Sure.  In some places, here and there, you absolutely WILL find the stereotypical east coast neighborhoods.  Gotta be a REASON for the stereotype, right?  But here’s what NOBODY told me — once you get a couple of miles outside of any one of those urban areas, it’s BEAUTIFUL.  Green, lush, shady, awesome. 

But I didn’t go from the one extreme (east coast SUCKS!!) to the other (western US is a DUSTBOWL, mang!) in one trip.  It was a slow build, for sure.

My first trip was work-related, in 2006.  Potomac, Maryland.  Out in the country.  We landed at Reagan National Airport, and I got to see those iconic Washington, DC monuments and memorials from the air.  Impressive, but still — dirty, cityish, gross.  As the cab drove from the airport and through the countryside to Potomac, I couldn’t get over how GREEN everything was, though.  Ginormous trees that were themselves festooned with vines and other plants.  Riotous would be a good word here.  So yeah, impressed as I was, and as much as I LOVED the time I got to spend in “the city” on that trip, the idea of ever actually LIVING there was pretty ludicrous.

In 2007, I got to go back to Washington and actually stay RIGHT DOWNTOWN at the Sofitel on Fifteenth and H.  I was there for a training class for work, but I was left with PLENTY of time to explore the city at night.  I walked ALL OVER EVERYWHERE, from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial and back, discovering on my own the Korean War Memorial (I had never heard of it) and the World War I Memorial, which is kind of hidden.  I had an amazingly stupid moment where I stared up at the dome that tops the memorial at the words (I’m paraphrasing here) Dedicated to the Washington DC Boys Killed in the World War.  And I thought, “Which one?”  Duh.  In the space of five days, I cruised five of the nineteen Smithsonian museums, ate exotic foods such as sweet potato fries and grilled endive, and learned all about some software I was using at work.

Later that year, we all took an epic three-week vacation that ranged from Philly to Worcester (my Utah peeps can have forty-five minutes here to argue about pronunciation, but just remember — it’s WUH-stuh.  DehyaGO!) to Maine to (reluctantly) Jersey to even Canada, a little bit.  Aside from some VERY funny stories about a general inability to follow instructions or people in traffic, the trip was AMAZING.  I was especially struck by the bucolic unbelievability of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York and, really, Vermont in general.  This trip was far more immersive and started the process of melting my resolve to never leave Ogden.

The following year (2008, if you’re keeping score at home), we repeated the same vacation, more or less, but with only the Missus and me, the boy, and his two cousins.  Bliss.  I can’t even describe how indescribably wonderful that trip was.  Another work trip a couple months later, again to Potomac, and finally the decision was made.  I was talking to the missus on the phone, I’d had maybe one or two more beers than I was used to, and we decided it was time to start looking for a job in Philly or DC and get our asses east.

Long story short, after nearly three years, we’re here.  We made it.  I now work on the same floor where my training class in 2007 was held, as a Customer Solutions Specialist for that very software program the training class had trained me for.  This is a framework, but there are DOZENS of stories that are all tied into this main narrative, and that’s what I’m going to try to talk about in the next little while here.  But welcome, all my pretties (I think I have like, THREE followers here) to this next stage of my grand adventure.  So much about my life is different now, but I’m still pretty much the same.  Hope you’ll enjoy some laughs at my expense as I relate some of the more ridiculous ways we got here.

Cheers!
Tommy (the REAL one)

Anyway, as I’m sure everyone is aware, there is a very big difference between knowing someone and merely knowing who someone is.  There are many, MANY people around town whom I can identify, but only a few that I could comfortably say I know, and fewer still whom I consider to be, if not friends, at least VERY close acquaintances.  One of these rare, special, and beautiful people died unexpectedly a little less than two weeks ago.  Recently enough, anyway, that his passing still doesn’t seem real.  Not sure, at this moment, that it ever will.

If you were lucky enough to know Bruce Carlson, aka Tich, aka BC, aka Homo erectus, then nothing I’m about to say will be a surprise to you, but we all had communal AND individual knowledge of this unbelievable treasure of a man, and I’m here, of course, to relate my very personal reasons for being so fond of him, as well as my surmisements (hey, it’s a word if I say it and you know what I mean when I do) as to why he was fond of me.

