I watched my maternal grandfather in the next room as he gripped his cane and struggled to get out of his chair.  My grandmother Esther (“Mormor” to us, since she was Swedish) gave me a sad smile and quietly said, “I see pity in your eyes.”

She was probably right.  I was 20 years old and in the prime of life.  Papa had always been something of a legend to us grandkids.  He was warm and kind to us but also quite reserved, and much of what we knew about him was second-hand.  Mormor’s wonderful bedtime stories included proud tales of our grandfather’s abilities and achievements.  It seemed there was nothing he couldn’t do, and to see him so debilitated by a paralyzing illness seemed tragically unfair.

Born in 1904 in a small town in coastal northern California, Carl McDonald had left home at age 13 and lived with an Indian tribe, commuting to elementary school in a canoe.  He spent his whole life working and learning.  During high school he lived in a shack he built for himself and worked on farms and in a barrel factory.  While earning a teacher’s credential at Humboldt State Teacher’s College, he did hazardous work building railroad trestles and formed a dance band, having learned to play the saxophone, banjo, and violin.  Somehow he found time to court Esther Holmgren, marrying her in 1925.

As a teacher and later a principal he would supplement his income fishing in the ocean with his good friend Cliff, using a 16 foot wooden boat they had built.  Carl built a cabin and three houses for his family, and learned how to overhaul car engines so he could keep his teenaged kids’ jalopies running.  He thought up highly effective – and amusing – disciplinary measures for misbehaving students.  Late in his career he completed a master’s degree program, such was his dedication to his work.  In retirement he hunted, gardened, formed another dance band, and traveled to Sweden with Mormor.  In everything he did, it seemed that Papa had been in charge.

He handled the limitations and indignities of his illness bravely, but it hurt me to see those capable hands no longer able to do the things that his mind knew how to do.  After Esther died in 1988, Carl spent his last five years in an assisted-living community near my parents’ home, and it seemed to me that he was largely waiting to join Esther in the old cemetery in her coastal hometown of Fortuna.

Life sometimes has a way of evening things up, inflicting the worst disabilities on those, such as Lou Gehrig and Stephen Hawking, who have accomplished much in other areas or other times and can live out their lives with no regrets.  Papa had certainly done more than enough for one well-lived life.  However, while going through some memorabilia with my mother recently, I found one pleasant little surprise: a certificate of appreciation from the assisted living facility for Carl’s participation in their security patrol.  It seemed that even then he hadn’t given up on accomplishing things and taking charge.

Author’s note: more tales from Carl and Esther’s life can be found at my sister’s excellent blog site, Fooleryland.com, under the category “The Mormor Stories” and, coming soon, “The Papa Stories” (title TBD).

I’m back.

It’s autumn in the Pacific Northwest, and I am driving past an ornamental tree farm whose poplars are delirious with color.  A honeycrisp apple, from a bagful I purchased at a farm a few miles back, makes a loud crunching sound with every bite.  A winery I visited yesterday gave me a spectacular view across its golden vines and out to the wooded hills beyond.  An old wooden barn, sitting unused on a scenic hillside, has apparently attracted too much attention from would-be buyers, because the owner has mounted a large sign on its wall:  “Barn and land not for sale.”

I had already returned to this region once, many years ago, in search of new career opportunities.  However, when I found a good one, I let it take me hundreds of miles away, and subsequent career moves took me even farther from my favorite place.  My second return is part of a new plan: choose the place first, and the career second.

The economy here is less favorable than the place I just left, but that didn’t stop me.  While I’m not willing to starve in order to live in my location of choice, I am willing to sacrifice some material wealth.  Many people acknowledge this region’s scenic beauty but could never live here because of the rain.  I, on the other hand, love the weather in my new home, and I won’t miss the four months of brutal desert heat I used to endure each summer.  The way I see it, my year has lengthened by four enjoyable months.  I’ve improved both my quantity and quality of life.

There are some things for which a man should be willing to live anywhere: the perfect job, ailing parents, a one-of-a-kind girl.  Having none of the above in the place I just left, I missed what I had traded for material success when I left here: green landscape, clean air, gentle climate, four seasons.  To be sure, I had wonderful experiences elsewhere and made some lifelong friends.  On the other hand, I just had dinner out on the coast with an old buddy I hadn’t seen in two decades.

