Sometimes life deals us a good hand and we are in the right place at the right time. Meeting Mary Morelock at the Legion Pool in 8th grade was one of those times. I knew who she was but didn’t like her because in 8th grade all I wanted was to fit in. She, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care what anyone thought about her, and she said and did anything that crossed her mind.
On that day at the Legion, there were several girls our age there, and we were hanging out together. Some of them went to lie in the sun, which left just me and Mary in the pool to hang out together. “Want to touch the bottom?” she said. “Sure,” I answered. Then we started doing flips off the low diving board, and I discovered I liked her because she was willing to try anything, and she laughed a lot and made jokes out of everything around her.
We spent a lot of time hanging out after that, and when I met her family, I felt like I’d found my second home. They were outspoken, or as we’d say today, not politically correct, but in an honest, and humorous, sort of way.
Mary’s dad, Demp, hung in the background, completely aware of everything going on but preferring to be an observer. Mostly his interactions were a few polite questions, and frequent offers of Little Debbie cakes, which must have been his idea of hospitality. “You want a Little Debbie cake? There’s a whole bunch of them out there in the freezer.” And then five minutes later: “You sure you don’t want a Little Debbie cake?”
When I first heard him say Mary’s name, he pronounced it, “Murry,” and that’s what I called her from then on, which I later shortened to “Mur.” When we were in high school, Mary had the only car, a Jeep – one of those utterly cool, real Jeeps with a removable tan nylon top like you see in African safari movies. Since she was the only one who drove, we all called her first whenever we wanted to do anything, either alone or as a group. She had tons of friends, so she’d get a lot of phone calls. Demp saw what was going on and started answering the phone, “Morelock Cabs.”
I hung out at Mary’s house so much he nicknamed me, “The Boarder.” He’d say it, even with me in the room, when he talked to Mary about me, as in: “Murry, do you and The Boarder want some stew?”
Once a car full of hoodlums chased Mary’s little sister, Kathy (called Bunny), home because they thought she’d cut them off. When she pulled up to her house, they got out of the car and started cussing and trash talking to her. Demp came out with a shotgun and said, “Bunny, git in the house.” He calmly told the boys to leave, and when they defiantly stood their ground, he raised the gun and peppered their Mustang, shooting the hood ornament off. Word got around and nobody messed with Demp’s kids after that.
I loved going to her house because she had big speakers in the living room and they were always playing the best music nice and loud. Not ear-splitting, but way louder than anyone else’s parents allowed. At my house, we never got to have our own music in the main part of the house – we had to listen to it in our rooms. My dad always had some Charlie “Yardbird” Parker or Miles Davis music playing that embarrassed the crap out of me. At Mary’s, they had the Allman Brothers, and Demp would sit right in the middle of the speakers, reading his paper and apparently enjoying himself.
My favorite story of Demp was the time we visited Mary’s parents when my kids were about two and six years old. Every time I go to Tennessee I visit Mary’s mom and dad. They moved to a place in the country after their kids all finished college, and my kids have always loved going there. On this day, me and Mary and my kids arrived just after suppertime. Us girls sat on the back porch watching my kids chasing lightening bugs while Demp puttered around in the house. It was about 10 or 11 o’clock by the time we got ready to go. We found Demp in the garage, and we were saying our goodbyes when he offered my kids a pop. I told him no, they didn’t need a pop, but thank you. A couple of minutes later he offered them one again, just like he used to offer me Little Debbie cakes.
“No, Demp, thanks but they don’t need a pop.”
“Suzanne, why won’t you let them kids have a pop?” he persisted.
“It’s late, and if they drink a pop right now they’ll wet the bed.”
“Aw, hell, I wet the bed every night. That don’t stop me.”
That was hilarious on so many levels that it makes me laugh even still.
Demp just went to the Big Cab Company in the sky, and I know for a fact that he’s up there, cracking up Jesus, all the saints, and the apostles with his wit and shenanigans. And he’s probably standing next to St. Peter, offering the newcomers whatever Heaven’s version of hospitality is, over and over again.
Showing posts with label friends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label friends. Show all posts
Monday, May 24, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Powder Puff Power Play
I promised I’d tell about the powder puff football game. Last fall the junior girls were pitted against the senior girls, and it was pre-determined that the seniors would win. That’s only fair, my daughter explained, because next year when she was a senior she’d get to win.
“How do they manage to guarantee the seniors will win?” I asked.
