crdahlberg

Protest and Pursuit

I should have known better. But my curiosity and emotions got ahold of me during that early morning trudge to meet my train—what could the clamor mean, these shouting voices echoing through this normally peaceful and quiet college campus? In the distance, the voices grew louder. I was onto the trail of a Happening! Could it be the beginning of yet another “Occupy” protest with folks sitting-in to rail against big banks and corporate villains? Perhaps I would stumble upon a breaking story, worthy of the evening news. And I was equipped with my video-enabled iPhone—I had to investigate! But I’d better be fast. I usually have a few minutes to spare before the train arrives. It would have to be a two-minute or less diversion for me to still be able to intercept my train.

I rounded the corner and came upon the marchers who had taken up their protest. I grabbed my iPhone and began recording the quickly-developing events. But wait, there were no police to control the gathering crowd. A lone security guard watched from his golf cart-like buggy, more amused at the event than concerned for my safety. What if this crowd should seek a target and take their anger against the system out on me, the news reporter? I didn’t exactly panic at the thought—but maybe I blanched—yes, that’s it—a full blanch.

It gradually dawned on me. This was no full-bore, nearly-getting-out-of-control protest. It was almost polite. And there were no slogans decrying “the Man” or “the System.” Instead, I learned that it was a student-led advocacy to improve the wages of the college food service workers, hardly the sort of event that would threaten my life or make the evening news.

I recognized I would have to move quickly. I concluded my video recording. My two-minute long diversion left me no time to spare. I launched into a shortcut to the train station to save time; I cut quickly to the back of the building to shorten my train trek. But wait! A large construction project blocked my path. I quickly found a way around it and squirmed through, only to have my path disappear behind a construction fence. I backtracked and then tried to go the long way around the construction, ending up nearly across the street from the train station. I walked quickly, relieved to have found a way out of my quandary. Just as I completed this detour, I discovered I had entered another cul-de-sac. Never mind. I would cut through the hedge to the street.

I failed to recognize that a hidden chain-link fence ran the length of the hedge. I broke into a trot inspecting for any way out. Unfortunately, I was moving directly away from the train station. Without finding a break in the fence, I came upon a tennis court. Surely, there would be a gate out of the tennis court area, and yes, there was! I hustled to it, backpack now jouncing smartly on my back, and found—a large padlock and chain barred my exit! I was stuck like a lab rat in a maze. There was no way out.

With few minutes until the train’s approach, I made a desperate, beeline charge back toward the site of the rioting students, where my shortcut path had first gone awry. The backpack bounced violently as I hit full stride, jostling my lunch and tumbling my coffee thermos. Would I make it to the train in time? Could my heart manage the unaccustomed and sudden surge of adrenalin? Would subsequent passengers find me, exhausted, splayed out in the shrubs?

As I urged my body toward a sprint, I passed a middle-aged couple, who politely bade me a pleasant, “Good morning!” as though my reckless flight, panting breath and galloping backpack were the commonest occurrence on their slow daily stroll.

I hurtled through the intersection, daring a passing bus or car to obstruct my path. The clanging bell announced the lowering of the crossing gates. I told myself I had to make it. Faster! Faster!

And then it was over. I seized the hand grab, bounced up the single step and tumbled aboard the train, the last passenger to alight.

Drenched with perspiration, I steadied my breathing, trying to hide my flushed and panting state. I eased into a seat beside an unknowing passenger lost in sleep.

Seconds before, I would have risked a coronary to make this train. But like many fleeting life goals, once I had achieved it, I was ready to board the next train to the familiar comforts of home.

Bomb Threats

An urgent voice came over the intercom: “All personnel evacuate the building immediately!”

Agents quickly stuck their heads into my classroom door at the parole office to see if I needed help clearing the students from the room. I grabbed my indispensable possessions—backpack, coffee mug, and iPhone charger—and despite the urgency of the message, casually stopped by to use the restroom on the way out.

This was our second bomb threat on two successive Tuesdays, so the novelty had worn off. That’s why I assembled my belongings and executed the evacuation at a leisurely pace.