So, for the time being at least, my life here is like that beautiful old barn:  I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with it, but it’s not for sale.

From "Adam @ Home" by Brian Basset

Eat this.  No, don’t!  Eat that.  No, it’s bad for you!  Cleanse your liver!  Fast for a day!  Detox!  With so many diet and health books out there, how do you know what’s good for you?  The once-trusted USDA recommendations are now widely accused of cynically aiding big corporations by making us buy tons of Lucky Charms.

First off, if I’m going to read books about improving my health, I’m liable to engage in a bit of age discrimination: if a diet book is written by a forty-something former slob who had tried other methods before losing 40 pounds on this plan, I’ll look into it.  If the author is an early-twenty-something who could live on Twinkies and still have a slim physique, I’ll probably pass.

Moreover, diet recommendations are often conflicting.  For example, some experts claim soy is a wonder-food, while others say it is largely indigestible by the human body, and still others state that it increases estrogen levels in both males and females.  Wonder-food or not, I don’t want to look like Wonder Woman.

Many temporary “cleansing” diets tout the benefits of fasting for one or more days: detoxified organs, weight loss, better sleep, sharper thinking.  I followed one highly recommended plan, and the only sharp thing about it was my hunger.  Later I read that the human body wasn’t meant to fast, and that any benefits of these plans are purely imagined.  Aha – fasting may sharpen my imagination!

Books about the “Mediterranean diet” extol the virtues of pasta, while others say pasta is terrible for you.  The book French Women Don’t Get Fat seems to say you can eat goose liver cooked in butter and wash it down with a bottle of Bordeaux, and you’re golden.  Been in a bookstore lately?  Sometimes I think these diet books were cynically designed to make us buy the tons of cookbooks that followed them.

Crazy Sexy Diet, a recent best-seller by Kris Carr, doesn’t sound so bad, until I read the subtitle:  “Eat your veggies, ignite your spark, and live like you mean it!”  The author is a cancer survivor and surely a lovely person, but that subtitle is dangerously close to motivational self-help, a topic that makes me look for books about curing hives.  Worse, the book cover further announces, “Including 21 Day Adventure Cleanse.”  Adventure cleanse?  Now there are two words that shouldn’t be used together.  Besides, any cleanse lasting three weeks already has a name: dysentery.

Another cleanse involves Epsom salts and achieves its results much more, uh, suddenly.  If you try this one, you’ll want a day’s supply of magazines in your bathroom.  Worse, its author advises that after going, you count roughly how many little green gallstones are floating in the toilet: if there aren’t hundreds of them, you’re apparently not doing it right.  If I do that cleanse, I’ll never eat chicken piccata again.

Another diet book touts the “100 Mile Diet.”  I wouldn’t try this one in conjunction with any sort of cleanse.

How about allergies?  Whole wheat is widely recommended food, but it reportedly is also the object of most common food allergy in the world.  Even gluten-free products may not completely solve the problem – and besides, gluten-free pizza crust is just gross.  Wheat can be replaced with more exotic grains with unpronounceable names like “kamut” and “quinoa”.  They sound like the name of a volcano, which is not something I want associated with my diet, especially if I’m cleansing.

So:  Italians thrive on pasta, the French put butter on everything, and I’ve never seen man-boobs on soy-eating Japanese men.  Since we Americans are all from somewhere else, maybe we simply need to figure out who our people are, culinarily speaking.  I wonder if I was meant to thrive on Twinkies.

What a difference a decade makes.

Since September 11, 2001, military men and women have been appreciated as patriotic heroes.  It’s been years since I left the service, but twice in the last two months I’ve had someone stick out a hand and say, quite sincerely, “Hey, thank you for serving our country.”

Rewind to September, 1991: I was fresh out of Navy flight school and attending my first convention of the Tailhook Association in Las Vegas.  The informal association had one requirement for membership: an arrested landing on an aircraft carrier.  I was still six months from meeting that requirement, but recent graduates like me were allowed to attend as prospective members.  There we caught up with friends from around the country, visited with defense contractors about new products in the pipeline, and had a wonderful, rare opportunity to ask pointed questions to a panel of top Navy brass about policies and programs.