As an early- to mid-teen boy, I was incredibly homophobic.  I’d been taught to be such by my friends and acquaintances at the time, conditioned to religiously avoid being even a little bit effeminate, to not behave in any way that might reveal me to be a fag.  This is, I know, very ugly shit and doesn’t paint me in the best light, but I’d rather be honest about this than pretend I’ve always been a paragon of tolerance.  I haven’t been, so to say otherwise would be a lie.

I can’t even pinpoint when this started to change, but I know that by the time I was sixteen, I was going through a lot of mental and emotional changes that caused me to not only sympathize with, but even to identify with homosexuals.  A lot of this had to do with a burgeoning realization that I really liked to dress well.  Previously, I hadn’t realized that all men with any fashion sense were gay, but believe me, everyone I knew at the time was quick to point this out to me.

Because so many, many of my age-mates were becoming increasingly convinced I must be gay, I began to question my own sexuality.  I matched so very many stereotypes of the gay kid, it was pretty hard to ignore.  I was very into drama, art, unpopular music, and fashion.  I was terribly interested in girls, but none of them seemed at all interested in me.  I took that to mean they must be sensing something I wasn’t consciously aware of.  But like the Katy Parry song says, eventually, at seventeen, “I kissed a girl and I liked it.”  Incidentally, she herself was very into drama, fashion, and unpopular music, and apparently still is.  She’s grown to be every bit as smart, sophisticated, and awesome as I always suspected she would.  But I digress.

As I finished out my teens and entered my early twenties, I had become what I should always have been — completely unconscious of others’ sexual preference as a method for judging their worth.  I actually got to a point where I didn’t notice, in the vast majority of cases, people’s race, sexual orientation, or gender.  I looked at almost everyone I knew or newly met as people first and whatever subcategories either later or, increasingly, not at all.  It was around this time that I met Bruce for the very first time.

No one told me he was gay, but that wasn’t really necessary.  Those of you who knew him will know what I mean when I say that although it was obvious, it also wasn’t the central fact of knowing him.  He never flaunted it, and yet, he ALWAYS did.  He never cared one way or another whether you noticed it.  It was at once his defining characteristic and the least important thing about him.

One of my favorite things about Bruce was that he was a very sharing individual.  Many will back me up when I say that it was at once an endearing and exasperating trait in him.  When he discovered a new joy, a new hobby, a new interest, he would go to extraordinary lengths to get you interested in it as well, and would not be gainsaid.  The earliest conversation with him that I can remember, he was explaining to me why he had a padlock hooked through the button fly of his Levi’s.  It was a new fashion trend he was trying to get going.  He explained all the symbolism behind it, as if it needed explaining.  When I tried to explain the (to me) obvious physical reasons to NOT engage in that particular trend (walking around with a padlock whacking into my junk repeatedly all day), he poopooed my objection by explaining it would teach me to walk more gracefully.  What a guy.

Oddly enough, the LAST conversation of any length I had with him before he died involved fashion, as well.  I had recently posted a photo of Tom Jones in a white mesh t-shirt and was enthusing to Bruce about how unbelievable Tom looked in the photo.  I explained how ridiculous I usually find men in mesh shirts to look, and he seemed to take it as a personal affront.  True to his Bruceness, he immediately lifted the shirt he was wearing to reveal the orange mesh t-shirt he was wearing under it.  He explained he was trying to get mesh t-shirts to catch on again because they make any man, no matter how in or out of shape he might be, look fabulous.  I still disagree, Bruce — VERY few of us can carry off that look.

It’s so very hard not to digress when thinking or speaking (or typing) about Bruce, because there are SO many things to be said about him.  To cut to the chase, somewhat — I loved Bruce because, at the end of any given day, Bruce was always Bruce.  He was one of the most absolutely genuine people I have ever known.  So much so that I have often feared for his safety as he walked or rode his awesome folding bicycle around Ogden, a town not known for its spectacular tolerance of anyone even slightly different.  Bruce taught me, more than anything, that merely tolerating or being tolerant isn’t enough.  We tolerate the things we really and truly don’t like, but have learned to put up with.  Bruce taught me to love the differences in people, not merely ignore them.  And that’s perhaps the biggest reason I have to thank him for having been a part of my life, as well as being the reason I think he liked me.  He so successfully taught me to love people that I never treated him any differently than I do any of my other friends.  His sometimes over-the-top homosexuality never made me uncomfortable, and I think he recognized that in me and many others and appreciated it.

