Talking with a Boy in the Woods

My boy and I took a walk one day far into the forest. With every step, people-generated noise like voices and cars was confronted then swallowed by the sounds of the forest. Suddenly, you couldn't miss the ruckus from the river and the ticking sounds squirrels make with everything from their teeth to their claws to their cast off shells, and the give of the ground was a marked contrast to unyielding cement. 

Jon that day in the forest,
with the river - 
and the wind - at his back.

We stopped to watch the river, and a gnarled branch snapped from a tree, fell into the water, and was quickly swept away. There was something reverent, primeval, yet efficient about it. I wondered if the tree had cut the branch loose or the branch had deserted the tree; whether it was a tiny death or a swift rebirth, or a little bit of both.

"Wow, Jon," I said. "That branch just stopped being part of a tree after who knows how many years, and now it's part of a river. We just witnessed something kind of incredible when you think about it."

Jon considered that. And so it was that after the branch parted ways with the tree, our conversation stopped being mundane; it shifted away from dinner plans to hover around what his life could become, of college, and adulthood, and ambitions and dreams.

I thought of a book I used to read to him and his sister, Raggedy Ann in the Deep Deep Woods. I don't remember all the details anymore, but in the story, Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy traipse off into the forest. At some point they drink something pink, and I made a hit with my kids, who were very little then, when we made our own "pink drink" from lemonade and food color. They were so excited about drinking what Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy drank, that it was like hitting the mother lode of parenting. Delighting them is more complicated and expensive now.

Jon leaves soon, heading off to college out-of-state. When that happens, one of my branches will drop free and travel on a river to parts unknown. Will I have let go of Jon or will he have let go of me? Will it be a tiny death or a swift rebirth? 

Maybe a little bit of both.

My Smart TV

I am a baby boomer, and as such, hold dear memories of when watching television did not require a certification in electronics. 

When I grew up we had two televisions, a Zenith and a Philco. Both sets were black and white, and the Philco swiveled on a base with four wooden legs. The picture swiveled too and couldn't be trusted to stay in one place for more than a few seconds. When The Outer Limits' announcer said, "We will control the horizontal, we will control the vertical," I'd shout the eight-year-old's version of, "Oh, thank God!" 

When I was growing up, we had seven television channels, and switching around within them was a breeze, even though, until the advent of the TV remote, one had to get up off one's fanny to change channels, and actually touch the set, which made TV viewing at least somewhat interactive and one way to get a little exercise. 

Once remotes came along, the couch potato was born, and it was possible to flop down on your sofa and channel surf for hours. 

A neighbor of my aunt failed to grasp the intention behind the remote and would get up, walk to the TV, pick up the remote from on top of the TV, change the channel, put the remote back down and return to her chair. But at least she wasn't a couch potato. She was no genius either. 

Today, unlike some of their owners, TVs are "smart." My TV said right on the box that it was smart, but I attribute this to the fact that smart TVs are often arrogant and boastful. Being complicated, difficult and frustrating doesn't make you smart. 

At any given moment, my kids and I might be using our "streaming stick" (something that sounds like it should be a home pregnancy test) to watch a show and then need our game-pad to access what we want to watch next. When I was young, the most technically advanced procedure we might have to perform on a TV was adjusting the rabbit ears on top. 

I need my kids in order to watch television because I'm so dumbfounded by all the equipment needed to watch one stupid TV show. In my defense, even my son referred to one of our recent TV tech add-ons as "that cable thing we just got." 

Last night both kids were going to be away so my daughter got me all set up to watch HGTV. She was going out the door when I asked how to change channels. Syd said, "I'm sorry, Mom, but I think we'll have to wait until I have more time." 

Then she left me all alone with the TV and all the "stuff" that goes with it. 

The first thing that went wrong was the audio getting out of sync with the video. My son tells me this is because we have a cheap internet service provider. Eventually the show I was watching shut down altogether and a message appeared on the screen saying: "Due to inactivity, playback was stopped to save bandwidth."

I sat bolt upright, clutched my bag of chips and yelled, "Whadda ya mean inactive?" And isn't TV all about inactivity unless you're an actor in Sons of Anarchy? Was I supposed to be wired to the TV so it could monitor my heart rate? If it was so smart, why didn't it just walk over and feel my pulse? 

After Syd got home, we wanted to switch to Hulu for Parks and Recreation, and it was another big process just to do that. I watched with envy as her little fingers danced around all the stuff and like a miracle, Parks and Recreation came on.

"Syd, do you think you can ever teach me how to watch TV without help?" I asked.

"Oh, sure, Mom," she said. But she said it like I'd just asked if there was a chance I'd ever build my own spaceship, and she didn't have the heart to tell me it was hopeless. Still, I'm optimistic. 