The annual Tailhook Conventions were also known for their evening parties, where huge crowds of officers and guests mingled among the hotel suites.  In the hallway a long “gauntlet” of men formed along the walls, and any woman passing through the hall was patted and pinched along the way by the rowdy mob.  When I walked up and asked what was happening, an older officer explained the tradition.  After a few minutes I noticed that some women coming out of the gauntlet hadn’t enjoyed the experience, and I returned outside to visit friends on the patio.

What happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay there.

Two weeks later, we learned that a female aviator who, like the rest of us, attended the evening parties in civilian clothes, had complained to her commanding officer about having received the same treatment as the civilian women in the Gauntlet by some men she hadn’t seen and couldn’t identify.  When her boss told her that there wasn’t much that could be done about it, she went to the news media to seek revenge.  What ensued was a witch hunt driven by elements of the Washington establishment willing to claim that all of Naval Aviation was rotten, arrogant, and out of control after the recent Gulf War, and fueled by a news establishment that loved a good scandal.  Every aviator who had attended the convention was subjected to extensive interviews and pressured to identify people who had groped women in the Gauntlet.  When no one could claim to have seen whose hands did what in the packed hallway, cries of “Cover-up!” were uttered.  Someone wanted a pound of flesh.

By the next summer, when I was flying important missions in the Persian Gulf, we were required to park the jets for a very insulting day of sensitivity training, and back at home base that fall, we were subjected to a repeat round of interviews.

Having found no serious offenders, DoD threw the book at a few men who had admitted to pinching or patting women in the hallway themselves.  Those aviators, one of them a friend of mine, were issued letters of reprimand that would short-circuit their careers by preventing further promotions.  The top Navy leadership did nothing to stop the process, apparently relieved that their own careers were saved by their ordering the sensitivity training.

While it was clear that someone had behaved badly and deserved punishment, it was equally clear that the witch hunters were doing far more harm to the Navy than the witches had, and didn’t care.  I myself hadn’t planned to stay in for a whole career, but I’m sure some of the reprimanded officers had.  Next time you graciously thank a former serviceman from my era, there’s a slight chance he’s someone who would like to be still serving.

While I sit in a coffee shop, searching my mind to find good words, a good friend sits sweating in a tent in Afghanistan, searching intelligence data to find bad guys.  We are at war, but I haven’t been called back up, gasoline isn’t rationed, and we’re not asked to buy war bonds.  If I didn’t have a close friend “over there,” I could easily forget that we’re at war at all.

When I need perspective, I look back seven decades to a war whose presence was felt much more closely by most folks back home.  To people who consider the recent war in Iraq unnecessary, the loss of some 4,000 soldiers there was an outrage.  In 1945 (when our nation’s population was half what it is today), the loss of 6,800 men in 36 days to take the tiny but crucial island of Iwo Jima was merely a sobering reminder to a war-weary nation that the victory hadn’t been won just yet.

My great uncle was a sailor in the Pacific during the desperate early months of World War II.  The cruiser USS Houston (pictures above) was part of a small flotilla of Allied ships, known somewhat euphemistically as “the Asiatic Fleet,” trying to hold the line against an onslaught by numerically superior Japanese forces while the U.S gathered its strength.  Houston became known as “The Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast” after several false reports of her destruction by the enemy in the skirmishes they fought.

Fate caught up with her in February 1942 when the two entire fleets met.  In his book The Ghost That Died at Sunda Strait, author Walter G. Winslow describes the Battle of Sunda Strait as one of those epic, old-school slugfests in which the opposing fleets sailed by each other in two lines and blasted away with artillery broadsides as fast as they could reload.  One by one, crippled ships limped out of line, typically on fire from stem to stern, then rolled over and sank, with terrible loss of life.  As a machinist’s mate deep in the Houston’s engine room, Uncle Don knew that if his ship sank he would have little chance to escape.  She did, and he didn’t.