He is also largely responsible for my militant support of the GLBTA community.  Whenever I imagine anyone being shitty toward a gay man or woman, I imagine Bruce as the victim.  I always felt very protective of him, and imagining anyone being horrible to him was (and still is, and hopefully always will be) enough to enrage me, enough to encourage me to never “let it slide” when someone is being as homophobic as I once was.  It’s one of my five or six hot buttons, and was before I met Bruce.  He was merely an intensifier of that feeling, and it’s one more thing I have to thank him for.

Bruce, according to my beliefs, is truly gone in any physical or “reality-based” sense.  I don’t believe any part of him (soul, ka, whatever) has survived him.  However, he touched SO many people’s lives in SO many ways that he will live on through us.  Yeah, the writers among you are groaning at the triteness of such a statement, but I stand by it.  We say things like that about so many people, but it’s very true of Bruce.  Bruce touched people in a way incomparable with anyone else.  I will miss him in ways that will continually surprise even me.

Joe was (and probably still is — I still see him around from time to time) an incredibly nice guy.  Terrible awful stuff used to happen to him on an incredibly regular basis, however.  In Pirates of the Caribbean, when the Black Pearl blows up the jail and everyone’s cell is knocked open but Jack’s, and one pirate says to Jack on his way out, “You have my sympathies, mate — you’ve no manner of luck at all,” I invariably think of Joe.

As an example, on one occasion when I asked him how he was, he embarked on the following tale:

Oh, man!  I was drivin home from my ex-old lady’s place in Washington Terrace, you know?  We had a BIG ol fight and stuff, so I was already in a really bad mood.  Anyway, I was driving just a leeeetle too fast and got pulled over.   I gave Pete a ride earlier and he left a bottle of rum in my back seat.  The Terrace cop that pulled me over was lookin around in my car and saw the booze and man, I was about to start explaining I wasn’t drinkin or nothing and instead, I just started to cry.  Like a little baby, man, I couldn’t even TALK!  I wasn’t trying to get out of the ticket or nothing, but the cop, man, he just tole to drive more carefully and he LET ME GO!!  I couldn’t beLIEVE it!  The crying wasn’t fake or nothing, don’t get me wrong — I just had THAT bad a day, you know?

So, to this day, Joe’s the only guy I know who ever got out of a ticket by crying.

Anyway, this would happen anytime anybody asked Joe how he was.  Most people you ask this question of will give the socially acceptable, “Fine, how are you?”  It’s a question we ask and don’t expect a full report.  And because of Joe’s usual luck, these conversations invariably made my life seem pretty cool by comparison. 

We all need a Joe, but I’ll go a step further and say we should make sure we’re not a Joe ourselves. . . .

What a guy, right?  So one day, when I was like, maybe four or so, my older sister (about seven) said, “You KNOW he’s not really talking just to you, right?”

“Yes HUH!!  Shut up!!”  (Even at four, I was wicked witty.)

Horrified, the next time Fred asked me if I could say something, I refused to answer.  Guess what he did?

Bet you can’t even guess.

Go ahead and try.

This is what happened:  He STILL said I’d done a good job, when I HADN’T SAID ANYTHING AT ALL!!!!  What next?  Santa Claus’s BEARD is fake???

Ah, childhood.  It’s all about losing faith, isn’t it? 

Before continuing on where she left off, however, I want to add a tiny little detail about setting up camp.  I approach setting up camp in much the same way as I approach cooking bacon — it’s my job and everybody else better just stay the holy hell out of my way, in other words.  With the bacon, it’s all got to end up the exactly perfect crispness, so there can be no overlapping of pieces and if this means I can only cook three or four pieces at a time, like it or go hungry, yeah?  And if you even THINK about messing with my pan of bacon, you’ll receive SUCH a browbeating, you’ll never look at eyes the same way ever again.  Apply that same mindset to pitching a tent, arranging bedding and fireside seating, meal prep, etc., and you’ve got me setting up camp.

