Punchlines

My favorite punch line is “This is the s*** that killed Elvis.”   It’s a sentimental favorite because it belongs to a story my youngest son, Kyle, told me shortly before he moved away from home and left me in an empty nest laughing at old jokes.

When my oldest son, Keith, left home to go play, there weren’t any stories or jokes.  He took an old voting machine he’d picked up somewhere and my Woodstock LP. He left his Social Security card, car insurance info and a very dirty carpet.

When Kyle decamped to start a life with a very fine girlfriend, he took everything he needed and made it a point to leave me laughing.  This is the kid that held my mother’s hand on the night she died until she told him to go home. His jump, more of a hop, into adulthood marked the beginning of my old age.

But the stories he left behind—or stops by to tell me—still make me laugh.  The time, for example when he and his best friend walked the mean streets of Fort Lauderdale trying to sell a chinchilla.  On the same walkabout a fellow tried to sell Kyle and his best friend Kyle a purebred pit bull puppy for $100.  No takers? Ok the puppy was a half breed, and the guy would settle for $50. Still no takers?  You get the idea.

Other punch lines that dot the i in lives are the corny but great ones:  “I did NOT ask for a six-inch PIANIST, “says the man in the genie joke.  There are the shorthand jokes between people who have lived together for a long time.  My husband and I use a line from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams:  “Thanks for all the fish,” to say anything or nothing.

And there are the unspoken jokes between girlfriends when one look exchanged between middle-aged women in the presence of a bad toupee or amid the roar of a fully outfitted F250 pickup truck can spark a giggling fit reminiscent of a ninth-grade slumber party.

So the story with the Elvis punch line is really a story about a guy Kyle knows who ended up working for a moving company.  During a move, Kyle’s buddy didn’t hit it off with a company client, and in an effort to keep his job and make amends for a few sharp exchanges, the friend agreed to stay for a quick drink after work.  After taking a few sips, he reviewed the drink with the comment, “This is the s*** that killed Elvis.”  His host lost his temper, announced that pills killed Elvis and that was the end of that job.

Maybe the funny part is the way I try to work it into my life.  I keep retiree hours so when I’m sitting at World Famous Red’s, a  bar and social epicenter for straight folk in my neighborhood at 6 pm,  I comment to the barmaid and two old guys waiting for 9 pm and karaoke that the wine I’m drinking may have killed Elvis. Silence.  It may be a statement of fact concerning the wine, but being ignored in Red’s is a lonely feeling. 

Maybe I’ll tell them about the guy who asks a genie for a eight-inch p****.

Tiny Shiny Parts

Making jewelry is my hobby and challenge. I am a permanent novice with shaky metalworking skills, but my survival sense and memory are relatively intact and so I offer this summary, gleaned from Ganoskin, an internet forum for jewelers.  It is condensed from a thread that deals with finding shiny bits dropped during the exacting process of building a beautiful object out of ordinary parts.

1.       Drop tiny, shiny part.

2.        Freeze, listen for the ding when the part hits the floor, slap thighs together and stick out left foot to catch the falling object.

3.       Remove needle file from thigh where the unplanned slap has wedged it.

4.       Don’t catch object.

5.       While wearing magnifiers and an apron—if nothing else—drop into Downward Facing Dog.  Simultaneously apply tourniquet and call somebody who cares.  Amateurs, work up to this move.

6.       Take a small flashlight, and place it on the floor EXACTLY parallel to where the tiny shiny part may be and look for a diamond-like reflection.

7.       Don’t find part.

8.       Make a new tiny shiny object to replace the lost one.  Repeat as necessary.

Speed and proficiency at jewelry making increases dramatically as this process is repeated.  At some point, more sensitive jewelers decide to take a little break from making jewelry and decide to teach.  Of course, the class mantra is always, “Practice makes perfect.”

This checklist can apply to many of life’s little challenges with a few modifications. After a password for email which was set up three computers and a couple thousand generations of technology ago can’t be recalled on the computer or in your memory, you can try dropping to the floor in Downward Facing Dog to unplug and replug routers, and calling India for your secret password.

