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.

When Will You Make an End?

My daughter just had her braces removed and got to bang a gong at the end of the appointment. The gong is huge and hangs in the busy offices of the team of orthodontists who have been managing my kids' orthodontia needs for an unexpectedly long time.  

Orthodontia - not exactly the painting of the Sistine Chapel, but close.

That's how it is with orthodontia sometimes. Your kid starts treatment and you have no idea how long it will take, and the orthodontist doesn't know much more than you. 

I'm not blaming anyone for this except the teeth. Teeth are unpredictable, hard to tame little beggars, and both my kids had problems with the same renegade tooth - tooth number 12 if your were viewing it on a dental chart or in a criminal lineup. 

My son still has his braces, his situation complicated by a sledding accident in which his right central incisor was broken off above the gum line. At the end of every appointment the technician briefs me on the progress - or lack of it. Again, this is not the fault of the orthodontia treatment, and in this case the blame is shared by tooth number 12, the right central incisor, and the sled.  

"So, how long do you think it will take?" I ask. "We really can't tell," they say. It is a similar exchange to that depicted in The Agony and the Ecstasy, the 1965 film about the painting of the Sistine Chapel. When Pope Julius II, anxious for Michelangelo to wrap things up, demands, "When will you make an end?" Michelangelo barks back, "When I am finished!"

I am a powerless pope in an orthodontics office filled with Michelangelos. I didn't need the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel painted on the roof of my kids' mouths, but it turns out that getting your kids' teeth where they belong is a goal almost as tricky to achieve.  

It was definitely worth it.

I started worrying one day when I watched a video in the waiting room depicting proper oral hygiene for the orthodontics patient. It seemed a bit involved and my daughter is the two-minute brush and you're done type. I imagined the bands coming off to reveal a mass of worms crawling in and out of each tooth, but as it turned out, my worries were unfounded, and my daughter's teeth were gorgeous. 

Seeing her new smile in the car mirror.

Still, my kiddo didn't really want to bang that gong, partly because she was turning twenty-one by this time, and partly because everyone looks up, claps and cheers at the noise. Since kids with braces live vicariously through the kid whose braces just came off, and their parents live vicariously through the parent of the kid whose braces just came off, I always sensed a whiff of resentment in the air whenever the gong was struck. Still, we had earned our gong moment, and I wanted all those people in the waiting room to resent us. I explained this to my daughter and just happened to add that she would be more embarrassed if I were to bang the gong for her.   

I wonder who got to bang the gong when the Sistine Chapel was finished, Pope Julius II or Michelangelo.

Don't Go in the Walk-in, Gordon!

I'm not sure how we got started doing this, but my daughter and I binge watch two of the older Gordon Ramsay series, Kitchen Nightmares and Hotel Hell. 

In case you've been slaving in the kitchen of a substandard restaurant for the past 20 years and haven't been paying attention, Gordon Ramsay is the British chef, enfant terrible, bad boy extraordinaire who berates the shows' dumb-dumb restaurateurs, innkeepers and hoteliers brave enough or stupid enough to ask him in for a consult; this is when their businesses are just a rotten smell away from going under. And judging from the looks, rotten smells abound in these places, and thank God no one has perfected Smell-O-Rama.

Not everyone who invites Ramsay over for advice is a dumb-dumb. Often they are the spouses or partners of the dumb-dumbs, and their savings are fast dwindling because the dumb-dumbs were dumb enough to get them into these messes. The place is being run into the ground by the dumb-dumb's poor cooking, poor business planning or outright selfishness. Gordon is sympathetic to the dumb-dumb's much better half even as he is all in the face of the dumb-dumb. 

In the case of Kitchen Nightmares, it's pretty much inevitable that Gordon will venture into the restaurant's walk-in refrigerator. It's the restaurant reality show equivalent to a teen in a slasher movie saying, "I'll be right back!" 

