High Plains Panhandler

Puppy

Yesterday I held my dog's head close to me and whispered in her ear as I waited for her to die.

Suzanne was with me because without her I couldn't have done it. We both cried.

Our dog, Schlomo, was sixteen years old. We found her, a week old puppy, a little tan ball of fur, at the animal shelter in Austin when I was in graduate school. We loved her very much.

Everyone says their dog is the smartest or quickest or cleverest, so I won't get into that. I know who she was. I know all the strange, miraculous, unbelievable, fantastic things she was able to do.

In the end, she had too much pain, too much to eat or walk or even move. So we chose what was best for her.

I know she trusted us, to the very end she did. And I felt, while we held her at the vet, that I had betrayed her.

But right at the very end, at the very last second, I knew I was wrong.

You see, a long time ago in my search for the perfect dog training method, I had read over and over that dogs, like people, smile when they're happy. I had never seen Schlomo smile, but I can tell you it was quite obvious that she was a happy dog. Running, jumping, licking, chasing, playing - she did it all, and I know it made her happy. I just never saw that smile.

But in the last second before she died, I saw her lips curl up. For the first time, I saw her smile.

Before her head drooped down and her eyes closed completely, I knew that all the pain was gone and she was, once more, a puppy.

My puppy. My dear puppy.

Gusts of Wonderland

The attraction of Wonderland, our home-grown Amarillo amusement park, compelled me to skip Aikido class for a few hours of roller coasters and water rides this past Thursday. At least once a year Suzanne gathers enough moms and families for a Big Night Out (with a discount), and we have a frantic time, cramming in as much fun as possible.

Last year we went with my brother-in-law Mark and sister-in-law Karen and their three kids. They are all from Houston, so we had to show them a super-swell at Wonderland, which is somewhat difficult to do with people who have slightly more amusement park sophistication. Or, rather, people who are used to amusement parks with permanently placed rides.

This isn't to say that Wonderland doesn't have permanent rides. It does, but I think that's because no one can remember how to move them. Most of the rides at Wonderland have the Essence of Carny. By this I mean they leave you wondering about the parking lot carnival the rides originally came from.

Last year Megan's flip-flop came undone, and she wasn't able to walk. I had the great MacGyver genius idea of wrapping her flip-flop with my shoelace, which worked pretty well, but then I had a floppy tennis shoe. So my brother-in-law Mark, through some arcane magic, found a long, yellow nylon cord that was about the same thickness as a shoelace. That brilliant yellow and very long shoelace got me through the night. And the next night. And the next season of lawn mowing. And the entire year.

And so there I was at Wonderland, a year later, with my green-stained lawn mowing shoes, the right one sporting a fancy neon yellow cord holding it together.

Colleen and her friend Franchesca wanted to ride the one thing I dreaded to ride in the evening: the big splash water whatchamacallit that has the singular objective of getting people wet. We rode it once and got soaked. Then we rode it again (why? I cannot say) and our soakness was soaked. When we waddled off the ride I noticed that the temperature had dropped significantly in expectation of a storm that was rolling in. All I could do was shiver and tremble uncontrollably. I feared summertime pneumonia.

The wind gusts started tweny minutes later, big frightful punches of Panhandle wind that immediately forced the park to close. The announcer over the PA sounded a little frantic as he instructed everyone to leave the park NOW.

So we did, and we looked longingly back at Wonderland (after a safe distance) with lightning backlighting the double loop roller coaster, and bid it farewell. Goodbye for another year. Or at least goodbye for a few more weeks. That will give me plenty of time to dry out my one good shoelace and one wretched yellow nylon one and debate the merits of riding anything that soaks my underwear.

Day 10 - Summer 2006 Vacation

3300 miles later and we're back home. The drive, relatively short (four hours from Oklahoma City to Amarillo) was filled with wind and ever decreasing heights of trees.

Picts are here. Now it's time to mow the lawn and give the dog a bath. Hoo boy!

Day 9 - Summer 2006 Vacation

I woke up this morning thinking I was on a slab of concrete, something not even Spike the vampire from Buffy the Vampire Slayer would find comfortable.

Last night we found a quick and cheap hotel on the outskirts of Atlanta, and since it had rooms available, we snagged it. It was a Microtel, and we kept making jokes about how everything was going to be teeny-tiny when we got there.

It wasn't uncomfortable really. It just wasn't memorable, although the ambience right out our window from the Pink Pony adult dancing venue (with valet parking!) helped a little. In the morning we all huddled together downstairs for the little breakfast with its tiny cups of juice and odd little bite sized muffins. At a table next to us sat a stern looking woman and an older man who was hunched over studying his Bible. I'm glad he was getting some food for his soul because I'll tell you, there wasn't a lot of food for the tummy there.

Soon after that we saw person after person come through the lobby, all wearing Salvation Army uniforms and carrying dour expressions. As we were driving away, I noticed a block down from the hotel was the Salvation Army Southern Territory Headquarters building. What a strange pairing! The Salvation Army headquarters was on one end of the block, the headquarters of nude dancing was on the other. There was more parking available for nude dancing.