If you are lucky enough to get back into your email, reset your password completely.  Don’t record the new password just make a note that Kenneth in an ATT call center in Mumbai can help you.

To finish the process, always remember to clean up after yourself.  Chances are good that if you sweep the floor or clean out the computer info files you will find what you are seeking.  Of course, finding the tiny shiny part or the password is more frustrating a year later.

Cross Creek

The most magical place in Florida is Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ home in north Florida.  It’s an old Cracker farmhouse, quiet and hot, surrounded by orange groves and the certain sense that time has stopped.

 The only way to get there is to suspend time and space. And cross the Styx, a slow muddy river between Ocala horse country and the college town of Gainesville.

We imagine ourselves as tourists in Miami during the 1950s, staring at paper Florida map placemats in a diner.  Drawings of mermaids and pirates on Florida’s west coast strike us as elementary school myths.  Instead of I-95, I -75, the Turnpike and AIA flowing like the karmic rivers of birth, old age, sickness and death away from the Fountain of Youth near Tampa, the one road out and up is 441.  

This is the Route 66 of Florida.  Tom Petty wrote about it in his song “American Girl”.

“She was an American Girl raised on promises…She stood alone on the balcony. Yeah she could hear the cars roll by out on 441 like waves crashing on a beach.”

Exhaust shimmer and occasional green lights combine to carry us past Palm Beach mansions.  Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Orlando doesn’t exist in our 1950s mental continuum. Our thoughts turn more toward gator farms.   Soon we are skirting Big Daddy Don Garlit’s Drag Racing Museum and Café Risqué, a small strip club outside of Micanopy, both imaginary at this point.  Now we are on a two-lane road and are crossing the Styx, probably named by early settlers who thought the area was as hot and snaky as hell.  Now it’s time to pass One-Beer Road and we are home.

The heat is prehistoric and clocks have stopped. Our busy imagination is still.   We slip three bucks a carload in the honor system box. As we enter, we pass a Rawling’s quote talking about the enchantment of Cross Creek. In another venue, she hinted at the force of nature which is the flip side of the peace that can be found in Cross Creek and the surrounding swamp.

“All life is a balance, when it is not a battle, between the forces of creation and the forces of destruction, between love and hate, between life and death.  Perhaps it is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins, for even creation and destruction are relative.” Rawlings wrote.

Because we’ve taken the tour so many times, we just sit on a wooden bench in partial shade and listen to insects crank up a dissonant concert. Flowers, chickens and the wind in the trees are different from the flowers, chickens and wind we noted during our last visit. These markers morph into one standard sound, light and noise show as we wait. After a while, we will walk around the rusted parked 1940 Oldsmobile and read a sundial:  “Grow Old Along with Me.  The Best is Yet to Be.”  These words surround a 3-D figure carrying a scythe.  Is it the Grim Reaper or just Father Time? 

The Pulitzer Prize in the house hasn’t moved and the weather only changes once in awhile.  In the right season, the blossoms on old orange trees smell like perfume.

It’s time to go now, and return to our own time.  The route back is quick, efficient and a little boring.  No imaginary placemat maps and we avoid slow hot 441 in order to get back home as quickly as possible. Our vacation in a time warp hasn’t aged us, but it hasn’t returned us to our youthful selves. Just as the protagonist in the Yearling, we slip into the problems and privileges of adulthood.  The peace of the Florida backwoods which exists right now without us seems like a half-remembered piece of childhood.

Things Happen for a Reason?

Recently, a Facebook Friend wrote “Things happen for a reason.”

 After some superficial reflection, and taking into account that things weren’t defined, happen wasn’t specified and reason wasn’t made clear, I decided Things Happen for a Reason (with appropriate capitalization) is a pretty good everyday mantra. Many situations we face don’t need clarification, specification or clarity.  The job doesn’t materialize, the significant other is grouchy or the favored candidate loses the election.  Although there may be reasons, who cares?

Then I started to think harder and the mantra fell apart.  It’s true—at least according to basic Buddhism as I understand it—that karma is action (reason) and its consequence (things),and this process can span lifetimes and affect many other lives.  In that sense, the thought holds.