Six months ago, we had our first bomb threat, and my evacuation tactics were far less polished. I had bolted from the chair, bruising my thigh on the low-hanging desk drawer, barely concealing my semi-panicked plea for students to exit—quickly, please! We had hustled to the far side of the parking lot, speculating about how long we would be outside, and was there really a bomb? If so, who had planted it and why? Creative conjecture ran rampant. What if the building blew up? Were we far enough away to not risk injury? To top it off, I then realized—I had to urgently use the restroom!

But there was no such anxiety this time. I was a seasoned veteran—an experienced bomb-scare advisor. I knew it would take two-and-a-half hours for the bomb-sniffing dog to arrive and run its course through the building with promises of puppy-treats dancing in its brain for a job well-done. A final rooftop sweep would signal the final “all clear.” By that time, I could easily hike the three-quarters of a mile to Starbucks, sip a Cafe Americano, check my e-mail messages, and leisurely return. So I did.

As I walked, I wondered. Who could have called in this parole office bomb scare? A discontented parolee? An agent threatened with job loss because of agency downsizing? A cleaning crew contractor, disgruntled by ongoing cockroach wars?

I was determined to discover who the culprit might be.

After my hike back from Starbucks, I still had time to kill. So I opted for pancakes at Dennys, where I discovered a glut of other refugee staff members from the parole office, killing time, sipping coffee, munching on selections from the Breakfast Specials section of the menu.

And then the obvious conclusion struck me.

I’m no detective. But I can sniff out a Denny’s manager who’s just a bit too eager to bloat a day’s profit from the misfortune of traumatized, bomb-threatened parole staff, fattening his income with my humble short stack of wheat pancakes and the surrounding sea of parole agents downing oversized three-egg Spanish omelets and greasy hashed brown potatoes.

The Denny’s manager – he’s the one calling in the bomb threats.

Oh, yeah.

This Is Not the Way Home

“Familiarity breeds contempt, while rarity wins admiration.”
–Apuleius (124 AD – 170 AD)

Last Thursday, on my way home from work, my train missed my stop. Now I could have expected to possibly miss my stop from train-induced slumber, but never have I been on a train that missed a stop.

To be clearer, the train performed its customary stop, but the doors on my car did not open. Unable to disembark, the train soon carried on its way, with us, the unwilling passengers who were unable to disembark, still jammed behind the train’s closed doors. Our station quickly passed behind us.

“Press the black button!” someone from our end of the car yelled to those imprisoned behind the doors at the far end of the car. A yelling chorus soon began. “Press the darn button!”

Someone finally pressed the button, apparently alerting the conductor to our unfortunate dilemma, and the train halted in the No Man’s Land that was neither my stop nor the next stop, but somewhere between. Outside, there were only scrub bushes and the gravelly bed of the train tracks.

Eventually, the voice of the conductor came over the intercom, explaining that we would back up to the wayward station we had passed. But there was no movement for five minutes. Finally, the voice on the intercom again: “We do not have permission to back up. We will continue on to the next stop.”

Mild panic spread through the still-standing passengers. How would they get to their awaiting autos, parked at the train station behind us, quickly receding from view? How long would it take to catch the next train going the opposite direction? With some of the women wearing tortuous high heels, would they be forced to walk back to our distant, intended station?

I decided not to wait to find out. When the train finally halted at the next station and disgorged us like confused tourists, I disembarked and guided a blind fellow traveler to the westward-bound boarding platform of this unfamiliar station. Then I started walking homeward.

Fortunately, this station and my usual station were equidistant to my home; I would later measure both routes homeward to be an identical 1.9 miles.

Like ants on auto-pilot returning to their mound, our well-traveled routes always seem shorter than less familiar ones. Today’s path forced me toward new decisions. The homeward hike seemed far longer because of the choices along the way. Which red light would offer me the shorter wait to cross the street? Would the sidewalk or bicycle path be the more direct route? With no experience to inform me, I followed my heart. A broad wooden bridge stretched before me on the bike path. In the growing dusk, I was all by myself, and I stopped.

Construction workers must have left this wooden bridge for my use alone, at this time, on this day, to service my displaced homeward hike.

