crdahlberg

Silver Streak

A 1949 Pontiac Silver Streak doesn’t just sit there. It lounges like a pregnant golden retriever, faithful, comforting, and swollen.

In 1956, I sat in the back seat of my uncle’s Silver Streak–uncle, aunt, mom, dad, brother, cousin and I all fit into that lump of a car, a trundling loaf of sourdough bread.

Fireflies lit up Ohio’s evening sky. Through the Silver Streak’s window, I watched them dance between me and the corner gas station and the stop light, which had advanced from amber to red as we came to a stop.

Instantly, the peaceful scene transformed. Behind us, tires howled; headlights glared, swerved, bounced. We lurched violently. Suddenly stilled, the headlights stared cross-eyed at the Silver Streak’s enormous trunk. All was silent, except for Uncle Chet, unrefined vocabulary seething in his breath.

Then the yelling began. First Chet, then the guy whose bumper had mangled our trunk. I don’t know how drunk a skunk can get, but he was all of it, and then some.

Chet dumped change into the gas station’s pay phone and called the cops. Meanwhile, the drunken driver somehow lurched into his car’s driver’s seat and blasted headlong down the country road.

Within minutes, a puzzled cop arrived. As Chet spilled the details to him, the policeman’s radio crackled. It was a quick call. “Which way did he go?” he bellowed. “The guy that hit you is the man we’re looking for!”

Long after the fireflies had extinguished for the night, Chet’s Silver Streak somehow crawled home with all of us still in it.

We all recognized the next morning’s newspaper headline story–drunk hits car at stop light, then speeds off.

But we could not have known the rest of the story.

The drunk man, car trunk filled with loaded firearms, so drunk he called his family, telling them he was coming to kill them all. On his way, drunk man’s car collided with our Pontiac Silver Streak. Discovering that his family had fled, he burned the house down. Drunk man was arrested for attempted murder.

Inside, in Chet’s house: us, greatly relieved.

Outside, in Chet’s driveway: the Silver Streak, bruised and heavy, a lump of a car, faithful, comforting, and swollen. And fireflies.

The Bus

When my young grandsons could no longer tolerate waiting for the grownups in the wine tasting room, we all stretched our legs and exited through the side door to the Texas Hill County acreage surrounding us. The rest of the family tumbled across the tree-shaded field to the goats and miniature horses gathered along the wire fence, awaiting each visitor’s customary food handout and head scratch.

Holland and I stayed behind to investigate the aged double-decker English city bus standing at the edge of the field, an ancient other-worldly sentinel, guarding a place to which it did not belong.

Visiting neighborhoods where we once lived is to return to the remnants of an earlier time, re-living cherished memories. It’s the same for this bus, shuttling strangers who forged deep friendships. We wonder at the passengers and the stories they once shared.

I recalled my own bus-riding chum, Joe. Why did every traveler on that bus know, like, and repect Joe? Self-deprecating, he wore a grin that possessed his entire face. Chicken-foot wrinkly skin embraced his blue-hued eyes, eyes that laughed and invited others to enjoy the silent joke. Joe was a toucher, not the kind of toucher that the news reports about. His was a hand on the shoulder or a gentle finger upon the humerus to let you know he was listening. Joe carried lunch in a backpack, a ritual since he began riding the bus after suffering a seizure, ending his freeway automobile commute. Will Rogers is famously quoted for never meeting a man he didn’t like. I believe in Joe’s case, it was true. Though he never finished high school, his bus ride transported him to his job as the COO of one of the state’s largest ice cream producers.

Humble man makes good.

Not a bad legacy for any of us.

The passengers from this misplaced English bus in a Texas Hill Country winery are long gone, taking with them their friendships and memories.

All who now remain are grandson Holland and myself. As I glimpse his tiny face in the abandoned bus mirror, I sense we are creating our own private history together.

I think it will be a good one.

Not a bad legacy for any of us.

Colonoscopy

The Winter Olympics have the luge event, toboggans violently hurtling tightly-fitting passengers down a tube of pure ice, slick and smooth as a child’s slide descending from an ice castle.

Instead of the luge, doctors have the colonoscopy. Like the luge, it requires guidance using surgical precision, and it necessitates traversing a long and winding passageway. Unlike the toboggan, the required equipment carries no passengers along its slow, meandering course. It delivers hi-tech equipment, snapping pictures, snipping samples, and performing minor medical corrections along its medical mission.

