Picture this. I’m five. Not only am I five, I’m short for my age. Don’t take up hardly any room.
Me, front seat, middle. No bucket seats back then. Just bench seats, I think they were called. Bench seats and no seat belts. Riding in Uncle Archie’s car. Archie driving. Dad riding shotgun, to my right. Me in the middle. Dad and Archie in steady conversation. Just two low voices. Blah blah blah. Me, not even coming up to their shoulders, the conversation literally and figuratively going right over my head. Nothing to do with me. Me, practically not even here, but I’m used to that.
My world right now is this dashboard in front of me. It’s all I’ve got. Nothing else to look at, not being able to see out the windshield. But it’s on my level, so… yeah, the dashboard. And… the ignition key plugged into it. I’ve been fixated on the ignition key for some time now. And the tiny beaded chain swinging from it. Shiny. Swaying. The only thing moving in my world right now. Like a little fishing lure for bored eyes.
Finally. Dad’s and Uncle Archie’s attention are suddenly focused on something up ahead and off to the left. Some house being built. By some friend or acquaintance of theirs. Whatever. I’d been waiting for something like that.
“Well, that’s coming right along.”
“I’d say so. ‘Bout another month maybe.”
Quick as lightning, I clamp that key in my sweaty little fist, twist it once to the left, then jerk it back to the right, and have my hand lying back in my lap like nothing ever happened as the car coughs, convulses jarringly, and K’POW! farts off a shotgun blast of a backfire before returning to normal.
Dad: “What the hell was that!?”
Uncle Archie: “Damned if I know! She never done that before.”
Fortunately, no one looks down and asks me. Why would they? I’m just a five year old. I’m not even here.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Let me begin with this obvious fact: automobiles are vastly different today than they were in the 1950s. They’ve evolved over time in the same way Man has evolved. On a sliding scale from the simpler to the more complex.
Who knows where each will end up when our sun finally implodes, sucking our solar system down inside the event horizon into its own black hole with it? If that even is what happens. Hell, I’m no physicist. But I do know a thing or two about what cars were like way back in 1950sville.
So many things were different.
All cars had manual transmissions back then. Why? Because there was no alternative, of course. The automatic transmission in cars were not commercially available yet. Meaning when you applied for your driver’s license, you knew you’d be taking your road test on a stick shift. No letter D for Drive, R for Reverse, or P for park. Meaning you’d have to have become intimate with the dreaded clutch pedal. I know. That’s scary. But I did it. In fact, we all did it.
But also meaning that the harder-than-nuclear-physics, manual-gear-shifting diagram was also something you’d have to become intimate with. Which is why you didn’t see Marty McFly jumping into, and driving off in, any 1950s cars in Back to the Future I.
I’ve already mentioned seating in The Prologue. Sports cars had bucket seats, but common cars did not. Plus nobody had seat belts in the 1950s, and nobody wanted those nuisances either, when they finally came out, as Chuck Berry’s song lyrics of “No Particular Place to Go” so aptly expressed years later: “Can you imagine the way I felt? I couldn’t unfasten her safety belt!”
Plus you’ve probably heard about those “suicide doors,” too— doors that opened up in the exact opposite direction than they do today. A leftover from the slower-speed, horse-drawn carriage days, a suicide door was an automobile door that was hinged on the rear-facing side, rather than the front-facing side.
Today if you’re barreling down the highway doing 70 and one of your passengers foolishly tries to open a car door, it’s nearly impossible. The wind’s 70 miles per hour blow-back pressure will fight to keep that door from opening up. In the 50’s however, many car doors (especially back-seat doors) were still designed to open in the opposite direction.
As a child, I was seated one afternoon in the back seat of our suicide-rear-door car while it was tooling down the road, probably at 50. For some reason (curiosity maybe) I grasped the door handle of the door on the driver’s side and began to open it a crack (can’t for the life of me remember why… although being naturally stupid and too curious for my own good immediately come to mind). As soon as I got the door barely inched open, the hurricane blow-back caught my door like a sail and just flung it open, practically catapulting me like a tiny, human, seat-beltless cannonball straight out onto the road in front of oncoming cars! Fortunately for me, my hand strength was practically zero so the door handle was just torn right out of my grip. My fingers got painfully sprained though, but I was still sitting, alive and whole, on the back seat. A hard way to learn a lesson
Ah yes. Life in the good old dangerous days.
But now to my main point. There is one big difference between the cars of the Nifty Fifties and today’s automobiles which I’ve never even thought about until lately, one which pertains to the incident I barely touched on in my prologue. More about that in a bit, right after I tell you a little story by way of introduction. It’s a true story, as all of my stories are. Never had any luck at all at creating literary fiction.
This one occured in 1960… me, thirteen going on fourteen. The year was 1960, but my parents’ car was a big, black, bulky 4-door 1948 Plymouth.
A cousin of ours who was two and a half, maybe three years older than me, lived in Massachusetts. Each year he’d summer at our place for a few weeks. His family was obviously better off than ours, financially anyway, because Wayne always seemed to have the coolest things. Cool clothes. Cool roller skates. Cool transistor radio. Cartons of cigarettes with usually one cancer stick nonchalantly propped up there like a pencil in behind his ear. A wad of twenties in his wallet at all times, and somehow always more where they came from. And fresh from the city streets of Boston, all the latest off-colored jokes to entertain everybody with. And most important, Wayne had just gotten his driver’s license. That was big. Because with him around, sometimes we had wheels. A lot of the popular town guys and all the girls couldn’t wait to see him show up every summer. In our redneck world, it was like having a lesser Elvis (notice how that almost sounded like a lesser evil? {Freudian slip, there}) come and stay at our place. I practically worshipped him (until I didn’t).
Now Dover-Foxcroft is situated only five miles from Maine’s gorgeous Sebec Lake. And that lake was huge in our summer social lives back then. We kids of just about all ages hitch-hiked out there and back almost every day. There was the municipal beach that was always pretty packed with the bathing-suited summer folks from away. The beach had its own concession stand for hamburgers, chips, cigarettes, and sodas, plus the usual male and female changing rooms and rest rooms. There was the marina next door to the beach where the wealthy tourists moored all those luxurious outboard and inboard motor boats.
The marina had a small convenience store too for beer, pastries, some groceries, fishing tackle, live bait, and boat rentals. The wonderful, magic roller rink was right there too (and oh, that makes me go all weak with nostalgia, just thinking about it once again). It was the jewel in the crown, if you ask me. All the beautiful girls from near and far skated there. In short, like the song, the lake was “the magnet and I was the steel.”
One Sunday afternoon, we wanted go back out there to retrieve something we’d left at camp so I, Denny, and Wayne went to dad to beg for the family car. Dad was a TV and radio repairman who did service calls over a pretty large portion of the county back then. Yes, even on Sundays. Here’s how the conversation went down:
Dad: I dunno. I’ve got a service call over in Milo, so I’m gonna need the car.
Us: We just wanna go over and back to pick up something. It won’t take long.
Dad: All right, But I’m going to need it in a half hour then.
Us: Half hour tops, no problem.
So we all piled into the Plymouth, me calling “Shotgun!”
It always felt so adventurous back then to just take off in a car not being driven by an adult. It gave me a new-found, giddy feeling of freedom that I was still just getting accustomed to as I grew a little older. Inside the car it was always just boy talk. Sometimes about girls. Sometimes about places we’d been, more specifically about where Wayne had been, like Quebec City, since he’d traveled all over and we really hadn’t. Sometimes it was about cars. That day it was about cars.
Denny and I didn’t know anything about cars, especially anything technical about them. What was important to me was getting my own license soon and just go off cruising to who knows where. I mean, just imagining what it was going to be like, sitting behind the steering wheel someday and actually driving someplace by myself was so enticing it was all I could think about. That, and the impossible dream of actually buying a car of my very own.
So yeah, we were talking cars that day. And for one reason or another, I brought up the memory I still have of causing such a satisfying backfire in Archie’s car, way back when I was five years old.
Me: And all I had to do was turn the ignition key off and then back on. Ka-bang! It was so cool!
Wayne: Yeah I’ve heard of that. And you know what they say?
Me: No. Whatta they say?
Wayne: That the longer you wait before, you know, switching the ignition key back to ON? The bigger and better the backfire!
Me: No shit!
Wayne: I shit you not.
Me: Well, my backfire was pretty loud, you know.
Wayne: Wanna find out if it’s true though?
Denny: No! We don’t. It’s Dad’s car. Besides, we ain’t got time to…”
Me: Of course we wanna find out!
So, long story short, there is this big hill at the end of Lake Road that rolls you down into Greeley’s Landing, where the roller skating rink, the Marina, the little store, and the Municipal Beach are. Guess what the name of that hill is. Mile Hill. Mile Hill, because you can just roll downhill on it for a certified measured mile.
And only five minutes later we’d reached the crest of that Mile Hill, and had started heading down. Wayne shifted the Plymouth into neutral, and we felt gravity begin to take over, pulling us along. “Here we go,” said I, me in the co-pilot’s seat.
“This is not a good idea,” radioed Denny back there from the tail gunner’s turret.
I twisted the ignition key to the OFF position as we gradually began to build up speed in our silent dive toward the lake below. It was a quiet drive down, nothing but the sizzle of the tires on asphalt. It would take slightly over a full minute to reach the bottom, where the road levels off about a hundred yards before becoming the boat ramp. “God, I wonder what this one’ll be like!” I marveled. Houses and camps and trees were beginning to sail past us on both sides of the road at an accelerating rate. Wayne tapped on the brakes now and then so we didn’t get rolling so fast we’d end up in the lake.
When we could see the blue water up ahead, Wayne said, “OK. We’re pretty much here. Do your key thing.”
‘Roger Wilco,” I responded.
“I still don’t think this is a good idea!” Denny reported from the turret.
But I responded with, “Bombs away!” I twisted the key back to ON.
There was a split-second of held breaths in pure silence.
And then… HIROSHIMA!
The car was rocked by the most devastating detonation I’d ever experienced at that point of my life! And when I say “rocked,” I am not kidding! The car spasmed! And oh man, we’d definitely gotten our backfire alright! The backfire of the gods. The noise of the blast was a deafening assault, and then the continued roaring that followed was unbearable if not injurious. You. Couldn’t. Even. THINK!
Wayne hit the clutch and let the car roll to a stop off the side of the road. Then he put her in gear, and turned the key back to OFF, thank God. The roaring stopped. I suppose that brought silence, but for a minute or three the roaring in my skull still reverberated so loudly, you couldn’t have proved it by me. We just sat there for a while.
Finally, after we’d gotten our breathing under control, if not our heart rates, Wayne looked over at me and said, “Well, you’d better get out and check out how loose the muffler is, OK?”
“OK.”
Now here is a moment I will never forget as long as I live. Rather than get out, I just opened my door, hung my head and upper torso down off over the edge of the seat, bracing myself with my two hands in the gravel to keep from falling on my head. And took me a look-see. After a moment I pushed myself back up in onto the car seat again. I let out a long sigh. And then I said it.
“What muffler?”
