THERE HE WASN'T


High on a ladder. Well, as high as I wanted to be, I stretched to cut off a dead palm frond. It lay below a big palm branch I'd sliced off earlier. A green palm pod with another hard barked frond would fall as soon as I sawed off the one closest to me.

As I sawed and pulled, I saw some wet web build. All was quiet around the uncovered spot. When all of a sudden...

Our daughter said "Don't mess with it. If a scorpion comes out, you'll jump back and fall off the ladder."

She, at the other end of the ladder, holding it so much better than my Little League aged son dressed in his Yankee uniform and ready to get to the playing field back in the eighties when I asked him to hold the ladder while I was high on a rung trimming a huge oak. He roughly placed both hands on the ladder as if he were grounding it. My knees buckled, but I was able to steady myself after my heart quit racing. But I digress.

I thought, "She is right." Down from the ladder I came leaving whatever kind of nest in the making exposed to the elements.

After all, it well could have been an arachnid spider scorpion tick mite as the one pictured above. Or it simply could have been a cockroach nest. But I followed her advise and as the poet once said, "and that made all the difference".

A GOOD SCREAM

has to be therapeutic. Charles Schultz knew it. When Charley Brown would let out with a AAAWWWWGGGHH, (maybe I overdid it), we all felt for him. We've all been there. Primordially speaking.

Women can do such a better job of screaming than men. I'd say it has to do with pitch and higher reachable octaves. I wonder how those women singers who can go up really high at the end of a song scream? Does it start lower and then as in their music reach a peak at another level? A good friend of ours, Lori, sings like that, but I've never heard her scream. I'd ask her to, but she would think me silly.

When guys scream it sounds too gruff. Plus, we don't have the stamina to extend it. Another plus--we usually stop short and look for an object to punch, throw, or kick. But what else can we do? Guttural emissions just aren't as effective as a good curdling yell. I really don't know any guy screamers. Just a lot of guy gripers.

For some reason I'm more of a laugher. At least I am when I'm riding a roller coaster and am scared. I just laugh. I also do that when I have a footrace with my son, daughter, or wife. I can never beat them because I start laughing. Now is that stupid or what? One time in 8th grade English class, Gertrude Snodsmith told me it didn't take much for me to be entertained. And, yes, she was right then and now. (But I don't think she meant it as a compliment way back then when she was teaching grammar.)

Ok, next time I have a race, and I may just do it tomorrow, I'm going to scream first. Maybe that's all I'll have to do. But if I were to wager, I'd bet on my laughing before too many steps.

CHEAP SHOT OR TIGER'S UNPLAYABLE LIE

First of all I apologize for the picture (courtesy of SI.Com) and the last half of the title (courtesy of AZ Republic 12/2/09). I may be tacky and tasteless, but I still remember to give credit for my sources. It also perhaps makes me look a little less like a jerk. (Feel free to disagree).

Is my entry today cruel? I think so. Judgmental? Probably. Inappropriate? Yep.

Then why did I do it? I still don't know. I just know when I hit on the website picture, I laughed a little. Am I proud of that? No. Do I feel sorry for the family? Yes, I do.

I remember walking out of the movie Basic Instinct a few decades ago and hearing a man claim, "I'll never do that. That movie taught me to be loyal to my wife."

"What?" I wanted to yell. "It took a stupid movie for you to declare your allegiance to your wife?"

Tiger's tale just brought that moment back to me in the lobby of the Granada Theatre in MTV. So of all that's be written, aired, and said, that's the connection or application I made. Maybe that's the animus of this entry.

I don't know what else to say. I have a feeling that I've said way too much with reproducing the picture alone. And if this whole debacle makes me feel rather sleazy, just think how the Woods family feels.

I wish the whole incident(s) never happened. I hope we as a culture can learn something valuable from it. And I pray that Tiger and Elin can reconcile and re-build.

THE ANNUAL



Well, we didn't call it that. It was always The Yearbook. And in this picture complied of yearbook pictures from high schools across the land in a variety of years, the object is to guess who is who? Of course, like any yearbook picture, laughs and ohmigoshes should be plentiful as we examine the way we looked.



All my high school yearbook pictures were a little goofy. Because I was a little goofy. My frosh picture marked the end last flat top I had in the Summer. Then when school started, I let my hair grow longer for warmth, or so I thought. My early- in- the- school year pic denoted stand up hair, not quite pre-Beatle normal; in fact it looked somewhat like guys' hair today--stand up abnormal.

As a Soph, our teacher didn't inform of us of picture day, so I was pretty slobby, or once again I would have fit in nicely with today's high schoolers.