"Don't go in the walk-in, Gordon!" I shout at the screen, but Gordon doesn't listen and goes in anyway where he finds himself in a haunted house of rotted beef, moldy pasta and slimy chicken. Gordon shoves his arms wrist deep into the gunk just to gross us out even more and to give himself added justification for a string of bleeped out expletives. Sometimes Gordon rushes out of the walk-in and straight to the nearest trash bin where he heaves up one of the awful meals prepared for him earlier by that episode's dumb-dumb.  Some of my favorite Ramsayisms include, "Wow-wow-wow-wow, wow," "Look at that!" (gasped in hushed tones like someone who's peeked beneath the casket lid's lower half to find that the deceased isn't wearing any pants), "Looks like a dog's dinner," and "I've eaten that!"

To give you an idea just how dumb the dumb-dumbs get, in one episode, a wife learned she was co-owner of a ramshackle, money-sucking, badly decorated inn when her husband called her up and said, "Guess what!" In another, a father who has raided his son's savings to buy a restaurant, proceeds to bend Gordon's ear about what a jerk his father was. 

We also binged season one of Hell's Kitchen where Gordon takes wannabe restaurateurs and screams and yells at them through a series of competitions until one of them wins a restaurant where they can hire their own staff to yell at. 

It sounds like a dream come true. (No, it doesn't!)

Spiritual J and the Bunny

For years, I've had this sense that I'm standing at the door of real faith. But even though God has opened the door many times, or, rather, opened the door wider, I often stand, frozen at the threshold. 

Other times I've skipped right through the door, merrily singing my little God tune, delighted by how good it feels once I'm in there. I worry less, have a lighter heart, and then, back out the door I run. 

What could be so scary is beyond me, yet there I am, hopping in and out and hoping God will just yank me through and sit me down. God, being a gentleman, has yet to do so.

I have a friend who is deeply spiritual. For the sake of her privacy, let's call her Spiritual J. She is one of the women I spend time with every fall in a cabin in northern Michigan. 

Spiritual J believes - openly, voraciously, enthusiastically believes. She calls God "Papa," and when something baffles her, she asks Papa for help. Sometimes she sees things that don't exist in this realm - fascinating creatures, colors, and things that can't be explained, and when that happens, Spiritual J asks, "Papa, what is that?" 

To anyone who might think Spiritual J has a screw loose, let me just say that, as far as I can tell, she is perfectly lucid, rock-steady, and grounded in reality. The only exceptions to that rule that I'm aware of are when we're "Up North," whipping up drinks in the blender. There's not a lot to talk about in that cabin for four days at a stretch except for drinks to whip up in the blender - and food, family, euchre, work, pets, and faith. Actually, there is a lot to talk about. 

It didn't take long for Spiritual J to peg me as an agnostic, standing outside in my manufactured snow, wanting to come in from the cold. She started smiling at me more, with her big, summery, smile, the kind of smile that could only manifest itself on the face of someone who calls God "Papa."

Spiritual J is someone who makes me think of the word anointed every time I look at her. One of the women who spends time with us in the cabin said it really does help what hurts when Spiritual J lays hands on you.

During one of our trips north, I experienced this after mentioning that my hand was a little achy. Turned out that Spiritual J had brought this cream with her that's supposed to be good for arthritis. So, she fetched it for me, but she didn't just hand me the jar; she opened the jar, scooped up a gob of the cream, then took my hand into both of hers and massaged the cream in. Something worked, and whether it was the cream or Spiritual J's application of it, I'm not sure.  

One night, when everyone else was asleep, Spiritual J and I sat outside, bundled in mittens and hats, peering out at the lake. Something came up about spirit animals and Spiritual J's belief that we don't just have spirit animals, we are spirit animals. Spiritual J said that when she wanted to know what spirit animal she was, she closed her eyes at bedtime and asked Papa to let her know come morning. 

The next day, as soon as Spiritual J opened her eyes, the word owl sprang to mind. When she searched the scriptures for owl, one thing she learned was that owls are guides, and she concluded that she was to help others coming to grips with their faith - or lack thereof. I climbed into bed that night, closed my eyes, and asked God to reveal the spirit animal I am.

In the morning, the first word that leapt to mind was bunny - not even rabbit - bunny. I snatched up my phone and googled the significance of rabbits in scripture. I would have searched bunnies in scripture, but that seemed juvenile even for a novice like me. 