Because nothing but jagged, smoking, metal shards dangled hellishly from both of the now-empty ends of the exhaust pipes that had once secured either end of the muffler firmly in its place. So. There was no muffler. Or… what remained OF the muffler lay strewn in a metal debris field spread over forty or fifty yards behind the rear bumper. An explosion of, for us at least, unimaginable force had blasted a steel muffler to smithereens!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Now two things I want to say at this point: (1) I have already admitted that I knew little, next to nothing really, of things automotive, so I had no way myself of technically understanding (let alone explaining) what had just occurred here; and (2) I’m worrying here that you, dear reader, might suspect me of using a little (or way too much) exaggeration in the hopes of over-dramatizing my description of what had just happened beneath Dad’s ’48 Plymouth. To try to make a pretty good story an even better story. I say this because if I were in your shoes, I think you would also find me leaning toward being the Doubting Thomas here about the way I’ve described this… happening.
So. If it please the court, I would like to enter into evidence my Exhibit A:
This incident occurred in, or around, 1960 as I’ve said. Much later (48 years later, to be exact), an essay appeared in a February 24th, 2008 syndicated weekly column of The Bangor Daily News. The column’s name was Click and Clack. Click and Clack were actually two brothers, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, a couple of comics whose other field of expertise lay in their lifetime careers as a couple of automobile mechanics. People seeking automobile and general automotive related advice and answers to questions would write in with their queries to the Click and Clack Brothers. On the date of publication mentioned above, this particular column title jumped right out at me: “HERE’S HOW VEHICLES WITH CARBURETORS CAN MAKE ADOLESCENTS GRIN.” I saw this, and I suspected right away what this was going to be about and, sure enough, I wasn’t disappointed.
See, I’d been wondering off and on over the years just why the three of us experienced SUCH a thunderous explosion that afternoon instead of just a heftier little backfire. By reading this article, my question was answered with a single word: “carburetor.” As they explained, cars these days no longer have carburetors. They’re all fuel-injected now.
And they go on to explain one particular, pertinent fact about carburetors, along with including a funy little story of their own (please do yourself a favor and read it, for a chuckle). “When you turned the ignition key off in an old car, the carburetor would continue to allow gasoline to pour into the cylinders. That gasoline didn’t get combusted, because the spark plugs weren’t firing so it all got pushed out into the exhaust system where it basically just continued to sit there, waiting for something to happen. When you turned the ignition back on, that first spark would ignite not only the fuel in the cylinder, but all of the fuel sitting in the exhaust system, too. And, kaboom!”
So let’s apply that explanation to Dad’s unfortunate 1948 Plymouth’s muffler. OK. I switched off the ignition key. This allowed gasoline to begin pouring into the cylinders and beyond, unabated. Now with my Uncle Archie’s car, back when I was five, I switched the ignition OFF and then right back ON immediately, so whatever little gasoline had dribbled into the exhaust system just made a feisty little kaboom. But in Dad’s Plymouth, unbeknownst to us, we traveled a full frickin’ mile while gasoline was happily filling up the muffler and “waiting for something to happen.” Is it any wonder then that the damn thing blew itself all to hell when I turned the key back to ON? The only wonder is that it didn’t catch the car afire, that the fire didn’t engulf the whole car in an instant ball of flame and melt us like three marshmallows! Wow.
Once again I plead temporary and/or permanent stupidity.
And that just leaves the second part of the fireworks— namely, facing my dad later in the day. Stay tuned.
I know what you’re thinking. But, no, the above is not actually a training video for extraterrestrials on How to Pass As Human Prior to The Great Alien Invasion of Planet Earth. Instead this one is to teach MORONS (us Baby Boomers) How to Use the Telephone!
By the way, there are hundreds of similar, vintage black and white PSAs (public service announcements videos) on YouTube waiting to entertain you. They cover so many very important issues: “Dinner Etiquette”; “What Makes a Girl Popular”; “Your Doctor Is Your Friend”; “Your Kiss of Affection, the Germ of Infection”; “They Don’t Wear Labels: I’ve Got VD ”; “Let Asbestos Protect the Buildings on Your Farm”; “Beware of Homosexuals”; “How Much Affection?”; and “The Trouble With Women, to name a few.At the risk of sounding like some crude scrawl of grafitti on the inside wall of a phone booth (remember phone booths?): For a good time…search YouTube for “vintage PSA’s.”
In 1958, “Telephone Etiquette” was the name of an actual dumbass teaching unit we kids had to endure in junior high. That particular ‘adventure’ lasted for approximately two dumbass weeks— and dedicated dumbassedly to conforming our rambunctious juvenile behaviors around the family telephone to rigid, recognizably Stepford-Wives-like standards, a laughable goal for preadolescents. The unit included intensive emphasis on such rocket-science, hard-to-grasp concept as The Three Magic Phrases: “Please,” “Thank you,” and “I’m sorry.” Fortunately, since we apparently were a class of morons, there was this helpful video:
So… how did we, the rambunctious preadolescent little morons, fare in our unit on telephone etiquette? Not so well, considering the number of after school detentions that ensued, along with the delicious fact that, on one particular day, a police officer was summoned to make an appearance. Of course the number of detentions was pretty much maintaining the status quo throughout the school year with the teacher we had: Mrs. Bernice Sterling, a.k.a, “Bugsy.” The cop being called? That was a one-off.
Bugsy’s reputation spanned decades. For instance, when our school held its annual evening Open House, giving parents the opportunity to drop into the classroom after work and chat with our teachers about our progress or lack thereof, my dad who was a saint by the way, couldn’t muster up the courage to show up. Bugsy’d been one of his teachers way back when, and he was still terrified of her to that day.
Anyway, considering how we boys (not so much the girls) found it next to impossible to take many subjects seriously, this unit didn’t stand the chance of the proverbial snowball in hell. Like most other classes there was reading the assigned pages, taking notes, memorizing the do’s and don’t’s from various charts, and taking quizzes.
But then there was also those stupid ggiggle-worthy “exercises” we had to perform where everybody had to partner up— each couple taking its turn in the pair of empty chairs at the front of the room and each student, in turn, directed to simulate phoning his or her partner to demonstrate proper phone etiquette for a passing grade. Sometimes the play-acting called for you to make a personal call to a friend; sometimes it involved calling a potential employer to ask for a job application and interview, etc. Whatever.
The very process of partnering up had one obviously built-in classroom management problem. It was the teacher who selected who’d couple up with whom, supposedly at random, but invariably, to keep one class-clown from being seated with another class-clown (a sure-fire recipe for classroom havoc), she tended to pair one boy with one girl whenever possible. So just try to imagine the barbed gigglesand whispers and note-passings that this engendered, along with the cruel, Roman Coliseum embarrassment the shyest, non-popular, non-attractive girl or boy had to suffer right along with the future prom king or queen linked with them. The blackboard jungle.
Secondly, and most importantly, we boys honestly knew so much more than old Bugsy would ever know about the real world of telephone use in her lifetime! We were the frickin’ experts! So the very idea of me (or any of my pals) having to demonstrate how to conduct a proper telephone call with a close friend was so beyond laughable it wasn’t even funny.
Up until 3rd or 4th grade, my family didn’t even own a telephone. But my grandmother who lived in an apartment upstairs did. One of those big wooden boxes that looked like a large birdhouse mounted on the living room wall, with what looked like a large pair of bugged-out eyes installed across the top-front of the box. Those were actually a pair of rounded, metal bells that rang whenever a call was received. Then there was that little black cone for speaking into, mounted like some cartoonish puckered mouth below the ‘eyes.’ Also, hanging off the box’s left side, was the large chess-pawn-shaped receiver on a cord. And finally, the little metal crank installed on the right side of the box was used for generating electricity. All very steampunk.
Occasionally I would be allowed, under parental supervision, to make a “magic” call to Stevie Taylor, my main pal who lived down the street. But once I’d got the hang of it, I’d sometimes sneak upstairs by my own self when Nanny was out, give the little crank a few turns, take the receiver off the hook, and secretly listen in on what was supposedly private conversations neighbors of ours were having. See, Nanny’s phone was connected to some of our neighbors on what was then known as a party line. A private phone line was expensive, so most families opted for the cheaper party-line plan. There were at least four or five neighborhood neighbors’ phones sharing the line with Nanny’s. So when a call came in and rang in two ring bursts (ring-ring! pause ring-ring! pause, etc.) then all connected families would hear it and know that that call was for the Smith family; whereas if the call sounded with bursts of five rings (ring-ring-ring-ring-ring! pause) then that might designate the call was for Nanny, etc. And in a perfect world, only someone in the designated family would pick up the receiver. In a perfect world.
Guess what. The world is flawed. The party-line era was infamous for adults sneakily listening in on their neighbors’ phone conversations. I mean, all the time. It was the neighborhood sport of phone-tapping spies. A world of audio voyeurs.
One day while I was listening in on whomever, I accidentally positioned the hand-held receiver a little too close to the speaking cone. Guess what happened! SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Ear-deafening feedback! Thunderstruck, I dropped the receiver! Immediately the screech stopped, thank God! But I could hear tinny little far-away voices from the dangling receiver, one exclaiming, “What the HELL was THAT!?” and another saying, “I have no idea!” I carefully returned the receiver to its cradle, and crept back down the stairs with a guilty heart. Bur EUREKA! Serendipitously, I had discovered the magic of feedback, although I didn’t know the name at that point. Did I ever create telephone feedback again? On purpose? What do you think? Of course I did.
So, back then there was this old crone, Lottie with the whiskery old witch’s chin, who lived right across the street from us— a real ‘Mrs. Dubose’ straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird. And when I was just a toddler playing outside in the rain, she’d spy me standing in a puddle and what’d she do? She’d come a-running out onto her porch screaming like a banshee at me! “You get your shoes right out of that puddle, mister! Your father works hard all day long at keeping you kids in shoes and clothes, and look what you do! Just look at you! You should be ashamed of yourself! You should be beat with a hickory stick, you ungrateful little…!”
Well, I didn’t know what business of hers my shoes or my dad’s income was because… she wasn’t my mother. But I’d retreat sobbing and tracking water back into the fortress of my home anyway .
When I was a little older, she was being bothered by dogs pooping on her lawn and running wild through her flowerbeds. So she came over to our house one day and asked my dad to let her borrow my Red Ryder BB rifle. And damn it, Dad let her take it. And oh, didn’t it irk me to no end to see her riding shotgun over there day after day, slouched in her porch chair with my rifle laid across her lap like some stagecoach guard in a western cowboy movie,and taking occasional potshots at the bandits. And at least a couple of times I caught her taking aim at me while chasing a stray rubber ball that was rolling a little too close to her flowers. She was your basic hard, neighborhood, old bag, a force to be reckoned with, to be feared by little boys, salesmen, and canines. That hag deserved every damned egg teenagers ever pelted her house with over the years.
So anyway, whenever I’d tiptoe up to Nanny’s vacant apartment to while away some time listening to the neighbors gossiping on the party line, I’d give the phone a couple of cranks, quietly lift the receiver out of the cradle, sit back, and just play spy. But… whenever I’d hear that familiar, scratchy, Long John Silver’s voice of Lottie’s, I’d delight in drawing the receiver up to the mouthpiece and… then… SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Nanny finally got herself a rotary-dial telephone. So did everybody else in the neighborhood, including Lottie. So gone were my days of fun of being The Phantom Feedbacker of the Neighborhood Party Line. Because rotary phones cleverly mounted the receiver and transmitter forever apart at opposite ends of the barbell-shaped handset. (The manufacturers had found me out.)