But I'm saving my receipt from the Acme Rocket Ship Company just in case. 

Rabbit Ears

When I grew up in the sixties and seventies, we had about seven television channels, and switching around within them was a breeze. Today, TVs are "smart." My TV said right on the box that it was smart, but I attribute this to the fact that smart TVs are often arrogant and boastful. Being complicated, difficult, and frustrating doesn't make you smart. 

Bunny Ears, copyright 
Teece Aronin.

Since our purchase of a smart TV, I have witnessed my kids hopscotching between Hulu, Netflicks, and YouTube and using a "streaming stick" to stream shows from other places. Sometimes they needed our game-pad to get to what they wanted to watch. When I was young, the most technically advanced procedure we might have to perform in order to watch TV was adjusting the rabbit ears or switching from UHF to VHF. 

When remotes first hit the scene, my aunt had a neighbor who would get up from her chair, cross the room to where the remote was kept on top of the TV, change the channel, then return the remote to the TV top and sit back down. In that case, the TV wasn't smart and neither was its owner.

I need at least one kid handy when I want to watch TV because I'm dumbfounded by all the equipment needed to watch one simple television show. In my defense, even my son referred to one of our recent TV tech add-ons as "that cable thing we just got." 

Last night both kids were going to be away so my daughter, Syd got me all set up to watch HGTV. She was going out the door when I asked how to change channels. Syd said, "I'm sorry, Mom, but I think we'll have to wait until I have more time." 

Then she left me all alone with nothing to keep the TV running but its smarts and mine.

The first thing I noticed is that the audio was out of sync with the video and that the video was ahead. My son tells me this is because we have a cheap internet service provider. Eventually the show I was watching shut down altogether and a message appeared on the screen saying: "Due to inactivity, playback was stopped to save bandwidth."

I sat bolt upright, with my bag of chips and yelled, "Whadda ya mean inactive?" Was I supposed to be talking to the TV? My father used to yell at ours when watching Hockey Night in Canada, but it didn't seem to improve his viewing experience and anyway, I would have thought those days were gone. If the TV was so smart, why did it need help from me?

After Syd got home, we wanted to switch to Hulu for Parks and Recreation, and it was another big process just to do that. I watched wistfully as her little fingers danced around all the stuff and like a miracle, Parks and Recreation came on.

"Syd, do you think you can teach me how to watch TV without help?"

"Oh, sure, Mom," she said. But she said it like I'd just asked if I could ever learn to build my own spaceship, and she didn't have the heart to tell me it was hopeless. 

Treats

I have a history of eating dog treats, and I never seemed to find them; they seemed to find me. 

Image: Teece Aronin

When I was about two years-old, our next-door neighbor plopped me down in the grass of her backyard, face-to-face with her cocker spaniel, Reggie. Then she shook some crunchy, colorful dog treats into my tiny, cupped palms. 

"Reggie loves treats," she said, and walked away. 

I looked at Reggie. Reggie looked at me. I took one of the treats between my finger and thumb and held it in front of Reggie's black-lipped, drool-y muzzle, at which point, he tilted his head, leaned in, and gently took it. Cheerfully, he crunched it up, then looked expectantly at me.

He must be waiting for me to take my turn, I decided, so I put one of the treats in my mouth and chewed. The dog looked crestfallen. 

Then, I gave a treat to him, and the dog cheered up. When I took my next turn; the dog looked devastated. 

And so it was that Reggie learned to share. Reggie's owner moved away a few years later and couldn't take him along. Knowing how much I loved him, she asked my parents to take him in. They did, and he was my heart for many years.

One night a few months ago, my daughter, Sydney invited her friend, Maddy to a sleepover. Syd and Maddy are "dog people," and since I ate enough dog treats with Reggie that day to become part dog, my daughter might have earned her dog person status partly through genetics. 

It was early Saturday morning when I stumbled into the dimly lit kitchen, yawning and rumpled. Both girls were asleep in the living room. On the counter were these cute little ginger snappish things, and without thinking, I popped one in my mouth. It turned out to have come from a box of treats Maddy brought over for our dog. 

"Rule Number One:" lectured a friend," If it's in your kitchen but you don't know how it got there, do NOT put it in your mouth."

Actually, it didn't taste that bad, and it brought back memories of when I was plopped down in the grass and told that Reggie loved treats.

Chimes

Aunt Ki had chimes. Doorbell chimes. Long, tubular, brass doorbell chimes - three of them. They hung in an intriguing little wall niche where as a child, I was enthralled by them. 