I’m now in the hospital’s gastro-intestinal waiting room. All around me there are procedures underway. Sloth-slow devices are creeping carefully along, fiber-optically photographing dark tunnels of colonoscopic flesh.

Meanwhile, in my waiting room, overhead televisions project the Winter Olympics, competing athletes performing sports perfection. If I’m fortunate, a luge event will be displayed on my television—sleds slicing breakneck down icy tunnels. At the eventual conclusion, a winner will be declared; medals will be awarded to the athletes atop a victor’s podium.

At the end of today’s event in my G.I. waiting room, a drugged patient with temporarily impaired memory will emerge and be rewarded with tourist-like photographs snapped along the slow, abdominal journey. Unlike the Olympic festivities, there will be no victor’s podium ceremony. No anthems played.

Well-deserved praise goes to the eventual breakneck-speeding Olympic luge champion–national flag unfurled, anthem playing in triumph.

And hail to the slow-motion, sloth-speed, fastidious colonoscopist for polyps discovered, removed, and clean bill of health restored. Surgical gown discarded, the hospital speakers page this doctor, urging him to yet another slow-motion, high-performance venue.

Watch Your World Fall Apart

Willie’s Joint, near downtown Buda, Texas, features a giant, oversized Jenga game. Players pull out the blocks that seem to be supporting nothing, one block at time, and put them at the top until the whole mess collapses. If you’re the one who causes the collapse, you lose.

Especially during holidays, life imitates Jenga. Hosting family and friends and juggling meal and schedules stack up. Extricating the time to add one more task puts us into Jenga-collapse territory.

We’ve changed our ways to some degree. We’ve pared down our Christmas gift-giving. Our miniaturized plastic Christmas tree sits atop a corner table. Whittle down, whittle down. We’ve gotten good at it, and not just at Christmas time. We don’t want Jenga-collapse. The few important blocks stay at the bottom.

Fewer blocks!

Streamline! Invite the neighbors over? No way!

Spend time watching that time-wasting event on TV? Heck, no!

Efficiency! NOW we’re getting rid of those non-essential blocks!

Finally! We’re down to eating, sleeping, and going to the toilet! We’ve got all that other annoying activity out of our lives! We’ve pared down to hardly any Jenga blocks at all! Victory!

We sit in the silent living room, staring at the interior-designer-approved grey walls. No neighbors to entertain. No jangling cell phones. No nothin’!

That’s when I start missing all the blocks we removed to get to this place. It dawns on me that Jenga did us in. All the activities and distractions that made our lives so much fun are now gone. All our time-wasting friends are gone. They’re precisely where we put them–at the top of the Jenga tower with all the other non-essential things, and out of reach.

Our Jenga base has been reduced to exactly one block wide.

With trepidation, I barely touch that one remaining Jenga base block so as not to destroy the fragile construction.

Then, with one violent motion, I yank it free.

Three in a Row

If you look up “Tic Tac” on the Internet, you are directed either to sites about the breath mint candy, or to an investigation into a mysterious UFO dubbed Tic Tac by the Navy pilot who spotted it.

Won’t go there.

By adding the third word, “Toe” we refer to the game we know as “Tic Tac Toe”. Three words in a row spell the name of the game. Completing three in a row also happens to makes you the winner in this game.

In this huge plastic variant, son-in-law, Randy, and grandson, Linus, seem to be working it out. Tic-tac-toe.

As it turns out, Aristotle believed that friendship is also a three-across proposition, another sort of tic-tac-toe.

Aristotle names the first friendship “accidental” friendship, and it’s easy to fall into. It’s the person you happen to sit next to in an assigned classroom seat, or a person you wind up with on the same train car together, day after day. When the class ends, the travel ends, or the job ends, the friendship fades.

The second friendship is pleasure-based upon mutual interests, and it’s also not hard to discover – I like a certain sports team, and so do you. Or maybe we both rave about the latest movie, or automobile, or restaurant. But then we move on. The friendship based upon mutual interests was good while it lasted.

The third kind of friendship is harder to build. It involves mutual effort and endurance. This third-in-a-row friendship is the tic tac toe winner. It’s called The Friendship of the Good. It values the virtues and qualities within the other person. While these friendships take time to build, they grow more valuable over time, and are long-lasting. They rest on a foundation of mutual esteem and faith. Their value deepens after both persons have been seen both at their best and at their worst. They are some of life’s finest rewards.

