I'm on the DFW airport tram. Two guys in baseball caps have taken over the four handicapped seats. They are very loud, tipsy loud:
"I ain't fishing there no more."
"You see that guy's shirt?"
"Whuuut?"
"His shirt. It had LSU un it!"
"LSU!"
"LSU baby!"
"Oh yeah!"
They slap palms.
I am in a Viagra commercial.
Today I was driven around in a Rolls Royce Phantom in Houston, Texas.
A few observations: the hood was as big as my entire car. The doors were heavy, like what you’d expect a bank vault door to feel like. The tires were massive. The leatherseats were large and cushiony, very comfy, and they were surrounded by wood: wood in the doors, wood on the dash, wood on the ceiling.
It sat four of us comfortably. Surprisingly five people would have been tight.
It smelled great.
But it was just a car. A half-million dollar car, but still just a car.
Now I’m convinced I need a leather seat on my bike, just to keep up.
On my way home from Lubbock the other day, I saw a recumbent bike rider hauling a trailer down the I-27 access road. It’s not every day you see that, so I took the next exit and waited for him so I could see where he was going.
He had a tan, leathery face, with a long, rectangular beard that jutted from his chin like a pharaoh. His right hand was stuffed into his jacket pocket, the other was out, steering his bike. The hood of his jacket was tied tightly around his head. He was moving about a mile an hour, and the trailer behind him was loaded down with spare tires and all sorts of strange and bizarre bundles.
He stopped pedaling (it was a recumbent tricycle, so he had no trouble staying balanced while stopped) and gave me a cold look.
“I have a recumbent bike too,” I said stupidly.
I could tell he absolutely did not care. He just kept staring at me.
“That’s some rig,” I said, looking at his trailer. It was long, like a coffin, and rode on two wheels.
“It’s 500 pounds,” he said, sounding vaguely like what you’d expect an Amish farmer to sound like, “including a propane stove and my tent.”
This intrigued me further. “Where are you going?”
“Oregon,” he said.
“Where are you from?”
“Oregon,” he said again. He paused and then said, “I ain’t got one of them. Never had.” He pointed to my car.
“Oh, not many people have a Prius,” I said, and then I realized he was talking about not having a automobile. He couldn’t care less about the kind.
“I’ve been going for eight years,” he continued, speaking into the wind as I wasn’t there. “I’ve been to South Carolina and all over. I’ve had 25 flat tires.”
And all I could say was, “Well, 25 flats over eight years, that’s not too bad.” If only the powers of division hadn’t eluded me, then I could have really sounded smart.
I didn’t know what else to say, but I knew a storm was approaching from the west, so I wanted to finish up and get on my way.
“Where do you sleep?” I asked.
He pointed at the ground. “Where ever I stop. I get in my tent when it’s too cold or too rainy. I just unpack right here. I made 12 miles yesterday in the wind. I might make 18 today.”
I took this as my cue that he wanted to get moving, so like an idiot I wished him good luck (good luck! I should have said ‘may the gods of puncture proof tires watch over you,’ but then again, he might have killed me for it - he had that kind of look about him). He started off again, in a low gear, crawling ahead. I waited a minute, and then I drove off, passing him but neither waving nor acknowledging him.
Now I’m on a plane, 36,000 feet up, going 521 miles an hour. It’s -67º F outside. Yet I just caught myself looking down and wondering where this Forrest Gump of bike riders is today, wondering what he’ll do when frightening storms roll off the Rocky Mountains tonight and blanket the high planes in lightning and screaming wind.
I wonder, but I know in a hour I’ll stop wondering and forget about him for a while.
But he’ll still be pedaling. Because that’s what he does.
I drove to Lubbock to attend a lecture by my intellectual property attorney who, as special guest star, flew in from Washington D.C. for the big event. The Prius was getting a decent 54 miles a gallon until the wind started kicking in and I started getting buffeted and knocked around on the freeway overpasses. I had no idea you could have white knuckle driving on a tornado-less flat stretch of road in the Texas Panhandle.
