An Omen?

Or two, or three? 

You bet!

I had an off day yesterday. No … I don’t mean because this is Spring Break and I was off work. I mean that I was mentally and physically off kilter. (What does 'kilter' really mean? I feel a Toad Moment coming on.) So this morning and on my morning constitutional I vowed that I would take my own advice, keep my senses open, and look for a moment. Because it was early and the sun was just burning through the morning fog, I decided to concentrate on watching for and listening to birds.

As I turned the corner by my brother’s house I stopped dead in my tracks – there were a pair of ducks, mallards to be precise, standing on the sidewalk in front of me. Now we don’t live in one of the neighborhoods where there are lakes, or ponds, or even a river. Oh, I think a few neighbors have swimming pools and there are a few hippie hot tubs around, but no open bodies of water. We have lived in this same neighborhood for almost 37 years and I have never seen a duck taking a walk down our sidewalk. So . . . seeing a pair of ducks did surprise me a bit. It also brought a big smile to my face.

You see, there are three animals that always cause me to stop, smile, and just plain mellow out  — ducks, toads, and beagles. Why? Well, that is another story. I will say that my nickname (thanks to a high school friend) is Duckman but that, too, is another story.

So…I stood and watched the ducks until they finally realized that they were in a cheap neighborhood that didn’t have a pond or a lake and they flew away. I walked another half block and when I turned the next corner, a dove walked out in front of me from under the neighbor’s rosemary plant. A great plant — I always swipe my hands through it when I am out for my walks. Now, I am not over the top about doves like I am about ducks but they are fun to watch and to listen to when they mourn.

So I am now feeling pretty good about seeing a few of nature’s creatures when I turn the corner again, and out of a neighbor’s lavender plant (yep, I run my hands through it, also) hop two little bunnies. Again, keep in mind that this is southern California and not central Illinois. In Illinois there always seem to be a dozen or more rabbits (notice I didn’t call them bunnies) eating my tulips. We don’t have bunnies in this simple tract neighborhood. The bunnies just sat there. Since this is Easter week, I started to really wonder.

So ... in my mind these were definitely omens and have already brought me pleasure. I cut my exercise short by thirty minutes in order to get home and write this all down. And … No! None of these were pookas. But they all provided a Moment!

My Drug Abuse

This morning at the communal water cauldron, a holier-than-thou co-worker went off about how South American third-world countries are corrupting American society. According to him, these countries have purposely introduced a plethora of drugs into the good old U. S. of A. These drugs have pushed our society into a death spiral to the point that we, too, will soon be a third-world country. He didn’t say it but he strongly implied that when we hit bottom it will be with the aid and direction of the pinko leftists.

I don’t like arguments so I kept my mouth shut. Besides, I have been using a South American exported drug for many years. Yes, this habit has cost me money and occasionally has clouded my judgment and affected my health. I guess I have always had a craving but the wise council of my parents kept me pretty clean. Once I graduated from college, moved to California, and had a steady income, I increased my intake.

I found a local source that was within walking distance of my office near the beach. My wife, who is also addicted, and I ultimately became close friends with our source. A good thing too - I remember late one Saturday night, after going out to an Italian dinner, we both desperately needed a fix but our cache was empty. In fact, our backup cache was empty so we panicked. We called our source who said she had some at her house and if we dropped by she would fix us up. We beat a path to her door, took possession of a bag of the goods, and sat in the car and used it before even driving the few blocks back home. Yes, we were in a bad way.

We have tried on a number of occasions to stop cold turkey but to no avail. When we were raising our children, we worked at keeping the stuff out of the house. All kinds of youthful problems have been associated with this drug. We ultimately found that one of our daughters was a friend of our source’s son. He would sneak bags of the stuff to school in his back pack and share it with our daughter at lunch. Needless to say, we did not report this to the authorities; no telling where it would lead.

As we have gotten older our tastes have become more refined and, unfortunately, we are now addicted to the expensive, more highly concentrated stuff. Fortunately, our friend is still in business and supplies a high-end product in half-kilo bags. We keep it at home in the buffet next to the cooking sherry. My wife uses it in brownies, but, you know, after the first brownie you get the munchies and can’t stop eating.

In recent years there have been lots of articles written on its medicinal value. I am not sure of the veracity of that research. One wonders if it is just an excuse to justify the bad habits and addictions of the authors. If all of the articles are true, then I will live a long time and prosper. My blood pressure will be lower, my cholesterol will be lower, my hormones will be better balanced, and my body will be protected from aging. I certainly know that my wife is a lot happier when the stuff is available.

If America does fall as a result of this drug we cannot blame the source but should look to one of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, an early addict, who said:

"The superiority of chocolate, both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain."

And don’t get me started on coffee.

Moments - A Cogitation

The other night my wife and I saw Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The main punch line of the play is when the newly dead Emily says to the Stage Manager, "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?" The Stage Manager replies, “No. Saints and poets maybe…they do some.”