On Memorial Day 1942 the citizens of Houston, Texas held a service in honor of the ship and her crew, and President Roosevelt sent the city a message, which I have excerpted below:

“On this Memorial Day all America joins with you who are gathered in proud tribute to a great ship and a gallant company of American officers and men.  That fighting ship and those fighting Americans shall live forever in our hearts….

“The officers and men of the USS Houston have placed all of us in their debt by winning a part of the victory which is our common goal.  Reverently, and with all humility, we acknowledge this debt.  To those officers and men, wherever they may be, we give our solemn pledge that the debt will be paid in full.”

It is fitting that every Memorial Day we acknowledge the debt we owe, both to those who have paid the ultimate price and to those who are out there, prepared to do so if necessary.  Not only is freedom not free, it is terribly expensive – but worth the cost.  Thanks, Uncle Don.

NEWS FLASH:  Las Vegas is a weird town.

I lived there years ago and quickly learned how guarded the women were.  Their wariness was primarily due to two types of men who pursued them: the guy wearing two months of his pay around his neck, who would spend another month’s worth in a single evening just to impress a girl; and the guy who latches onto a girlfriend as a means of support for his addiction to drugs, gambling, or gold chains.

Soon after joining a local gym, I met a woman who interested me.  Unlike the bleached, tanned, enhanced “bombshell” types that were so common in that city, she had a very pretty girl-next-door look.  Like most attractive women in the gym, she kept to herself to avoid the attention of the men described above.  We ran into each other there every month or so for two years, exchanging hello’s and nothing more.  Then one day she walked in as I was leaving and suddenly wanted to chat a bit.  I got her phone number.

I had tickets to an upcoming Las Vegas Philharmonic concert and asked if she would like to go.  She replied, “Saturday nights are my biggest work nights, so it would have to be something like an Andrea Bocelli concert to get me to skip out.”  I didn’t ask what she did for a living, and she didn’t offer.

Curious, I researched upcoming concerts and found that the singer was coming to town in a couple of months.  Tickets cost far more than I would normally spend on a first date, but I thought she might be worth the risk.  When I asked her if she would skip work to attend the show with me, she said, “Definitely!”  The date was on.

Two days before the event, I called to ask if I could pick her up around 6 p.m. so we wouldn’t be rushed through dinner.  The correct reply would have been:  “Sure!  Here’s my address.”

Her reply:  “Where are we eating?”

I told her that my brother was the chef at a fancy restaurant and that I had arranged something special.  (She had mentioned some favorite foods and desserts in an earlier conversation.)

Correct reply:  “Sounds great!  I can’t wait to go.”

Her reply:  “What kind of food do they serve?”

I told her that it was predominantly Italian but offered gourmet dishes of all kinds.

Correct reply:  “Yum!”

Her reply:  “I don’t like Italian food.”

She had recently mentioned a new (and expensive) restaurant that she was eager to try, and now she dropped a bomb:  “I’ll call this other restaurant and get us a reservation there.”  In other words, Well, you’ve screwed this all up, but maybe I can fix it.

Her bombing wasn’t over, however:  “Oh, and can you pick me up in the parking lot at my workplace?  Then after the show you can drop me there and I can go back to work.”  Now our special night out was just a university study break.

My reply:  “Okay, I’ll jump on it tomorrow.”

My suppressed reply:  “Go jump in the lake.”

I sat on it for 24 hours, but the next evening my disgust hadn’t dissipated, so I called and left her this message: “I’ve been wanting to know you better for two years, but your reaction to this date tells me you just wouldn’t be any fun, and I’ve decided to take someone else instead.”  I did, and my new date and I had a great evening.

Las Vegas may have turned this girl into a gold digger – but not a very good one, in my book.  A smarter woman would have known enough to be nice to her date.  It was Gold-digger 101 – and she had bombed.  But what had Las Vegas made of me?  Perhaps I should invest in some gold chains.

Incidents always seem to turn into stories in our family.  This tale was first told at the home of my sister’s future in-laws on the occasion of her wedding and later managed to become a holiday dinner-table classic for our family.  It was based on a simple Christmastime incident on the ranch, one that had me shaking my head and chuckling as I walked back to the house after it had ended.  Everyone found the incident quite amusing – everyone, that is, except the calf.