To my left, I heard the distant sound of the freeway. To my right, a partially-occupied condo complex waited silently for the arrival of the inhabitants at the workday’s conclusion. In the distance, a train horn heralded the arrival of the westbound train that would return the displaced commuters to their familiar surroundings, ants returning to the mound.

A fallen leaf blowing along the wooden bridge reminded me that there are some choices in life that we are able to select, like a well-worn path home. And there are some that we don’t get to choose, like uncooperative train doors.

And sometimes, the only choice we really have is whether we make a graceful transition between the two.

Zombies in Hollywood

I first learned of the famed corner of Hollywood and Vine while reading a Dennis the Menace comic as a young boy. The famed Taft Building still stands here, once home to offices of the silent film era’s movers and shakers including Charlie Chaplin and Will Rogers. Nearby, of course, are other landmarks such as the Capitol Records Building, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Hollywood sign and Graumann’s Chinese Theater.

And then, there’s this. A few weeks before Halloween, these early celebrants paraded on this famous corner of Hollywood and Vine—in fact, the Zombies were on parade. They groaned, they grunted, they limped on wounded limbs. They stared their otherworldly, blank stare into my eyes. And then, to my relief, they moved on without capturing me to join in their ghoulish procession.

ER #16

On Monday night, I escorted my wife to the hospital. She had somehow acquired an extremely painful and potentially very dangerous abscess. The emergency room was loaded with a riot of bacterial- and viral-infested and otherwise-wounded victims. Some displayed hastily bandaged injuries still seeping blood. An elderly woman moaned in her wheelchair, clasping a cloth over her face as she rocked back and forth, while her husband, supporting himself in his own walker, stared blankly alternately at her and the wall. There was rare seating available for emergency room johnny-come-latelies. I estimated 75 people crammed into this bin of ailing people. “Golly,” I thought to myself. “If it’s this bad in America, what’s it like in Bangladesh?”

Eventually, after completing multiple copies of forms each repeating the same questions, my wife’s name was called. At least, we think it was called. With no speaker system in the room, the hoarse yells of the hospital staff were barely audible above the ruckus of shrieking babies, the generalized sniffling, sighing, and moaning of the occupants, and the horseplay of those who obviously only accompanied the core populous of the emergency room.

She disappeared behind curtained glass doors. I waiting for her to be processed—blood- and urine-sampled, fingerprinted, name-and-birthdate-verified, mother’s-maiden-name-queried and the like. I passed the time chatting with my high school-aged neighbor about the perils of football while examining his purpling right ankle. More than two hours later, when my wife had still not returned, I asked about her progress. I was informed that she had been admitted into an Emergency Room, and, yes, would I like to go in? I wondered how long that I, like a hound dog anticipating his master’s return, might have waited along with the huddled masses of our fellow sufferers.

I found my wife in a non-private group room, leaning over the frame of bed ER #25, experiencing frightful pain and nausea that made it impossible for her to lie down. Mercifully, shortly thereafter we were escorted to ER #16, where she lay down and stared at the ceiling. Eventually, a nurse popped her head in, and told us our wait for a room would not be long. Six hours later, I had memorized every inch of ER #16. I knew which medical products were in short supply and had retraced the trail of the curious dried blood drops on the floor.

Finally, the long-awaited curtain pullback from the emergency room doctor! He informed us that he would create an incision to relieve the pressure and blood from the offending abscess. Unfortunately, the procedure preceded the administration of a stiff painkiller; only a weakly numbing drug wound its way through the clear plastic tubing to the needle dripping in her arm.

I’m glad I departed the room prior to the doctor’s medical procedure. Upon my return, my pale and trembling wife reported that the pain from the events–the slicing and enthusiastic squeezing of the barely-dulled abscess–rated right up there with childbirth. There were new trails of blood to track on the floor. I helped creatively arrange my wife on the gurney to best contain her newly inflicted pain.