After the bulk of the heavy lifting was done, I took an eye-wateringly cold beer out of the cooler, sat on the lid, and removed my mud-caked engineer boots.  Heavy anyway, the mud added several tons.  I twirled the cap off the bottle, tilted my head back for a well-deserved slug of cold cheap beer, and almost didn’t notice the ginormous white barn owl screaming in at eye level.  Right at my face.  Must’ve mistaken the pony tail for a rodent of some kind.  I nearly choked on my beer, because it’s pretty difficult to safely swallow icy beer while keening like a little girl at the same time.  At almost the exact same instant, the owl realized I was maybe just a smidge larger than his usual diet, and he also screamed like a kitten with its tail caught in a kitten-tail-crusher.  I think if I were an owl-whisperer, this is what must’ve passed through his mind as he wheeled away:  SHIT!!  MONKEY!!!  I picked myself up off the dirt an instant before the beer bottle would’ve implanted itself in my forehead.  Kris, of course, was laughing her ass off in a very concerned and helpful manner.

The day after the events Kris described in her blog, we decided we’d better get to work getting the car out.  The term our questionable map used to describe the mud in those parts, bottomless, is about the best word possible.  The first over-the-toply optimistic idea I had was, hey, the mud’s been sorta gelling over night, I’m sure it’s solid enough I can just gun the car out with brute force!  Duh.  No amount of spinning those tires, in either direction, would budge Hector an inch.  Oh, yes, Hector.  The Toyota’s name was Hector, and he (I know, you’re supposed to think of your car as female, but this son of a bitch was FAR too stubborn to be anything but male and an ass) was giggling uproariously at my attempts.  Down to business.

First, the digging.  If we dig all the mud out, there must be drier dirt somewhere beneath it.  Bottomless.  For real.  In the time it took to lift a shovelful of muck out of the hole created by the shovel, it filled back in.  It was like some weird special effect in a movie about Sisyphean tasks.  Clearly, we could dig all day and it would have absolutely no effect on the level of muck upon which Hector placidly sat.

Gravel.  Kris and I both had, on many past occasions, used gravel to get cars unstuck from snowbanks and ice wallows.  You’d think gravel’d be easy to come by in a desert, and maybe you’d be right elsewhere, but the west desert offers nothing of any assistance ever.  Except solitude.  Which wasn’t helping us at all that day.  Where in the world could we find gravel out in this great empty expanse of sage brush and giggling rabbits?  Okay, so maybe it sounds paranoid, but I’m pretty sure the rabbits were laughing.  Believe it or don’t, I don’t much care either way.  So, after casting about for some time, gathering a lot of rocks that were pretty much too big for our purposes, Kris remembered the reason the tent was so pissy — more importantly, she remembered about clinkers.

Do we really find actual clinkers next to railroad tracks in this modern age?  Bonus points for anyone who answers this one correctly (except Cristine, whose background makes her overqualified to answer).  No.  Clinkers were accidental leavings back in the days of coal-powered locomotives.  However, there is a lot of gravel associated with train tracks, so we dragged a tarp over, loaded it with about a million one-inch bits of rock, and dragged it back over to Hector.

At first, as we started pouring gravel behind the back tires, it was rather like dumping rocks into a flooded quarry.  They vanished faster than we could pour them.  Bottomless.  Finally, they began to pile up above the level of the mud, and I decided to give it a try.  Let’s just say I’ve never seen a more spectacular spray of gravel in the state of Utah.  Once, in California, with Hector, we managed to throw large quantities of slate slabs that flew like Frisbees or skeet, but that’s a blog for another day.  Gravel shotgun effect aside, we had accomplished nothing. 

Let’s prop a chunk of wood behind the tire!  Nope.

Let’s pile up cheat grass in such huge quantities that they dry up the mud!  Nada.

Let’s say, “Fuck!” a whole bunch of times, with volume and enthusiasm!  Didn’t move the car an inch, but made the steadfast refusal of the car to move a little more bearable.

Finally, and it was Kris’s idea, Let’s revisit the gravel idea, but once the gravel’s piled high enough, let’s put a tarp over it and under the tire.  Hey, why not?  Once we had this all set up, Kris gave me a final bit of advice — “If you should actually get moving, remember to shoot for the BIG grass this time, huh?”  As the only place there was room enough to work was behind the driver side rear tire, my plan was to go backwards and, once traction was established even the tiniest little bit, to romp on it and so up to the big grass.

This worked, and if you’ve ever been stuck for any appreciable length of time, you know the elation I felt as Hector finally rocketed out of the muck and up onto the meadow where, if it ain’t true it oughta be, I ran over those giggly smartass goddamn rabbits.  I stopped the car, leapt out, and did a little victory dance.  Even had a celebratory smoke, because I’d obviously earned it.  Kris and I took that moment to just sort of bask in the glow of our glorious escape. 