I found a lot of references to cuds and clean versus unclean animals, and then I read that the Physiologus, a Greek text dating back to about 200 AD, depicted rabbits as creatures that seek safety on cliffs and mountains only to scurry back down, their stumpy front legs making them easy prey to anything wanting to pick them off.

"I'm a frickin' bunny!" I whispered to Spiritual J at breakfast. “Supposedly, I run up mountains and then I run back down, and then I get eaten because my front legs are too short." First of all, in my scriptural youth and inexperience, I failed to process the fact that the Physiologus isn't scripture, and even if it were, there are all kinds of ways to interpret it.

Not even Spiritual J could make me feel better about God calling me a bunny - or so I thought. But Spiritual J smiled.

"Maybe God is telling you that you run to Him, but then you run away. It's not necessarily a bad thing; it's just a human thing. Maybe God is telling you that He knows you struggle."

At least Spiritual J's owl didn't swoop down and pick my bunny off a mountain. But if it ever does, I'm sure it will be for my own good. 

A Torn Leaf

I have lived through interesting times more than once in my life, and I seem to be pulling out of the most recent iteration. Last spring I lost my job, the one I counted on for health insurance and retirement benefits, the one that covered my mortgage payment, the one that fed my kids. My employer was heading in new directions, and I didn't seem to be a match for any of them. The good news was that I'd always been a saver, and I was vested; in other words, I wasn't broke.

Image by Teece Aronin

What followed were the tough adjustments you might imagine one would experience after something like that, but some great things came, too. I had experience as a resume writer and career coach, so I knew my skills, knew how to articulate and market them and could craft my own resume. I had never lost my passion for that work, so it wasn't long before I was networking in that direction and returning to my roots of writing resumes and coaching people on their next steps. 

Another benefit of that work experience was that I knew what to expect emotionally, and the words I once used to comfort, encourage and empower unemployed people came wafting back to save me. I was relieved to find the words helped, and that I hadn't been feeding people a lot of patronizing poo back in those days. 

I became a list-maker. I made lists of things that would keep me sane. One was a list of things to remember when I wasn't feeling strong; the other was a list of things to look forward to once the kids and I were back on our feet.

Currently, the first list looks like this:

• You actually have a normal life and a bright future.
• You know what to do and are wise; any mistakes you make are human and understandable.
• You're not unemployed; you're self-employed, looking for a great new opportunity, and building a new business.
• When you feel down you should clean your room, buy blankets, buy towels, buy good winter clothes, buy boots, buy silverware, clean the kitchen, read something informative, read sappy novels, remove one obstacle, set a reward, go for a walk, go for a drive, review your lists for when you're on your feet.

My lists for when the finances are better are of things that probably wouldn't cheer up anybody but me, like replacing the flower boxes on the house and painting the front door and the shutters. 

As to my first list, I don't advocate spending as a means of self-medicating. It just happened that we needed more blankets, we needed more silverware and we needed more towels. I wanted to know that although a storm was coming, we had everything we needed to stay warm and dry and feel safe. I wanted to know that we could even go out and play in that storm. I shopped for most of those things at thrift stores. My motto: You scratch my back, Goodwill, and I'll scratch yours.

One thing about storms, though, is that they take little pieces of you with them; a few hairs from your head, a few skin cells off your face, a few beliefs you once held sacred. I choose to look at it this way, that it's less of me to take care of, to fuss over, or to think about. It's less ego to get in the way. I tell myself that each storm leaves me a little more streamlined. And I remind myself that whatever has weathered a storm has a beauty the untouched and pristine among us just can't have.

Like a torn leaf or a chipped demitasse. 

The Surly Bonds of Earth

I am a baby boomer. When I was six years-old, my parents booked a flight for themselves, my two brothers and me from our home state in the Midwest to Southern California where my aunt and uncle lived. It was also the sole residence of Mickey Mouse before he built himself that second home in Orlando. Knowing Mickey lived in the same state as my aunt and uncle made it the most intriguing destination I could imagine.   

Wild Blue Yonder, by Teece Aronin, available on 

products at  Redbubble.com/people/phylliswalter.