I’d grown tired of listening to boring old ladies exchanging recipes and supposedly juicy gossip anyway. And meanwhile Lottie was maintaining her hard-earned reputation as the number-one, all-time, serial, neighborhood party-line eavesdropper ever. A legend. She’d become that ghostly shadow, always standing off to the side and just behind the lacy curtain that veiled the window in her front door. Sort of like that signature TV pencil sketch of Alfred Hitchcock at the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Perpetually the eyes and the ears of the neighborhood. Only with a telephone handset glued to her ear.
So of course when you were speaking to someone/anyone on the phone, you knew you were being monitored, and would choose your words accordingly. However, one afternoon after school, I was on the phone with Steve Taylor and, I don’t know why but I was feeling extra-feisty. And suddenly, mid-conversation, I just blurted right out, “Be careful what you say, Stevie, ‘cause you just know that old bag Lottie across the street is listening to every doggone word we’re saying!”
“WELL I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW I’M DOING NOSUCHTHING!” Lottie blasted haughtily, and then bang! Gone. She’d hung up. Good ol’ Lottie. It made my day!
So anyway, “Feedback” was my first lesson learned in becoming a sophisticated telephone “operator.” But I learned another little phone trick just as serendipitously. I was older at this point, and using the rotary dial had become second nature to me. I was at somebody’s house and had to call home to leave a message for Mom. OK, Nanny’s upstairs phone number was 2197. Just four simple numbers. But being in a hurry, I screwed up, actually only dialing only 297.Quickly realizing my mistake, I hung up to do it again but before I could even pick the handset back up, the phone was ringing right in front of me. I automatically picked up and said, “Hello?” There was no answer. “Hello? Anybody there?” Nope. Just the dial tone. That was odd. But it had happened so instantaneously, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had somehow caused it. On a whim, I dialed 297 intentionally this time, and hung right up. Again, the phone rang. Again, no one there. What a curious thing. But by God, I had stumbled onto something! I tried it again. And yes: I could make my host’s phone ring at will. And already I was wondering, Would this work on another phone? Other… phones? On Nanny’s phone?
So at home I headed upstairs, dialed 297, and hung up. Yes! The phone rang! Nanny came out of the kitchen and lifted the handset to her ear. “Hello?” she said, “…Hello?” and then, “Well, that’s odd. I guess they hung up. Just a dial tone.” I was ecstatic. I really had discovered something! Something deliciously all mine! Something to make life just a little more interesting. And I alone seemed to be the only one in town who knew about it. In no time, I had pranked about a dozen people I knew.
Say I’m at a friend’s house, waiting for my buddy to come downstairs. His mom leaves the room. I get out of my chair, dial 297, hang up, and leap back into the chair again. Ring! Mom hurries back in, picks up the phone, says hello a couple of times, and says, “Well that’s funny. Just a dial tone.” I was controlling people. It gave me a sense of power. I even pulled that stunt on Merrick Square Market a few times. But I kept it just for myself. I didn’t share my… super power with any of my friends. For a long time. Finders, keepers you know. But of course I eventually did spill the beans. And then… phones were ringing all over Dover-Foxcroft, driving the population crazy. heh heh…
Oh, I’ve just gotta tell you this one. This one is rich:
It was December, Christmas time, and J. J. Newberry’s had a little sales gimmick going on that year— a Santa Claus hotline. Their Santa’s phone number was published in their Christmas flyers and advertised on the radio. Little rug rats were encouraged to call the hotline and talk to Santa, telling him what they wanted for Christmas. I, and a friend, saw a fun opportunity in this. We would call the hotline and, using our Academy Award winning babyish voices, mess with Santa’s mind. We were such little dicks. The prototypes of Beavis and Butthead.
But unfortunately for all concerned, there was a very, very similar number to the hotline’s that was getting a lot of calls by accidental misdialing. Word from other Beavis and Butthead prototypes had gotten around. Turned out, it was already widely known to whom that number belonged. It was a woman in town who was socking away a little Christmas money—you know, cash under the table— by entertaining ‘gentlemen callers’ at all hours of the night, if you get my drift. And word was, she was one angry dudette. Well, since we were a couple of the worst kind of little dinks, and due to the fact that there was no such thing as Caller ID, we didn’t have to be told twice.
A woman’s voice answered, “Hello?”
“Can I pweathe talk to ThantaCwauthe,” I said, with a child’s voice and a lisp, “cauthe I wanna tell him wha…”
“Goddamn you little shits all to hell! You got the wrong number. Again! Now this… has to stop, you dig? I can’t take this anymore. This, for your information, is a business phone! Not the Santa Claus number at Newberry’s, for Christ’s sake! And you’re tying up my goddamn line! Now… you just call the right number right now and you tell… your fat-ass Santa Claus… that J. J. Newberry’s is gonna get sued! For harassment! And if you’re stupid enough to call this number one more time, I’ll… track you down! I’ll find you and wring your little neck! You got that!?”
“Well… Mewwy Chwithmuth…” I said, but Bang! She’d hung up. Rather rudely, too. But I mean, holy crap, was that ever fun for two little pains in the ass like us! But, boy, did she ever sound scary. Still more fun than poking a hornet’s nest, though.
However, please don’t get the idea I was the only one being an obnoxious little brat with the telephone games. Because I’m here to tell you no, not by a long shot. So many extra Y-chromosome boys my age were also badass contemporaries in the same field. I mean junior high fellas? Bored and with nothing to do? And there was that telephone just sitting there, a toy waiting to be used and abused? Prank phone calls were a sport back then. A craze. And it wasn’t jjst kids, either. Look up “50’s phone pranks “on Google. You’ll see. Oh, and once again, you have to remember: no Caller ID.
There were some, the more creative ones like myself, who were experts at it; and then there were those mealy-mouthed amateurs, sheep basically, just following the pack and repeating what everybody else had been pranking since the caveman days. For instance, dialing a random convenience store number and asking, “Do you have Prince Albert in the can?” And then, if the answer is, “Why, yes, we do,” the low-life prankster/dilettante would shout, “Well… why don’t you let him out so he doesn’t suffocate?” before hanging up, falling on the floor laughing, and laughing himself sick.
*Prince Albert being the brand name of a popular pipe tobacco sold in either a soft package or a can
That prank, plus this other most common one, were so overused.“Hello. This is General Electric calling. Is your refrigerator running?” and of course the response to a “Yes” would be, “Well, why don’t you run after it and catch it?” Yeah. Two of the most boring tropes of the 50s. I know, sad, right? Audio memes.
My cousin and I preferred the more interactive scenarios like this one, especially effective when you got a little old lady on the line:
Prankee: “Hello?”
Pranker: (In a low, adult-sounding voice) “Good morning, Ma’am. I’m a representative of the Bell Telephone Company.”
Prankee: “Oh? How can I help you?”
Pranker: “Well ma’am. We’re going through the town today, house by customer house, cleaning out all the phone lines. If you happen to have a paper bag handy, that would be a big help.”
Prankee: “Oh. Actually I do believe I have some paper bags in the cupboard. All right. I’ll get one and be right back.”
Pranker: “Thanks, ma’am. I’ll wait right here.”
Prankee: (heavy paper rustling) “I’m back. And I do have a bag. What do I do with it?”
Prankee: Please pull the bag right over your telephone handset, then wrap the bag up tightly and hold it firmly. But be especially sure to look away. We blow the dust out of the lines with our heavy-duty power blower, and we don’t to get dust all over your floor or, especially, in your eyes. Let us know when you’re ready.”
Prankee: (really loud paper rustling) (Prankee’s voice sounding fainter now under the rustling) “OK. I think I’m ready…”
Pranker: “OK. Hang on tight!” (Pranker, making a loud, drawn-out, high-pitched WOOOOOOOWEEEEEeeeee! with puckered mouth.) “OK. Ma’am. We’re done. The Bell Telephone Company thanks you for your cooperation in this matter.”
Prankee: “Okey-dokey!” (loud paper rustling) “Ummmm. There doesn’t seem to be any dust in my bag, though…”
Pranker: “Well done. We commend you on your neat housekeeping, ma’am. And thank you again.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Mostly my cousin and I were really just trying to harmlessly amuse ourselves. One time, for whatever reason, we decided we’d conduct an important-sounding survey by calling 30 or so totally random numbers to find out which opera was Dover-Foxcroft’s favorite. Both of us having been brought up pretty much on Mad Magazines (“What, me worry? I read Mad”), I’m guessing that played a part in our play-acting choices. Neither of us knew anything at all about opera, however, other than “The Barber of Seville” soundtrack that accompanied our favorite Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd cartoon. “The Rabbit of Seville”.
Our survey was conducted over the weekend. We kept stats in a notebook. We were all about the stats. Many contacted, like ourselves, had no real idea about operas. But quite a few took us fairly seriously. All I really remember is that Madame Butterfly took 1st place, and The Barber of Seville got a few mentions, as did The Flower Drum Song.
See, we did things like this when there were no Medusa-like distractions like computers and cell phones to turn us into motionless, dead stone.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
OK, back to Bugsy’s class unit on Telephone Etiquette…
The two weeks seemed to me such a ridiculous, ho-hum waste of time. However, on the very final day of the unit, things suddenly got pretty tense, and we all found ourselves perking right up. What was happening is that Bugsy had begun to push the class discussion into darker waters. She’d begun shifting the focus to the dire consequences of some very particularimproper uses of the telephone. Namely, the evil little practices by some children (why, not us, of course) misusing the telephone in malicious ways. In fact it turned out that what she was getting at, what she was beginning to poke her nosy old nose into, was none other than the misuse of the telephone by willfully committing the unimaginable and heinous crime of (oh my!) phonepranks!
“Yes, obviously some of you, if not all, have heard about thesee thoughtless telephone pranks, and the harm can cause. The mischievous calling of random numbers, the tricking of innocent victims into believing their caller is someone other than who he really is. Perhaps some of your families have even been the victims of such telephone abuse… or know of someone who has been.”
“Yes!” piped up one of the dumb-bunnyest, most brown-nosing girls in our class. “That happened at our place just last month!” Some of the other girls were nodding vigorously in support. Girls! Jeez!
But yikes. I had hardly expected that particular can of worms to be torn open in this class. And by the most feared teacher on the planet. Here I’d been assuming it was all going to be nothing but the namby-pamby, goody-two-shoes, golden rules we should all follow. But no. Apparently not. Where was she going with this? Did she… Did she know something? I mean, hey…
Like some hardened Alcatraz inmate, I surreptitiously allowed my gaze to secretly travel around the room, gauging the reactions of my fellow miscreants in attendance who, in turn, were surreptitiously gauging mine. Each of us felons had by now assumed the mask, the bland, know-nothing, poker face. You’ve heard of the Cosa Nostra, the Italian phrase that once referred to the Mafia and which translates literally to “our thing?” Meaning “our secret thing.”
“What many of these so-called pranksters don’t realize is that several instances of prank phone calls fall under the auspices of… criminal behavior.” Somebody somewhere at the back of the class giggled. “Punishable criminal behavior at that!” she added. Giggling a high-pitched giggle like some little girl. Only it didn’t quite sound like a girl.
“Yes, Arthur?” asked Mrs. Sterling suddenly in her sternest voice. She was never one who liked being interrupted.