Time passed slowly. The gurney was uncomfortable, not intended for extended lounging by the wounded. It was narrow and the plastic was slippery, contributing to the fall to the cold, tile floor that my wife incurred as she inaugurated a hazardous journey to the solitary men’s/women’s combo restroom. It was down the hall, hidden in the corner of the non-private patient emergency room receiving area, where patient beds lined the walls like fighter planes on the deck of a Navy aircraft carrier.

As the hours dragged on, we would each have opportunity to visit the restroom many times. I narrowly missed the pandemonium that ensued when one out-of-sorts patient yelled for help from within this restroom. He claimed he could not manage his quest for a successful “Number Two” experience alone; he needed assistance. When none came, his yelling continued until he finally exited the room, holding his prize feces aloft in his hand like a treasure-hound, for all of us to see. His triumph did not last long; nurses descended upon him from every corner, like—well—like flies on poop. I know this happened because my wounded wife witnessed it all during her long trek from said restroom back to ER #16.

The night lengthened, and I grew covetous of my wife’s little gurney and the brief naps it provided her. My chair’s legs protruded far enough that I could not place it close enough for the wall to support my head. I attempted several alternate variations. In one construction, I extended my buttocks nearly off the end of the seat so that my neck could barely catch the back of the chair. Another variant took the opposite approach, featuring the top of my head protruding over the top of the chair so my crown barely reached the support of the wall. The frailty of human anatomy proved both of these options unsatisfactory. I found myself fitfully alternating between one and the other, leaving precious little time for sleep.

ER #16 held us captive for nearly 30 hours. We greeted our first nightshift nurse for the second time at the beginning of her second night’s 12-hour shift. Doctors drifted in, all asking the same questions we had already provided the previous visiting M.D. My wife’s wound was un-bandaged, examined, and re-bandaged multiple times.

During all that time, I was preoccupied with sleep, until finally, regretfully too late, I figured out what should have been obvious. Borrowing a style from my fellow train-riding commuters, I decided to do the Train-Rider’s Head-Bob. I sat somewhat erect on the chair and allowed my chin to drift downward in slumber, risking a dangerous neck sprain should my head collapse to one side. But it didn’t. For 15 precious minutes that night, I slept; it was suddenly interrupted by the final doctor’s visit, telling us to prepare for surgery.

The purgatory of Emergency Room #16 finally concluded. Perhaps our release depended upon my eventual discovery of the successful, if brief, napping technique.

The doctor told me that my wife would be in surgery for an hour, and would I please stay in the surgery waiting room. Two and one-half hours later, in the middle of my second night without sleep, and with plenty of time for my sleep-deprived brain to conjure all sorts of visions of what was transpiring, I was informed that she was out of surgery and resting comfortably in her room, and would I like to see her. You bet.

Tonight we are home. We’ve been gone two days, which is 48 hours, or 2,880 minutes, and it felt every second of it.

Meanwhile, the waiting room at the hospital is likely still full.

The First and the Best

The passing of Apple founder and genius Steve Jobs leaves a cavernous hole in the unrelenting technological race to be the First and the Best. Pundits question whether Apple will be able to keep cranking out cutting edge creations that others seem only capable of feeble imitation. Time will tell.

Well-deserved accolades honoring Steve Jobs will go on and on.

The rest of us are not Steve Jobs. So how can we leave our own small mark on our world?

Each time I hike from Santa Monica to Venice Beach, I pass the very first Hot Dog on a Stick stand. In 1946, Dave Barham bought the concession stand for $400, money he borrowed from his older brother. He named his new enterprise Party Puffs. Having discovered there were no chain store distributors for corn dogs, he developed the now-famous corn dog, which could easily be eaten while walking the beach. He renamed his enterprise Hot Dog on a Stick around 1960. The unmistakable waitress costumes were designed to invoke familiarity; customers perceived a familiar person each time they were waited on. Their tall caps were meant to suggest Las Vegas showgirls. To push the scale further, his servers stood behind the counter on platforms to appear even taller. Barham died in 1991, at the age of 77, and Fredrica Thode succeeded him as the corporation’s president. Barham had hired her as a receptionist in 1980. Today, the company is an employee-owned corporation with more than 100 locations.

Barham’s governing principle was keeping things simple and making it all entertaining.