For dinner I thought I’d sneak out and head to Double Dave's, where you can find the most delicious pizza rolls - Double Dave's calls them peproni rolls. (I lived on these in grad school - ah, the days of backpacks lined with aluminum foil and the all-you-can-eat pizza roll buffet!)
I followed my phone’s Google maps directions carefully and finally found myself in the parking lot that was home to Double Dave's, a grocery store, and several other various shops and whatnots. But as I drove past the Double Dave’s window, I saw it was packed with college kids watching a handful of different sports channels on the TVs scattered around the dining room. Then I realized, even though my love of pizza rolls was strong and fierce, Double Dave's that night wasn’t my scene.
I am old now.
So I ended up at Souper Salad, which has a large buffet of all sorts of interesting things, including olives, cottage cheese, and chicken soup. I ate my old person food and read The New Yorker and enjoyed the quiet.
As I was leaving I saw one of the cooks run through the dining room followed by three large dogs. She stopped me and asked if they were my dogs, and I just shook my head, finding the question odd. She said the dogs had come in through the kitchen’s back door, and she wondered who they belonged to.
So they ushered them outside, and the entire staff stood by the front doors, arms crossed, murmuring to themselves about the weird dogs from the alley.
And I left, driving away and wondering if that was really chicken in the soup after all.
At dinner one night Alex made the following pronouncement:
“When I grow up, I want to be a limo driver.”
And then he made sure we knew that it wouldn’t just be any kind of limo.
It would also have a pool.
So of course we needed to know more about this pool-carrying limo, and Alex said with a pool he could drive and then swim whenever he wanted. Then he showed us what he meant: he pretended to turn a large steering wheel back and forth in front of him, saying “Drive, drive, drive.” And then slapped his hands together, twisted his body, and dove below the table. “Swim!”
Suzanne told him he just invented a new dance. She called it “The Limo.”
A few weeks later at the Father-Daughter girl scout dance, Megan introduced The Limo to her fellow scouts, and soon the entire dance floor was infected with the eager shouts of “Drive, drive, drive . . . swim! Drive, drive, drive . . . swim!”
It’s obvious Alex doesn’t need to be a limo driver. He needs his own Top 40 dance show.
Dig it!
Last weekend was out big regional Destination Imagination tournament in Lubbock, Texas. It's a two-hour drive from here, and since he had to be there pretty early for registration, we left Amarillo around 6:30, bag full of pre-toasted bagels at the ready.
It was a busy day, and since both Suzanne and I were the managers of two different teams (yet again, the only teams from Amarillo were our two) we were dashing around the high school were the tournament was being held, zipping here and there and mainly rounding up parents who had no idea where they were supposed to be.
Each team had their main challenge performance time and an instant challenge time (main challenges are the puzzles they've worked on since October; instant challenges are quickie and trickie assignments that get popped on the team and then the team is given five or so minutes to come up with a solution). Suzanne had the tougher part of everything during the tournament because she had to make her own team's regular challenge time, their instant challenge time, and my fourth grade team's instant challenge time (she was my team's instant challenge coach - no one else is allowed in an instant challenge room except for the team, the judges, and one team manager.
The results? (Drumroll.) Both Colleen's sixth grade team and Megan's fourth grade team came in second place in their divisions, which is really terrific. And no state tournament this year means Suzanne and I can take a break from Destination Imagination until next fall, which is also terrific.
We had lunch at a Lubbock burger place called Spanky's or Stinky's (it was something like that). Here's a sign on the stairs going up to the dining room. Apparently it instructs people to drink beer and then impale themselves on the stairs. Now that's a destination for some imagination!
In all the hubbub I neglected to post a little entry about Megan's 10th birthday (which was in January). It included: a handful of friends, a big cookie, presents von delirium, and an oversized tent that I put up in the house and delicately whacked the ceiling fan with its oversized poles.
Well, at last I can write about it.
Almost a month ago, February 1st, Suzanne and I went to give blood at our friendly neighborhood blood bank, The Coffee Memorial Blood Center, which has everything you'd need including comfy chairs, friendly staff, and plenty of cookies and drinks.