Image copyright, Teece Aronin

This exotic little altar at which I beheld the "miracle of the bells" every time I visited Aunt Ki, was located in a postcard-sized spit of hallway from which three steps would take you into Aunt Ki's bedroom, two steps into Aunt Ki's sitting room, and another two steps, straight to the sink in Aunt Ki's pink-tiled bathroom. 

Chimes like those were not uncommon in homes built from the thirties into the sixties, but Aunt Ki had the only ones I could get close to. I would stand in front of them, gingerly bumping the shortest one against the middle-sized one and the middle-sized one against the longest one. Then I would ponder the different notes they would intone. 

The chimes were whimsical, like something one might find in an enchanted art deco cottage or a 1930's Constance Bennett movie. Yet they were important-looking, perhaps having first worked their imperious magic inside a mansion vestibule.

Recently, I bought a house built in 1958, and while there's not a wall niche, there is a tiny foyer and a quirky little cove where two walls meet perpendicularly. That gives me two options for installing my own chimes one day.

I found a company online called Electrachime which manufactures these all but extinct melodious miracles. When my budget catches up with my tastes, I will order some. That's not to say Electrachime's products are pricey; they're not. But right now I have to be frugal.

But I'll have them one day. I keep a budget and pay myself an allowance right along with the kids', but something always comes up to keep me from my cherished chimes. Life and elusive chimes are like that.

But that's okay. It will happen. And when it does, peals of welcome will dance across the land - even if I have to stand on the porch and ring my own bell.

I've done it before.

Scary, But Not Very

When I was growing up, my favorite thing about television was a creepy genus of quasi-humanity known as horror movie hosts. They roamed airwaves free and untamed on Friday and Saturday nights after the eleven o’clock news and sometimes on Saturday afternoons. Their heyday was roughly the late 1950s through the eighties.

One of my own little horrors.
Image: Teece Aronin

Horror movie hosts first sprang from the earth when a package of aging Universal horror films was made available to syndicated television stations and someone had the diabolically brilliant idea that the movies be hosted. 

By the late sixties many local television markets had had at least one of these hosts. Vampira in L.A. was likely the first. Then there were Zacherley, Morgus, Ghoulardi, the Ghoul, and an endless string of others - many now lost to the annals of time. 

And most of the original programming is lost, too, because the broadcasts were often aired live but not recorded. Worse, some were recorded then recorded over by stations on a budget. So even for those of us who are "of a certain age," most of those programs are but dimly lit memories in the spook-house of the mind. 

The hosts' personalities ran the gamut from formal and stiff to bouncing-off-the-dungeon-walls-zany. Better yet, they were often sarcastic. Elvira, Mistress of the Dark was sarcastic and tantalizing, saucy, and sexy.

Among my favorite hosts was Sir Graves Ghastly who aired in Detroit, Cleveland, and D.C. He straddled the qualities of formality and sarcasm, once summing up the merits of that afternoon's movie by sneering that it had been "smuggled in in a cheese bag."

One nice thing about Sir Graves was that he was a little scary but not very scary. On that score he let me down only once when I had a nightmare about him climbing through my bedroom window. That dream scared me because mine was a second story bedroom, so it followed that if Sir Graves was climbing through my window, he wasn't just looking to come in from the rain.

Sir Graves "lived" in Detroit, in a castle off the John Lodge Freeway. Elements like that ignited my imagination. I remember riding down the John Lodge in the back seat of the family car watching for that castle. There's no better fun when you're a nerdy nine-year-old than looking for a castle beside a freeway in Detroit.   

And we "kiddies," as Sir Graves called us (he also called us, dear hearts), quickly figured out that he and all the funny peripheral characters inhabiting his world were played by one man. His name was Lawson Demming. But as crazy as I was about Sir Graves et al, I was just as interested in what I might find if I crawled through my family's black and white Zenith console television to peek behind his wingback chair. 

There are still horror movie hosts, even some from the old school. I'll just have to get savvy enough to track them down in the haunts to which time and technology have driven them - like wolves from the woods. 

One has fared very well, though. He is Svengoolie, whose alter ego, Rich Koz, replaced the show's original host almost 40 years ago. “Svengoolie” is syndicated nationally via MeTV, but I haven't quite figured out how to access the channel. I think I'll ask a kid to do it in which case I'll be hooked up in no time. 

So, that same technology that nearly ended them has also given the hosts new homes. If I look hard enough, I'll find them lurking amid the vaults of public access television and slinking around the headstones on social media sites.  

If I could watch the original shows again, I would want to watch them as they were originally presented, in ultra-brief blocks interrupted by rivers of commercials for local businesses with yammering salesmen. L.A.'s car salesman supreme, Cal Worthington was generally accompanied by his "dog, Spot”  who was usually a bear, a tiger or a chimpanzee. 