Finally, we decided it was time to strike camp and move on to the next site.  I started to pack up the tent and gear (striking camp is also like cooking bacon — BACK OFF, I’m DOING IT!!) when Kris, who had gone out to Hector’s near-grave to gather up our tarp, said, “Dude, uh, where’s the tarp?”

Damn good question.  I went out into the muck sea to help her dig around for it, but after a good five minutes, we were convinced it must’ve hung up on the car somehow.   I walked over to where Hector sat, looking appropriately humbled, and cast around underneath until I finally located the tarp.

I should clarify that we’re not talking about some wimpy little blue nylon Wal-mart special tarp, especially because this story takes place before there even were any Wal-marts in these’yere parts.  No, this was military surplus half-inch-thick by-god canvas.  And it was wrapped around Hector’s axle like a — like a — uh, tightly-wrapped-around-an-axle thingy.  Damned simile failures!

Eventually, we had to jack the car up so that I could carefully disentangle the tarp, which was so completely infused with mud, it was nearly as muddy as my jeans.  Oh, I forgot to mention — in all the morning’s work, my jeans had become mudslicked to the point that they were indistinguishable from the bottomless roadbed. 

So, having freed the tarp and, eventually, packed all the gear back into Hector’s loving embrace, Kris and I had a brief discussion about what to do about the mud-drenched tarp and jeans.  I hadn’t packed any other pants or shorts, but we decided no one could see me from the waist down while I was driving anyway.  So we lashed the jeans and the tarp to Hector’s luggage rack such that they were able to flap free in the breeze while we drove to the next site.

Upon our arrival, we removed the tarp and my jeans, both of which had dried completely stiff.  It’s the only time I’ve ever said, “Those jeans are so filthy, they could stand up by themselves!” and it actually meant something.  The tarp?  Well, you remember the Superman comics when we were kids, right?  The dramatic way his cape was always drawn, flapping the in the wind of his passage?  (Which reminds me of. . .  uh, never mind.)  Yeah, that was the tarp.  Very dramatic.  Both items, when pressure was applied, literally cracked and snapped as the caked mud broke away.  After beating them on a rock for a bit, they actually came pretty clean. 

These events all happened in the first few days of that trip, which ended up being epic.  Nearly three weeks on the road, driving almost completely aimlessly all over Southern Utah and Northern Arizona.  Waking up each morning, striking camp, breaking out the map and deciding what was close enough to drive to that day.  In short, a young people’s trip.  When finally we arrived home at the end of the trip, my sister remarked that we looked like Pig Pen from Peanuts as we walked to my apartment, dust and grime literally hanging in the air around us.  Good, good times.  Damn good times, to quote John and John.

Most people relate anecdotes, i.e., here is what happened first, then this happened, then I said thus and such, etc.  The people closest to me tell stories, often imitating the tone, voice, and accent in which the participants in their stories spoke.  The people closest to me, the ones I allow to get the closest to me, all but perform their stories.  Here are a few cases in point. 

One of my favorites of all time, whom I’ve known for almost twenty years now, tells the most elaborately rambling stories you can imagine.  I remember one time at a Robert Burns celebration at her house, she began this epic oration about the importance of art.  She kept beginning new threads that seemed to have nothing to do with what she’d previously been speaking about.  Damn, is she ever DRUNK! I was thinking until, like a Robbie Burns Miracle of old, she suddenly tied all the threads back together at the end.  Convinced the whole thing had been a prepared speech, I spoke to her afterwards and she assured me she had been winging the whole thing.  In the years since, I have seen her pull off this same feat both in talking to large groups and in small conversations with one or two people.  It’s a gift, one I wish I had. 

My maternal grandmother was like this, too.  She was a great one for jokes, was grandma.  She would start telling an elaborate story about “the good ol days” in Wyoming or downtown Ogden and sometimes, even after the punchline was delivered, it’d take me a minute to realize she had just told a joke.  She never started a joke with, “Hey, did you hear the one about. . . ?”  

My fellow atheist and genius card player (the only person I’ve ever known to make a living from poker, both playing and teaching) is one of the best story-tellers I’ve ever known.  He has an incredible ear for what’ll entertain an audience.  On a message board he and I used to frequent together, he vowed once to cut off his thumbs if he ever weakened enough to respond to a particular poster ever again.  After a few weeks, he was goaded into a response and crafted the most beautiful post written as if he no longer had thumbs.  To this day, it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever read online. 