  But Buddha probably never met Everlee Shepherd Hambright.  Everlee, my husband’s late grandmother, was born in 1899 in Grover, NC.  She spent most of her life in a small house on the side of King’s Mountain, NC.  As she approached middle age which can be a particularly unreasonable time of life, she inexplicably dropped the r in Everlee and added an i and became Evielee (Ev-ee-lee) Hambright for the rest of her life. Around the same time, she constructed a wall of 1950’s era family photos. At the top of the pyramid, was a picture of young Elvis.  In the late 1970s, the empty lot next door which had always afforded her and her husband, George, a beautiful forest view was sold and a ball bearing plant was built blocking the pastoral beauty.  Evielee’s dilemma in my opinion was not to adjust to changing times, but how to find out about her new neighbor.  She finally decided to bake a pound cake and deliver to the plant.

We will never know the reasons for the dropped r, the fact that Elvis was King of the Family or how a pound cake was supposed to give her the opportunity to shed light on the mystery of a factory instead of a person as a neighbor.    We do know that Evielee coped with a changing world without moving from her home, her religion or herself.  How she accomplished these feats—the reasons behind each of the above actions—we can’t know and even Evielee may have been a bit mystified at her own actions.

After using Evielee to point out that middle-aged Things don’t always Happen for Reasons, I decided to not delve any further into mantras or mysteries.  After all, I live near Miami where odd and horrific crimes happen regularly without any special discernible causes.

  Although I passed eighth-grade science and can discuss shifting tectonic plates and earthquakes on a par with most seventh-grade science fair contestants, the loss of life and livelihood that accompany natural disasters still seem without reason to me.

So it is back to Facebook to discover the sayings, reasons and daily mantras that will point the way to my next  reason to write a small story.

Let's start at the beginning!

Memoir 1—Birth Day

The best story my Mother ever told may have been a lie, a partial fabrication or the truth as she remembered it.  It was the story of my birth, and I was 57 years old and she was pushing 90.  Within months, she died, and I would be left wondering about what stories, facts or lies would help me frame my life up to the point of her death.

We talked in a hot bright sunroom of the cottage that she and my Dad shared in an old folks’ development in South Florida. It was the end of a road, my parents’ personal Oz, which began in the Midwest during the Depression.

Mom had the air of a secret Santa giving an unexpected gift.  She was the star of the show and knew her audience of one was paying attention.

I was born at 6 a.m. Dec. 13, 1952 in Broward General Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, FL.  The doctor arrived too late to administer anesthesia.  Pain, which Mom handled with drama in later life until her death when she showed courage, was an old wives’ tale designed to keep younger women from handling the cataclysmic miracle of childbirth.  No air conditioning and window curtains moved slowly in a breeze.

“You were a gentle child,” she said with a farm wife’s practicality. (Act or truth?) “You could be knocked over with a feather.”

Within days, Dad, a pilot who stayed in the Naval Reserve after World War Two, left for a long trip to Morocco.

The stories associated with my two sisters’ births carried a different tone:  My grandmother wrote a letter to an aunt detailing the middle sister’s entrance to this world, saying that it was uneventful and babysitting me required patience.  The story is that Dad gave Mom an aquamarine ring at my birth and a dishwasher when my sister was born.

Five years later, according to family lore, my youngest sister was born on New Year’s Eve after a bumpy ride over railroad tracks to induce labor so Dad could take a tax refund for the year.

Neither sister stayed in South Florida for the 35 year walk down the yellow-brick road to the old folks’ home. Both listened to my versions of my parents’ dramas. My own fabrications, lies and truths must have reflected the increasing disorder of lives when small details that color a story—trips to the grocery store, lack of calls from old friends—became insurmountable distractions to the telling of tales.

Is it time for each of my sons to know how he entered the world?  A good storyteller needs a good ending and playing Secret Santa, telling stories, lies or truths are tidy ways to close journeys or lives.

These clean endings, of course, may satisfy the performer-- who needs a place to stop and rest--but the reader or listener, who lives between the lines, is always left with a different story

Sistah Anne Writes To Beat The Band

My sister Anne has an idea to capture stories in writing.  Here it goes.