“Oh, the refs give the juniors a bunch of extra penalties and stuff,” she said.
At first my husband tried to get out of going to the game. “I don’t want to watch a bunch of little girls playing flag football,” he said with disgust. But my friend Gina had a bunch of us over for dinner and we went straight to the game, so he came along.
While we were scrunched in the stands trying to keep warm, waiting forever for the game to begin, one of the dads called out, “Did anyone bring a boda bag?” We all laughed (and secretly wished someone had yelled, “Over here!”)
My daughter’s prom date, Johnny, was the junior’s head coach – chosen by the school’s football coach. It looked like he had gotten eight or nine of his friends as assistants. They were all wearing the forest green t-shirts with “Juniors Rule” scrawled in sloppy white paint on the front that the girls had made for them.
When I compared the size of the junior girls lined up next to the seniors, and saw all the talent on the junior team, I thought, those poor seniors don’t stand a chance.
The juniors got the ball first. My daughter’s job was to call everyone into the huddle. They plotted for a few seconds, then the two teams faced each other on the line and squatted down just like real football players except they weren’t wearing shoulder pads. The junior’s center picked up the football and stood up, saying, “Hey, they gave us the wrong ball. Look at this, it’s the wrong ball.” She turned and handed it to the quarterback.
The quarterback hollered, “Yeah, hey this is the wrong ball.” She looked at Johnny on the sideline and bellowed, “Hey, coach, you gave us the wrong ball.” She started walking toward him, calling out, “We can’t play with this ball, this isn’t the right one, there’s something wrong with this ball.” Everyone else just stood there, waiting for someone to fix the screw up. I thought, this is going to be one long game.
The quarterback was almost to the sideline, still ranting about the ball, when Johnny yelled, “RUN!” She took off flying down the field, chased by a befuddled pack of seniors, and scored a touchdown on the very first play of the game.
You’ve never seen such carrying on. Girls were bouncing up and down like they were on a trampoline, ponytails flying in the air, hugging and flailing their arms and squealing with delight.
“Was that legal?” I shouted above the cheering parents.
“Johnny found it online,” Gina shouted back. “He ran it by the athletic director first to make sure it was legal, and he said it was.”
The seniors sulked and accused the juniors of cheating, and even though the athletic director/referee squelched their grumbling, it’s probably the reason the game got a little rough. It was supposed to be flag football, but juniors were getting tackled, especially Gina’s daughter, Julia, who was like a cheetah on the field. She has broken school records in track. The quarterback kept handing the ball to her, and she’d run toward the sideline, gaining several yards before literally getting knocked out of bounds.
Once my daughter ran off the field crying and holding the splinted finger she’d broken in gymnastics. Another time Julia limped off, crying, after being tackled. And several girls stayed down on the field after plays. When it happened, both teams got down on one knee, but since it would take awhile for the injured girl to get up, some of the juniors started whispering. If it went on for a few seconds my daughter belted out, “SHUT UP!” loud enough for all of us in the stands to hear. She later told me that Johnny thanked her and finally told her he’d call the game if the girls did it again.
The seniors scored, then the juniors scored, then the seniors scored again and it was a tie game with a couple of minutes left on the clock. My daughter rushed two times in a row and snatched the senior quarterback’s flag, which led to them turning the ball over when they missed getting a first down.
A couple of quick plays got the juniors in field goal position with two seconds left on the clock. To make sure the juniors didn’t score and win the game, the referee put the ball way off to the side of the field so it couldn’t possibly go through the goal posts. Nobody could make such a kick.
Aleeta, the six foot tall soccer queen, got in position to kick. We were screaming in the stands, blowing frosty steam and jumping up and down. Aleeta ran up to the ball and gave it a good solid soccer kick at an impossible angle, and it flew like a homing pigeon right through the middle of the goal posts to win the game.
The whole junior class raced out on the field like kids on the last day of school - jumping, screaming, and waving their arms. Parents went down on the field too, though we were totally ignored for the longest time until our daughters came tearing out of the massive hive of kids and nearly knocked us down with excited hugs, “WE WON! WE WON! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT, WE WON!!!!”
“Did you like the game, daddy?” my daughter asked when she caught her breath.
“Best game I’ve seen in a long time. Beats most college games I’ve seen,” he said.