The missus and I often have conversations about the proper way to tell any of the zillions of stories we share.  We discuss which ways of telling the tale work best, make for the most entertaining telling we can muster.  Not to toot our own horn, but I think as much fun as it is to listen to any of our stories when just one of us is telling it, it’s a rare treat to be able to listen to us both telling it at the same time.  Her ability to make a boring anecdote into a story is one of things that first attracted me to her. 

I was recently at another party at the afore-mentioned friend’s house, she of the rambling threads stories.  I paid particular attention to the rhythms of the conversations at the party, and every single person there was telling stories rather than relating anecdotes.  One gentleman whom I hadn’t previously met told us the entire plot of a movie he had watched, and after he was done, I felt almost as if I had watched the movie myself. 

My mom recently told me the following story, asking me to blog about it.  I explained my blogs are for my stories, but she told it anyway and I feel it deserves a retelling here.  Why?  Because she’s my mom and I always do what my mom tells me?  No.  Because she told me the story twice.  Not because she forgot she already told me, but because she likes the story so much she felt it deserved a second telling. 

“I was pretty proud of myself because I had lost enough weight to be able to notice it.  Lisey gave me a hug and said, ‘Wow, Grandma!  My arms can reach all the way around you now!’ 

“‘That’s because of all the weight I lost!’ I told her. 

“She looked at me, then held her arms out in front of her, looking at them, looking at me, then said, ‘No, I think it’s just because my arms are longer now.’” 

And, because this also seems to be a family trait, she then laughed uproariously at her own story. 

My son’s namesake and I used to work together at an inbound call center.  He was speaking to a gentleman on the phone who was pissed off because the thing being advertised on his television wasn’t available in his area.  “Why the hell’s it on mah TEEvee ifn’ I cain’t ORDER it?” the man wanted to know.  My friend, quick as a wink, comes right back with, “Well, sir, radio waves don’t recognize political boundaries.”  No one but an inveterate story-teller could’ve come up with that response. 

My son himself is quite the teller of tales, revelling in using different voices for the different speakers in his stories.  I love to listen to him, because he reminds me so much of myself at that age.  I enjoy being his willing audience.

This all comes to mind as I think about how our language helped develop our culture.  Writing was certainly a huge part in preserving the culture, but for years prior to that, special people existed whose job it was to remember the stories, to tell them in such a way that others would remember them, to pass the important tales on to subsequent generations.  To all the story-telling people in my life (which is, pretty much, all of you), remember the importance of the tales you tell, and keep on yarnin.

"So we were driving along and she says -- Hey, are you LISTENING??"

So, we toured the whole park for about ninety minutes and, as we were just about done, I noticed a small boy, maybe four or five years old, staring at me in pure unadulterated and undisguised awe.  I’ve always been a little uncomfortable being stared at, by anyone, but I was tolerating this pretty well.  The kid actually fell a few steps behind his parents (kids themselves, only maybe in their mid-twenties), seemingly unable to peel his eyes off me.  As we were about to actually pass each other, his eyes got alarmingly big and he started, “Is that. . . ?”  At this point, I actually quit walking and just looked at him, because although he was looking right at me, it was obvious he was actually talking to his parents.  “Is that. . . ?”

I gave him my best “Yes, go on” look, and finally he managed to get it out — “Is that. . . SANTA CLAUS??”

I burst into gales of laughter (later, it occurred to me how funny it might’ve been to burst into HO HO HO laughter) and assured him I definitely was not Santa, I was just wearing his hat.

The boy seemed utterly unperturbed by this, shrugged it off, and rejoined his parents.  I looked at my son, who was laughing so hard tears were in his eyes, and just, again, felt stupidly happy.  Christmas is, all in all, pretty damn groovy.

Naaaaah!!

When we arrived at the store the other day to do our shopping, the boy and I were gathering the shopping bags up when he noticed one of the bags was chock-full of socks.  Close call! I thought as he set that bag aside.

Grocery shopping for us is always an epic event that takes us a bare minimum of two hours, and this one took a little longer than usual as we had to pick up a few gifts for birthdays and Christmas.  Without fail, this practice wears me out, so I’m usually completely spent when it comes time to check out. 