Along with most of the other kids, I cranked my head around for a look-see over my shoulder. And there he was, the fool. Little Artie Buck. Grinning. Squirming in his seat like he had to go to the bathroom. Arm waving high in the air signaling pick me, pick me! Oh, he had something he was just dying to share with the class.
Down went the arm. “OK. So…” he began, almost delirious with remembered joy, “…this one time…? I dialed this number. You know, just for fun?”
What in the world…? The class and Bugsy waited silently while he gathered his witless thoughts. Me thinking, Artie, what the heck do you think you’re DOING!?
“Well, anyway,” he began again, “see, this lady answered.” He was having such a hard time containing himself, overcome as he was by his autonomic giggling system. But oh, he just couldn’t wait to get his wonderful story out of his mouth, so he forged on. “And so I said, ‘Is Frank Walls there?’ And she said, ‘No. I think you have the wrong number.’ ” Then the giggles overtook him once again for a moment before he could go on. But finally: “So I said to her, ‘Then is Pete Walls there?’ And she said, ‘No.’ So then I said, ‘Are there any Walls there at all, then?’ and when she said, ‘No’ to that…” hee-hee-hee “…I asked her…’” and here he really had to contend with one final meltdown of his own hilarity, “ ‘Then… what’s holding up your roof?’ ”
Artie had finished. And he was looking all around the room expectantly. Waiting for the gales of laughter. But the room had gone so electrically silent you could have heard a dust mote touch down softly on the floor! Every student was frozen stock still. How could Artie have done this to himself? we were asking ourselves. From the look of sudden terror that flashed across his face, that’s what he was suddenly wondering as well. How could he have just forgotten where he was? In the dragon’s lair! Was he just stupid? Or mental? Or both?
Bugsy’s lizard eyes had locked onto Artie’s beating, little bunny-rabbit heart like a pair of talons. She cruelly allowed the silence to go on for too long a time while the clock ticked. And then she said it. It was an Hercule Poirot moment!
“So… that was YOU!”
The class gasped as one! No! Oh my word! Just imagine! Oh my! What are the chances of…?
We watched as Bugsy marched the condemned off to the principal’s office by the ear, leaving us jaw-dropped and utterly rocked. And alone. By ourselves for once. Everyone equally shocked. Some of us, of course, were secretly relieved. It hadn’t been US. It had been Artie.
Time went by. We’d obviously been forgotten. We all gathered at the window when the patrol car pulled up outside in the faculty parking lot.
We never did find out exactly what happened to him. He wouldn’t talk about it. Whatever it was, it must’ve been bad.
In retrospect, maybe they’d sat him down in front of a movie screen and made him watch a number of black and white public service announcement films on how… Crime Doesn’t Pay.
THE TELEPHONE PRANK– A GATEWAY DRUG TO OVERDUE BOOKS AND REEFER !!
My “Come on Baby, Light My Fire ” story took place in 1957. Twenty-three years later, in 1980 and at age 34, I moved back to my hometown of Dover-Foxcroft, and was happy to do so. This little hamlet felt so much safer after where I’d been living over the last eleven years. And upon my return, I was overcome by wonderful waves of nostalgia. I found myself taking several little sentimental journeys on foot, re-visiting all my old childhood haunts: the home I’d grown up in as a child, the playgrounds, the river, the old Indian cave, the municipal beach at the lake, the camp and, of course, the old drug store. It all felt so Ray Bradbury-ish, if you know what I mean.
And of course I was surprised and delighted to find Beryl, pleasant as ever, and still working behind a drug store lunch counter. The catching up we did was so therapeutic for me. She wanted to know all about where I’d been and what I’d been up to all that time. And likewise, I wanted to know about the happenings and whereabouts of her co-workers from way back then, about the town in general, and what had been going on in her life as well.
But of course finally, we came to one thing I was really itching to find out…
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“But enough about all that, Beryl. There’s a question I’m dying to ask you.”
“What’s that, Tommy?”
Tommy. Now boy, didn’t that make me grin. I’d been called a lot of things over the last two or three decades, but I know I’m back home again when I get to answer to “Tommy.”
“Something that’s been bugging me for years, actually,” I say. “And as many times as I’ve told and re-told the old story, there’s always that one, nagging, little piece-of-the-puzzle missing. So, here it is.
“Just what, exactly, was… the ‘Hot Shot?’”
She blinks, tips her head to one side. “I’m sorry, Tommy. I guess I don’t know what…”
“Oh, sure you do, Beryl. Of course you do. Just think back now… all of us little boys and girls crowding around the counter for ice cream sodas, cherry Cokes, and root beer fuzzies? Oh, and Zombies? You remember the Zombies don’t you…?”
“Oh. Well sure, of course I remember the Zombies, but…” Then she blinks once again, and I can see that flash of recognition. A frown forms. “Well, I guess I’d almost forgotten all about… those… ‘hot shots.’” Her expression implies that she’d rather not remember. But she can’t help it of course. Now that I’ve gother seat-belted securely into the Wayback Machine, and we’retravelling on our way back to… the “Hot Shot” days of yesteryear…
“OK,” she finally says, “first and foremost, I have to say it was the owner’s idea, definitely not mine. I didn’t like it. At all. But he, and the pharmacist, got really fascinated by how you boys would do practically anything to get attention. Attention from us. Attention from the girls. And they got to talking about just how far you’d all go. Giggling over there behind the pharmacy counter like a couple of little ten year olds themselves. Then they devised their little plan for their own warped entertainment. I’m not sure, but I think there might have been a wager involved. Anyway, I don’t believe they ever expected it to catch on the way it did, though. But Tommy, you need to know I was against it from the start.”
“That’s the way I seem to remember it, Beryl. You, never being too keen on the whole thing. And that I had to practically twist your arm to let me have it. And don’t think I don’t appreciate that in retrospect, Beryl. I do. But wow, it never ever occurred to me that we were being watched by a couple pairs of eyes peeking out from over the pharmacy counter. I mean, all you could ever see of them was just their heads. I never even thought to wonder who came up with it. I’m really surprised. All I knew is, it was just something going on there at the drug store. It was just there. It was part of the scene, and I desperately wanted to be part of That. I was such a brainless little sheep back then.”
“Believe me. You were far from the only one. But mostly it was the high school boys. And that was bad enough. But when you jumped into line… oh, I really didn’t like that one bit. But… there you have it I guess.”
“Well, yes and no. I mean, that only explains the why and the how. What I’m a lot more curious about is the what. Like, you know. I mean, just what the heck was that stuff, anyway? Battery acid? Sterno? I’ve been wondering about that for years. So…?”
“OK. It was a pure distillate of hot chile pepper concentrate.”
“What? What!? Wow! Holy cow! Ouch!”
“Yes, I know.”
“But why in the world would a drug store have something like… hot pepperconcentrate on the shelves??”
“Well, not so much on the shelves. Not back then. It was kept back there, behind the pharmacy counter.”
“OK. But why? What the heck would something like that be used for?”
Pain management. It’s used as a counter irritant.”
“Counter irritant?”
“Yes. something you can rub in over a sore muscle. Or an arthritic joint. You see, the burning sensation on the skin is so intense, it temporarily cancels out the nerve pain going on down beneath it. The actual name for it is capsaicin.”
“Capsaicin. So, that’s like, what, when I’ve got a bad headache or something, and I could just slam my fingers in a door? Which would hurt so bad, wouldn’t feel my headache?”
“Something like that. At least… that’s the general principle, only a lot more complicated.”
“A counter irritant, huh? But that sounds like you’re just temporarily trading one pain for another.”
“Yes, but it’s only for temporary relief. It’s complicated.”
“Well, it wouldn’t end up being so temporary if you slammed your hand in a door.”
“No, it wouldn’t. But I don’t think you’ll find anybody recommending crushing your fingers for pain management, either.”
“Well, couldn’t you just put capsaicin on your fingers afterwards then…? I’m joking.”
“Like I said, only for temporary relief.”
“All right. But wow, even to this day I can’t get over (A) how badly it burned, and (B) for how long the burning lasted. It certainly didn’t strike me as very temporary. But… yeah, time is relative.”
“The mucous membranes are particularly sensitive to it. And they readily absorb the capsaisin, hold onto it, making it last for a longer duration. And it really is especially painful to the mouth, nasal passages, and the eyes. Compared to just being rubbed onto the skin of your arm, say, which is painful enough.”
“I’d say. From what I can remember. Wow. ”
“But you know, it is sold on the general shelves these days. No prescription needed.”
“Well, I didn’t know that. Pain to kill pain. Who’d a-thunk it? Butl yeah. Fighting fire with fire, I guess.”
“Sure. That, yes. And also for self-defense.”
“I’m sorry. I beg your pardon…?”
“In those handy little aerosol cans? Called pepper spray?”
“Omigod!Pepper spray?”
“Yes. I’m sure you know how effective pepper spray can be. At warding off attackers?”
“Wait. So… are you saying…that I… willfully swallowed… pepper spray!?”
“Why do you think you took off flying around the store like a rocket on the Fourth of July?”
“So… oh my God! I always suspected I wasn’t too bright for my age, as a kid. But now you’re telling me… I mean, jeez, what kind of a dummy was I back then? Hey guy, check this out. If you’ll watch me lap up a spoonful of pepper spray, I’ll pay you twenty-five cents for your effort. But thatmuch of a dummy!”
“You only had about four drops of it.”
“Oh, which was enough, it was plenty, I can assure you!”
“And which, don’t forget… it was against my better judgement. Despite all my repeated warnings.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
This is a true story. It really happened. Even the conversation-heavy epilogue above, if not quite word-for-word, is close enough to win a cigar, in my humble opinion. And if youfind the anecdote somewhat shocking and somewhat mean-spirited, then know this: so do I. But only by today’s standards, that is. Because here’s the thing : I didn’t then. I can laugh at it today. Yeah, even if I got one hell of a burned mouth out of it. See, the world that I, and my generation, lived in 65 years ago was another planet. A planet with its own constantly developing standards. Its own level of knowledge. Its own mores. Just like the world we’re living in today.
It’s as simple as this— No matter what year or decade you live in, there you are…
I’ve got this… thing about brains. No, not in the zombie way. But I’m just hung up on the very essence of the phenomenon we call the brain. For me, the human brain is an unimaginable, alluring mystery, totally worthy of pondering. So yeah, I think about the brain. Not all the time, but a lot. I read about the brain off and on.. And I often find myself writing about it. Hell, I’m setting out to write about it right here and now.
But being ‘only an English major’ I’m scientifically handicapped, aren’t I— way over my head in deep waters. No Bill Nye the Science Guy, me. I know that. But still, I just can’t seem to get myself past marveling at how you, I, and Bill Nye the Science Guy are totally reliant, for everything, on what appears to be nothing more than an approximately seven-by-three-by-four-inch “walnut”-shaped lump of Silly Putty nestled in our brain pans like some inert loaf of bread. And… that this lump is universally hailed by the entire civilized modern world to be the best damn Central Processing Unit and hard drive combo in the known universe, bar none. I mean, that just… boggles the brain. Yes, I’m incapable of anything more than writing odes to the human brain, inexpertly philosophizing about it, or asking the for-me-elusive-and-unanswerable cosmic questions about how this organ manages to do what it does. So this little essay is bound to end up just being another essay paying homage to the walnut-shaped lump.