On this particular day I was feeling perfectly fine, and I was making jokes and looking up random internet stuff on my phone. No sweat. It wasn't even windy, and for February in the Texas Panhandle, that's saying something (strike that - for every month here that's saying something).
Suzanne was in the chair next to me, and for the next 15 minutes or so we chatted away merrily as the blood drained away.
Once I had finished, I was about to get up and head for the cookies, but then a little weirdness struck me. "I'm a little dizzy," I said. The nurse said she'd tilt my head back for a bit.
And then the next thing I knew six people were surrounding me and someone was saying my name and slapping my face (the smelling salts didn't work). I came to, which was really hard because it was so difficult to focus on anything, and the strange world where I had drifted off to had given me all sorts of great new ideas - ideas that were amazing and earth-shattering. Too bad I can't remember any of them. All I do know is that I wanted my little notebook so I could write down these amazing thoughts, but when I asked for my notebook all that came out was, "Bapfluuuuggah Deurrrp!" Plus I was so tired. I mean, I was wiped out, and all I wanted to do was sleep. I tried to explain that, but I'm sure it came out unintelligible as well.
That's when my back started screaming at me. For some reason, I had this terrible, miserable, nasty back pain, the worst pain I had ever felt. I squirmed around in the chair, trying to get some relief, but it was no good. Oh, it was horrible. The blood center people tried to put pillows behind my back, but I'd have none of that. I just wanted to get out of that chair. That brutal chair from the Spanish Inquisition.
They finally brought a rolling cot over to me and I threw my body onto it. Then they wheeled me into a small room, everyone nervously pacing, Suzanne holding my hand, me making weird moaning noises.
Doctor T., the doc on call, showed up a couple of seconds later and gave me the skinny. Apparently I had had some freaky seizure while I was in the chair and that had tensed up my back muscles something fierce. The seizure lasted for a long while, and I know I stopped breathing (I overheard one of the nurses say that), and it really hosed up my back, bad enough that I couldn't sit up, turn around, turn over, or do anything more difficult than moan a little more.
The doc prescribed some muscle relaxers for me (the first prescription wasn't powerful enough, so she had to double the dose), and at five o'clock, they got me into a little chair with wheels and pushed me to the van, where Suzanne had moved the Girl Scout cookies to make room for me in the back. I rolled out of the chair and landed flat, stretched out, on the van's floor. Suzanne took me home, and two guys from the blood center followed her, helping me to the bedroom once we got to the house.
And there I stayed for a week, occasionally taking half an hour to move the ten feet to the bathroom (I could only walk with my hands on my knees, hunched over, and creeping sideways - standing up was impossible, as was coughing, sneezing, playing the Wii, or even considering opening my laptop). But I progressed, slowly, and measured my success by how much further I could crab-walk the next day and then the day after that. It was ugly though, and at some point I had pulled my neck so hard I couldn't lie down to sleep, so for a couple of nights I had to sleep on my knees next to the sofa, and that sleep only lasted an hour each night. Brutal.
By the end of the week, after a series of doctors and physical therapists, I was finally feeling almost human. But even now, almost a month later, sneezing is out of the question, and if the kids start making me laugh too hard it's horrible (yet I can't resist their corny jokes).
I've tried to discover what might have happened to me. It could have been a low blood sugar seizure. One of the docs said it was a tonic seizure (I thought at first he had said Teutonic Seizure, which I was sure had to be something really interesting), and he also said it's like I was in a bad car accident. He then said it'd take four to six months to get back to normal. Four to six months! From giving blood!
Oh, and I'm not supposed to give blood again or, as the doctor said none too gently, I could die. That means croaking, kicking the bucket, auf wiedersehen. So I need to steer clear of any blood centers from now on.
Through all this I didn't want to scare the kids, but they and Suzanne were great. The kids made a Get Well Soon sign for the bedroom door and they brought me meals in bed and then disappeared while I ate and peered through my toes at the TV to watch episode after episode of Monk.
So now I'm better and am back to work. I canceled a trip to Boston for next week because I can't summon the strength to strip down at an airport (honestly, who can?). But so far, so good.
And I still move like a 200 year old man, but I hear that's the hip new thing. So at last I'm cool.
