Thanksgiving Trots are for Turkeys

Our family’s Thanksgiving tradition is to ritually avoid them.

Multiple generations of loved ones gathering under one roof? Rarely. We have more of a shrub than a family tree. Plus, we tend to shy away from forced socializing. If we had a coat of arms, it’d feature badgers swathed in poison ivy.

Football? Ha! We’re New York Jets fans! By the fourth Thursday of November, we find more excitement in scouring the internet for video of curling competitions.

The Day The Sky Went Silent

I worked in a downtown Dallas office building in those days. My 7th floor office window, on a clear day, commanded a look of the flat, indistinctive North Texas landscape that was so broad and distant that one could almost make out where the Earth's surface made its subtle curve toward the other side of the planet. However, on most days the smog and ozone cleared only enough to reveal the lower parking levels of a nearby office building. So instead of marveling at natural wonders, a few of the IT people I shared the floor with would occasionally entertain ourselves by trying to identify which airline's planes from the multiple airports nearby were the ones rattling our windows at any given moment.

I came into the office a little earlier than normal that Tuesday morning, still a bit hung over from the previous week's annual sand, surf and suds vacation with friends, and logged into my computer. That's where I first saw the bulletin about a plane striking one of the Twin Towers.

Some Pup Owners Belong in the Doghouse

Our town is going to the dogs, and you know who is responsible?

Not the developers. They’re leveling historic slums to build luxury slums of the future.

Not the folks in charge of our neglected local infrastructure. They’ve been letting the mold grow in our schools because … well, something has to hold the crumbling bricks together.

It’s the dog owners. You rotten, self-righteous lovers of furry beasts that retrieve old tennis balls, you.

One day, lad, all this minivan will be yours

NOTE: After my unearthing of last week's piece about the Minivan of Manliness, I remembered that I had written another piece about it in 2017 for the fish wrapper that eventually let me go this past December. This one is about Excitable being, well, excited, about inheriting my ride when he started learning to drive. More on that after the story:

My son asked if we could give one of his high school teammates a ride home, so I hit the button to slide open the passenger-side rear door to the minivan. As the two of them climbed in, Excitable told his friend with what I knew to be more of his own brand of goofy pride than sarcasm, “Dude, this here is gonna be my whip.”

Don’t look it up; I already did.

The Modern Age of Youth Baseball

Welcome back to Little League baseball, guys! It’s good to ha–

What’s that, Carl? You want to be called what? Like Casey Stengel, the great baseball manager? No? Like Kacey Musgraves, the great country songstress. Mom and dad on board with that? Cool. Let me grab my clipboard.

All right, let’s try this again.

Welcome back, children, to Little League baseball. OK, so you all have good winter? Play some basketball or hockey, did you? No? Well, what sports did you kids play over the winter?

Fortnite does not count as a sport, Roberto. Neither does Minecraft. I agree, it does help your hand-eye coordination. It also helps prepare your glutes for another three months of riding the pine.

The Headaches of Moving and Downsizing

If you still haven’t found the motivation to clean out even your kitchen junk drawer during all this pandemic downtime at home, try this three-step formula:

1. Sell your current house.

2. Move 200 miles out of state.

3. Then, and only then, buy a house built when lives were simpler and homeowners smaller.

That’s what we did this autumn. My Love received a job offer she couldn’t possibly pass up even though, despite living in a world brimming with deadly airborne contagions and pants-less Zoom calls from home, it required her to work on-site. With live, air-spewing co-workers. And, I assume, a dress code.

Frigga It All! It's Friday the 13th, Again!

Today is the second Friday the 13th of the year. Does that make you anxious and full of dread?

It shouldn’t. If you survived 2020 long enough to read that sentence, brother, you should not sweat friggatriskaidekaphobia. Not even if your preferred freakout is paraskevidekatriaphobia.

Those two tongue-tripping words mean the exact same thing — the fear of Friday the 13th — but I prefer the former because, after the year we’ve had, we should all find it far more satisfying to look at the calendar today and shout “Frigga it all.”

Syrupy Tales of Election Day, Pancakes

It started as either a clever plan to instill the importance of participating in our democracy in my children or a hankering for butter pecan syrup. 

Since my two children, now 20 and 18, were old enough to stand still for a minute in the voting booth, we have followed an Election Day ritual: Wake up on the first Tuesday of November, cruise to the polling place in the minivan to cast my ballot, and then head out for a breakfast feast. The IHOP is our usual destination — owing to that aforementioned jonesing of mine. My family rarely went there in my youth, but its steep royal blue roof had been such a familiar sight to me over five decades, at least from a car window, that it seemed a perfectly stable and secure spot for building a lifetime memory along with a customized pancake combo. 

Life Hands You Quarantine, Make Quaran-tini

Tomorrow, I find a restaurant with a huge outdoor patio and indulge in a fresh, hot burger and fries. And, definitely, a cold draft beer. At minimum, I’ll go get a haircut.

That’s how I plan to celebrate the end of my state imposed, 14-day self-quarantine for the high crime of vacationing in a COVID-19 hotspot even though while there I didn’t go out for a burger or a beer or anything vaguely vacationy beyond sitting on the spacious beach beyond our rental’s back deck for hours and hours. I won’t name the location to protect the many conspiracy theorists who permanently live there, but I’ll offer hints. It’s a state where:

• face masks only became required in public settings in late June,
• indoor dining is allowed at 50 percent capacity, and
• the riskiest behavior I undertook was showing my Blue State issued driver’s license to the Good Ol’ Boy behind the register at the ABC store.

Taking a lickin' at the hardware store

I’ve always been sweet on trips to the hardware store and, quite honestly, it started with the candy. Those old-fashioned striped stick candies, if you must have details.

It never struck me as odd that places where the air is thick with lawn fertilizer and 3-in-1 oil also specialized in sugary delicacies, cellophane wrapped and flavored with root beer, cinnamon or the exotic if not vague “tropical fruit.” But I was knee-high to a sack of Kingsford briquettes then, usually stopping in on a Saturday with my dad so he could pick up a bag of concrete mix or a propane canister for his soldering torch. And those ol’ mom-and-pops had everything. "Hey, Ethel, we already sell slip joint pliers, right? Let’s stock some cavity inducers while we’re at it?"

The Mighty Have Fallen

I contributed to global warming more than usual recently, so: World, I’m sorry. But that tree had it coming.

A 2019 study published in the journal Science concluded the Earth has enough open space to plant more than a trillion trees. This, it noted, is enough to capture some 800 billion tons of carbon dioxide, or roughly the equivalent of a cable news pundit’s daily output of hot air. Actual experts said this could bring greenhouse gas levels down to a number not seen since the days before American women were allowed to vote. 

Yet I, avowed advocate of suffrage and not suffering death by polar ice cap sweat, gave the order to take out a four-story black oak that had shaded our back porch for decades. It was not an easy decision. Initially.

“Smart” appliances, meet the smart aleck

DUCK, N.C. – This oven has convinced me that the Luddites were on to something.

To review that historical reference you can’t look up because your cell phone is down to 3 percent,

Calling someone a Luddite today is a put down. It means the person is opposed to technology and, in general, change and progress. That’s not me. I’ve never longed for the days of manual typewriters or using paper road maps. But while I’m not old-fashioned, I do abhor technology that makes me want to drown in Old Fashioneds because it is unnecessarily complex. Or just simply unnecessary.

Commence Reacting, Coronavirus Class of 2020

Thank you for that warm introduction, Dr. Principalperson. And thank you for your bravery. Some would consider it pretentious of non-medical professionals such as yourself to still want to be addressed as “doctor” during these pandemic times.

What did you say, Dr. P? Huh?

Oh, seems I’ve muted everyone’s microphones for my portion of the Zoom graduation ceremony.

See that, my dearest beleaguered faculty, our hardest-working custodial staff, and most of all, you -- The Coronavirus Class of 2020. The ability to click a button and shut up your alleged superiors is just one feature of COVID-19 life that’s not too shabby.

Now let us ponder that phrase: “alleged superiors.”

Pandemic Thrills in the Produce Aisle

Mere weeks before I first met my wife, she had survived a tandem skydive. That’s jumping out of an airplane with another person strapped to your back and only some polyester sheets to prevent the two of you from becoming a human short stack.

I, meanwhile, was still living with my parents. Living on the edge to me meant swigging their 1 percent straight out of the carton without first giving it a good, long sniff.

Nearly 30 years later, I am now the risk taker. The thrill seeker. The adrenaline junkie. The one who goes out for supplies during The Pandemic.

Bitcoin Bomb Scam Explodes on Homefront

Staying home isn’t even safe for my family anymore during the COVID-19 pandemic because apparently we have an “explosive device” in our house even more lethal than the homemade eight-bean chili in the freezer.