The next day my daughter was still pumped up. She was so hoarse from screaming that some words didn’t come out. She showed me all her bruises, and there were plenty because she had played both offense and defense. “This one senior hit me right in the face,” she said, “and she hit Hannah, too. And they were pulling girls’ hair from behind when we were running with the ball. I’ve got this giant bruise on my thigh, and feel this one here on my arm, it’s sticking up. And one of them grabbed my splinted finger and twisted it. They were really mean, mom.”
After school on Monday my daughter reported that the seniors mumbled the word, “Cheaters,” a lot. “They need to just let it go,” she said. “It wasn’t our fault we won. We just did our best.”
The juniors had a secret weapon. It was Johnny who won the game for them – with that incredible first play. That’s the kind of guy he is. Smart and clever and sweet.
“How do they manage to guarantee the seniors will win?” I asked.
“Oh, the refs give the juniors a bunch of extra penalties and stuff,” she said.
At first my husband tried to get out of going to the game. “I don’t want to watch a bunch of little girls playing flag football,” he said with disgust. But my friend Gina had a bunch of us over for dinner and we went straight to the game, so he came along.
While we were scrunched in the stands trying to keep warm, waiting forever for the game to begin, one of the dads called out, “Did anyone bring a boda bag?” We all laughed (and secretly wished someone had yelled, “Over here!”)
My daughter’s prom date, Johnny, was the junior’s head coach – chosen by the school’s football coach. It looked like he had gotten eight or nine of his friends as assistants. They were all wearing the forest green t-shirts with “Juniors Rule” scrawled in sloppy white paint on the front that the girls had made for them.
When I compared the size of the junior girls lined up next to the seniors, and saw all the talent on the junior team, I thought, those poor seniors don’t stand a chance.
The juniors got the ball first. My daughter’s job was to call everyone into the huddle. They plotted for a few seconds, then the two teams faced each other on the line and squatted down just like real football players except they weren’t wearing shoulder pads. The junior’s center picked up the football and stood up, saying, “Hey, they gave us the wrong ball. Look at this, it’s the wrong ball.” She turned and handed it to the quarterback.
The quarterback hollered, “Yeah, hey this is the wrong ball.” She looked at Johnny on the sideline and bellowed, “Hey, coach, you gave us the wrong ball.” She started walking toward him, calling out, “We can’t play with this ball, this isn’t the right one, there’s something wrong with this ball.” Everyone else just stood there, waiting for someone to fix the screw up. I thought, this is going to be one long game.
The quarterback was almost to the sideline, still ranting about the ball, when Johnny yelled, “RUN!” She took off flying down the field, chased by a befuddled pack of seniors, and scored a touchdown on the very first play of the game.
You’ve never seen such carrying on. Girls were bouncing up and down like they were on a trampoline, ponytails flying in the air, hugging and flailing their arms and squealing with delight.
“Was that legal?” I shouted above the cheering parents.
“Johnny found it online,” Gina shouted back. “He ran it by the athletic director first to make sure it was legal, and he said it was.”
The seniors sulked and accused the juniors of cheating, and even though the athletic director/referee squelched their grumbling, it’s probably the reason the game got a little rough. It was supposed to be flag football, but juniors were getting tackled, especially Gina’s daughter, Julia, who was like a cheetah on the field. She has broken school records in track. The quarterback kept handing the ball to her, and she’d run toward the sideline, gaining several yards before literally getting knocked out of bounds.
Once my daughter ran off the field crying and holding the splinted finger she’d broken in gymnastics. Another time Julia limped off, crying, after being tackled. And several girls stayed down on the field after plays. When it happened, both teams got down on one knee, but since it would take awhile for the injured girl to get up, some of the juniors started whispering. If it went on for a few seconds my daughter belted out, “SHUT UP!” loud enough for all of us in the stands to hear. She later told me that Johnny thanked her and finally told her he’d call the game if the girls did it again.
The seniors scored, then the juniors scored, then the seniors scored again and it was a tie game with a couple of minutes left on the clock. My daughter rushed two times in a row and snatched the senior quarterback’s flag, which led to them turning the ball over when they missed getting a first down.
A couple of quick plays got the juniors in field goal position with two seconds left on the clock. To make sure the juniors didn’t score and win the game, the referee put the ball way off to the side of the field so it couldn’t possibly go through the goal posts. Nobody could make such a kick.
Aleeta, the six foot tall soccer queen, got in position to kick. We were screaming in the stands, blowing frosty steam and jumping up and down. Aleeta ran up to the ball and gave it a good solid soccer kick at an impossible angle, and it flew like a homing pigeon right through the middle of the goal posts to win the game.