Two out of three – “Tic Tac,” brings candy or a UFO story. Or transitory friendships.

But finding The Friendship of the Good completes the “Tic Tac Toe.” And that’s what makes a winning combination.

Holding On to Memories

Holding on to Memories.

I don’t know what’s going on in grandson Linus’s head. The dump trucks, the jungle gym, the soft, cushiony wood chips all conspire to create a place in his Thought World that he might play back hundreds of times, spanning many decades. It could be the beginning of a warm, embracing memory.

Memories. Some are so powerful, others so fleeting.

My earliest memory is sitting at a stainless steel dinette set in our kitchen. It was lunch time, and my high chair seat was pulled close. As she navigated the spoon toward my closed mouth, my mother teased me to open up.

“Here comes a car. Open the garage door! Here come the cows! Open the barn door! Come on! Here comes a plane, coming in for a landing!”

I remember that. The chrome chair legs, the red vinyl cushions, the white plastic table top with abstract grey squiggles. Like yesterday.

But ask me what I did last weekend. I’m clueless.

Memories are weird that way.

One time I caught myself in the garage, in my underwear, carrying a flyswatter. And I asked myself, “What am I supposed to be doing in the garage in my underwear with a flyswatter?’ Never came up with the answer.

Don’t tell me it’s never happened to you. I won’t believe you.

This week I heard a riveting news story. Researchers are discovering that as we age, two particular brain waves get out of synchronization when we sleep. Not by much. By milliseconds. But those milliseconds are critical to long term memory. Without this highly coordinated fleeting brain wave dance, the memories get lost. Short term memories never have a chance to be converted into long term memory.

They will not make the trip from short-term ephemeral experience into permanent, vivid long-term permanence. Access to that memory fades away.

I wish I could remember everything I once knew. I wish I could recall everything that I once experienced. I’d be the most brilliant and interesting person on the block.

But it sounds like that’s not going to happen.

That’s why we need photographs and journals to help remind us of the short-term stuff that lost its way.

More than that, that’s why we need our friends, so we can re-live the good times together.

The Ugly Smoothie Bus

Painted sky-blue with a bright red staircase at the far end, the ugly bus is too boxy, too oversized for proper use as a smoothie stand. Unlikely umbrellas sprouting out the top, like oversized inverted T.V. satellite dishes, add to the comic effect.

Instead, smoothie stands should be cute, accessible and inviting, not bulky, cold and intimidating. Shouldn’t they?

Recently, I witnessed another incongruous event—a television interview with famed Canadian actor, Donald Sutherland, who is now 82. He is the veteran of over 150 film roles, although he confesses to have never viewed many of those films.

I assumed Sutherland to be self-assured, a man of confidence. Instead, he was surprisingly uncertain and full of comic introspection.

He is especially put off by his own physical appearance. As a young boy, he asked his mother if he were good looking. Avoiding a direct response to his query, and after a long pause, she answered, “Your face has character, Donald.” He escaped to his room to hide.

“It’s not easy to know that you’re an ugly man,” he reflected in the interview.

To be beautiful, to be handsome seems to be what it’s all about. But common sense tells us that looks aren’t everything. Consider King Saul, the most handsome of men, but a royal disaster.

In fact, all of us have bits out of place. It’s those out-of-place, incongruent bits that make us who we are–the knobby nose, the unequal ears, the scrubby brows.

Many of us, like Donald Sutherland, have misgivings about ourselves. Like the oversized sky-blue smoothie bus with red staircase, we feel ugly as a giant smoothie stand.

Yet, it’s that same sky-blue and red paint and odd umbrellas that make the smoothie stand so memorable, unexpected and delightful; there’s an incongruent party going on.

Without those peculiar ears, chin and eyes, we’d miss Donald Sutherland. He just wouldn’t be the same.

And without our own slightly whacky, slightly unexpected but thoroughly engaging bits, neither would we.

Childlike Wonder

A water drain beneath their street was enough to draw grandchildren Holland, Linus and Thatcher in for a spelunking adventure. Nets and cups. Check. Rain galoshes. Check. Those corrugated steel pipes might contain toad or salamander trophies, or perhaps a scrap of unknown substance. My guess would be kryptonite.