Now wait! Don’t you go walking away telling me that, sure, the brain’s important and everything, but it sure as heck ain’t interesting! Are you kidding me? Interesting? Why, the brain is fascinating six ways from Sunday! And I’m betting I can prove that with just two freakin’ examples.
Example #1: Ever hear of Phineas P. Gage (1823-1860)? The man who did more for the science of brain surgery and neuro-studies than any man alive today?
Now hear me out. He wasn’t any white-coated scientist or doctor. So what was he? I’ll tell you what he was. Phineas was a common laborer who blasted out rail beds with explosives for a living. And I don’t know if he was a loser or not, but he certainly didn’t have enough brains to know you gotta be pretty darn careful when you’re tamping down blasting fuses into black-powder-packed holes with a thirteen pound crowbar! On September 13th (13 being the unlucky number here), 1848, he was working for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad up in Cavendish, Vermont. He was whanging that crowbar into the rocks when a spark launched it like a Chines fireworks rocket right up through the side of his face and out the top of his skull, landing with a clatter on a granite slope some eighty feet away. And after the echoes died away and the smoke cleared, there sat old Phineas, conscious and as aware as any of the crew.
And he could still talk. And the next thing you know, he was walking back to the wagon that would convey him back to his lodgings in town where he would confound a physician brought to examine him. Yes, Phineas Gage who by all accounts should have dropped dead on the spot but instead went stubbornly on about the business of living minute by minute; then hour by hour; eventually a whole day; and after that a day at a time… tor twelve years! Yes, a frontal lobe partially lost and a ghastly fame won, our hapless survivor of “The American Crowbar Case,” as it came to be called, entered into the Annals of Science and Medicine as Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient, the individual who single-handedly contributed more than any other earthly soul to research regarding how specific regions of the human brain control personality and behavior , giving the big green light to decades of experimental lobotomies, all the way up through One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest…and beyond.
Example #2: Would you believe me if I told you that there was once a famous case of somebody’s brain being kidnapped? Perhaps you have. If you haven’t, you may think I’m joking, or misinformed. I have to admit it does sound like something right out of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein… if not Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. But no, it’s true. And guess whose brain it was. Albert Einstein’s! It’s true. Einstein’s brain was stolen shortly after the autopsy was performed on his body right after his death in 1955? And you needn’t take my word for it. Just look up “Einstein’s Stolen Brain” on Google and you’ll get many links to articles and documentaries on the subject from a number of immaculately credible sources.
Or… why not simply sit back, relax, and enjoy this 3+ minute tutorial about it I’ve just borrowed from YouTube:
I can’t help but wish I were sufficiently brainy to be part of a scientific medical team that might get the opportunity to scrutinize the leftover fragments of what is allegedly the most ingenious brain in human history. I mean, just try to imagine for a minute all the recorded thoughts, ideas, memories, events, scientific formulae, facts, opinions, experiments, theories, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations that once resided (in biological ones and zeroes) in the brain with the I.Q. that was off the charts.
By contrast, most of us humbly presume that our cranial databases consisting of phone numbers, lottery numbers, computer passwords, favorite memorized song lyrics, movie quotes, baseball stats, family birthdays, and future calendar events that we’ve got socked away “upstairs” don’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the Famed Physicist’s. But hold on. Not so fast…
Sure, Einstein’s brain probably is by far the Rolls-Royce of Gray Matter, but on a sliding scale? I contend that mine and yours are nothing less than a pair of shiny, brand-new Cadillac Coupe DeVilles. Because whatever the damn thing is that we’ve got sitting up there under the hood actually is… it’s constantly at work soaking up data like a cosmic sponge from every single thing our eyes, ears, noses, tongues, and fingertips come into contact with. 24/7. From day one (the birthday) until this microsecond. If you ask me, that’s one damn fine, unbelievably busy, multitasking piece of hardware.
And it’s said that under hypnosis, a subject can recall lists of long-forgotten birthday presents she/he received at any age. I mean, how’s that for a universe-class computer?
Mine’s a 1946 model. And like the old Timex watch commercials of the 50s and 60s, it’s taken a licking and kept on ticking. I just did the math, and I find that I’ve been drawing breaths for approximately 42,000,000 minutes give or take, in my lifetime. And that’s only so far. So, I’m getting pretty decent mileage.
And here’s a thought: just imagine hooking up a printer to your brain and commanding it to print out your brain’s entire stored cache from birth. Whattaya think that would look like, hmmm? I’m betting you could tape all the pages together and string’em to the sun and back.
Anyway— in my very first blog post, “Unstuck In time With Billy Pilgrim,” (posted about 24,500 minutes ago) I shared about how so many of my very-long-ago-forgotten childhood memories keep surprising me, just popping up randomly, unbidden and unexpected, into my conscious thoughts. And that’s in stunning detail to boot. The memory I kicked this blog off with was a particular one of when I was four years old, at a family reunion in the early 50’s up in northern Maine. I wonder how many megabytes that little stored event takes up in my skull. I’ll never know. And if I had to guess, I’d speculate that the total data capacity of the human brain is measurable only on yottabytes. Two minutes ago I didn’t know what a yottabyte was. But then I googled “What unit comes after terabyte?” The answer on my screen read “After terabyte comes petabyte. Next is exabyte, then zettabyte and yottabyte.” It turns out that a yottabyte is equal to one septillion, or a 1 followed by 24 zeroes. And honestly, that explanation goes right over my head. I can’t fathom it. A shame we’re not allowed to use the full 100% of our brain’s capacity.
Regardless of that, when I die… there goes my four year old’s family reunion memory.
And there are maybe gigabytes of others. And since I’m wallowing in the plethora of memories that are doomed to die of with my passing, lemme share another sample just for fun, one more specific, little, neural-ones-and-zeroes anecdote that’ll be rolling right along in the hearse with me on the way to the drive-by crematorium someday soon. And perhaps this one will further cause you to reflect on the gems you’ve got stored in that yottabyte treasure chest of yours. Think about all the currently out-of-sight, out-of-mind memories, which are endless, that you’ll be taking with you when your time comes.
So go ahead. Meditate a little. And take yourself a little stroll down your memory lane on a sentimental (and in many cases not so sentimental) journey. And surprise! See what might pop up.
OK. Once upon a time, boys and girls… back in the twentieth century…
OK. See, I have this kid brother. Twelve years younger than me. He’s an engineer. And after high school he enrolled in a Boston engineering college. I know that I, along with the rest of our redneck immediate family, worried needlessly about him leaving our safe, one-horse town environment to venture into the great, who-knows-what of…The City. But he flourished there. And upon graduating with his degree, he was immediately snatched up by a large technological firm and settled down in large housing development in a nearby suburb.
One day shortly thereafter, he telephoned us to relate the shocking news that in his absence someone, or more likely someones, had broken into his new apartment and stolen practically everything but the kitchen sink. Including his trash! (He figured they’d pretended to be transfer station employees and had unnoticeably taken their spoils in trash bags along with them out to the getaway truck.) We were horrified. So immediately my wife and I traveled down to his emptied-out pad to give him some familial love and whatever support we could muster. Late that morning however, we found him in good spirits, taking everything in stride. A lot better than I would have. He assured us that his was, in fact, not a bad or dangerous neighborhood, not really. And we were like… Oh, really?
Anyway, that afternoon we spent some time enjoying the horse races at the old Rockingham Park, dined out that evening, and eventually went to bed. I say bed. Phyllis and I slept comfortably on the living room floor. (Ah, to be young again.) I’m not sure, but I’m thinking The Beagle Boys left my brother his bed. Too large and difficult, probably, to smuggle out in a standard-size trash bag.
But then, sometime in the middle of the night, Phyllis and I were rudely awakened not only by the number of voices muttering just outside the apartment’s front door, but by the disturbing, pulsating, red, blue, and amber lights bleeding through the slats of the picture window’s Venetian blinds. Close Encounters of the Third Kind came immediately to mind. “I’m going out there,” I told Phyllis as I yanked on my jeans. I mean, if there was a ufo landing out there, I’d be damned if I were going to miss out on it.
So I cautiously cracked the door open and slipped out into the coolness of the summer night. There was a large crowd standing stock still on the front lawn, facing away from me and at the three or four strobing police cars, the firetruck, and the ambulance. I sidled in amid the rear of that crowd. I remember looking behind me and spying Phyl’s worried pale face watching me from beneath the lifted blinds.
It took me a few moments to take in all that I was seeing, especially the dreamlike little drama going on at the front end of one particular patrol car. Two cops were down on their knees, flashlights in hand. Curiously, they were peering straight in under the front end of the vehicle. And repeating something over and over. “Come on. Come on out from under there. Now!”
I was thinking, Out from under there? Out from under where? Under what, the patrol car? What would somebody be doing under a frickin’ patrol car? This just didn’t sound good. At all. And talk about eerie. In the frozen, hushed silence, this had all the makings of a bad fever dream.
I began looking around, surveying the lay of the land. The first thing I couldn’t help but notice were the tire tracks in the lawn. A vehicle had obviously come rounding the corner of our building to my left and driven this way, toward the parking lot in front of me, straight across the immaculately mowed lawn. And judging from the six- or seven-inch-deep tire tracks in the grass, and the gouts of mud and grass clumps spun all over the place, this vehicle hadn’t just been going fast, it had been accelerating! My eyes followed the tracks to where they morphed into a pair of black rubber smears on the asphalt of the lot.
“I said… come out of there. NOW!”
Also, a long chain of heavy iron links lay like a rope on that asphalt. Attached to the chain, spaced at intervals, were the uprooted poles that once held the links up as a barrier to vehicles, a fence if you will. Said car had plowed right through said chain link fence, for crying out loud.
“Hey! I’m serious, Mister! Come out!”
I returned my gaze to the tableau before us, as much as I could make out of it between the backs and heads of the witnesses in front. Of course, some of the backs and heads belonged to uniformed police officers. And there were several of them at this scene. I turned to my right and discovered I was standing next to a towering, black, muscled god of a man. I craned my neck up to speak to him and spoke very softly in the silence. “So, uhmmm… what… exactly… happened here?”
He looked down upon my pathetically inquisitive face. “They run him down,” he said. “They. Jus’. Run. Him.Down.”
Now, he didn’t voice that very loudly, but in the solemn quietness it was loud enough that three cops with stern glares immediately snapped their heads back around to see who had just spoken those very accusatory sounding words.
And me? Just like that old Kenny Rogers’ line? You’ve got to “know when to walk away… know when to run.” I executed a smart about-face and scampered back into the apartment with my tail between my legs!
Next morning when my brother, finally awake, stepped out of the bedroom, I hada coffee waiting for him. I’d just purchased the coffee at a convenience store a block away from the apartments, since the coffee maker had gone missing with the stereo, furniture, etc. But the real reason I had gone to the convenience store was to see if I could find out any information as to what had really gone down in the night before.
“So,” I said to my brother, “you like this neighborhood, do you?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Pretty much.”
“You feel safe here.”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, I’ll tell you what. take the coffee outside. I gotta show you something.”
Out front in the sunlight now, you couldn’t possibly miss the egregious in-your-face evidence. The lawn was torn up a lot more than I’d been able to notice the night before. It was obvious now that the squad car had been gunning it fast and hard, practically all the way around one side of the whole building complex. Likewise, a much greater length of the uprooted chain fence lay snaked along the edge of the lawn.