My father, who maintains a few dozen beef cattle on his former dairy property, sells his bull calves so he won’t have two-ton monsters roaming his pastures and looking for someone to trample when they’ve grown up.  However, he keeps one occasionally to raise as a steer to feed his own household.  The difference between an ornery, hard, sinewy bull and a tender, docile steer is the result of a minor surgical procedure performed sometime before the bovine equivalent of puberty.  The castration (there, I said it) is best performed when the animal is very small, when there is considerably less bleeding, trauma, and risk of infection.

Oh, and it’s safer for the calf, too.

One chilly December morning Dad had isolated a young calf in the barn where the cows were fed their hay, and after lunch I was instructed to go and make sure the critter hadn’t escaped while Dad gathered the necessary tools for the job.  The calf was still in the pen, and he knew something was up.  He was just a little guy, about 80 pounds, and when Dad arrived I climbed into the pen.  I wrestled the struggling, bawling animal to the ground, rolled him onto his back, and told Dad I was ready.  He kneeled to help hold the calf, reached into his coat pocket, and handed me . . . one of Mom’s brand new steak knives.

My father is a practical man.  By that I mean that he is 100 percent about function, and zero percent about aesthetics or other niceties.  The purloined implement was actually quite suitable for the job: besides being the right size, it had a serrated edge that could be used to scrape through the calf’s scrotum and spermatic cords, rather than slicing cleanly through them.  The rough cuts would allow the clotting blood to seal the wound very quickly and speed healing.  It was even appropriate, in a weird way, given that the knife was meant for cutting through beef.  An amusing downstream result of Dad’s tactic was that, since the knife was indistinguishable from the others in the set, we tended thereafter to speculate at the dinner table as to which of us was using the knife.

The castration was completed without mishap – unless you see it from the calf’s perspective, of course.  The real irony of castration is that an uncut bull has no reason for his orneriness, being well fed, fully equipped, and surrounded by females.  A steer, on the other hand, lives his  life without the urge to trample anyone – despite the fact that he may be on the plate in front of me the next time I tell his story.

When I was growing up on a dairy farm, my father grew tired of occasional mass bovine escapes and began replacing our miles of old barbed wire with sturdy steel fences.  It took a while to complete the job, and the pastures right behind the house were at the tail end of the schedule.

We had always taken break-outs in stride.  One night I woke to the sound of barbed wire being stretched to its breaking point and finally snapping, accompanied by the sound of many hooves – and then a splash.  We had just installed our in-ground swimming pool but had not yet put a fence around it.  Fortunately the entire pool was only four feet deep.  We shooed a very surprised heifer toward one end so she could walk up the steps and make her exit.  I’m sure Mom shock-treated the pool the next day.

Another late-night wading adventure was more stressful – for the cow and for me.  All Mom had to do was wake me with the words, “Sorry, Rob – cows are out again,” and I would have rolled out of bed, grumbled something about the wisdom of any animal that needs fences in the first place, and prepared to do what needed to be done.  Instead, Mom shock-treated me by standing, dimly silhouetted in my bedroom doorway with a flashlight and saying, “Rob, wake up – we’ve got trouble!”  (My sister Laurie later remarked, “Who says that, except maybe in Old Yeller?”)  Climbing down from the ceiling, I’m sure I grumbled something about the wisdom of any woman who wakes someone in such a manner.

An old-fashioned septic tank is an open concrete box covered at the top with heavy wooden boards and buried just underground.  The boards don’t last forever, and the owner is typically notified that it’s time for new timbers when something heavy passes over the septic tank – like, say, a cow.

We heard her mooing in the darkness but couldn’t find her in the beams of our flashlights.  We were looking too high.  The animal was standing in the septic tank behind the mobile home next to our house and was craning her neck just to see above the ground.   She couldn’t climb out by herself, so we tried lowering a hay bale to use as a step.  However, even a dense alfalfa bale is too buoyant to be pushed under the, uh, water that filled the tank.  Next we brought the old wooden stair from the mobile home’s back door and lowered it into the tank.  The cow tried climbing up but quickly turned the steps into splinters.  Okay, so those boards needed replacing, too.  Then my older cousin Mike arrived with Dad’s big Ford loader and began excavating the earth beside the tank, using great care not to excavate parts of the frightened cow standing just inches from the huge steel scoop bucket.

