Month: June 2012

A House in Underwear

The gigantic lettering on the white background should say Hanes instead of Lowe’s. The house has been caught in its underwear. But a house is neither a plumber, stooped to do his job while displaying three inches of peek-a-boo underwear, nor is it the slouched and sloppy wannabe gang banger with his barely-hanging-on undies. Typically, one doesn’t see what’s beneath a house’s siding, its protective exterior veneer.

In this case, a contractor has surgically removed the house’s damaged skin. Over time, it succumbed to dry rot, which gradually ate away the wood siding like a cancer. The disclosed vulnerability invited the appetites of hyena-like termite invaders, patiently awaiting their opportunistic feast.

The house, which we entrust to shelter us, is now in its most vulnerable state. Without outside protection, the Lowes underwear merely hides its shame against total indignity.

In a few short weeks, the house will again be fully clothed in new, high-tech siding, boasting new energy-efficient rebate-worthy windows throughout and upgraded air conditioners surgically implanted into the walls instead of crazily hanging onto window frames. The foliage, trimmed back to the extreme for this reconstructive surgery, will recover and bloom, calling home the temporarily displaced honeybees and hummingbirds. Soon, it will stand out as the most gleaming house on the street.

And I will be proud because this house belongs to me.

One day, inevitably, I will move on to my Permanent Home, and this house will no longer belong to me. The new owners will have no memory of its kindly, welcoming days of service, providing lodging for my guests. Nor will they recall the rowdy noise of laughter, the boisterous joy of holidays, and even the occasional weeping, all of which left their indelible marks within its walls. They will know nothing of the hospitality of its front yard—the children’s Slip ‘n’ Slide gatherings, and later, for those same children, the wedding receptions.

The blueprints will tell the new owners it is the same house, but it really won’t quite be the same house for them.

They will have missed this parental-like connection; they will not have seen the house at its most vulnerable, standing in its Lowes underwear, with the labels showing. They will not know of our efforts to save her from decay.

For each of us, the place we call home harbors significant events and memories of our lives, secreting them from others, selfishly enshrining them as our own private treasures.

1-1-3

Working in a parole office, there are moments to suspend belief. Or perhaps there are rarer moments to actually engage belief. It depends upon which side of belief you start on.

Life stories stretch and relax with no logical explanation. You pick up some and discard others.

Last week, two new students who are on parole began the interminable paperwork required for each new student to enroll in my literacy class: name, address, social security number, parole agent’s name, birthdate…

Wait. What? Birthdate?

One student’s birthdate was January 13, 1979.

I reviewed the other student’s data. And his birthday, amazingly, was also January 13. Even more astoundingly, the year was also 1979.

Two students registered for my class at the same time, on the same day, who were also born on the same day, the same month and the same year.

What are the chances?

How many of us have experienced similar weird circumstantial encounters in our own lives? And, perhaps, we have narrowly missed other up-to-chance events that we will never find out about. How could we know if we passed a first grade classmate, thirty years later, walking just beyond our sight on our hurried way to the post office?

Oh…one other detail. My own birthday is also January 13. So three of us sat together, joined together by a common birthday, and that was all.

Two fellows on parole and one teacher. All joined by January 13. Numerically expressed, the date becomes 1-1-3.

We held up our fingers to mark the circumstance. In some small and weird way, we bonded over something so apparently trivial as our birthdays.

I wondered how many other “one-one-threes” are waiting to be discovered in the people right around us. “Something-something-somethings”—they are the small things that can remove barriers.

In a world shredded by criminal backgrounds, race, religion and social class, we may find ourselves repeating the seemingly inane quote by the late Rodney King, “Can’t we all just get along?”

By discovering more 1-1-3s in the weaving of our lives, perhaps we can.

Mega-Stretchfabric Man

In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the best time for me to enter the candy and soda pop store, just when Mega-Stretchfabric Man was on the prowl, examining the goods and consuming the high-calorie, caffeine-injected junk food lining the shelves. The store was being held hostage by this super-villain gone bad. He is a superhero gone astray, a powerful force who used to advocate for a the low fat, low sugar lifestyle. Not any more.

But still, he’s Mega-Stretchfabric Man. He can do as he pleases.

What happened to him can become the fate of any one of us when we pursue destructive, self-indulgent behavior. In our own thinking, we can do no wrong. All is justified.