The gentleman who was ringing up our purchases and graciously using our cloth bags without complaint (why would a store encourage you to buy their reusable bags but not train their cashiers to avoid being snotty to those who actually use them?) suddenly stopped and said, “Uh oh.”

I’m thinking ripped bag or missing handle or something along those lines, so I ask, “What’s up?”

“SOMEONE forgot to take his underwear out of this one!”

I don’t embarrass easily, and this was no exception.  I’m usually too tired to be embarrassed.  I asked the young man to hand me the bag so I could check.  Sure enough, they were mine.  Luckily, they were clean and modest — I rarely wear the g-string these days — so I pulled them out of that bag and put them in one that already had been used for groceries.  The cashier seemed a bit reluctant to use the bag that had contained the undies, but he was a sport about it.  I looked at the boy and said, “You catch the one with socks but miss this one?”

It's Big, It's Heavy, It's WOOD!!

But I didn’t come here today to tell you about Log.  Rather, this is about Teddy, who, I guess, really is not my defining dog, but this experience was a defining pet-owning experience.

Teddy was the dog who knocked all my pins over in the Hilltop blog.  Teddy was a terrier-based mutt who was rambunctious and fun to be around, playful and joyful and happy.  He was the only dog that everyone agreed was my dog while I was growing up, and he was only mine for about a year or so.  He used to play tag with us — he’d take a ball or whatever and run all over the yard evading our attempts to catch him and take it away.  In all honesty, I really don’t remember too much about him, because he was born when I was four or maybe five years old, and he was taken to the pound when I was six. 

I was playing with Teddy in the living room when my uncle walked in.  This uncle never came to our house — he was something of a pariah, for good reason.  He was a wife-beater, and his wife was my mom’s sister.  This, understandably, made him pretty unpopular all around.  So even at the young age of six, I knew there was something rotten in Denmark when he walked in.  Having not learned the appropriate social niceties yet, I blurted to my mom, “What’s HE doing here?”

Grabbing my arms and walking me toward the bathroom, she answered, “He’s come to take Teddy to the pound.”

I don’t remember the next moments very clearly.  I know I screamed and fought and kicked and yelled like a miniature demon, but Mom managed to hold me down, mostly because the bathroom was so small.  I also don’t really remember much about the rest of that day, except, again, I know I cried and cried and cried.  I was SO pissed at my uncle!  That son of a bitch!!  Took my dog!  My Teddy!! 

My cousin, the uncle’s stepson, and I used to rank the uncle to the dogs and back for years after that for what he’d done.  The first time in my life I ever wrote the word “motherfucker” was in a diary entry about him when I was maybe seven years old.  It was a deep and abiding rage that held on well into my teens, even after my aunt finally got smart and booted his ass out before he killed her.  By then, the Teddy business, though it still rankled, had taken a major back seat to the bastard kicking the shit out of my aunt on an almost daily basis.

Eventually, though, after having a son of my own, I started to look at that whole situation a little differently.  My uncle had come to the house to collect my dog and take him to the pound.  On whose orders?  My mom’s and dad’s, that’s whose.  He was just the bagman.  It was my parents who decided to get rid of my dog and didn’t even have the decency to let me know in advance so I’d've had a chance to say goodbye.  My mom actually had to practically sit on me while, in my poor little six-year-old brain, an evil shithead was, essentially, stealing my dog.  No, there was never any apology, no explanation, no admission that hey, maybe they could’ve handled it better.

And I can hear the tough-love types already — Man up!  That was over thirty years ago!  Yeah, it was.  And no, I don’t dwell on this.  But I’d be lying if I said I don’t ever think about it either.  What this is is one of many examples of how my parents taught me to parent.  A lot of parents serve as positive role models for their grown children.  Mine?  Mostly, I look to my parents as examples of exactly how NOT to behave toward my child.

I watched bowling on TV.  I went to the bowling alley with relatives every chance I got.  I was never allowed to bowl, because it was a different atmosphere back then (mid-seventies).  Bowling was a grown-up activity that children were occasionally allowed to watch.  Bowling alleys were places of smoke, booze, and smelly old wrist wraps, and at the bar, to paraphrase Johnny, the mud and the blood and the beer.  Basically, I remember Hilltop as, essentially, a bar with lanes. 