Then we drove. And we drove. And we drove. And we would have made better time but Suzanne just had to follow my pathetic navigation through downtown Birmingham, Alabama instead of around it, just as I should have told her.

There's not much to say here except we drove from Atlanta to Oklahoma City and still retained some of our sanity. That was a long trip. Here are some highlights:

1. A bumper sticker in Mississippi that said, "Enjoy the Ten Commandments!"
2. A scary Ronald McDonald torso sticking out of the front of a McDonald's, which inspired me to make unfunny quantum and teleportation jokes (that Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen entanglement is a hoot!).
3. A sign for Toad Suck state park (I had to look that up and make sure it was a real place).
4. A billboard for "OJ's Cleaning Service: No one can lay a glove on us." Nice.

Tomorrow - four more hours to go.

Day 8 - Summer 2006 Vacation

The beach and Tybee Island were quick memories as we hit the road once again for Atlanta. Compared to the upcoming drive home, this was a short jaunt, and we arrived a little after lunch.

We debated what to do first, but ended up (mainly due to following the first signs we saw) at the Carter Presidential Museum and Library. Unlike the Clinton museum, which was brash and gleaming, the Carter museum is nested in a forest, consumed by shade and meditation. It was tranquil there and very relaxing.

We toured the museum and overheard a volunteer tour guy talk about the time she was in the middle of a handshake with the president and the pope, a little Zelig moment I gathered.

The main theme of the Carter museum was evaluating his presidency in relation to other presidents of the 20th century. We saw this in the introductory video (boy, can these things really get dated!), in a display along the main wall, and throughout the smaller displays in the museum. One of the most interesting displays was the one dedicated to Carter's Nobel Peace Prize. I had never seen a Nobel prize before. It looked like a large gold foil chocolate coin.

We didn't have much time, so we decided to go to the World of Coca-Cola after that (we had talked about going to the new Georgia aquarium, but since it cost roughly $5000 a person, we opted for something cheaper). They charge to get into the World of Coca-Cola, and I don't understand why because it's simply a marketing bonanza about the greatness of Coke. One display after another talked up the history of Coke, the history of the trademark (an accountant created the swirly logo), the protection of the trademark, the importance of the trademark, and the marketing success that is Coke. Holy smokes. After sitting in a Coke theater (the sign said it was Atlanta's first high definition digital theater, but it showed movie made in 1990) and being bombarded with commercial after commercial, I wanted Coke to pay me!

(Oddly there was nothing anywhere about Coke's history with cocaine.)

The highlight, of course, is the tasting room where you can sample, get this, Coke. Sure, there was all sorts of other stuff: Sprite, Tab, Poweraid, and some drinks from other countries (avoid the Italian drink - it's wretchedly nasty), and in the end we were so full of carbonation and sugar even Fizzy Lifting Drink wouldn't have sounded good. Bleech.

We burped our way to the van, drove around a bit, and ended up in Buckhead, which is a swanky part of Atlanta. We found a nice, quiet residential lane, parked in some shade, and walked through the neighborhood to the Buckhead Diner where we had a very nice dinner. When I took Alex to the restroom, I was able to take a look at the wall of celebrity photos. When I found the one of MacGyver, I knew we were in the right place.

Tomorrow - the long drive to almost-home.

Day 7 - Summer 2006 Vacation

The thing about the beach is this: it doesn't change much. This morning we had more more beach time, and we took a long stroll on the beach where we found several interesting shells, half a sand dollar, and a few signs in the water that said, "Dangerous currents. Do not come past this sign." I found this intriguing and wanted to venture out past those signs because a close-by sandbar tempted me. But dying is a powerful disincentive. That, and I didn't set a bad example for the kids.

That afternoon we rented some bikes and rode to the historic lighthouse on the end of the island. The bikes were too big for Alex, so I towed him in a trailer along with our lunch cooler. The bike ride was very pleasant, and we stopped for a nice lunch at a park near the lighthouse.

The lighthouse, condemned to a life as a park and gift shop after being usurped by technology, has 178 steps to its top. We trudged to the top and, once there on a narrow observation platform, we had a fantastic view of the island. Down below we took a tour of the keeper's house (now renovated) and found out he had four kids and had to make the journey to the top of the lighthouse with a giant can of oil every four hours.

I thought I'd play a joke on the kids, so I rushed upstairs and hid behind a dresser in one of the renovated bedrooms. Then I started moaning like a ghost, "Whhhooooooo whooooooo!" I looked up a few seconds later to see the kids and Suzanne piled up in the doorway looking at my reflection in a mirror across the room.

"We can see you Daddy," said Colleen.
"Whhhhooooo?" I said, ducking and pretending all was creepy.