According to the convenience store proprietor, the perp had tried unsuccessfully to break into one of the apartments during the day, while the three of us had been spending the afternoon at Rockingham Park. Somebody had caught him in the act, chased him away, and called the police. The cops had apparently decided to keep an eye on the complex and, in fact, had been surveilling the scene of the crime when the perp had actually returned. A chase had ensued, ending up with the perp being apprehended and scoring a free ambulance ride to a local hospital.
Before heading back for home, I asked my brother to send me any more information he could glean about the incident to me because… well, enquiring minds want to know, don’t they. So a week later, this news clipping arrived in the mail:
So. How important is this little incident in the larger scheme of things? Well, despite the fact that I thought it was pretty cool, it’s of no importance whatsoever. Unless you were the perp, of course, whose first name turned out to be Paul. Or some of the cops who ran over and arrested him to the tune of “Bad boys, bad boys. Whatchoo gonna do? Whatchoo gonna do when they come for you?” Oh yeah, and unless you were me, who got a really cool, momentary adrenaline rush from it, something I live for in this otherwise boring world.
But… see, when I die, this little recorded event goes straight down the tubes with me, both of us taking that long Green Mile ride to our local, drive-by crematorium. (Well, except now that I’ve shared it with you.) so for the time being it’s also temporarily nesting like a little egg among your brain cells, too.)
Now, look around. Look at all the people. The people you know. The people you don’t know. The gazillions and gazillions of people you can’t see, those that have lived on this earth since time immemorial and have long since passed. All those brains. Carrying what? Knowledge, that’s what. Valuable experience. Unspoken death-bed confessions. The key to Rebecca. The answer to what’s buried on Oak Island, if anything.
So having pondered what may have gone down the drain with Albert Einstein, whattaya suppose Janis Joplin’s brain took with her? Or Mickey Mantle’s? How about Dwight D. Eisenhower’s? Muhammed Ali’s? Elvis Presley’s? Johnny Carson’s? Leonard Cohen’s? Genghis Kahn’s? Charles Bukowski’s? Your buddy, Joe Six-pack’s? And what other odd jumble of things have you amassed in your hippocampus?
I think of all the zillions of important and unimportant brain records that get flushed down the toilet of death, millions and millions of times every week. How about you? Have you ever had these thoughts about… the brain?
Did I mention that I’m kinda obsessed with the human brain…? I think I did.
From the south and the west, they head northeast born-again zombies, officially ‘deceased’ they come from Nowhere, just any old place their backtracks, vanished – they’ve left no trace followin’ the drinkin’ gourd’s cold north star raisin’ your hackles like an old film noir raisin’ your hackles like an old film noir
Got a fresh driver’s license, an accent urbane they land up here in the backwoods of Maine lookin’ like lost ones just been found nervous shifty eyes just a-glancin’ all around got a mortgage on a house sittin’ just up the hill got a job makin’ fabric up at Guilford Woolen Mill got a job makin’ fabric up at Guilford Woolen Mill
Buy their frozen pizzas at the local Shop ‘n Save their kids go to school and they never misbehave they never go to church and they never join a club and never hang out at the local grille & pub… man seems content with his nondescript life woman kinda acts like a Stepford wife yeah the woman kinda acts like a Stepford wife
Ask him his name and he’ll smile real polite but he’s radiatin’ nervousness—he’s real uptight and you know he’ll be a ‘Jones’ or a ‘Johnson’ or a ‘Smith’ he’s just lip-synchin’ recent memorized myth and his first name’s ‘Tom,’ ‘Dick,’ or ‘Harry,’ ‘Ed,’ or ‘John’ not a name to call attention, just a name to make you yawn not a name to call attention, just a name to make you yawn
You wonder what they’re doin’ here and what they did are they some sorta modern-day Billy the Kid? were they some kinda Godfather once in the news makin’ too many offers that you couldn’t just refuse? did they ever run guns for the CIA? did they turn state’s evidence in court to get away? did they turn state’s evidence in court to get away?
From the south and the west, they head northeast born-again ‘zombies,’ officially ‘deceased’ they come from Nowhere, just any old place their backtracks, vanished – they’ve left no trace followin’ the drinkin’ gourd’s cold North Star they arrive in droves—beneath the radar got a whole new life and a new used car…
“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.” Ever hear that expression? It’s of course a reference to the gigantic, wooden Trojan Horse that the Greeks used to trick Troy’s army, to win the Trojan War. Today in computer lingo, the word “trojan” (no, not that one, not the one with the capital T, on sale at the local pharmacy) refers to something similar. Namely a virus, some malware or the like that hackers use to nefariously upload little digital gremlins into your PC, tablet, or cellphone in order to gain control of your processors and access your private sensitive data, the effects of which can be devastating to the user.
And then there’s click-bait. Something that appears on your screen in the middle of your copying and pasting on Facebook or Instagram just to tempt, tempt, tempt your little brains out till you give in and click on that provided link, a link just waiting to escort you down some Alice-in-Snake-Oil-Land’s rabbit hole. Like these two that appeared recently on my cell phone:
Hello, sailor…
And what’s your name, handsome…?
(OK. I confess. I provided the little captions.)
Perhaps these two ladies are the loveliest beauties you could ever imagine. Perhaps not. No matter. Click-bait doesn’t always have to be the singing sirens that caused Odysseus to order his crew to ear-plug, blindfold, and lash him to the ship’s main mast to keep him from being tempted. Because hey, if not you, there’s still a couple trillion other redneck guys out there who, after a single glance, will start hearing “Hello, Dolly” playing in their small smitten brains. And they’ll click the bait for sure. But that’s not the point.
The point is the name of the town. Did you notice it? I did, first time I ever stumbled upon one of these ads because, hey, I live in the little town of Dover-Foxcroft, Maine. A small hamlet you never hear anything about unless (A) you live here, (B) you live in New England, or (C) you have relatives who live here. Why? Because of its insignificant size and lack of relative importance in the Big Picture of things.
Dover-Foxcroft. Often simply referred to by its residents as just “Dover.” One of only a handful of hyphenated town names in the entire U.S. of A (only our rare hyphen is gradually disappearing thanks to computer algorithms getting confused by it when you try to have an order delivered from Amazon.com or Etsy). Population only a tad over 4,000. County Seat in one of the poorest counties in the state, maybe the nation. A simple little ville situated smack-dab in the geographic center of the state of Maine.
Just a tiny spider-webbing of streets, roads, and avenues whenever you look it up on MapQuest.com. Two traffic lights, six or seven churches, two groceries, half a dozen convenience stores, the courthouse, the hospital, the fire station, the schools, the Ford dealership, etc. She’s small, but she’s good enough for us. We like her. Dover’s my hometown. Where I live today and where I’ve lived practically all my life. And I’m 77. A homeboy.
But of course the thing is, if you don’t live in Dover-Foxcroft or one of the other surrounding tiny towns, you’d never have seen these particular ads anyway. Because these ads are targeted at our immediate geographical area and no where else. Well, on the other hand, you will undoubtedly be the lucky recipients of the exact same ads, the only difference being with the name of your town or city pasted over “Dover-Foxcroft.” Two dubious “perks” bestowed on us by computer programmers, whether we like them ot not– the wonderful “gifts” of A.I. and algorithms.
I admit I was really taken aback the first time I caught one of these “hometown ads” popping up on my PC. (Wow. That’s actually MY town right there. Wow. Hey Phyllis! Come look!) Now, a gazillion times later, it’s grown old of course, so very old. So, lately I’ve just been collecting some of them in a special folder, as a novelty, the same way I collect some of my favorite memes. Which are, I suppose, pretty much the same things, or at least close cousins to the phenomenon of hometown-click-bait.
BIZZARO DOVER-FOXCROFT, where all the women are strong and the men good looking
So. Welcome to that folder:
You’re traveling through another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the Bizarro Dover-Foxcroft!!
So by the way, you in the market for a new pickup? I sure am! Guess I’d better hurry up and track down this unbelievable dealership deal. But I pity the poor souls who come here and don’t even have the wherewithal to purchase one of these vehicles though. I mean, whatever could they do when they’re in dire need of a set of wheels?
Maybe this one? There are just SO many unbelievable great deals here! Eat your heart out, Barbieland…
Oh wait. Here’s the Bizzaro-Dover-Foxcroft answer to that:
A man with a face you can trust
How wonderful is this. I mean, one way to make some cash would be great… but six? OK, I’m doing all six then. Life is just so…je ne c’est quoi here, gnome sayin’? But wait. What if it turns out that this free money isn’t all that much? Like maybe just a few piddling nickels and dimes so to speak? The ad doesn’t say.
Oh wait. I almost forgot. I’ma gambling addict. Of course! How could I have forgotten? And the word on the streets of Bizarro D-F (B-D-F) these days is that for some reason, it’s turning out that people in this particular Dover-Foxcroft (Piscataquis County’s Little Las Vegas) seem to be winning at an unbelivably higher rate than anywhere else in the country. It’s almost like one of those carnival barker’s promises: Everybody’s a winner!
This couple has lockjaw
This lady has lockjaw too…
Wow! But wait just a minute here! Three megabucks winners in this one town in the last six months??? I’m surprised I didn’t see this on CNN! But what the hey, it’s GREAT! This is definitely the place for me. With the nickels and dimes I’ll be hauling in from from the Six Ways to Make Money Without Getting a Job, I’ll nickel and dime myself into the Big Mega Bucks. Shouldn’t take too long, either. Then, yeah, I reckon I’ll buy myself a house and settle down.
So, let’s just check out the classifieds:
Whoa… You know, I was gonna splurge on a big luxurious mansion, but on second thought… why not be economical? Sure, these little babies are tiny, but there’s only me, right? I don’t need much room. And apparently the rent’s cheap enough. So yeah, I’m gonna do this. Then I’ll splurge on a big new Cadillac, like Elvis, and maybe get a super cool double-decker ten-room RV, and a small yacht to haul behind it.
But of course, I know I really should be putting a little nest egg aside, for unforeseen medical emergencies and my general health and stuff. I’m not in the best of shape. I’ve got a humungous beer belly that really bugs me. And I’ve been promising myself for years that I will go on that diet. But diets take a long time. And it’s hard to keep the pounds off after you lose them. Well, that’s what the people who really have tried dieting have told me. Sound like a lose-lose situation, you know?
Well whattaya know? Eureka! B-D-F has come up with a new and better way. A way that actually looks pleasurable and fun, according to the looks on this babe’s face. Oh man, this look a bit like some Sigourney Weaver scene from an Alien bloopers out-takes collection. Like the one where the Face-hugger shot low and missed its target…
Whatever. I really dig that “without surgery” part though. Doing that!
WHEEEEE!
And speaking of possible medical emergencies, it’s comforting to know this B-D-F has such a large medical staff, considering its small population.
In R-D-F (Regular Dover-Foxcroft) our local hospital had only one actual M.D. on staff. They were supported by a handful of physician’s assistants, though. But listen. If you were to take a little jaunt over to scout out the reception area of R-D-F’s hospital and look around, you’d find, mounted on a prominent wall there, a display of professional portraits featuring their entire medical staff, a visual directory if you will. What you won’t find there however, is anyone as qualified (or healty looking) as our seven rave-review medical wonders, mounted on our wall over here on this side. Especiallythe cute one pictured above. Like that song from the 60’s by The Zombies: “She’s Not There.”