I know . . . It only made sense in L.A. 

Baby Boom

I nearly met my end twice by the time I was four, each time as the result of an explosion. 

Me no doubt asking a firefighter
to help me blow this pop-stand
before it blows again. 

I don't recall either event, but according to my mother, both blasts were real doozies. 

The first happened in our basement before I was two years-old. The furnace blew, the explosion so powerful, the kitchen floor heaved up and the cast iron door on the unit's face flew off.

Firefighters traipsed through the house where I sat in a rocking chair calmly watching. 

"Why didn't anyone carry me out?" I recently asked my mother.

"Well, we looked at you and you seemed fine," she said.

A couple of years later I had a second brush with a blast. My father was a building engineer. Every day, I went with my mother to pick him up from work. My routine: open the boiler room door, scamper over an iron catwalk, bear right onto another catwalk, then run into the tiny office where my father waited.

One day I was sick and my mother's timing was off, getting her to my father's job later than usual. At precisely the time I would have been running up that first catwalk, a boiler exploded. Had I been there, I'd have been killed, with 40 pounds of ragamuffin meat hurled to the cold, hard floor. 

My mother was uninjured due in part to the shift in her arrival time. My father survived because he was far enough away in his office. 

Had I been closer to the basement that one day, or calumphing my fanny up that catwalk on the other, I wouldn't be here now and my children wouldn't exist. 

My ex-husband would never have met me, making him and his mother the only ones to gain anything.

Similar subject matter has been explored before, of course. Consult your television viewing guide during the holidays and you'll see some channel somewhere is airing It's a Wonderful Life, the story of downhearted George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) shown by a fledgling angel how barren others' lives would be had he not been around.

We see that theme of altered existence in the story, A Christmas Carol, too, when Ebineezer Scrooge is shown the bleak fate set to befall that sickeningly chipper Cratchett clan should he not change his ways.  

But what about the good things that never happen to us because we zigged instead of zagged, or worse, the good things that never happen to us because others zigged? We are all the sum total, not only of our own decisions, but of others'. 

What windfalls, career boosts and loves have I missed due to my decisions? Last-second impulses to turn right and not left, polite rejections of would-be suitors, or not sending a resume to that hot little start-up are choices. Those choices, once escorts to alternate futures, stand as vague and shadowed sentries, barring gates they would otherwise open. 

And when things happen . . . or don't happen . . . is it fate, good luck, bad luck, a higher power or merely the simple order of things?

Before I decide that it's all a mess of randomness, I will give this notion more thought. 

I just won't expect any conclusions. 

A Perfectly Beautiful Son

Mother's Day will be here soon, so I thought I'd reach way down deep in the memory drawer and pull something out that I wrote years ago and haven't looked at in a while.

A picture of me with my own son

A woman once told me about the day when her son, born with cerebral palsy, came into the house upset because some neighborhood kids had been bullying him. She stood with him in front of the full-length mirror she kept in her bedroom and said, "Look at yourself. That's your body and it's beautiful." 

After she told me that story, I wrote this poem for her. I'm sharing it here for all the mothers of children with disabilities. Your children are amazing, and they have made you more amazing too and probably stronger than you ever thought you could be. Happy Almost Mother's Day to all of you.

A Perfectly Beautiful Son

"I'm crippled and useless; the kids say I am."

"You're my perfectly beautiful son."

"Mommy, how can you say that when you know how I look?"

"You're my perfectly beautiful son. You look like your father. You're lucky, my pet. He's handsome and strong. Can't you see? You belong. Be proud, my beautiful son."

"My feet drag on the ground; I fall down all the time."

"You're my perfectly beautiful son. And when you fall down, you get right back up. You've never stayed down and I know you won't now. Get up, my beautiful son."

"My hands always shake; I spill everything."

"You're my perfectly beautiful son. And when your hands shake, I will hold them in mine. It will steady us both; not just you but me, too. Hold tight, my beautiful son."

"My speech comes out funny; people can't understand."

"You're my perfectly beautiful son. And when I hear you speak, I hear magical sounds. The words are so clear and their meanings so dear. Speak out, my beautiful son."

"People think that I'm weak, just because I'm so small."

"You're my perfectly beautiful son. And your heart's grown so strong, how could you be weak? To me you're so mighty, sometimes I can't speak. Stand tall, my beautiful son."

"The kids have been saying I'll wind up alone."

"You're my perfectly beautiful son. You have so much to give and a great life to live. And when the day comes that a girl sees this too, I'll love her so much - but not like I love you. But I'll love her to pieces, and I'll shout to the world, 'My son's found his true love! What a perfectly beautiful girl!"