Am I remembering it wrong?  Almost certainly.  I know kids were allowed to bowl, sometimes, but we never were.  I was actually okay with that — I just loved being there and watching the adults bowl.  The adults in my family were pretty damn good, and I just loved the sound of those pins breaking and flying all over the place.

Somehow, by the time I was six or seven, the love affair with bowling had ended.  I still liked to go to the alley once in a while, but that obsession had mellowed considerably.  I still thought of Hilltop Lanes as the be-all and end-all of bowling alleys, but we never went there as a family after I was about six or seven.  We did a lot of bowling at Ben Lomond Lanes and Rainbow Gardens.  I bowled a few times in my later teens and early twenties, but I wasn’t very into it.  Nor did I think I ever would be.

In February of 2008, however, my son did a little bowling at my sister’s house on her Wii and, as a result, wanted to try the real thing.  He was nine years old at the time, almost ten.  I figured, what the hell, we’ll hit Ben Lomond Lanes, let him try it a little bit and, when he realizes how much harder it is to bowl in real life than in a video game, he’ll lose interest.  I was never more wrong.

I know I’m his father, so everything he does is precious and impressive to me, but I was just about on fire with pride as he flat-out refused to use bumpers (when I was a kid, either bumpers hadn’t been invented yet, or I had just never seen them).  To this day, he never has.  His total score on that first game was something like twenty-seven, but this score included one strike.  His first game.  Me?  To that point in my life, I had never bowled a strike.  He was hooked and, because he was obviously enjoying it so much, my latent love of bowling was reawakened, with a vengeance.

We began bowling at least once a week and sometimes two or three times.  One day, we went to Ben Lomond and found we couldn’t bowl that day because they had a league in there, and they were going to be there for quite some time.  I remember Hill Top, and headed on up there for the first time in almost twenty years.

I remembered as a kid that Hill Top was all flashing lights and shininess, a glittering bowlerama, like something from your dreams of the Palladium.  The present day reality was nothing at all like that.  The equipment was very outdated.  Yes, they had scoring computers, but as often as not, they missed pins or counted pins that hadn’t fallen.  The ball returns were slow at best and often just completely failed to return the equipment.  The pinsetters had a nasty habit of only setting up eight or nine pins.  However, they were obviously in the process of a pretty major remodeling.  They were improving the appearance of the place, but continuing to ignore the deplorable state of their equipment.  Bad move, as we later found out.

We learned they were having a summer parent/child league, and at the end of the league, participants got a Marvel Superheroes Visiball.  In addition, competitors were allowed to bowl three games per day for free.  So for about six weeks, the boy and I bowled our ever-loving asses off.  We made a big deal out of showing up every Friday night with a Marvel Heroes shirt on and dreamed of that day at the end of the summer when we’d get our own balls.  Yes, many, MANY childish jokes were made around this concept.

On the sixth Friday night, we went to the league match.  As I was walking up to the counter to pay, the owner stopped me and said not to bother — the alley had been sold and would be closing the following night, and as we’d spent so much money there over the past months, he wanted us to go ahead and bowl for free.

Hilltop couldn’t close!!  That was like telling a seven-year-old kid there’s no Santa!  I was crushed, but not very surprised — the place was almost always deserted anymore, and the prevailing complaint I heard from other bowlers was, you guessed it, the equipment.  Many other customers shared my complaint that it was pretty stupid to fix the place cosmetically without first updating the equipment.  Since the closing, I’ve talked to other bowlers at Ben Lomond Lanes, and they say the same thing — the reason they didn’t bowl at Hilltop was the appalling state of the equipment.  I was heartbroken.

We bowled our last league game and paid the price we would’ve paid for the rest of them so we could get our balls.  Sean picked a twelve-pound Iron Man ball; I chose a ten-pound Spidey.  Yeah, I’m rockin a ten-pounder, and you can keep your snotty comments to yourself, thankyaveramuch. 

Anyway, we made a point of going back the following day to get our three free games, and it was VERY hard for the boy.  He was VERY sad, so much so that we went back that night and bowled until they kicked us out.  On the drive there, he burst into tears as much out of frustration as pure sadness, which, in turn, caused me to get pretty choked up too.   When we left, he wanted to “just sit here in the parking lot for a while and look at it.”  So we did, trying to put some necessary closure on it.

Growing up is as much about saying goodbye to things you thought were eternal as it is about learning entirely new things.  I much prefer the new things to the goodbyes.