We can easily list political leaders, spiritual leaders, bankers, business folks, even physicians who have, over time, become their own version of Mega-Stretchfabric Man. They’ve fallen.

Somewhere on that list we can probably add our own name because change can happen gradually. Self-interest seeps in, drowning our nobler aspirations. We can all fail to live up to our aspirations.

Slowly we devolve, morph, change into that which we do not wish to become–and we may become our own version of the irritating, crimson-suited, Mega-Stretchfabric Man, an unwelcome transformation that is apparent to everyone else but ourselves.

But hold on. The End has not arrived. Remember, in Comic Book Land, there are heroes to counterbalance every villain’s influence. Every hero has equally powerful choices to make to turn things around. Heroes conquer one thought, one action, one attitude at a time.

Put on your stretch suit, hero. We’ve got work to do.

“I’ll Have Another”

The horse pictured above is a locally-stabled equine. It is not the horse that is so much in the news these days.

No, the current horse of renown, named “I’ll Have Another,” has already won two of the three horse races required to earn the fabled Triple Crown. Will he gain horse racing’s highest honor by winning three in a row? In a few days, we’ll find out.

Those who keep up with such things will recall the last Triple Crown winner, in 1978, named Affirmed. He was only the eleventh such winner, dating back to 1919. That’s an average of one Triple Crown winner every 5.36 years. Statistically, we’re way overdue.

Three days ago, at the Los Angeles International Airport, I heard the luggage belts creak under the combined weight of suitcases and sports bags, the unloaded belongings of thirty-five giant players of the triumphant Belmont Shore Rugby Club returning from Colorado, where these hulks had demolished the other national rugby championship contenders. There were winners’ medallions around their necks and high fives all around.

More sports victories–ice hockey fans are tumbling from obscurity into sports bars to observe the newly-minted triumphs of the Los Angeles Kings. This year–if the playoff finals go their way–they may win their first-ever Stanley Cup victory, the highest achievement in ice hockey.

I’m no sportster. I don’t generally attend sports arena-based athletic events. Most of this is beyond both my pocketbook and my personal interest. 

Nonetheless, I experienced my most salient encounter with a professional sports personality during high school in 1969 on a Detroit freeway. A friend and I were sailing along in my very first car, a white 1962 MGA convertible, with the top down. In those days, the gas in my tank cost me 19.9 cents a gallon. We owned the road.

We were, quite logically to us, pretending to be flying in an aircraft, our hippie-era hair blowing freely, our arms extended outside our doors on either side of the car to imitate wings. We spoke back and forth to one another on pretend microphones grasped in our fists, checking altitude, wind velocity and destination headings. We were alone in our own world on the freeway.

Suddenly, the car ahead of us inexplicably slowed and pulled into the lane to our right. I looked up at the enormous automotive hulk. When the driver’s window got next to ours, his electric window descended, and he peered down at us. Our arms were still extended in airplane-flying mode.

A handsome, middle-aged man appeared from behind the lowered glass in the neighboring car, staring at us. Suddenly his hand emerged, grasping a big black object. On my second glance, I saw that in his hand he held a very large wingtip shoe, which he had extricated from his foot. He held it there, in the car window, toe to his ear, heel to his mouth, beaming gleefully back to us, pretending that it also was a microphone. Through his wingtip mouthpiece, he pretended to converse with us through our imagined fist-microphones. We were astounded. We were confounded. We were delighted that an adult would take us seriously–or playfully banter with us in our imagined world.

After a few moments, he was gone with a wave of his hand. The window rolled up, and he passed by us, our arms were still extended as wings.

As his car pulled in front of us, I read the personalized license plate displayed upon the car’s chrome rear bumper, identifying the car’s owner, and our freeway aircraft co-conspirator, as–Gordie Howe.

Yes, we had been trading antics with none other than that Gordie Howe, the Detroit Red Wings 23-time National Hockey League All Star. He is recognized as the greatest all-around ice hockey player in history, and, incidentally, the owner of an impressively large wingtip shoe and a generous sense of humor.

Whether “I’ll Have Another” or another horse yet to be born will eventually win the next Triple Crown is an open question. As for me, my wish is that I’ll Have Another life-long memory with the likes of an athlete like Gordie Howe, a man of generous heart who, on a Detroit freeway, inspired me to also live life generously.