Not my Junior year though. I wore a sweater and tie. I know most Seniors were the ones to dress up, but I had had too many bad pictures. My picture was fine, but I looked about 12 years old. Couldn't help it. But I was spiffy.

My Senior year I sported Beatle bangs with a variation. I still had a part in my hair on the left side. A modified Beatle. In sport coat and tie, I smiled for the camera man who didn't tell me that my bangs had been separated by the morning rain. Even a variated, modified, codified Beatle didn't look too cool with a jeri curl.

Other pictures of me in the yearbook faired no better. In most, I seem to remember burying my neck into my chest and looking up. Kinda the way the barber tells you to sit so he can clip those annoying neck hair pockets on the right and left side of your head.

But I thought yearbooks important. I tried to write copiously to my friends and attractive girls when they asked me to sign. Maybe it was my way of making up for a bad picture. You know, years later when they found them while moving; "you know he looked pretty stupid back then but he was nice."

I don't know. (It seems like I say that more and more all the time). Maybe for half my high school career, I would have fit in better with this generation of adolescents. The other two years, well I don't know. I guess I fit in better when I was on the other side of the desk. Awwh, who I am kidding? High school teachers never fit in anywhere.

TAKE ME BACK

I used to love Fall in the Midwest. The changing colors of the leaves, the few trees I could annually count on to try to outdo the rest in brilliant display.

The picture on the right of simpler times perhaps also appeals to me. If you look closely you can see a young child running, getting ready to throw himself into the pile his Father has raked up.

But what I do not ever no never not miss is the burning stench left by smoldering branches and soaked leaves emitting green phosphorus type gases. So many beautiful days of Autumn were ruined by my neighbors' burning. Windows had to remain shut for the entire season when a nice airing out of the house would be like clothes drying on a line in the sun.

Fortunately out West we have few leaves, thus little burning, thus fresher air. Well, except for the brown ribbon of smoke fog pollution that encircles the city of Phoenix. Even if it gets blown away today by strong winds, it'll be back tomorrow.

Scientists may find that it is caused by Midwest leaf burning. But then again, maybe the antithesis of cigarette smoking, leaf burning extends one's life. At least the biggest torcher of leaves I ever saw is still going strong at age 93, although I understand she now hires it done.

HANDS UP OR DOWN

I'm reminded of the old Zen question, what is the sound of one hand clapping. Which reminds me of a little hand jive we did in high school. If you were cool, you could hold your hand straight out in front of you almost as if you were pointing a gun at someone. You know, a finger gun. Then you'd slap the other three fingers against the fat part of your palm under your thumb and make an almost clapping sound. Ahh, the answer to the Zen question.

It was a sign. A mark of recognition. When you'd see a fellow cool guy (absolutely zero girls did this) in the hallways, you'd just do the slap with one or both of your hands as a way of greeting. No spoken words, just the sign. A few of us learned to play hambone, another kind of slap, snap hand game. We did it in public once in awhile, but that was mostly reserved for private gatherings where other cool guys were.

I used to entertain our kids and even my students on rare occasions with my hambone, including the double hand crossover which I never quite got down. The best in our group was Donovan, now a retired bank vice-president.

In Botswana on New Year's Eve two years ago, I performed for some African women at a restaurant. A few of them had done a similar routine to entertain us, only theirs was called gumboot. They were much better than I, but they seemed to enjoy the American rendition, even going to the kitchen to get some more workers to observe. What I do for international relations.

So something as silly as doing hambone in high school, probably because we were so bored having nothing else to do, turned into something I would use years later in a country I never ever expected to visit. Had I only had the costume in the picture.

TWICE LAST WEEK, A MILLION TIMES TOTAL


The foursome in front of me is painfully slow. The foursome behind me can't wait to hit.

There are all kinds of ways to evaluate teachers. One method is to record by check mark what is happening in the classroom every 15 seconds. Teacher talking, student talking, students reading, teaching handling discipline problem, and a plethora of other possibilities including teacher looking out for students by lowering shades in the classroom.

If they had the same kinds of tests for the golfers in front of me last week, I would never have been checking swinging the golf club. No one was ever ready to hit. Not even a practice swing. No wonder they were so slow.

Even when we played one round in 3 hours forty-five minutes and the other in four and a half hours, there was still no reason for slow play like that. In addition, there were a few opportunities for them to allow us to play through, but it was as if that concept was as foreign to them as being ready to hit the ball.

So why am I complaining when I should be thankful that I'm healthy enough to be playing, the weather conditions are spectacular, I have no other commitments which might take me away from the golf course (such as teacher evaluation using such an instrument as I described and that I used to do). Well, because that's what I do. I'm working on it, but I'm not advancing much farther than the golfers ahead of me. Now if I could attack my patience problem like the players behind me, I'd be making some progress.