And I'm digging it. Well, not with a shovel because that would really hurt. Really.
Today I am at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It's a short visit, just enough time to run around the floor of the gigantic convention center, avoiding the typical booth babes and mediocre magicians, so I might find the hidden gem usually squirreled away in the South Hall, next to the Cheap Chinese Imported Items booths.
I had lunch at Wolfgang Puck's, and since the restaurant was busy, I had to sit at the bar to eat. I had tossed my CES program booklet on the bar next to me, and a second later the solitary woman on my right pointed at it and asked if the convention was going on. I told her it was, as demonstrated by all the geeky guys running around with palm-sized name badges hanging around their necks.
"Well, the adult expo starts this weekend," said the woman, whose name I soon discovered was Cindy.
"Now that's a registration line I don't want to be in," I said. "I bet there are some oogy guys hanging around at that one."
"That's my line of work," said Cindy.
Yikes!
"Really," I said, unsure of how to proceed. Yet the quest for the interesting story compelled me to ask questions. "What do you mean?"
"I own two adult bookstores in Florida," she said.
Intriguing. Suddenly I caught myself wondering: do they have franchises, like McDonalds? When does the inventory show up? In the middle of the night, in a truck wrapped in brown paper? Do they even wrap things in brown paper anymore? Did they ever?
"How did you get into that line of work?" I asked.
"I was a dancer for 10 years," she said. [I am using "dancer" as a proxy for our more delicate readers; her occupation is similar to what some people do with old paint when they're trying to take it off the wall.] "So," she said, "it naturally took my career in that direction."
"Naturally," I said.
She then tells me about what she's looking for at the expo and how she's excited to meet the celebrities and all the stuff that goes into managing a business that I always had thought was lit solely by neon.
By this time, I noticed (oblivious to her first three glasses) that she was quickly downing some weird liquor concoction. Her breath could have stripped the skin from my face. It was also at this time that I noticed she had scooted close to me and now, every time she gestured with her hand, her arm rubbed against mine. My weapon of choice in these circumstances: the iPhone slideshow of Disney World!
"And these are my kids," I said rapidly. "And here's my wife. Right there. Right here in this picture."
"Oh, she's so pretty," said Cindy.
"So pretty!" I said.
"Where are you staying?" Cindy then asked without pausing.
"Roach infested hotel over there," I said, waving vaguely in a direction that some would call northwest-southeastern. I had a handful of french fries to go.
"I'm just waiting for my room to be released," she said. I'm here all by myself."
"I'm not," I said. "Plenty of people with me today. Yes sir!"
Right then the guy I had been at the show with stood up from his seat and said he'd see me later. Then he left.
"You happily married?" she then asked.
"I am," I said, because when you get a question like that, the simplest, straightforward answer is the best.
And then she smiled and said she was glad because she doesn't meet many people who are happily married (I imagine this has something to do with her work environment). "You have a beautiful family," she said.
That made me smile, and I realized perhaps I had read her all wrong. Maybe all she wanted was someone to talk to, someone to make lunch a little less lonely, someone safe, someone different.
We talked a little more, mainly, believe it or not, about existentialism, belief, and truth, and then it was time for me to go. She shook my hand and said goodbye. I wished her well at her conference.
Then I left, but on my way out I looked back and she was pawing the new guy who had taken my seat, the new guy with a name badge around his neck, the new guy who was enjoying every minute of attention by the tipsy stranger at the bar.
Good luck, Cindy. I hope Las Vegas gives you the thing you're looking for.
The day after Christmas we made the long trek to Houston (more accurately, The Woodlands, which is north enough of Houston to have its own name). We ate and ate and played Guitar Hero, which Colleen said I didn't like because it didn't teach science, and, in general, had a jolly good time.
We had to make one long shopping trip to the Galleria one day so Colleen could exchange some clothes and the kids could ice skate at the indoor ice rink. It was there, as we stumbled through the life sapping energy field of the Galleria, and as we walked past some strange lingerie store, that I snapped the Most Awesome and Crazy photo of Alex and his cousin Joseph (seconds later the store clerk chased us away).
Behold:
