Ghosts in the Kitchen

An eerie feeling settled over our stove tonight.  I thought only I had sensed their presence, but I was wrong.

We have unseen kitchen help.  Often, when working on a recipe with more than three steps, I am forced to admonish my aide with words like, "Why did you add the flour before the butter was melted, Dumbass?

Yes, that's what I call him.  As I said, he's completely invisible, but he can make a mess of the simplest meal, and often does.  Should you be visiting some night for dinner and hear me shout, "Didn't you know that was hot, Dumbass?"...you'll know I just got a blister....and that Dumbass was there.

If we sit down to eat and there is no sour cream for the baked potatoes, you will know he was on grocery detail that week.  I'll be honest about it, saying, "I'm sorry about the spuds.  Some Dumbass did the shopping."

I was in the living room yesterday, while my wife, Miss Kitty, was making Christmas confections.  I heard her exclaim, "Didn't you save extra topping for after it bakes, Dumbass?"

I immediately ran around the corner and asked her, "Does he work for you, too?"

Today my daughter was home, whipping up a batch of cookies for her friends.  From the dining room, I heard her say, "All right, where did you put the vanilla, Dipshit?"

'Dumbass' and 'Dipshit'...I wonder if they're related.

What the hell...at least we're hiring for the holidays.

...and then it was gone

I was pushing a stroller on the sidewalk one day

When a sleek motor bike came roaring my way

An old friend was holding the chrome handlebars

Of a bike that cost more than both of my cars

It was brand new and shiny, the detailing extensive

But diapers and formula were awfully expensive

It made me feel sad, a little withdrawn

as it zoomed right on past, and then it was gone.

I was mowing my grass on a Sunday in June

When my old friend drove by in pick-up, ‘round noon

My jealousy bubbled, the bile just poured

The horsepower galloped, the engine, it roared

But there were school clothes to buy, the roof needed shingles

Besides, trucks were for those who were footloose young singles

I stood there and watched on my hard-scrabble lawn

As it zoomed right on past, and then it was gone.

I was painting the trim, my patience worn thin

When my old friend drove by with a new car again

A convertible this time, in bright cherry red

Every boy’s dream, some romantic said

Could’ve made it my goal, my personal mission

But the kids went to college and needed tuition

In the chess game of life I was merely a pawn

As it zoomed right on past, and then it was gone.

It was many years later, on a cold winter morn

My old friend walked by, looking sad and forlorn

I invited him in, to escape from the cold

I was shocked by his face, he looked haggard and old

“Not driving today?” was the salient question

He shook his head sadly at the very suggestion

“What happened to the Caddy, the Harley, the Benz?

Do you still have them, or have you sold them to friends?”

He answered, “I’d give you them all, if in trade

I could have the family and the life that you’ve made

I’ve said I loved cars as I raced ‘round a track

But not a damned one of them has loved me back.”

We tried to remember the days of our youth

The times when we weren’t quite so long in tooth

He exited sadly, refusing my assistance

He said he’d be fine, despite my insistence

He said, “Life seemed so simple, and so clearly drawn

as it zoomed right on past, and then it was gone.”

Carolyn's Legacy

Even when I was a young man, I always wondered what I might be remembered for when I’m gone.  In the five years before I turned fifty, I spent many hours with my creative palette, sharing the ideas and inspirations I’d dreamed up, writing and performing at every opportunity.  Is it possible that one role I took on inspired a youngster to take up acting? I pondered.  Could some set of words I’d written become a mantra for a lost generation?  Could it change a single life?  Could one of my punchlines become a private joke that never gets tired between two people?

Ultimately, of course, it’s not for me to decide.  It appears that you don’t get to choose your legacy, your legacy chooses you.  Hilariously, I’m recognized four times more often for playing Mark Twain on a web series called Soggy Jim than I am for playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman.  The play that has paid the most bills for me, Night of the Livid Dad, was written when I was nineteen.  It was about being a husband and father, two things I had not done at that point in my life.  So much for “Write what you know.”

I had a chance to see a person’s legacy reveal itself this past week when my mother had a stroke.  It was, thankfully, a mild one (an easy thing to say when it wasn’t me with difficulty walking and a crushing headache).  When she had stabilized and was ready to share with the world her excellent prognosis, I dictated a statement and took it home to place on social media.

I should explain at this point that my mother’s life was not always an easy one.  A third child, adored by her father and resented by her mother, she could rarely do anything to please the one who had given birth to her, as a youngster or as an adult.  Discouraged from reaching for the stars, browbeaten for having dreams, she coped, doing what she could to become her own person and still seeking the approval of one who was so stingy with it.  I won’t go into my late grandmother’s psychiatric problems…all of her life, she attempted to make every story center around her and today I will deny her that victory.

Mom had to fly by the seat of her pants, trying to be a wife and a mother when she’d been given a piss-poor example of same.  Giving birth to two sons, she had to learn, being the only woman in the house, how to be one of the boys.  To this day, she can still feign interest in wrestling, boxing and baseball when she would rather be watching a Fred Astaire musical.

She told my brother and me we could do anything we put our mind to.  While that wasn’t exactly true, it didn’t stop us from trying.  She was always there to cheer us on, exalting in our triumphs occasionally and certain that the fates would be different if we tried again at something we had failed.  When we were grown, we left the nest without backward glances, eager to try our new wings, positive that we would always have a place to land if the weather turned nasty.