We rode back to the condo, took a little air-conditioned break and then hit the beach one last time, just to walk around. We set up a game of dots in the sand. (This is the game where you start with a grid of, say, ten dots by ten dots; the object is to connect two dots with a straight line. If you connect two dots and make a box with three other previously drawn lines, you put your initial in the box and then go again.) I dug a grid of about 15 feet a side, digging the dots in the sand with my heel. As we played, I drew my lines (and dug the kid's lines deeper) with my big toe, and at the end of the game the side of my toe was rough, ragged, and on the edge of bleeding. I got some strange looks from quite a few beach people as I limped away from the game board.

After the game, Megan had the great idea to trace our shadows in the sand. The sun was close to setting, so our shadow tracings looked as if they we had done them of tall, skinny aliens from Close Encounters.

Dinner was at a fried seafood place (the Crab Shack the other night fried nothing, so this restaurant came in a crummy second place), and I swore up and down that I saw the guy who placed Michael Garibaldi from the TV show Babylon 5, which got me thinking about what character actors do when their gig is over. Do they tell their friends they used to save the pretend universe but now hang out in Georgia eating soft shell crab? Do they ever get used to dorks coming up to them and saying, "Yo. What's up with them Vorlons?"

Tomorrow - sell me more sugar water, baby!

Day 6 - Summer 2006 Vacation

After consulting the Internets, I knew the secret to constructing the Most Awesome, Spectacular, and Fantastical sandcastle Tybee Island - no, strike that - the State of Georgia would ever see. So we slathered up with enough SPF Nuclear Winter sunscreen and headed for the beach. After consulting the tide charts, Suzanne picked out a nice towel spot pretty far from the water, explaining that high tide would be at noon, but the water shouldn't come to our camp.

Well, as the beach's self-appointed sandcastle expert, I scoffed at that. I picked a very nice spot about ten feet closer to the ocean because I knew high tide simply couldn't come so far up the beach in just a handful of hours.

I based these conclusions on all the beaches I've visited in Amarillo.

The first order of business was to build a good, solid base for my soon-to-be 14 foot high sandcastle. Megan, Alex, and set up a construction quarry a few feet away from our castle location (we did this to avoid marring our beautiful location) and starting digging. We loaded bucket after bucket with sand, lugged them back to our site, and dumped them for the base. This was, unfortunately, hard work, and after the first six or so buckets Megan and Alex decided to talk an extended break and play in the water.

After about an hour, our sandcastle had reached the soaring height of eight inches, which wasn't even large enough to hold the wine cellar and torture chamber. I went to dig out another bucket of sand when I noticed the ocean had crept up on us and was now ten feet away. We still had an hour left before high tide.

So Megan and I changed our construction plan and put all our energy into digging a moat around our flat rectangle of a castle. We figured that if we dug deep enough, we'd be able to hold back the entire Atlantic Ocean.

Alas, however, not even the power of the ocean can match the power of exhaustion. By the time we made the second layer of castle cake, all of us had had it. So we made some quick doors, a window here and there, threw a feather on the top and called it a day. High tide brought the water line right to our moat, filling it, but the castle survived (until high tide again in the middle of the night, which washed over everything and left a significantly disturbing Mafia-inspired body-sized lump of sand on the beach).

Our beach plan was pretty simple: beach in the morning, something else in the afternoon. This particular afternoon we decided to go to the Fort Pulaski National Monument, which was a mile inland from Tybee Island. Fort Pulaski sits on the Savannah River and was built to protect Savannah from the British or French, but its big claim to fame came during the Civil War. At the time, the fort was thought to be impenetrable, protected by water, marsh, thick brick walls, and an entire mess of cannons. The Union army landed a mile away on Tybee Island and starting shelling the fort with a new kind of cannonball. Unlike old round ones (which would do no damage to the fort), the Union forces shot an brand new elongated cannonball from a newly invented rifle cannon and breached the fort in about 30 hours. The fort commander surrendered (he was afraid all his munitions would explode next), and everyone then realized this was the end of the brick garrison. It completely changed how armies had to build their next generation of forts.

You get to hear this story a lot on Tybee Island.

The fort is now a very pleasant place to walk around. I kept trying to convince the kids that the fort was named after the somewhat unpleasant Doctor Pulaski on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but they refused to believe me. There is a moat (a little better than our sandcastle moat), and it is actually filled with alligators. A sign near the fort says, "This fort was designed for war not safety. Have a safe visit."

For dinner we decided to have a shrimp boil and eat on the balcony of our condo. Suzanne knew where the best fresh seafood place was, and right when we were turning into its small parking lot, a grumpy old man came out the front door, flipped the Open sign to Closed, and got in his pickup truck. We pulled up next to him, but he didn't pay any attention and he drove away. Even though we were there an hour before closing, and even through we were inches from his car window, he had places to go. We were a little stumped at this fabulous customer service, but as we were driving to another store, we suddenly understood it all. The grumpy old man's pickup truck was parked in front of XYZ Liquors.

I guess it's hard to chop off fish heads all day long.

Tomorrow - 178 steps to the top of the lighthouse.