I don’t agree with the Stage Manager’s response. I think we all “do some.” The “some” that we do are called “moments.”

Life is all about moments and the stories that come from them. Sometimes they are humorous. Sometimes they are sad. Sometimes they are romantic. Sometimes a moment is so private that you can’t tell the story publicly but you still have the the memory and the story.

I collect moments like some people collect coins or books.  I am always on the lookout for a good one. Moments are clearly important for everyone.  Did you ever think about all of the songs that speak of moments:

This Magic Moment – The Drifters

Moments to Remember – The Four Lads

Magic, Moments - Perry Como

It Only Takes a Moment – Hello Dolly

One of the things that make us human is that we tell stories. Moments lead to stories.  Without a moment you have no stories. 

We all have some moments. Some are obvious like our first date, our first kiss, losing our virginity, our wedding, the birth of a child, seeing the Grand Canyon or Chartes Cathedral for the first time, or seeing your first pileated woodpecker. To make life exciting you need to make yourself available to experiences. Open your senses… your eyes, your ears, your nose. But most of all get out there and look for moments.

Photography helped me learn to see, allowing me up to gather more moments. Even when I don’t have a camera with me I am constantly looking for a picture. Be careful – you don’t want to look like a scanning radar – but do keep yourself alert to opportunities. Sunsets, sunrises, rainbows are common but with the right person or at the right time they become a moment.  To me, full moons are always a moment. However, I remember only a few of these – a lunar eclipse, the moon over the Eiffel Tower with my arm around my wife, a swooping owl.

Moments are not just opportunities of the senses. Sometimes being in the right place at the right (or wrong) time is what causes the memory. My being in the air at 6:00 am on September 11, 2001, was not a lot of fun, but I do have a story to tell.

We all know that music and scent can bring us back to a moment. The first line of the first story I ever wrote was, “I remember it as a summer of The Graduate, “Cherish”, and Windsong” … three sensations that brought back a moment.

So, fellow Boomers, what do you remember when you hear the line, “Hello darkness my old friend,” or “I can’t get no satisfaction,” or “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away?” Or… do you remember who you were with the first time you heard Vic Flick’s guitar riff Dum-Di-Di-Dum-Dum…  (Yes, the James Bond Theme)?

Rarely does TV provide a memorable moment but one that jumps out at me was watching Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald in real time. And a few years later we watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.

So, we all need to be alert and looking for moments. When we find a good moment, we want to make sure that it has a lot of momentum. I am absolutely sure that my children are tired of hearing about some of my momentous moments. But, that’s OK; I have a granddaughter to tell my stories to now.

And since I argued with Thornton Wilder at the beginning, I think it only fair that I let him close. 

“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”

A Dogged Moment

Over the past month several of my friends and colleagues have commented that The Toad and Dogged Dialogues have both been quiet recently. I checked and it has been well over a year since I posted anything. There are a lot of reasons for that but I suspect that at the top of the list are my sloth and ennui. In defense, however, I have started writing several poems, essays, and Toad’s Words but, well, acedia always took control and my muse would run away.

To solve the problem of never finishing anything I start, I decided to create Dogged Moments. These will be very short dialogues based on some of the weird thoughts and musings that occasionally blow the windmills of my mind and then dog me for the rest of the day.

Dogged Moment #1 - Dashboards

While I was peeling my grapefruit this morning and waiting for my morning thunder tea to brew, I found myself singing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.  Don’t we all sing tunes from Oklahoma while fixing breakfast?

You can pretty well find anything in their lyrics to inspire you: “Oh what a beautiful morning,” “They’ve gone about as fur as they can go,” “I cain’t say no,” “It’s a scandal. It’s an outrage,” “Don’t start collecting things.” Although it is my wife who usually sings this last one to me. And my favorite, “It's summer and we're runnin' out a' ice.”

Anyway, if The Surrey with the Fringe on Top is good enough for Marlene Dietrich to sing and Miles Davis to play, then I can sing it in my kitchen.

Well, I got to the line which I have heard and sung a million times, “The dashboard’s genuine leather”, and it suddenly hit me that we were talking about a surrey here. That begs the questions: Why do both cars and surreys have dashboards? And, why is it called a dashboard?

The answer is simple. Surreys, wagons, sleighs, and carriages were pulled by horses and when horses run fast, or “dash”, they tend to throw clumps of mud, crud, and other, even less delightful stuff, off their hooves.  Hence these modes of transportation put boards in front of the driver and passengers to keep the mud from hitting them.

So why do they call them “dashboards” in cars? Keep in mind that early cars were called carriages or horseless carriages so it made sense to name the board holding the knobs, gauges, and controls after what everyone was already calling it, the “dashboard.”

The truly interesting thing is that now we also call computer displays that show us real-time data like weather, time, stock prices, and news, “dashboards” … clearly a misnomer. These modern day dashboards don’t protect us from the crud the news and stock market throw at us.