By the time Mike had dug out the earth beside the tank and broken down its concrete wall, the cow had grown too weak from the cold water to climb out by herself, so he got a chain around her neck and dragged her out with the tractor.  I half-expected to hear the sound of the cow’s neck being stretched to its breaking point and finally snapping, but once on solid ground she was able to walk away with only her dignity injured.

Mike, with his wonderful twangy voice and blunt wit, summed up the event: “Growing up on your farm I’ve always seen people covered with cow $#%@, but I’ve never seen a cow covered with people $#%@!”  Such is country life – where septic tanks become swimming pools, and vice-versa.

I had never thought of the residents of my rural county as environmentalists, but we did tend to get maximum use out of our metals.  For example, a twenty-year-old car on its way to the auto recyclers would probably make a stop along the way, at the annual county fair and its ever-popular demolition derby.  Besides providing entertainment to the fair-goers, the event partially pre-crushed the cars so they occupied less space on the way to the recyclers – kinda like the beer cans in your own recycling bin.

One day when I was about 14, one of the employees on our dairy farm acquired a twenty-year-old car that looked even less roadworthy than the car he regularly drove.  I wandered over to the on-site mobile home that he rented from my father to check out the vehicle.  Its windows had all been removed, and a large number was spray-painted on the driver’s door.  Aha – a demolition derby car for the upcoming fair!  Larry was tinkering under the hood.

“Hi, Larry.  Are you going to drive in the derby this year?”

“Yeah – what do you think of the car?”

The brown, dented, well-ventilated Chevrolet looked quite suitable for the task.   Glancing inside, I saw that Larry had already removed the rear seat.  In its place was the largest quantity of empty beer cans I had ever seen.  If you grew up in a county like mine, you know that’s saying a lot.

“So, are you going to take the cans out before the derby?” I asked with a grin.  Looking a bit sheepish, Larry replied, “Yeah – I’ll recycle them, but for now it’s just an easy place to toss the empties while I’m working on the car.”  Clearly he had already put in a lot of work.

The fair arrived.  In the grandstand, in the hands of my fellow derby watchers, was the second-largest quantity of beer cans I had ever seen.  A water truck rumbled around the arena below, spraying liberally to turn the dirt into mud.  The slippery surface would prevent the derby cars from gaining enough speed to cause serious injury to any drivers.  The object was for each competitor to race around in reverse, using the rear end of his car as a battering ram to disable his opponents.

The derby had several elimination rounds like an athletic tournament.  The last car still standing would be the winner.  When Larry’s car first appeared, I watched as it slipped and slid around the track among a dozen or so other cars, lining up for its first attack.  The brown Chevy accelerated backward across the middle of the arena and rammed another car with a satisfying crunch.  With other collisions occurring all around, I don’t know if anyone else in the grandstand noticed the small, shiny object that came flying out the back window of the brown Chevy upon impact.  I wonder if anyone in the crowd noticed the teenager among them shout, to no one in particular,

“Hey, Larry – you missed one!”

I had some strange friends in high school.  Our small group tended to be quirkier, more intellectual, and less inhibited than most of our fellow students.  We weren’t richer, though, so one year a friend gave me a rather unusual homemade birthday gift.

Nowadays you can get adhesive bandages in bright colors or with drawings or designs on them.  You can even get Dora the Explorer Band-aids – as if it weren’t enough for your child to spend half an hour hearing the television character shout things like “Say, ‘LACERATION’!!!”  However, the birthday in question was a long time ago, before Dora was even a twinkle in some sadistic cartoonist’s eye.  Back then if you wanted designer bandages, you had to design them yourself.  And that’s what my friend did.  On the back of each bandage she had glued a magazine photo or cartoon drawing of . . . Ronald Reagan.  Her note invited me to enjoy my “Ronnie Band-aids.”