The whole junior class raced out on the field like kids on the last day of school - jumping, screaming, and waving their arms. Parents went down on the field too, though we were totally ignored for the longest time until our daughters came tearing out of the massive hive of kids and nearly knocked us down with excited hugs, “WE WON! WE WON! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT, WE WON!!!!”
“Did you like the game, daddy?” my daughter asked when she caught her breath.
“Best game I’ve seen in a long time. Beats most college games I’ve seen,” he said.
The next day my daughter was still pumped up. She was so hoarse from screaming that some words didn’t come out. She showed me all her bruises, and there were plenty because she had played both offense and defense. “This one senior hit me right in the face,” she said, “and she hit Hannah, too. And they were pulling girls’ hair from behind when we were running with the ball. I’ve got this giant bruise on my thigh, and feel this one here on my arm, it’s sticking up. And one of them grabbed my splinted finger and twisted it. They were really mean, mom.”
After school on Monday my daughter reported that the seniors mumbled the word, “Cheaters,” a lot. “They need to just let it go,” she said. “It wasn’t our fault we won. We just did our best.”
The juniors had a secret weapon. It was Johnny who won the game for them – with that incredible first play. That’s the kind of guy he is. Smart and clever and sweet.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Whiners Are Us
My husband is out of town and I was so looking forward to sprawling in that big bed without having a locomotive’s worth of snoring to listen to tonight, but I got a late night request to do some changes on a project and now it’s 1:20 am and all I can think about is whining.
Whining isn’t usually all that funny. I know some people can make it funny – wasn’t there a skit on Saturday Night Live with Doug and Wendy Whiner who had these nasal whines and dragged out their miseries in extended words that sounded like this? “Do-ug, whyyyy are you DO-ING tha-at? You KNOW it ma-akes me cra-a-a-a-a-azy.”
When I whine, people leave the room. I usually whine that I get no freaking help around the house. “Why do you people throw your coat in the floor day after day after day when you know good and well that I’m going to yell at you about it and that makes you mad so why do you do it?”
My kids whine constantly about the food for dinner. My husband is a gourmet cook, which to a kid is worse than feeding them dog food straight from the can. “What’s this? It’s gross? Are we supposed to eat that? I’m not eating it. I can’t even look at it.” They were describing yellow squash which they both loathe like a cow hates flies.
My friends whine to me. They call it venting, but when the vent’s always open and it’s always blowing hot air, it can get pretty annoying. In fact, I get sick and tired, just plain sick and tired of them spouting off about their spouses. The guys are idiots, I’ll concede that, but telling me what their newest outrage is, especially when it sounds pretty much like all the other outrages, gets old. I don’t need to know every single day that Bill was late for supper the night before and didn’t call so the food got cold and the kids were starving. Night after night this happens, and day after day I listen to it. Give it a freaking rest.
Did someone say rest? That sounds like a great idea – if I could only manage to GET some which I won’t be able to since it’s so late and I have to get up at the crack of da-awn.
Whining isn’t usually all that funny. I know some people can make it funny – wasn’t there a skit on Saturday Night Live with Doug and Wendy Whiner who had these nasal whines and dragged out their miseries in extended words that sounded like this? “Do-ug, whyyyy are you DO-ING tha-at? You KNOW it ma-akes me cra-a-a-a-a-azy.”
When I whine, people leave the room. I usually whine that I get no freaking help around the house. “Why do you people throw your coat in the floor day after day after day when you know good and well that I’m going to yell at you about it and that makes you mad so why do you do it?”
My kids whine constantly about the food for dinner. My husband is a gourmet cook, which to a kid is worse than feeding them dog food straight from the can. “What’s this? It’s gross? Are we supposed to eat that? I’m not eating it. I can’t even look at it.” They were describing yellow squash which they both loathe like a cow hates flies.
My friends whine to me. They call it venting, but when the vent’s always open and it’s always blowing hot air, it can get pretty annoying. In fact, I get sick and tired, just plain sick and tired of them spouting off about their spouses. The guys are idiots, I’ll concede that, but telling me what their newest outrage is, especially when it sounds pretty much like all the other outrages, gets old. I don’t need to know every single day that Bill was late for supper the night before and didn’t call so the food got cold and the kids were starving. Night after night this happens, and day after day I listen to it. Give it a freaking rest.