Flying was an event back then, and all of us were dressed up. My mother looked lovely in a dress, and my father wore a suit and tie. My brothers were in the sixties' equivalent of business casual, and I was wearing a brown and white striped seersucker dress with a pair of Mary Janes. My parents bought me a pink plush wind-up elephant to take on the flight, and its trunk rotated along to the tune of Frere Jacques. 

Our meals were real food, meat and potatoes and vegetables, and the flight attendant (or stewardess, in those days) gave my brothers each a junior pilot pin. I can't remember what little token of the flight she gave me, probably a junior stewardess pin.  When my father jokingly asked the flight attendant where his pin was, she made a big fuss over applying a junior pilot pin to his lapel. She was blonde, beautiful and spoke with a lovely accent. She reminded me of Inger Stevens.

Last week, I took my daughter, Sydney to the airport so she could fly out to visit her dad and we were abruptly notified at the ticket counter that her flight had been cancelled. The reason given had something to do with bad weather near Baltimore, but I've been told that airlines sometimes do that when a flight isn't full. 

Whatever the reason, we headed home for the night. I was just grateful they could book her on the same flight out of the same airport the next day. For a while, because of computer problems, they were insisting I'd have to take her to one of the busier hubs, the kind  patterned on that hedge maze in The Shining. 

The next day, which only felt like Groundhog's Day, we approached the same ticket counter behind which stood an unsmiling, monosyllabic ticket agent. She attached an ID tag to my daughter's suitcase and pointed us toward Security.  

Syd and I were sweating it out because she didn't have her I.D., and we knew it would be dicey explaining things to TSA. Syd's an anxious flyer as it is. Just as we approached the first TSA officer, I realized that I didn't have a gate pass. I've never walked up to a ticket counter with one of my kids and not been asked if I wanted a gate pass. Granted, Syd is 20 now, but tiny as a waif and still in braces, so she looks like someone who would need a grownup to get her to the gate. 

Since I had my mind on my daughter and the intensified security measures she'd be up against, I didn't think to ask for a pass, and I think I had a better excuse than the ticket agent. The officer suggested I go get my pass while they got started with Syd. I walked up to the same ticket agent and smiled.

"I need a gate pass." My request was pleasant enough, I thought, considering my resentment of this woman.

"You didn't ask for one," she said. 

"Because it usually comes up in the converSAtion," I replied. 

When I rejoined Syd, she was standing near a lectern behind which stood a different TSA agent. He was telling her to name a landmark, and at first Syd looked a little blank.

"He means near where we live, honey."

"Don't answer for her ma'am," said the agent.

I didn't think I was. Syd answered a whole slew of questions like that while the officer relayed her answers to someone over the phone. She passed with flying (no pun intended) colors, but still had to be patted down. After that we made it to the "other side," the land of book stores, gift shops, bars and restaurants and gates. 

Syd and I each had a sandwich and a bottle of tea which cost me around $20. Silently, I longed for the days when she was delighted with brown bags of peanut butter sandwiches, string cheese and sliced apples. Sadly, she's had the audacity to grow up. 

And she wasn't the only one of us who'd been detained by TSA. When she was a kindergartner and her brother was about three, we were at the airport with my mother, waiting to be cleared for a flight from Maryland to Michigan. I'd left my driver's license at home after taking it out to scan or copy or something, because someone had mentioned that we might also go to Canada.   

My mother was in her eighties by that time and seated in a wheelchair while we waited at Security and I tried to think of what to say. When I couldn't get cleared, someone from the airport wheeled my mother to the gate while I stood there watching them disappear into the distance. A friend later suggested that if I'd mentioned that my mother was due for her diaper change, the requirement for my picture I.D. would have been miraculously waived. 

I looked around at the other passengers waiting to be screened and spotted a woman in an Army uniform who had chaperoned a school field trip with me a few months earlier. She vouched for me, displayed her own substantial credentials, and TSA let me through. When the kids and I caught up with my mother (who did not wear diapers, by the way), my pulse rate was approaching tachycardia.

Syd made the flight out to see her father without much problem considering, and when it was time to fly home, she and her dad knew to expect another round of enhanced identification measures. But when they asked her questions this time, they were all about Baltimore and the area where her father lives. He's moved at least twice since we all lived in Maryland, and Syd couldn't answer the questions. 