Well, what did you get for your sixteenth birthday?  At least I remember my gift.  And still have it – most of it, anyway.  I used a lot of them.  I also still have another memorable gift: a pair of fluorescent green socks that my sister had given me for my fifteenth birthday.  She wanted to encourage her somewhat shy younger brother to be less inhibited.  It worked.  I wreaked my revenge by wearing them to school frequently and telling my horrified classmates exactly who had given them to me.  However, I never wore the bandages and the socks on the same day.  When I had a Ronnie Band-aid on, I just felt too serious and dignified.

Today I’m more confident and less inhibited than I might have been without these gifts.  Recently, for example, I took a lady on a first date to an outdoor cocktail lounge and managed to spill an entire glass of Oregon pinot noir on the seat of my pants.  I know what you’re thinking: “They make pinot noir in Oregon?”  Anyway, my reaction to the incident put my companion at ease and helped get me a second date:  instead of acting mortified by the spill, I laughed it off, stood up, and showed everyone my cotton-clad hiney, which was now the color of Dora Band-aids.

I like to think it’s what Ronald Reagan would have done.

After my grandfather died, Grandma lived another 13 years in the house they had purchased new in the 1940’s.  Soon after she passed, I visited the house to help my uncle dispose of their belongings.  I expected to take a few items that I could use and a few that I simply thought should stay in the family.  I didn’t expect a surprising glimpse of my grandfather’s character.

The garage wasn’t a surprise.  While many of today’s homes have two- and three-car garages with no room for cars, my grandparents’ one-car garage contained not only their Oldsmobile but also, neatly arranged on benches and walls, all the tools and implements that Grandpa used to maintain their home and yard.  My grandmother had left his things untouched all those 13 years.  I took a few tools and boxes of supplies: electrical and plumbing items, fasteners, door and window hardware, and the like.

Grandpa fit the stereotype of the professional civil engineer: organized, methodical, and handy with tools.  Judging from his garage, I’d say he could fix almost anything in their home.  Also fitting the stereotype, he was mild-mannered and introverted.  Grandma fretted that despite his competence, Grandpa may have suffered in his career because he was too modest for aggressive self-promotion.  That didn’t seem to bother him, though.  Grandpa seemed quite content to put in a full day’s work and then come home and maintain the house.  Browsing through the kitchen earlier, I had selected the decades-old Thermos bottle he had taken to work daily as a memento of his humble simplicity and work ethic.

Finished with my nostalgic exploration of the garage, I found the real surprise on the built-in shelves of the living room, where Grandpa’s book collection also sat undisturbed.  Titles such as North to the Pole, Arctic Adventure, Kon-Tiki, and James Michener’s Caravans caught my eye.  M.M. Kaye’s epic The Far Pavilions is now one of my favorite novels.

It seems that my grandfather had a taste for adventure but had to satisfy it through books, having chosen a more conventional and peaceful life.  He and Grandma never took any trips more daring than a tour through Europe.  Did Grandpa travel off on imagined explorations while reading in his easy chair or working diligently in his garage?  Grandma must have known.  Maybe that’s why she left his things alone after he departed.

I’m afraid of heights.  I get a tightening in my chest, as if someone were reaching in and squeezing my spine, from the mere thought of clinging to a sheer granite face high above the ground.  I suspect most people have this healthy fear, as the ones who didn’t were long ago removed from the gene pool.

Nevertheless, personal limits don’t move by themselves; they have to be pushed.  Mount Whitney, located in California’s eastern Sierra Nevada range, is the highest peak in the Lower 48 States, at 14,494 feet.  It’s a very popular climb for hikers who take the arduous 17 mile trail.  However, when I learned that there’s an even harder way, a rock-climbing route up the awesome east face, the trail route suddenly seemed like a cop-out.  An amusing image formed in my head:  I claw my way up the face and arrive at the very feet of some out-of-shape guy in baggy shorts.  He looks down at me and says, “Wow, you look tired!  Here, have some Cheetos.”