When we are young, everything is new and undiscovered, so there is wonderment in everything. As we age, we can become criminally hardened to wonderment, to the “oddness” of things since we have seen it all before.

Last week, while taking a shower, an odd juxtaposition occurred. I draped my fresh clothes over hooks and unceremoniously dropped my old, soiled clothes in a pile on the floor.

Stepping into the shower, I closed the curtain behind me. With preliminary preparations completed, there was no turning back when I heard, and then spied, an enormous blue bottle house fly. I was imprisoned with this beast, cordoned off from the world, within the confines of fiberglass wall and shower curtain.

Shortly, I recognized that the fly’s incessant dive-bombing of my normally-inaccessible body parts could not go on. Defenseless, with reaction time inadequate to squash him and with no flyswatter in sight, I sought a means to destroy him.

We are blessed with an extremely efficient hot water tank, and doubly blessed to possess a shower head with a hand wand. Standing well back, shower wand in hand, I cranked the water knob all the way to the left–to scorch mode.

Briefly, the fly’s buzz escalated to the wail of a tiny ambulance siren, as the fly frantically sought an escape route. The wail was quickly extinguished when the scalding water fried the pest’s innards.

I wondered over the power and authority I possessed to end this pest’s life, a life so annoying yet wondrous in its creation. It lay, limp and tiny in the shower stall, a miraculous trophy of art and engineering. I felt both powerful and humbled.

There it went, down the drain, down the sewer. Perhaps my grandchildren will soon find their own creation trophy in a sewer drain beneath a road, fish it out with their net, and share in its wonder.

Communications Revolution

There’s just one word that describes the latest communications methodology: stunning.

This new advance offers a social media platform that is transformative, without depending upon any underlying technology. Breathtaking, really.

Two blocks down from author Jen Hatmaker’s residence in Buda, Texas, the Buda Soda Fountain is not where you would expect to find this awesome technology. Yet there it is, operating from this humble business since long before the creation of Apple and Microsoft. But there is no Internet data to purchase, no setup charge, and never a need to call tech support.

Amazingly, there are no devices—of any kind—needed to get this system to work. No laptop, no smartphone, no Wi-Fi.

To give this system a thorough test, Jackie and grandson, Linus, sat down together with this amazing invisible technology at the Buda Soda Fountain. Prior to the test, the TSA searched them for any hidden technology designed to cheat this experiment.

To my consternation, the experiment worked brilliantly! Yes, you heard me correctly; I witnessed it! There they were, communicating with each other without any apparent technology!

First, using his mouth, Linus would speak directly to Jackie—in perfectly intelligible words. She would listen, and then, apparently understanding what he said, she would utter her response back to him—in real time! They continued this interaction repeatedly, over and over and over again, and—I repeat—it worked without a glitch or hiccup, using no visible electronic equipment!

In addition to communicating words, this killer technology offers amazing color rendition. It blew away Apple’s cutting edge Super Retina screen display technology. Check out the vibrant shade of bluish-green. Simply unreal! Again, no visible technology was employed! This is real-time communication using real-world rays of light!

Apparently, the eventual goal is to bring this awesome real-as-life technology to other universally-accessible soda shops, dining tables or living rooms that are available to both you and me. Amazing!

It’s a right-on-time, not-available-at-your-local-store technology that could radically change our world.

Retribution

The slogan on these martial arts studio t-shirts declares, “Touch Me and Your First Lesson Is Free.”

We’re cautioned against inappropriate behavior. We’re reminded that the consequences of misbehavior could be costly.

Society is noticing. Unwelcome, patronizing physical contact is not acceptable.

They ought to make a movie about it, or pass another law against it. Unfortunately, some of the movie makers and law makers are themselves flawed.

There are truly outrageous transgressors out there.

Just when I get ready to cast the first stone against these offenders, I am apprehended.

Because if we widen the lens, we can all think of things of which we ourselves are guilty. Foolish things. Inappropriate things. Things having bad unanticipated consequences.

Maybe we were young and insecure and wanted attention. Maybe we were cocky, arrogant, and purposefully crossed lines, and knew better.

For whatever reason, we let ourselves go there, we are ashamed, and we ought to be.

There is a sort of underlying, guiding truth.

No matter what the offense, those of us who recognize the depth of our transgression and repent, get to start over.

Those who don’t, endlessly circle and snarl.