Did someone say rest? That sounds like a great idea – if I could only manage to GET some which I won’t be able to since it’s so late and I have to get up at the crack of da-awn.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Catching Crabs in Chesapeake Bay
When I was in 9th grade, I was lucky enough to get invited to go with my girlfriend, Carole, to Baltimore to visit her family.
That was when people threw a mattress in the back of a station wagon so the kids could wallow around and be comfortable for a long trip. It was about an 8-hour road drive from Tennessee, and there were 9 of us in the car – Carole’s parents, their six kids and me. I could write about that alone, except I want to get to the good stuff.
When we got there, she and I went to Uncle Bill’s, and the rest of them went somewhere else. Uncle Bill and his wife, Aunt Edna, lived on the Chesapeake Bay. Literally – we walked out their back door and crossed over twenty yards of grass to the edge of the water, which was about two feet down from the bank. They had a small, partially covered dock with an aluminum boat hanging in the middle of it.
Uncle Bill took us out the next morning to catch crabs. He tied a chunk of fish to a string and tossed it into the water. Pretty soon a crab must have grabbed hold of the fish and took off with it, because the string started moving away from the dock. “We got one,” Uncle Bill said. Then he started pulling the string in slowly through the murky water, and soon you could see the crab coming into view. “If you pull gently, the crab will hold on almost up to the surface.” He told Carole to grab the long pole with a net at the end. “When you see the crab coming up to the top, swoop the net under him,” he said.
From the moment the hazy image of the crab came into view about a foot or two below the surface, Carole and I started screaming and jumping around like we’d seen a tarantula. The crab let go and fell out of sight.
“You girls try it this time, and don’t scare him off.” We fought over who was going to tie the disgusting bait on the string and who got to do the net. Finally we decided to take turns. I pulled the next crab in gently, and Carole swooped the net under him. We screamed again with him crawling around in the net, but Uncle Bill just laughed and told us to dump him in the boat behind us. Soon we were catching enough crabs by ourselves to keep us entertained for hours.
Over the course of a week, we were together 24/7, and were starting to get on each other’s nerves. Plus, it appeared that Uncle Bill favored me – I joked and teased with him because he reminded me of my grandfather – and I think he found me amusing. Whatever the reason, Carole and I ended up getting into an argument about who was going to do the net. Neither wanted to tie bait. “Well, it’s my uncle’s house so I should get to do the net,” she said. “Well, he likes me best, so I should get to do it.” I snapped back. These statements pissed us both off, and we started scuffling on the narrow dock. With the pushing and shoving, we lost our balance and fell arm in arm into the water.
We surfaced and screamed bloody murder, because these were brown, murky, crab-infested waters that stretched as far as the eye could see. Plus it shocked us – it was salt water, which I’d never experienced before. We scrambled back onto the dock and started laughing. Uncle Bill came out and told us it was completely safe to swim in there, and we could touch bottom. “Your screeching and thrashing scared off all the crabs in a hundred miles,” he assured us.
We jumped back in with our shorts and t-shirts, screaming and splashing around to make certain the crabs stayed away. When Uncle Bill went back in the house, we decided to be naughty and go skinny-dipping. You couldn’t see into the water at all, and it wasn’t like a beach where there were people around. This was literally in the backyard of many cottage-type houses, and no one else was ever around. So we flopped our clothes up on the dock and took turns doing daring stuff like touching a foot on the squishy bottom. We got braver after awhile and decided to touch a hand on the bottom, which meant we had to do a surface dive, which meant our bare bottoms were exposed to view for a few seconds.
I’d never skinny dipped before. It had never occurred to me to do it. So it was quite exhilarating. We touched the bottom with our hands over and over, going at the same time so we didn’t expose ourselves to each other. People couldn’t see us from their houses, or at least we couldn’t see them because of the bank. We felt we had our own private bay. Boats passed on occasion out in the distance, but far enough away they couldn’t see us. What a fun time we had – and we didn’t fight again after that. We were sisters in scandal.
Months later, when we were back home, I overhead my mom and dad get into a tiff because he had Playboy magazines. “I only get them for the articles,” he explained. Of course this aroused my curiosity, because I didn’t even know what a Playboy magazine was. I found a copy hidden under a pile of stuff in their bedroom and was shocked to see the foldout and other pictures. But what caught my eye the most was a letter to the editor with a grainy, zoomed in picture of two creamy white butt cheeks poking out of murky brown water. The caption read, “Great White Spotted in Chesapeake Bay!”