We learned this through an email my wife received last week. It instructed her to transfer $10,000 into a Bitcoin account lest a hidden device be detonated by a hitman “keeping the area under control.” I immediately recognized this as a hoax because, seriously — a bomb, an extortionist AND a hitman? So excessive for the suburbs.

Strangers Among Us

The Woman in the Yellow Hat first appeared on a Saturday morning in the early days of The Great Sequester.

I spotted her from our dining room window, striding purposefully around the cul-de-sac. After lunch I ran some errands and drove by her, arms pumping briskly as she ascended a hill about a mile from our house. I passed her along a different street on my return an hour later. As the sun descended behind the tree tops, she appeared again cruising around the cul-de-sac without any apparent loss of stride.

I see The Woman in the Yellow Hat regularly now, though never as frequently on a single day. Usually she’s walking, once in a while jogging. At all times, she’s wearing that ballcap — a glowing lemon beacon -- and not a trace of the exhaustion I feel just thinking about her seemingly perpetual motion.

She’s part of the new cast of characters in my life. COVID-19 may be keeping people home and out of their cars but not in the house or off the roads off my neck of the burbs. Where in the past my dog and I, on our twice daily rambles, would only fleetingly see folks as they whizzed by at some rate well above the posted limit, now we are having to cross the street to safely and politely avoid the increase in casual strollers and side-street athletes.

Office Space: Coronavirus Home Edition

Back in those halcyon days of, oh, four weeks ago, a friend shared a jokey tweet from Sam Adams, a senior editor with Slate. Adams wrote that the most frightening aspect of a pandemic that forced people to stay in their homes for 90 days would be that “the only ones to survive will be freelance writers.”

It’s now Day Numbersomethingorother of The Big Sequester, folks. It’s the end of the world as you know it, but I feel fine.

This “new normal” the coronavirus created is generally not much different than any ol’ normal day I’ve had for the past 16 years as a work-at-home writer, a socially distant profession well before it became de rigueur. The commute to my office remains congestion-free, provided the dog doesn’t cut me off in his haste to attend to his own business outside. My three-martini lunches still consist of a seltzer and leftovers with Jim Rockford, P.I. I’m always home in time for dinner because I’m always home and someone needs to cook.

Except now those nighttime meals are no longer made for me and my family. They’re for me and my three new full-time office mates.

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

My extreme couponing doesn’t seem so insane anymore, does it, Helen?

“Insane.” That was the word you used, wasn’t it? Let’s see if I remember your exact words.

“Nobody needs a hundred cases of pinto beans, Henry. I don’t care if you got them by preying on an acne-scarred cashier who mistakenly honored four competitor’s Sunday inserts and a rebate slip with an illegible expiration date,” you said. “Pallets of tuna fish cans! Pallets! Up to the ceiling. It’s insane, Henry, insane!”

I remember it clearly even though it was years ago. It was an oddly humid winter afternoon when I found you there, rooting around my stacks of Barilla rotini and Jif in search of an exit to the cozy fortification I created to be our apocalyptic escape home. You let out a little victory cry as you squeezed one last time out the steel door, obscured as it was by my towers of Ivory and Charmin.

Well, who wants some soap and TP now, Helen, hmm?

Man Trains Dog, or Vice Versa

If it was good enough for Snoopy ...

Training dogs for years essentially boiled down to whapping a disobedient pooch with a rolled-up newspaper. For several reasons, this is no longer true:

• Most people today get their news online rather than on newsprint.
• No one wants to do hurt their pooch let alone their expensive digital devices.
• Modern theories on “positive” dog training insist there are no bad pups only lazy and inconsistent owners.

I know this because I’ve been up to my eye teeth for weeks in books, videos and Pup-peroni trying to mold our latest family member into a model canine citizen.

The Murphinator at Rest

My daughter, Li'l Diva, refuses to watch any non-animated movie with a dog as a main character. After seeing one too many of these in her lifetime, she has concluded man’s best friend “always dies in the end.”

This, of course, isn’t true. Critics and parents alike nauseated by Beethoven and the Air Buddies couldn’t kill off those canines in multiple sequels and, yes, while it’s been a few years since those series have been in production – trust me – they are just cat napping.

But in real life, all dogs do eventually die. The many joys that spunky puppy brings us on arrival eventually ends in a painful moment when a faithful, furry family member leaves forever. This is what happened to us several months ago.