A corn dog is no Apple computer. And Dave Barham is no Steve Jobs. But keeping it simple and entertaining are values they both promoted.

When our world seems to become more complex and less fun, there’s probably a lesson there for each of us.

The Un-Midas Touch

We’ve seen these two Tweedledum and Tweedledee-like fellows before. Maybe not these identical fellows, but we’ve seen similar folks.

Here they are, minutes before they begin their performance, while they are still bendable, putting the finishing touches on their costumes.

Soon they will begin their street-side mime routines, becoming frozen and unmoving on the sidewalk, mimicking metallic sculptures stiffly locked in place, awaiting the monetary incentive from a passerby to grind into action. Until then, they will remain still and silent.

While in their static position, these two will appear to have been in the company of King Midas, who turned everything he touched into precious but lifeless metal by virtue of the magical gift he received, fulfilling his insatiable greed.

An uncertain child bearing a small gratuity for the street performers will eventually approach them hesitantly on tip-toe, coaxed on by an encouraging parent. At the moment the child’s meager coin reaches the performers’ basket, the frozen sculptures will leap into action, gyrating through a crazy series of excited moves, brought spontaneously, and briefly, to life.

Gradually, the robots will appear to run out of power and again hibernate, stiffly awaiting their next coin-induced spasmodic flurry of movement.

Other children’s touches will again break the Midas spell over the characters, periodically unfreezing them. During these moments, the children’s innocent, Un-Midas Touches will briefly assuage the urgent need and greed displayed by the metallic figures.

For a few moments, they, like ourselves, will shake off isolating temporal concerns and, once again, remember what it is to be fully alive.

What the Baker Knew

Recently, I was invited to a social gathering by friends who were expecting their first child. The big event at the festivities would be their announcement whether their unborn child were a boy or girl. Having never experienced this sort of sex-of-a-baby disclosure, my curiosity was naturally aroused. How would they pull this event off?

At the gathering, the crowd gradually grew, and as the guests exchanged pleasantries, we nibbled on a wide variety of appetizers. We carried our plates to long tables set up outside, and eventually the entrée was ready. At this German-themed happening, our hosts served us bratwurst with all the trimmings. Through prearrangements, my food selection was vegetarian Italian sausage, which resembled the reconstituted crook end of a squash, unevenly splashed with brown shoe polish. Not bad, if I ignored its texture and tensile strength that resisted the attempts of my knife and fork against its rubberized skin.

My curiosity over the sex of the baby-to-be grew with each bite of my faux Italian sausage. How would the happy couple announce the news? I imagined they might recite a bogus postdated newspaper article from the Los Angeles Times, cleverly declaring the birth and name of the child. Or perhaps there would be a trumped-up theatrical opening of a highly decorated gift box–from within, the parents would draw out a tiny pair of baby booties in the appropriate sex-identifying baby color. Maybe—just maybe—there would be a sonogram image of the baby in utero, enlarged large enough to see the gender-disclosing details of said baby. I quickly discounted the latter option as being in questionable taste, even at this warm and embracing celebratory event.

So how would they announce the baby-to-be’s as-yet-undisclosed sex?

None of that happened. Instead, the host proclaimed the presentation of a cake—and, suddenly, a moment of inspiration hit me—of course! The cake decorations, I surmised, would happily declare the sex of the child-to-be. Tiny model cars and trucks would announce that the baby would be a boy! Alternatively, the decorative presence of equally tiny dolls would identify the child as a girl! What could be more obviously cute, clever, and informative?

I edged over to the cake table, which a throng of guests already surrounded. Standing on my tiptoes in the back row and holding my iPhone high above my head, I peered over those in front of me, straining to see the cake decorated with a tiny toy truck or doll. To my chagrin—there was nothing there, except for a large and beautiful white-frosted cake. No truck. No car. No doll.

And then it finally hit me. The currently non-gender-identified baby’s sex would be revealed when the couple cut into the cake! Of course! When the cake was sliced with a knife, something embedded in the cake would cleverly identify the sex of the baby. But I quickly recoiled when I imagined the various choices of doohickeys that might give a clue of the baby’s gender. Horrors!