I just KNOW that was me!
That was when people threw a mattress in the back of a station wagon so the kids could wallow around and be comfortable for a long trip. It was about an 8-hour road drive from Tennessee, and there were 9 of us in the car – Carole’s parents, their six kids and me. I could write about that alone, except I want to get to the good stuff.
When we got there, she and I went to Uncle Bill’s, and the rest of them went somewhere else. Uncle Bill and his wife, Aunt Edna, lived on the Chesapeake Bay. Literally – we walked out their back door and crossed over twenty yards of grass to the edge of the water, which was about two feet down from the bank. They had a small, partially covered dock with an aluminum boat hanging in the middle of it.
Uncle Bill took us out the next morning to catch crabs. He tied a chunk of fish to a string and tossed it into the water. Pretty soon a crab must have grabbed hold of the fish and took off with it, because the string started moving away from the dock. “We got one,” Uncle Bill said. Then he started pulling the string in slowly through the murky water, and soon you could see the crab coming into view. “If you pull gently, the crab will hold on almost up to the surface.” He told Carole to grab the long pole with a net at the end. “When you see the crab coming up to the top, swoop the net under him,” he said.
From the moment the hazy image of the crab came into view about a foot or two below the surface, Carole and I started screaming and jumping around like we’d seen a tarantula. The crab let go and fell out of sight.
“You girls try it this time, and don’t scare him off.” We fought over who was going to tie the disgusting bait on the string and who got to do the net. Finally we decided to take turns. I pulled the next crab in gently, and Carole swooped the net under him. We screamed again with him crawling around in the net, but Uncle Bill just laughed and told us to dump him in the boat behind us. Soon we were catching enough crabs by ourselves to keep us entertained for hours.
Over the course of a week, we were together 24/7, and were starting to get on each other’s nerves. Plus, it appeared that Uncle Bill favored me – I joked and teased with him because he reminded me of my grandfather – and I think he found me amusing. Whatever the reason, Carole and I ended up getting into an argument about who was going to do the net. Neither wanted to tie bait. “Well, it’s my uncle’s house so I should get to do the net,” she said. “Well, he likes me best, so I should get to do it.” I snapped back. These statements pissed us both off, and we started scuffling on the narrow dock. With the pushing and shoving, we lost our balance and fell arm in arm into the water.
We surfaced and screamed bloody murder, because these were brown, murky, crab-infested waters that stretched as far as the eye could see. Plus it shocked us – it was salt water, which I’d never experienced before. We scrambled back onto the dock and started laughing. Uncle Bill came out and told us it was completely safe to swim in there, and we could touch bottom. “Your screeching and thrashing scared off all the crabs in a hundred miles,” he assured us.
We jumped back in with our shorts and t-shirts, screaming and splashing around to make certain the crabs stayed away. When Uncle Bill went back in the house, we decided to be naughty and go skinny-dipping. You couldn’t see into the water at all, and it wasn’t like a beach where there were people around. This was literally in the backyard of many cottage-type houses, and no one else was ever around. So we flopped our clothes up on the dock and took turns doing daring stuff like touching a foot on the squishy bottom. We got braver after awhile and decided to touch a hand on the bottom, which meant we had to do a surface dive, which meant our bare bottoms were exposed to view for a few seconds.
I’d never skinny dipped before. It had never occurred to me to do it. So it was quite exhilarating. We touched the bottom with our hands over and over, going at the same time so we didn’t expose ourselves to each other. People couldn’t see us from their houses, or at least we couldn’t see them because of the bank. We felt we had our own private bay. Boats passed on occasion out in the distance, but far enough away they couldn’t see us. What a fun time we had – and we didn’t fight again after that. We were sisters in scandal.
Months later, when we were back home, I overhead my mom and dad get into a tiff because he had Playboy magazines. “I only get them for the articles,” he explained. Of course this aroused my curiosity, because I didn’t even know what a Playboy magazine was. I found a copy hidden under a pile of stuff in their bedroom and was shocked to see the foldout and other pictures. But what caught my eye the most was a letter to the editor with a grainy, zoomed in picture of two creamy white butt cheeks poking out of murky brown water. The caption read, “Great White Spotted in Chesapeake Bay!”
I just KNOW that was me!