Thank God for portals and inter-dimensional mass transference. That’s all I can say.
Wow. I’m so impressed. Just look at all the things available in this Dover-Foxcroft.
It’s amazing! A veritable pot pourri:
Yeah, the other 30 lawyers here are losers…
Oh, I’m trying this one.
This place is incredible. You need it, we got it.
Uh-oh. But what do we have here, eh?
WE’RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!
You know what almost creeps me out at first glance about this shot? It really doesn’t feel… all that welcoming… you know? It’s almost like these dudes have drawn a line in the brickwork sand they’re standing on, and are amused to find out if anyone is gonna dare to cross it or not…
But when you think about it, this is probably a very positive photo. Because let’s face it, when you begin preparing for your big retirement back in the universe of the regular D-F, you’ll find yourself buried alive under an avalance of paperwork, and will have to literally jump yourself through monthsand months of hoops. Only to try to get back what you’ve put into your own someday retirement, what you’ve earned by rights, and by law… even if the government seems to never want to give it back.
So yeah, I’m guessing what we’re looking at here is a good, positive, pro-active group. No, they really don’t come across as your basic CPA types. Instead, these dudes and dudettes seem to be radiating the repressed, and slightly defiant vibes of some new upstart gang in West Side Story, plotting to rumble The Sharks or The Jets straight outta town. Like maybe they’ve adopted the J. G. Wentworth battle cry: “It’s my money and I want it now!” With or without the government’s consent!Wow. A real get’r done group here, I’d say. But whatta I know? Like you, I’m just a stranger in a strange land here. And I really doubt that anybody would resort to anything like exerting physical force here. Because apparently there are many other… gentler ways to get those in power to see things your way in this world.
Trust me. You don’t want to mess with us. Just sayin’…
For instance, it seems there are some agencies here that stand ready and willing to help you out at… well, whatever (if and when you feel you have the need). And it looks like they probably operate in ways similar to private investigators, or in other words, as simply benevolent researchers.
You talkin’ to ME?
I imagine these guys just do background checks on those who are really the problem, even though they may not have realized it…yet. And then they put together a report, or dossier, if you will. And after the multiple back-ups are collated and stored for safe-keeping in different locations (strictly for quality control purposes, you understand) these friendly researchers could act as couriers, where they go and share the collected documents and candid photographs with the subjects of the said dossiers. Whereupon, more often than not, the subjects will then examine the collected contents at their leisure and, so inspired, will undoubtedly come up with surprising new and creative ways to alter, and even improve, their behaviors in ways that will benefit… well, everyone. Cooperation, you know, is a good thing.
(Oh, wait a minute– that sounds like blackmail. But as I said, Whatta I know?
But, man. You know what? I’m starving. All this ranting has made me hungry. I gotta look around Bizzaro Town here and find me something to eat. Something tasty. And inexpensive. Some of that delicious, gourmet, and inexpensive almost to the point of costing next to nothing Bizzaro-Dover-Foxcroft grub. Let’s see…
Ah, here we are…
Ah! Oh yes!
Hmmm… And I just happened to think. I wonder if this Dover-Foxcroft enjoys the same Annual World Famous Whoopie Pie Festival. If so, a whoopie pie would really hit the spot for a dessert to top off on right now.
Guess I’ll hafta ask around…
THE World Famous Annual Whoopie Pie Festival in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine
(I’m calling this one “Part One,” not because I have a specific Part Two in mind at all. It’s just that, knowing me, I’ll probably have a couple hundred Parts on this theme. I mean, who knows?)
We begin…
As a 34-year teacher (a career that came to an end over two decades ago), I was forever unearthing priceless little tidbits of poetry from the many literature anthologies I’d inherited in whatever classroom I was assigned. That was one of the big English teacher perks, for me. I collected any and all the ones that touched me in one way or another, and now I carry around a gazillion of them in my iPhone (well, technically they’re warehoused in the cloud). But… anyway, sometimes when I’m languishing in a doctor’s waiting room, manning the circulation desk during the quiet moments at the local library, or riding in the passenger seat while my wife, Phyllis, drives the car, I can simply pull out the phone and alter my mood with a poem, just like that. And I have so many genres: love poems, war poems, protest poems, sci-fi poems, beat poems, horror poems, anger poems, hilarious ones, short ones, endless ones… you name it. Strange little things, smart phones. You never really know who’s packing what.
Sometimes there have been these important-to-me poems in my life that I’ve somehow managed to lose and, consequently, I’ve ended up investing a great deal of my years tracking them back down. Which is next to impossible if they’re ancient and especially if you can’t for the life of you conjure up the title or the poet’s name. But if and when I ever do recapture one of those, there’s a little celebration that goes on down deep inside me that flutters my heart (somewhat like A Fib only more fun). I kid you not.
Here’s a true story. About three or four months ago, a TV commercial was advertising an upcoming boxing match featuring a boxer whose last name was Saavedra. I probably shocked my wife when I leapt up of the sofa and shouted, “That’s IT!THAT’S HIS NAME!” Then of course I had to explain to her what the hell I was yelling about.
Well, a little poem that I’d discovered way, way back when had somehow vanished from my collection. It was just a snippet of a thing, a little love poem only a few lines long. Wouldn’t be deemed important to most of the citizens of our planet but, as I often say, we’re all occupying our own little unique spaces on the social spectrum, aren’t we. And yes, it was a love poem. I’m a sucker for love poems if they’re well-and-creatively written. The main reason I was having no luck recovering this one is because of the hard-to-remember-let-alone-pronounce name of the poet: Guadalupe de Saavedra. Plus wrack my brain as much as I could, the title refused to leave the tip of my tongue. For years! And then…
Bingo! There was some unpoetic dumb-ass boxer named Saavedra going to box some other unpoetic dumbass palooka on TV. And finally (and serendipitously) gifted with the boxer’s name, I only had to seek the help of the Great God Google. Ding! Retrieved it in five minutes!
The poem is titled “If You Hear That a Thousand People Love You.” And today is the perfect day for me to share this love poem here, it being Phyllis’ and my 57th anniversary today (7/30). So that’s got me feeling all warm and fuzzy here. Spoiler alert: I’m such a damn romantic. But now that I’ve talked about it and put it on a pedestal, I imagine you’ll look at this piece off fluff and say, “What the hell does he think is so special about this thing?!” And that’s OK because, right after this poem, I’m going to share two or three poems I’ve written to Phyllis over time and, yeah, sure, they’re bound to be deemed head and shoulders above this one, right?
IF YOU HEAR THAT A THOUSAND PEOPLE LOVE YOU
by Guadalupe de Saavedra
If you hear that a thousand people love you remember… Saavedra is among them.
If you hear that a hundred people love you remember… Saavedra is either in the first or very last row
If you hear that seven people love you remember… Saavedra is among them, like a Wednesday in the middle of the week
If you hear that two people love you remember…one of them is Saavedra
If you hear that only one person loves you remember…he is Saavedra
And when you see no one else around you, and you find out that no one loves you anymore, then you will know for certain that… Saavedra is dead
Yeah, not really such a great poem perhaps. But when I first found it, I was smitten. My favorite line is Saavedra is among them,like a Wednesday in the middle of the week. I dunno. I can identify with a love like that.
Story of my life with Phyllis: since I was a high school junior and she my freshman sweetheart in 1962-63, I went crazy writing poems for her, about her, and about us. I was a rhyming fool, a creator of bad doggerel (poetry written by dogs, I was once told). I don’t know why, but I was madly driven to capture The Adventure of Our Old-fashion Crush with all its ups and downs on reams of notebook paper. Each verse was honestly a sonnet in itself. I get this feeling I might still have a few “chapters” of those maudlin verses lying around somewhere, in a box maybe, but I couldn’t find them. Just as well, I imagine. I’m pretty sure I’d be embarrassed by them today.
Funny, immature me, I’d go to the movies and hear how cool Clark Gable or Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Stewart would speak to women, and then I’d try to model my own ‘lines’ after some of theirs. One time at Phyllis’ home, I was sitting at her kitchen table and watched her making me a cup of coffee. Then, as she brought it over to me, I dunno, the whole scene felt so domestic and she so wifely, that I Abruptly came out with this one: “Hey, you and me? Let’s grow old together.” Now how corny is that?
OK, I’ll tell you how corny it is. It’s laughingly as embarrassing as a Harrison Ford line in the 1973 film, American Grafitti. The year is 1962. Ford plays Bob Falfa, the reckless badass dude driving a hot, souped-up, black ’55 Chevy. Bob wants to prove his car is the fastest car in the valley. So, he’s itching to go up against Paul Le Mat’s character, John Milner, who drives the locally famous yellow 1932 Ford 5-window coupe, the hot rod that had long been the fastest car in the valley. Before the race, however, badass Falfa picks up Laurie (Cindy Williams) who’s virginal, vulnerable, and on the rebound from having just been dumped by her steady, Steve (Ron Howard). Unfortunately she’s about to become the lady-in-distress as Falfa has decided she will accompany him in the ill-advised speed race out on the outskirts of the city. But first, he tries to come on to her, in his way (who wouldn’t) but the way he attempts it is something that is so weird and awkward it caused me to cringe. First he grows all serious, then looks her straight in the eyes, and after a moment (what?) begins ridiculously singing “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific. I know, right?! Don’t believe me? Stream the flick. It’s a wonderful film (with the exception of Ford’s musical come-on). But as awkward as that was, it’s a little bit too similar to my out-of-the-blue “Let’s grow old together” attempt. Oh well, it’s funny now. And of course it’s taken 60+ years, but Phyl and I eventually did succeed in accomplishing just that.