If you’re as lucky as I am, there are those people you’ve known since high school (or before) that you check in with on occasion.  Social media has become a place where I see the disappearing hairlines and just-appearing grandchildren of people I’ve known for over thirty years.  Most all of them have been to the house I grew up in, many finding a safe haven from the chaos in their own adolescent homes.  Mom didn’t approve of many of the activities we were up to and was hardly shy about expressing it.  She also knew that we were better off in her basement, under her watchful eye, than out on the street.  She seemed to know when to pat us on the head or kick us in the ass and seemed to be aware of which ones needed it the most.

When I shared the news of my mother’s stroke, comments poured in, some from people I hadn’t heard from in years.  One guy, who rarely used the ‘L’ word with his first wife (and only occasionally afforded it to the Green Bay Packers) wrote, “I love that woman.”  When I looked at the posts and allowed my mind to go back to the old, smoke-filled basement, I saw it.  Carolyn’s legacy.

There were people who found the courage to walk away from abusive relationships.  A few that decided that they didn’t have to be wired on drugs to be funny.  There were those that decided to speak their mind, although it was going to make people angry.  Some applied themselves to school because of her counsel, while others decided they loved themselves, even though they were heavier than society thought they should be.  At least one decided to find their satisfaction in the Bible instead of the bottle.

And so, we see a life’s work unfold before us, a grain of sand at a time instead of a shovelful of dirt all at once.  It’s possible my legacy is sharing this story with you.  Perhaps yours, Dear Reader, is in sharing your story as well.  She didn’t set out to change the world, but she changed lives.  One heart at a time, she’s made the world a better place.  I aspire to her greatness.

In Memory of Dirty John

There are always a lot of water main breaks this time of year.  Seeing the men working in holes dug in the road always makes me think of my old boss, Dirty John.

When I was in college, I worked full-time for the university’s physical plant as a “student plumber.”  For the princely sum of $3.75 an hour, I, and my co-worker Abdul, sometimes found ourselves up to our knees in the frigid, muddy water, digging around the burst pipes so the union plumbers could be called in to complete the job.  Dirty John was making good wages of course, but he was right there with us, cursing the cold, working as hard as we did.  He was about fifteen years older than I was and had a bad back.  He never complained.

Most days, we were finished with work early, free to play euchre while we fielded emergency calls from the school buildings and family housing units.  We laughed a lot, playing as hard as we worked, occasionally cashing in all the abandoned soda bottles to pay for for a feast from Domino’s Pizza.  Sometimes, I think it was the best part of the years I spent in college.  I was nineteen, being treated like a man because I could be counted on to work like one.

Abdul was in a frat, which we visited occasionally, on the clock and off.  One night we attended a bachelor party for Abdul’s brother, an evening I can’t forget no matter how hard I try.  When the beer ran out before the entertainment had arrived, our spirits were kept high by passing around fifths of liquor, of various types, taking a pull from the bottle and passing it on to the next guy.  I won’t discuss the strippers…and you can’t make me…but the last thing I remember that night was losing my lunch while leaning over the porch railing.  Dirty John whispered into my ear between heaves, “Don’t puke on my bike, Sport.”  He meant it.  As I was not beaten to a bloody pulp, I can only assume that I missed his Harley with my bazooka barfs.

That is one story that we all shared.  But we shared a lot of stories from our own lives, trusting each other with information no one else knew.  To my knowledge, no one ever betrayed a confidence.  I intend to betray Dirty John’s today.

With no children of his own, Dirty John was fatherly, in his way, towards his young charges.  He didn’t give advice or hugs.  He didn’t loan us money when we’d blown all of ours on a girl we’d met in a bar the night before.  He was just there, a constant presence, someone who knew me well enough to walk up beside me when something went wrong and say, “You fucked up, Sport.”  It wasn’t a condemnation.  It was a question, as in, “What are you going to do about it?” 

One thing he didn’t like was being called “Crazy John”.  It would be imperceptible to most, but to those of us that spent a lot of time with him, we saw the pain in his eyes when he heard the words.  He would blink and recover, responding with a smile, “That’s right, and I got papers to prove it.”  And he did.  He showed them to me.

John had served in Vietnam.  He once told me, “Those were the greatest two years of my life, because I got paid to shoot people.”  He described some of the horrors he had seen, adding, “I had pictures, but the doctors took ‘em away from me.”  He was just another West Virginia boy who chose picking up a rifle over picking up a coal shovel.  I don’t know which would have been better for him.

There were times when the stories where so sensational that you had to doubt their veracity.  And then there were other times, like the day Abdul committed a minor infraction in a card game, when John whipped out his buck knife and slashed him across the hand, cutting him nearly to the bone along the lifeline, where the thumb met the palm.  It took twelve stitches to close the wound.  If Abdul had said a word, John would have been fired the next day, but it didn’t happen.  John’s contrition was immediate, though the damage had been done.

Abdul graduated not long after the incident and I flunked out a short time later.  After leaving school, I never saw John again.  It was shocking to hear, a mere seven years later, that John had died of a heart attack at the age of forty-two.  I’d never made the fifteen-mile trip to visit him and recall the times we’d spent in a hole dug in the road, the water pouring into the rubber boots that were supposed to insulate us.  I was told, second-hand, that he had found love with a second wife and had two daughters that he doted on.  I hope that is true, and that the years that followed our brief association were blissful.

I tell you all of that to tell you this…there is an election coming up in a few days.  There are a lot of candidates telling you to “Support the Troops” that don’t support them with their votes in Congress.  We have to remember that these soldiers, men and women, have put their lives on the line and have scars we can’t see even after their physical wounds have healed.

Dirty John, wherever you are, I’m sorry I told some of your secrets.  Just know I did it with the best of intentions.  I miss you, for the man that you were.  I love you, for the man you wanted to be.  May every returning soldier receive the care to which he or she is entitled.

We, as a country, may be stuck in a muddy hole right now.  But we can still climb out.