Friday, January 8, 2010
Tightrope Inspiration Falls Short
If you read yesterday’s post, and I’m sure you did, you’ll know that I was all excited about watching “Man on Wire,” a story about a guy who crosses between the World Trade Center towers on a tightrope in 1974.
I was inspired by his leadership – how his friends supported and helped him propel this crazy dream to completion. I turned the TV off and wrote the blog right after he’d completed the walk and been arrested as a trespasser but at the same time hailed by the media as a wonder.
I thought of my life and how I had, at one time, led my friends on adventures – road trips to Myrtle Beach and Fort Lauderdale and Key West with very little money and sometimes no transportation – camping and hiking trips through the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, and several road trips across country, one from Florida to Oregon and others starting in Tennessee and leading to both coasts. I don’t think about them much, but I really should write some books because many of these adventures were pretty entertaining. However, I’ll have to wait until my children are adults, if you catch my drift…
So I left the blog and turned the documentary back on, and lo and behold, Philippe Petit fell from grace in my eyes. (How do you like that “fell” pun? Actually, they say when you have to explain or point out your jokes, they weren’t that funny in the first place...)
How did he fall from grace? As he was walking out of the police station to the hoards of media, a pretty little thing came up and put her arms around him and said she wanted to be the first to help him celebrate. A tightrope groupie, I guess you’d call her. I wonder if she had dreams of being a groupie and went down the list: rock band groupie? No; political groupie? No; tightrope groupie, YES! All of the above, hmmm, maybe I should check this one…
So Philippe’s accomplices – one of which was also arrested, and the others on his team, and his girlfriend who had pretty much abandoned her own life to be his love interest and athletic supporter – were all waiting for him totally jubilant about his (and their) success and wanting to jump up and down and high five each other, they were left to anxiously look down an empty hall or await a knock on the door while he goes off with this groupie and bounces on her waterbed for awhile (which is shown in the film – I’m not sure if they used a body double, but this Philippe liked being in his birthday suit, I think). He calls his friends and girlfriend on the phone to tell them he’s being “interviewed” and will catch up with them as soon as he can tear himself away. There are many jokes I could make right here, things like, “Cheah, more like enterview!” but they’d all be puns of some sort, but I’m not sure you’re up (get it) for that.
Nothing happened to him legally with the trespassing charge. He was even asked by New York’s attorney general to entertain some kids with juggling for publicity. His other arrested friend, however, was kicked out of the US, for good, I presume.
On the flight home, he tells the friend who appears to be his closest one, “Well, for our next trick…” and his friend says, “Nope, don’t count me in, enough is enough.” These aren’t exact quotes, but the gist of it, and who can blame him? He and the crew did so much work and had so much at stake – what if Philippe had fallen? – and didn’t really get anything from it except the joy of giving themselves over completely to Philippe’s whimsy and have him abandon them at the time of their mutual success. The movie doesn’t say, but it appears Philippe and this friend had a falling out because the friend appears to have regrets during his last interview.
I think it could be said without a robust argument that men seem to let the little head do the thinking for them at the worst possible times. It happens constantly – it’s in the news daily – just think Tiger Woods. He’s the example handiest right now but there is a list that could circle the globe a million times. So Philippe’s fall is not shocking (that I continue using the “fall” pun is, however).
He even admits in the movie that he “betrayed” his friends and girlfriend. I liked her a lot. She never once says a negative thing. Even at the end she describes how she could see Philippe’s life changing as he became famous, and that it was time for their love affair to end, and surprisingly she was ready for it to end, too. I want to be like her, having tact and grace, but I’m negative and a b-word. I would not have been so kind.
I said yesterday I wanted to be like him. That’s no longer true. I was like him, on a much smaller scale. I had friends who went along with my adventures, and I don’t think they were disappointed. I’m still in contact with my old friends, though distance separates us and the contact may only be through Christmas cards. When we get together we talk about the present, but mostly we remember the things we did and wonder how we survived them.
The movie ended with Philippe alone in his yard walking on a tightrope. All the scenes prior had his friends splayed around in the grass. What has his life been like since 1974? Did he find taller buildings to conquer? Wider distances? I’d never heard of him when it happened, and haven’t heard about him since, but I live in a vacuum. It gets pretty dusty in there. Get it? Vacuum.
It was an amazing feat, and I still recommend the movie, but his story is just like life. It has its ups and downs, highs and lows. When we’re on top of the world, it’s exhilarating, but sure as the sun rises, we’re going to fall (pun) sometime in the future, and it’s nice to have a safety net of friends to cushion us.