The east face actually offers three climbing choices, all starting just above tiny Iceberg Lake, where climbers make their base camps at 12,400 feet.  The Mountaineer’s Route is a difficult but non-technical scramble up a steep gully to the summit.  The harder East Face route traverses highly exposed ledges and is rated 5.6 (moderate) on the rock climber’s scale of technical difficulty.  The nearby East Buttress Route takes climbers up a huge rocky spine extending outward from the face.  It is slightly more difficult, rated 5.8.  An intelligent person always seeks to make a tough task as easy as possible – but at 5:30 a.m., with another climber and a guide, I left base camp for our rope-up point at the base of the East Buttress.

The Eastern Sierra Nevada must be seen up close to be believed.  Enormous granite slabs cling to the slopes, and great stacks of rock perch improbably on huge shelves.  Our rubber-toed climbing shoes stuck to inclines and gripped tiny nubbins of rock protruding just millimeters from the walls.  We jammed fingers, hands, elbows, and feet into cracks as we advanced up each of the 12 pitches (rope lengths) of the route.  The fourth pitch brought us onto the ridge of the buttress and ended on a tiny shelf with dizzying drops on both sides.  Someone was squeezing my spine again, but I was learning to ignore it.

After eight pitches we reached a larger platform, where we clipped ourselves to the wall and had a snack.  We were almost level with nearby Mount Russell, a fourteen-thousand-foot peak with curved ridges sloping up to its summit.  By the eleventh pitch we were near our own summit, and the lessening slope allowed me to go ahead of the guide and be first to the top.

A dozen hikers from the trail route were already on the summit, two of them sitting just in front of me and facing the other way as I scrambled up.  Hearing the clinking of my carabiners, they turned and said, “Wow – where did you come from?”  Then, to my surprise, they offered me food!  I couldn’t keep from grinning.

“Got any Cheetos?”

[Originally published in 2004 in the  Las Vegas Review-Journal.  Republished with kind permission.]

Recently I spent some time looking for some second-hand furniture items on the Craig’s List web site, where people can upload their own ads for free.  The site also has a “services” section; if there was an ad there for spelling and grammar instruction, I doubt it had any takers.

I had no idea there was so much entertainment in the headlines for these ads!  Most of the silliness was due to misspellings, but some resulted from word choice – such as “Black Stools.”  These would go great with the “Spanish wrought iron cabinet with designer bowel.”

Some items seemed to be advertised in the wrong section, such as “White Flowered Drawers.”  Who would want to buy such things used, anyway?  How about this:  “Slight Damage – $125.”  This one clearly belongs under “services.”  I wonder how much they would charge for serious damage.

Not to be outdone by the Spanish cabinet, someone offered a “Brown Micro-fibre Swede Sofa” – another abomination from Ikea, no doubt.

Some of these sellers are more cultured than I thought:  “Brass Handel Door Knobs.”  I’ve been looking for a set of those for years!  I wonder if he’d part with his Wing-Bach Chair, too.  Might as well collect the complete set (available only on Craig’s Liszt).

“Tables, Tables, and More Tables . . . or Desks.”  Well, which is it?  Make up your mind!  Perhaps this was the same person who offered “Occassional Tables” – which “occassionally” turn into desks, apparently.

The trouble with wrought iron is that it’s hard to spell if you don’t know what you’re saying.  I saw “Rod Iron” and the intriguing-sounding “Rot Iron,” but my favorite item was “’Faux’ Wrong Iron / Glass Table.”  Can you believe it?  He handled “faux” just fine but spelled “wrought” . . . wrong.

Let’s skip over “Lather Wrap Bar Stools” and “Descent and Pretty Comfortable” and get to the biggie:  Dinning.   You would not believe how many “dinning tables” I saw advertised.  I didn’t even know “din” was a verb.  Do these tables have something to do with loud noise?  If I wanted that, I’d get the cabinet with designer bowel.

Finally, the subject of sex was bound to make an appearance.  One seller, frustrated at being stood up by prospective buyers, didn’t even advertise an item but instead wrote an ad entitled, “What’s with the NO SHOWS?  (I could’ve been having nookie.)”  She mentioned being a sex-starved parent and laid a curse on the flaky respondents to her ad:  “I hope your doorbell rings whenever you’re having nookie and your mother calls when you’re taking a nap.”

Talk about sex-starved!  She clearly was not the same person who had placed my favorite ad of all:

“Bonk Bed.”

Now that’s what I call used furniture.