I got on the phone with the TSA officer and willed my head not to explode. Patiently he explained that I was the wild card that got Syd on the flight to Maryland, and her father was the wild card coming back. When she couldn't supply any solid facts linking herself to him, she was grounded. It made sense, and I was grateful not to be a TSA agent having to explain policies like this to furious parents of kids traveling without I.D. 

I offered to send a picture of her birth certificate, but the agent said he couldn't accept anything electronic. Eventually someone put a supervisor from the airline on with me who suggested I send a picture of Syd's birth certificate. I know, that's what I thought. 

"I offered to do that," I told her, "but they said they can't accept anything electronic."

"I know,'" said the supervisor, "but I'll print a copy."

I wasn't about to ask how that was any more legitimate than me texting the same birth certificate directly to TSA. I guess it's that TSA agents aren't allowed to use printers? I'm still confused, but it got Syd on the flight and that's all that mattered. 

Talking to her father later, I said, "I'm so glad I had her birth certificate."

"You couldn't have thought of that last week?" he asked, and we laughed and laughed. Actually, we didn't.

Flying isn't what it used to be. But I'll bet if Syd could have walked up to those agents and flashed her junior pilot pin, they'd have ushered her straight through.  





  

McCurdy, McCrew, and McLean

One could argue that Elmer McCurdy and Anderson "Andrew" McCrew didn't amount to much in life, but man oh man, if anyone ever earned eternal rest, it was these two. We'll begin with McCurdy.

Image copyright, Teece Aronin

Elmer McCurdy robbed banks and trains around the turn of the last century, and according to AllGov.com, someone really did say, "You'll never take me alive!" and that someone was McCurdy. As a result of that defiant determination, the posse that had hoped to take him alive, just shot him instead. He died on October 7, 1911.

The AllGov post continues, explaining that no one claimed McCurdy's body, so the undertaker charged a nickel to anyone who wanted to take a peek at the embalmed corpse. Aside from that, I don't know what happened to him for the first five years he was deceased, but it is said that five years after his death, a carnival snapped him up, thinking him quite the moneymaker, and for the next 60 years McCurdy was sold and resold to carnivals, wax museums and haunted house attractions.

In 1976, a Universal Studios television crew was prepping part of a Long Beach, California amusement park to shoot a scene for The Six Million Dollar Man. When they came across McCurdy hanging from a noose, they assumed it was a wax figure. But when they moved the corpse and the arm fell off, exposing bone, the truth was shockingly clear. Arrangements were made, and McCurdy was buried in Guthrie, Oklahoma on April 22, 1977.

Anderson "Andrew" McCrew was a one-legged hobo who fell from a moving train, and according to at least one source, lost the other leg when he was killed. McCrew was an African American man in his mid-forties, and this all went down - McCrew included - in 1913 Marlin Texas.

Like McCurdy, no one claimed McCrew's remains, and after being embalmed by a heavy-handed mortician who preserved him to within an inch of his life (so to speak), a traveling carnival picked him up, dressed him in a tuxedo and propped him in a wheelchair. He toured the country that way for some 50 years. Some sources say he was billed as "The Amazing Petrified Man," and others as "The Famous Mummy Man." It might have been one, it might have been the other - it might have been both - but it's a pretty safe bet that McCrew never aspired to either.

According to AllGov.com, the carnival shut down in the late sixties, and McCrew landed in a Dallas warehouse where he was discovered by Elgie Pace. Pace felt he deserved a proper burial, but stored him in her basement since she couldn't afford a proper buriel. 

Singer and songwriter Don McLean read an article in the New York Times about McCrew and wrote a song about him, The Legend of Andrew McCrew. The official Don McLean website says the song inspired Chicago radio station, WGN to air McCrew's story and played the song to raise money for a headstone. The station's campaign raised enough funds to have McCrew exhumed and laid to rest in Lincoln Cemetery in Dallas, this time with a marker. It reads: Born 1867; Died 1913; Buried 1973.

The next time you tour a haunted house attraction, visit a wax museum, or pop your head into the curtained doorway of a carnival side show, take a good long look at any "dummies" you see - because they might be anything but.