No…now I was certain that, instead, they had tastefully selected a plastic baby boy or girl doll and placed it carefully into the cake prior to cooking, so that when the cake was sliced open, the appropriate doll would reveal the baby’s gender. Yes! That was it! How cute!

But wait! Perhaps the heat from cooking the cake had melted the plastic baby hidden within the cake. And even if not, could slicing into the cake with a knife possibly maim the doll representing their future baby? Good grief! No, no! A thousand times, no! Please, don’t do it! Don’t cut the cake! Just announce the baby’s sex to us verbally! Please! We’ll act just as excited as if you had baked in clever clues or a gender-announcing doll! Don’t go through with this nightmare!

It was too lake. The knife descended, as, hand-in-hand, the couple made the first, horrifying slice into the cake.

I couldn’t look. Please! Please! No hideous amputation of the embedded, perhaps melted plastic baby!

The crowd cheered, “It’s a girl! It’s a girl! Congratulations!”

When I dared look back at the cake, there was no gender-identifying doll in the cake. There was nothing. Nothing but white cake with strawberry filling.

“Strawberry?” I asked my cheering neighbor. “What does strawberry filling have to do with the sex of the baby?”

“Pink,” she responded. “It’s pink. And pink is traditionally, well, a girl’s color.”

“Yeah! Of course! I know that!” I retorted. I turned my head to avoid displaying my own growing pink blush.

I didn’t say it aloud, but I was secretly proud of myself for having figured out what a blueberry filling would have meant.

In life’s social rituals, we don’t get the choice whether we are the smart and clever ones or the duller learners. When we find ourselves among the latter, it’s a good practice to keep a cool head, a closed mouth, and try to be a quick study.

Totally Fried

Ha! It’s county fair time again! Time to discover who won this year’s gooseberry jelly first prize! And we’re awestruck by the winner of the formal dining table decor competition: a country music-themed homage featuring a look-alike Brad Paisley hat for the centerpiece, Roy Rogers-inspired silver bullet salt and pepper shakers, and decorative accents honoring Dolly Parton.

We eagerly launch ourselves into the fair’s enormous display halls, searching out our favorite gadgets, hawked by gung-ho purveyors demanding to know how we survive without their trinkets, which, by the way, are seriously discounted–today only–at a Special Fair Price Reduction. How could we fail to take home the orange sponge thing that, with one magic swipe, can absorb a baby elephant’s entire trunkful of water? Or maybe we will choose to purchase one of the countless competing sets of hi-tech cookware, compellingly presented by the non-stick humor and extravagant propaganda of the frying pan merchants—these futuristic copper-cored titanium-clad industrial-strength pots and skillets will present a lifetime of culinary treasures!

Another prime reason for a trip to the fair is the excuse to dump our allegiances to healthy fruits and veggies, long-extinct in this environment. Onward, to sample the fair’s gastronomical fares! We unceremoniously discard restraint, loosen our belts by several notches to accommodate the impending added girth, and the maniacal self-indulgent search for serious fair nosh begins.

The grub is easy to come by. A mound of barbecued tri-tip is squeezed between oversized buns and lathered in sauce. The ensuing energetic consumption sends warm brown goo splashing noses, dripping down chins and sloshing in pools on shirts and shorts. The gigantic Texas Turkey Legs appear large enough to have belonged to a variety of miniature dinosaurs. Oversize hot dogs are smothered in cheese, lathered with chili and accompanied by a combo order of cheese fries and onion rings. The setting is rife for virtual—or actual—heart attacks.

How to choose what to eat? Each would be a perfect choice!

Then our eyes fall onto the Totally Fried vendor’s cart. Totally Fried! What a delight! Our salivary glands cramp at the notion of Totally Fried Chicken Sandwiches accompanied by Totally Fried Krispy Kreme doughnuts, Totally Fried Klondike ice cream bars, Totally Fried Kool-Aid, Totally Fried frog legs, Totally Fried avocados, Totally Fried caramel apples, Totally Fried FryBQ ribs, and Totally Fried Twinkies. How to choose among such treats?