I was inspired by his leadership – how his friends supported and helped him propel this crazy dream to completion. I turned the TV off and wrote the blog right after he’d completed the walk and been arrested as a trespasser but at the same time hailed by the media as a wonder.
I thought of my life and how I had, at one time, led my friends on adventures – road trips to Myrtle Beach and Fort Lauderdale and Key West with very little money and sometimes no transportation – camping and hiking trips through the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, and several road trips across country, one from Florida to Oregon and others starting in Tennessee and leading to both coasts. I don’t think about them much, but I really should write some books because many of these adventures were pretty entertaining. However, I’ll have to wait until my children are adults, if you catch my drift…
So I left the blog and turned the documentary back on, and lo and behold, Philippe Petit fell from grace in my eyes. (How do you like that “fell” pun? Actually, they say when you have to explain or point out your jokes, they weren’t that funny in the first place...)
How did he fall from grace? As he was walking out of the police station to the hoards of media, a pretty little thing came up and put her arms around him and said she wanted to be the first to help him celebrate. A tightrope groupie, I guess you’d call her. I wonder if she had dreams of being a groupie and went down the list: rock band groupie? No; political groupie? No; tightrope groupie, YES! All of the above, hmmm, maybe I should check this one…
So Philippe’s accomplices – one of which was also arrested, and the others on his team, and his girlfriend who had pretty much abandoned her own life to be his love interest and athletic supporter – were all waiting for him totally jubilant about his (and their) success and wanting to jump up and down and high five each other, they were left to anxiously look down an empty hall or await a knock on the door while he goes off with this groupie and bounces on her waterbed for awhile (which is shown in the film – I’m not sure if they used a body double, but this Philippe liked being in his birthday suit, I think). He calls his friends and girlfriend on the phone to tell them he’s being “interviewed” and will catch up with them as soon as he can tear himself away. There are many jokes I could make right here, things like, “Cheah, more like enterview!” but they’d all be puns of some sort, but I’m not sure you’re up (get it) for that.
Nothing happened to him legally with the trespassing charge. He was even asked by New York’s attorney general to entertain some kids with juggling for publicity. His other arrested friend, however, was kicked out of the US, for good, I presume.
On the flight home, he tells the friend who appears to be his closest one, “Well, for our next trick…” and his friend says, “Nope, don’t count me in, enough is enough.” These aren’t exact quotes, but the gist of it, and who can blame him? He and the crew did so much work and had so much at stake – what if Philippe had fallen? – and didn’t really get anything from it except the joy of giving themselves over completely to Philippe’s whimsy and have him abandon them at the time of their mutual success. The movie doesn’t say, but it appears Philippe and this friend had a falling out because the friend appears to have regrets during his last interview.
I think it could be said without a robust argument that men seem to let the little head do the thinking for them at the worst possible times. It happens constantly – it’s in the news daily – just think Tiger Woods. He’s the example handiest right now but there is a list that could circle the globe a million times. So Philippe’s fall is not shocking (that I continue using the “fall” pun is, however).
He even admits in the movie that he “betrayed” his friends and girlfriend. I liked her a lot. She never once says a negative thing. Even at the end she describes how she could see Philippe’s life changing as he became famous, and that it was time for their love affair to end, and surprisingly she was ready for it to end, too. I want to be like her, having tact and grace, but I’m negative and a b-word. I would not have been so kind.
I said yesterday I wanted to be like him. That’s no longer true. I was like him, on a much smaller scale. I had friends who went along with my adventures, and I don’t think they were disappointed. I’m still in contact with my old friends, though distance separates us and the contact may only be through Christmas cards. When we get together we talk about the present, but mostly we remember the things we did and wonder how we survived them.
The movie ended with Philippe alone in his yard walking on a tightrope. All the scenes prior had his friends splayed around in the grass. What has his life been like since 1974? Did he find taller buildings to conquer? Wider distances? I’d never heard of him when it happened, and haven’t heard about him since, but I live in a vacuum. It gets pretty dusty in there. Get it? Vacuum.
It was an amazing feat, and I still recommend the movie, but his story is just like life. It has its ups and downs, highs and lows. When we’re on top of the world, it’s exhilarating, but sure as the sun rises, we’re going to fall (pun) sometime in the future, and it’s nice to have a safety net of friends to cushion us.
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