunday morning, May 24th, 2009, he passed away due to cancerous complications. From the moment I met Bob I wondered if the word ‘gregarious’ were too meager a term to describe this guy. His personality lit up like a neon Vegas sign; open for business 24/7. How could he keep the energy flowing like that? And yet, he was clearly feeding off...
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In the 1950′s, unlike today, TV broadcasts had a daily shelf life and at some time in the morning, say 3am or so, after the late movie and some nebulous local half hour show no one watched, the voice-over announcer would explain that the broadcast day had concluded and would return at such and such a time. Then they played the national anthem with the flag waiving away and then, boom, nothing but static and white noise. When I got up around 5:30am on Saturday mornings for cartoons I deliberately got up a bit early, before the programming day...
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I don’t think I ever quite got the worth of Kindergarten. Back in 1956, pre-school hadn’t been created and kindergarten was the launching pad for your school years. Most of the kids in my class were discovering the wonders of their newfound social circle, while others were simply enthralled with their own boogers or the taste of white paste. After careful examination of all the circumstances involved, I decided that kindergarten might hold some untapped value; the only question being what and how. First of all, the teacher was well past the nurturing stage and into basic little-twerp management....
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My dad (father #2) loved the grandiosity of staged illusion and made it a major part of his performing repertoire. When he spoke of the history of magic and magicians it was with great reverence for the craft and he worked hard to hone his own skills so that they were a worthy contribution to the greats that came before him. He made himself, Frederick the Great, and while that smells a little like Michael Jackson dubbing himself the “King of Pop”, my dad realized the marketability of ‘sounds like’, ‘acts like’, ‘is like’. So, he was Frederick the...
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With the recent passing of my step-dad (father #3, more on him later), the inevitable barrage of morbid thoughts have been pouring into my brain. I’ve also ratcheted up my macabre humor to previously unheard of levels but that is how I’m personally dealing with his death. Everybody’s got their way. So for the past month or more, my life (and the lives of my mother and my wife) have been forever altered and big changes are in order. A short time beyond my dad’s service, something especially wonderful happened that was born, inadvertently, from his passing and something...
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At various times throughout my youth I had BB Guns, pellet guns, a machete, archery gear, an array of deadly fireworks that would rival a military ammo dump, and even a .22 caliber rifle, but for all of that I just didn’t have the heart of a hunter. Tin cans I could brutally mow down with the conscience of a mercenary. A battalion of plastic army men were gone in the blink of an M-80 blast and, hearkening back to the stone age, dirt clods were lobbed like grenades at the neighbor kids. With all of that inherent destructive...
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From the ages of about 9 to 12 I used to go with my mother to visit my Great Aunt Louise at her cabin in Brainard, Minnesota. I loved Aunt Louise and looked forward to seeing her in the summer. By the time I hit 12, two major things had changed my summer vacation plans…one being my hormones and the other being Aunt Louise’s marriage to Dan, a local farmer, so we spent part of the time at the cabin and the other at Dan’s farm which, city boy me, found charming for all sorts of odd reasons. I...
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Of the many experiences one can rack up over the years, sometimes it’s nature’s unexpected revelations that become the most memorable. Your first tornado, your first look at birth, your first foray into Poison Ivy, but it was the onset of puberty that gave me an unparalleled hormonal triumph that I would never forget. You simply don’t see it coming. You’re strolling along, all little boyish, and bang, girls are suddenly on the map and life has a new complication. Pig Latin and mud pies should have been enough of a challenge but the gravitational pull of the female...
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