Still, I was mildly troubled by the Totally Fried offerings. Where was the Totally Fried butter I had anticipating sliding down my gullet? Imagine–a butter stick, perfectly fried in, what else—butter—then rolled in cinnamon to create that perfect treat, comprised of 100% saturated fat—what a delight!

There’s time to think over our choices, as the distinct smell of an ill-maintained barnyard drifts our way, demanding our attention. And we’re off! Who could miss the Fairview Farms domestic animal display area, to view the endless milking of bovines, and the eternally cud-chomping goats with staring and unfocused geometrically-challenged pupils.

Where else is there the opportunity to see—and smell—those gargantuan hogs, rubbery snouts buried and rooting in mud, eagerly gorging themselves on anything that will fit into their gaping mouths! As an added bonus, it’s hard to believe our good fortune—last year’s blue ribbon winning hog, “Mighty Mickey,” makes a return showing, this year appearing as the pure-pork pepperoni featured atop Luigi’s Flying Pizza! We hurry over to sample him, to see if he serves up this year on the plate as proudly as he paraded last year on the hoof. Thumbs up. He tastes better than he ever smelled.

After eventually exiting the fair, our waddle to the car in bloated, cholesterol-charged, sweat-drenched bodies reminds us of one obvious fact.

We ourselves are now, unmistakably, Totally Fried. But at least we have a whole year to purge the lard from our bodies and repent from our recalcitrant ways before we try it all again.

Praying Mantis

Six years ago, I spotted an oddly-shaped green leaf on my sidewalk. It was a skinny leaf, as though torn from a larger piece. Scrunching down on my knees for a closer look, I realized it was no ordinary leaf. Instead, I stared into the rotating, alien-looking eyeballs of a praying mantis. His weird eyes really did rotate like the bulging eyes of a chameleon. I could track the tiny black pupils staring back at mine.

He stood directly between me and the door of my house. I wanted him to hop or jump or fly or whatever it is that he does, directly away from me.

Instead, he dared me to squish him. He wasn’t a bit afraid. Every move I made, he followed with his stare. He became a Godzilla-like monster to me. Would my wife arrive home and find me, hours from now, still locked in a sidewalk staring duel with this fearsome-looking creature?

I imagined his brain had me figured out. His calculating calmness meant to weaken me, his intentions to do me harm once I gave in to the madness of the ever-creeping fear.

Seizing upon a solution to the impasse, I grabbed a twig, and, holding it bravely at arm’s length, I poked him. Godzilla stood his ground on the sidewalk, eyes rotating toward mine, defying my efforts, as if to say, “Is that all you’ve got?”

I poked again. This time, his large front legs, the ones he seemed to be praying with, flexed open, then slowly closed. Maybe he really was in prayer–in prayer for this giant oaf of a being who was interrupting meditations that I could not perceive.

In time, he unlocked his rotating-eyeball stare. Perhaps his prayers had concluded. Perhaps he spied a tasty-looking beetle in the weeds. Perhaps he felt sorry for me and decided to let me go. Legs still held in reverence, ever so slowly and proudly, he strolled forward to the edge of the sidewalk and dropped over its edge to once again enter the bug kingdom.

I may be the only human he ever makes contact with. I wonder what impression I left behind?

Postlude

Two weeks ago, I was crossing a parking lot, when I spotted an oddly-shaped brownish-tan leaf. It was a skinny leaf, as though torn from a larger piece.

This time when I scrunched down, I recognized that I was staring into the rotating eyes of another praying mantis.

By now, I knew that a praying mantis changes color from green, in a wet environment, to brown, when it is dry.

By now, I knew that a praying mantis possesses ultrasonic hearing, much like a bat; this one had heard me coming.

By now, I knew that a praying mantis has exceptional eyesight and can see movement up to 60 feet away; her rotating eyes could see me better than I could see her.

By now, I hoped that somehow this praying mantis had placed herself in a parking lot to help me recall her long-deceased green relative, and to remind me that the seemingly most insignificant of life’s encounters should not pass unnoticed and without gratitude.