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
you crossed the square heading west on main… we were the yang and the yin
i was the fire & you were the ice, the odds stacked against us had loaded the dice
but we didn’t know that then
i watched you walk with your new friend & talk, unaware i was being reeled in
that was the fateful momentous day in our tinytown lives so mundane
just a fall afternoon with the sun dropping down
autumn leaves underfoot, yelloworange&brown
on the corner of north street and main
i watched you walk with my cousin & talk
(through the drugstore display window pane)
the gambler in me told my heart & my soul: though opposite charges attract
i’d look you in the eye & retain full control…
our fate’s cosmic die rode the crapshooter’s roll
& rolled boxcars— the odds had been stacked
(magnetic north pole & magnetic south)
our futures were processed & packed
the bi-polar pull of our gravities’ force set our orbital paths for collision
inevitable contact… there was no recourse
our hormones alone were our single resource
the dice roll had made its decision
no time for reflection, no room for remorse
the outcome was nuclear fission
when matter and anti-material collide: cataclysmic, the chain reaction
its thunderclap echoes through all space and time
it alters the future’s & past’s paradigm—
twin suns, we were lock-stepped in traction
each destined to fall as the other would climb
the orbital dance of co-action…
you crossed the square heading west on main (we were the yang and the yin
i was the fire & you were the ice
we were starcrossed as soulmates—indelibly spliced
but we didn’t know that then)
i watched you walk with your new friend & talk
aware you were reeling me in
FETCHING
needling your quilt in your lamplight halo
you look over and catch me
your “RCA dog”
gazing into your eyes
my spiritual tail beginning to wag
and me growling some humorous
something or other—
this old dog’s old trick
for fetching me
the biscuit
of your sweet
laughter
THE BIG CHILL
“we got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout”
— johnny & june carter cash
you were the spark
that ignited the fuse
for the
big bang
of my hitherto
relatively uneventful
love life
it flashing incendiary
roman candles & rockets
molotov-cocktail love
flame-thrower love burning
magnesium hot
launching me in a straight trajectory
right over lover’s leap at
e=mc2
but that was in my callow youth
today
like the olympic flame
my love for you
still burns
patient now & serene
fireplace cozy
cup of cocoa hot
electric blanket warm
Happy 57th anniversary to us (7/30 /1966 -7/30/2023)
“What goes on…in your heart?What goes on…in your mind?” –The Beatles
By first grade, I was pretty convinced that whenever I climbed into bed at night and closed my eyes, whatever I was secretly thinking would appear in a cartoon word balloon right above my forehead for my mom to “read,” just like a Beetle Bailey or Dennis the Menace comic strip. And honestly? Some of my thoughts tended to border on being a tad naughty by definition. Spooky how she seemed to always have a pretty good idea what might be going on in my head. She’d often ambush me in the act of some evil family felony, like pilfering one of Uncle Sherman’s left over cigar butts from the guest ashtray. So when she’d slip into my bedroom to say goodnight, I’d surreptitiously tighten all my muscles, ball up my little fists, and strive for only LOUD Sunday school thoughts until she’d leave. Acute Guilt Paranoia.
I went to college and became a high school English teacher, teaching English and American literature and tons of grammar and composition. However, teaching creative writing was my specialty and my passion. I’ve dabbled at becoming a writer myself and, even though my literary output is “small potatoes,” I get a lot of enjoyment out of the pastime.
In my grades 9-12 short story units, I’d get really pumped when we’d work on characterization. “Invent a character,” I’d begin, “in a single 5-sentence paragraph. But in your paragraph, no including your character’s name, height, weight, eye or hair color because… a preacher, a serial killer, and a rock star could share all of those identical attributes. The idea here is to bring out something that really distinguishes the person. So what can you include? What are some observations that reveal something that those stats don’t?” I’d might get corny and sing a line “Getting to know you, getting to know all about you…” or the chorus of the Beatles “What Goes On?” Then, for a springboard… I’d offer up myself as the artist’s model.
“OK. All of you, look at me. Check me out. Who can pin point something personal about me that reveals something, anything that goes beyond the yadda yadda mugshot stats. Don’t be afraid of offending me. I guarantee immunity.”
I’ll never forget the very first time I started with that prompt. Despite my assurances that that there would be no repercussions, it of course took a while to get a response. Then finally, after a tense silence, a mousey girl who almost never let us hear her voice during class discussions surprised me. She had raised her hand. “Tell me whatcha got. Lay it on me…” I said.
“You… have… a dog.”
Whoa! Did I ever do a double take! Totally flummoxed, it took me a few moments to gather my thoughts. before I could respond. (A) I did not own a dog, (B) I had never owned a dog, so (C) how she’d come up with that out of the blue I couldn’t imagine. But there she sat.. Waiting. Smiling brightly. Smiling hopefully. And I immediately realized something about her. She was a dog person.
“I’m guessing a white dog? Or at least partially white.”
“Uhhhmmmm…wow. I mean, well, see… that’s… that’s pretty interesting. I’m totally… surprised. Never in a million years would I have expected that. So… I really hafta ask. What made you say I have a dog?”
Continuing to beam at me, she bravely replied “All those little hairs on your shoulders. And down the front of your shirt.”
“What?”I automatically eyeballed those areas she had identified. Oh crap! Yep. There they were. Busted. How embarrassing! I could sense the class really getting interested in our dialogue. Apparently this quiet mouse of a girl was turning out to be a little Ms. Sherlock Holmes.
My face must have been showing some consternation because she worriedly asked, “What?”
Humbled, trying not to gag too noticeably on my pride, I had to say something. “Man! Man oh man. First of all… relax. You did really well here at zeroing right in on something… very specific. Perfect in fact. Exactly as I asked. Which, I guess, makes you an A+ student for today. Yeah. And I… have a confession I need to make now. No, make that two confessions. One, no, I don’t own a dog. Never have.” I could see I was confusing her. “And two, I’m a little embarrassed. Because…well, I have to own up what this i…”
“You trimmed your beard this morning!” She was right in her TV-quiz-show-contestant-mode glory.
“Bingo,” I conceded lifelessly. “Yeah. The white hairs. In my beard. So, yeah, it appears… I guess… I’m a little vain, aren’t I. Trying to ward off old age with a pair of scissors. Sheesh. But you know… you, youdid a great job here. Spotting something really telling. About me. More than I expected. Or realized. That was… wonderful really.” Yeah. (heh heh) Right.
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Sometimes, since I had no budget, I would take the kids out to the school parking lot on a “poor man’s field trip.” I’d send us all wandering around, checking out all the cars and pick-ups, both students’ and teachers’. The assignment was to take notes on the automobiles’ little give-aways, things that were revealing about the owners or drivers. Bumper stickers. Vanity license plates. Decals. Rust. The kinds of trash littering the car seats and floors, etc. Any way to tell if they were male or female, old or young, wealthy or not so much. They had a field day with my old rust bucket. But it was a fun assignment, I think. Got us out of the classroom anyway.
Back in the classroom I enjoyed creeping them out a little by having them contemplate the proposition that had intrigued me so much as a kid. “Imagine for a moment that there’s this… way to look into a people’s brains and see everything going on inside them. Everything they’re thinking, or have ever thought. Their hopes and dreams. Their fears. Their pain. Their guilt. Who they have their eye on right now (elbow-elbow, nudge-nudge). Could be a some kind of technology… or just ESP. Or…” And then I would confess to them my early childhood fear of Mom knowing my every single naughty thought or idea, and the crazy little cartoon balloons I imagined filled with give-away readable text appearing above my forehead. They’d get a big kick out of that… until I left my desk and slowly began approaching them, getting up close and personal…
“Imagine for minute if you will that each of us has one of those cartoon balloons floating over our heads right now. No wait, instead of cartoon balloons, let’s make that our own personal little Goodyear Blimps, electronically reading out everything that’s going on in those private little vaults we call our brains, OK? And we have no control over what it’s revealing. It’s spilling our guts, on everything we’re thinking. Every thought hanging right out there, front and center for everyone to see, just like clothes drying on an old clotheslines. Imagine! You can look left, you can look right, turn around and look behind you and guess what: no more secrets! Wouldn’t that be fun?”
And by then I’d be standing right in front of the front row, looking down upon all of them… with the Dreaded (oh no…) Personal (oh no!) Eye-Contact. “So, look around at your neighbors. What are we going to learn about Johnny or Roberta? Hmmm? Or… what are we going to learn about…” and here I’d let my eyes travel around the room like the little silver ball on a spinning roulette wheel “…you, Betty!?” The response would be a terrified spastic jerk, a look of shocked embarrassment, and an ‘Eeek! No way!’ “And how about we all take a look at Fred back there. What’ll we find, Freddy? What are you secretly up to these days, eh? (Fred: ‘Jesus!’) Class laughter. Nervous laughter. All fearing it might be them in the spotlight next). After a bit more of the sweaty palms fun, I would add, “Or what about… me?”
And then I’d end by restating my thesis. “People are interesting, not boring, folks. Every single one of us, every face in the crowd. We’re not cookie-cutter cardboard cut-outs here, are we. Not just height, weight, and hair color. When you create your characters, try to imagine what their Goodyear Blimps are hiding. Have fun with them.
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All right. Enough of this reminiscing bullpucky (“bullpucky” being a much-used Colonel Potter word on the TV sitcom M*A*S*H). Time to get on with my intended purpose in creating this blog (which does, by the way, actually relate to the above ramblings).
Quite a few years ago, I was invited to spend two whole days in a second grade classroom, getting to sport an officious little badge that read, “GUEST.” Having garnered a modest reputation as a local writer who had published a number of poems in different magazines, I was there to entertain the little rugrats who were ankle deep in a creative writing unit. What a challenge for a teacher who had spent 34 years dealing only with teenagers. But what fun it was, a really positive adventure for me. At the end of the second and final day, the regular class teacher assigned her students to each write me a personal note, thanking me for visiting and telling me what they had learned as a result of our time together. What a sweet thing. When I got home, I read them all. They were all nice, as you would expect. However one stood out from all the others. It read, “Dear Mister Lyford, What I learned from your visit is that old people can be interesting.” How about that!?
In my 77 years, I’ve self-published 7 books of poetry, 2 memoirs, and a few episodes of a podcast (and yes, self-published, I know. So, not bragging here.) Basically I’m a long-in-the-tooth story-teller who’s gotten tired of his own stories, all of which have been non-fiction by the way. That’s what I was doing in my podcasts too, telling anecdotal stories of my earlier past. The podcast never went anywhere and I do understand why. Primarily it was just another one of my little “adventures,” or hobbies I’ve dabbled in all my life to ward off boredom. The podcasts comprised stories of my long Charlie Brown life.
With podcast publishing, you receive daily viewership counts. Like a lot of hacks, mine were miniscule. Once again, I’d turned out to be just that same old same old, peculiar, local non-phenomenon. My last podcast episode, however, did surprisingly much better. The reason, I believe, is that I’d said to hell with the stories, and instead tried simply taking a “walk” in my own head, to capitalize on what was going on in there. My mind has forever been a behive of thoughts and conversations buzzing so loudly it’s a wonder I can sleep at night. So for that last podcast, I finally ended up with a piece titled I, Robot, an odd philosophical patchwork inspired by many of my favorite artists from Rod Serling to Cole Porter. I’m somewhat proud of that little effort. It was a lot more of a challenge because I didn’t really have a whole plan to begin with. I only knew I wanted to begin by rehashing the plot of one of my favorite old Twilight Zone episodes. After accomplishing that, I just sort of wandered off into the words looking for my path. It felt adventurous to do it that way.
In this effort right here I’m planning to capitalize on being 77, an age I’m amazed I’ve actually reached. Seems unbelievable. And just as I described in my very first blog post, “Unstuck in Time with Billy Pilgrim,” (this one is number 2) I really am being overrun by mini-flashbacks of my escapades in the time-space continuum. And I’ve been feeling a real need to share what I’m “receiving,” from this freight train overloaded with time travel memories, roaring up the tracks from yesteryear. So I want to dedicate this blog to being that guy with the revealing cartoon word balloons floating up and out of his brain like chimney smoke, that vain guy with the sprinkles of tell-tale beard whiskers down the front of his shirt. I want to tattoo “OPEN HOUSE” on my forehead. “MY BRAIN AND WELCOME TO IT.” As Bob Dylan once quipped, “I got a head full of ideas and it’s driving me insane.”Not so many “stories” with beginnings, middles, and ends this time, but…story bytes. Topics and impressions. Remembrances that reflect my brushes with music, literature, poetry, sports, and visual arts, and how they affected me emotionally and helped me grow. Foods? Personalities? Fears? Superstitions? Danger? Evil? All of the above and more. Who knows? The possibilities are endless. But it’s open house…
NEARING THE END OF THE LINE 