Rollin’ Rollin’ Rollin’

I have to drive today. I hate that.

I used to drive a lot, every day. A one hour/one way commute has been about minimum for me since Carter was president. Sometimes, it’s been much longer. I grew to hate it. I hate toll booths and gas stations and signs at night and corrugated pavement. I hate being away from home, ever.

For a while, I had to fly fairly often, too. I’d take those nerve-wracking short flights where the runway seemed only ten feet longer than the plane required; fifteen minutes in the air and then the ground came at you like a freight train. Flying is glamorous. The first time you do it. Then it’s just the bus station squared.

I have to drive to deliver things now and again. I don’t mind that so much. It’s driving to pick up things I hate.

In a business that makes things, logistics is everything now. You’ll hear management course geekspeak about just-in-time inventory and so forth, but all it boils down to is this: if I gotta go rooting around for it, I’ve made a mistake somehow, and I’m wasting time. It’s that simple.

The internet has made the procurement of materials much easier in the last ten years, and I’m mightily grateful for it. It was not always the way.

When I was a manager of another business and charged with hiring many persons, I used to ask a series of questions to potential candidates about what their approach would be if one of our previous customers in upstate Maine called and said there was no hot water in their restaurant, and needed us to fix it. Pronto. We were three or four hours away from this benighted eatery. Just a little exercise, I told them.

Of course it wasn’t. It had happened, when I was being managed and not managing, and I had to deal with it. And so there was a right answer, or a series of them, and I knew them.

I used that little plot device a few dozen times, and nobody ever made it to gools — hot water in the restaurant by the end of the afternoon. I’d give hints, even, but they’d never get it. It was their approach that always killed the prospective applicant. They thought there was a big secret, an answer like in a puzzle. They never realized it was an approach you were looking for, not a secret password or silver bullet or something. How you went about solving a problem at a distance told all. All you had was all you needed, too; a phone and a crummy computer on dial-up. And without fail, when the applicants were told “nope” too many times about their proposed approach, they’d start to tug a bit on their shirt collar, perspire a bit, and offer that they’d drive there right away and handle it themselves if they had to. I guess they read somewhere that managers in the commercial construction business like folks that grab the bull by the horns.

No we didn’t. We still don’t. I don’t want to go anywhere because it’s a symptom now that I overlooked something, and now I have to go somewhere and deal with it. If you’re riding around in the construction business, you’ve failed before you spilled the first coffee in your lap while giving the finger to the first jerk weaving into your lane.

If I was a better manager, I wouldn’t be leaving the shop today, even for a minute.

But then, what would I have written about? See? Multi-tasking, boss.

Buttonhook Right On Three. Your Shoelace Is Untied.

I never played organized football. I was skinny and contemplative, and it never occurred to anyone involved, me included, to even try. But we used to play all the time.

It was like this, in that there were never enough people to make a full team, never mind two. In extremis, the quarterback had to hike the ball to himself. We actually made the fellow turn perpendicular to the line of scrimmage, and toss the ball up in the air and catch it again before he ran or threw it. Hilarious. I remember Danny, one of my friends, hiking the ball to himself; throwing the ball up in the air after receiving his own snap; running underneath his own wild heave of a pass and catching it; then like a final, magnificent capstone to his herculean if bizarre effort, tackling himself by putting his foot in a ground hog hole while picking his way through the cowflaps and tacklers, falling face first into the pasture grass.

I’d pay ten dollars to see it again, but it’s free in my head, and unavailable at any price elsewhere.

The ball often had the bladder bulging out of one or more of the seams or the lacings. To this day, I see professional players throw those marvelous spirals, the camera capturing it revolving slowly as it sails into the galloping wide receiver’s hands, and all I can think is: That’s a nice ball.

We didn’t have any equipment whatsoever. We got smart after a while and wore a half dozen coats or sweaters for the padding, and after the first time being excoriated by your mother for tearing a pocket off the only winter coat you were going to get that year, you learned to put the crummiest garment on the outside.

Once a kind cousin who had become a man and abandoned childish things gave my father his old shoulder pads. My father gave them to me with a straight face. I bet after I skipped elated out of the room with them, his laughter began — and will echo down through the eons like some second big bang. I wore them outside my clothes, the dense fiberglas flaps clacking as I ran and pinching the opponents’ fingers when they tackled me. It is hard to come up with a tableaux more absurd. I must have looked like some insane earthbound Icarus trying to get lift as I ran.

We’d butt heads like rams with our preteen nubbins, bloody our noses and rend our garments literally –figuratively if we were losing, and had a grand time.

The football game is on today, but I am a man now and must work. I will tune it in on the AM radio to carry me along as I bang on my work like a blind cobbler’s thumb. Don’t matter. The faraway crackling descriptions will be better than being there, or that marvelous fraudulent stand-in for being there, the TV.

It will be better because I will see it in my mind’s eye, imagination trumping reality every time, just the same way it did, stumbling and clacking and flapping across Miller’s field all those years ago.

Cloud Nine

All humans have their discontents. We’d all still be living in a cave if we didn’t often scan the horizon and wonder what was possible.

When you are facing challenges, it is always salutary to consider the pleasant things in your life and surroundings that offset the pebbles in your shoe. Such meanderings are a form of gratitude. I have vices by the bushel, of course, but ingratitude is low down on the list. I am often put in wonder at persons that are placed in extreme situations, many which seem for a time hopeless, and then triumph over adversity. The wonder is perhaps not that they did not succumb, but rather that it occurred to them to attempt to persevere in the first place. With some people I’ve met or known about, it can be distilled down to a piquant drop: I’m still above the lawn. Let’s go!

What makes a man happy? Dunno. But I think that I am. It is easy to recall times when I was profoundly unhappy for a time, but in a way hadn’t a care in the world to justify the feeling. There were other times when I’ve been in a mess, and simply heard the squeaky little voice say deddy from down there near the floor, and everything’s all right.

I’ve been right at the door of death a few times. It’s very calm there. I wonder if it’s because you claw and bite and scratch to live the most when you know you’ve squandered or been cheated out of the time you had, and wish to have a chance to catch up on the plus side of the ledger before you go — but if you’ve done all you can do you are content with your lot. Dunno that either, but I’ve always noticed it’s the man losing at cards that wants to stay all night.

I notice also that many persons have a kind of self hypnosis that renders them immortal in outlook, because they are not prepared to be ever nearer to death, day by day, as every day they have is squandered, and they know it. And to deal with themselves, they must deny mortality. Botox for the mind.

I have heard that word deddy a thousand times a thousand times, and considered a thousand times in the moonlight the velvet cheek of the woman that loved me truly. While the cave yawned behind me, filled with the indistinct shadows of those that huddled there for shelter and safety, I inspected the horizon, and walked toward it in the sunshine. I think of all the people chained in the cave, murdered in the cave, crippled in the cave, unable to overcome the timidity that seeps from the cave walls, that couldn’t walk out even if they wanted to, and I’m grateful.

These are little things, I know, but it’s all you ever get in this world.

Watercolor Watercooler Talk

I wonder if Hal Printup had any idea that people would save this. It was attached to a Christmas card, and I’m probably the most obscure recipient of it to Hal. There’s a lovely Christmas wish on the back, which mentions the birth of one of my nephews, who is of course one of Hal’s numerous grandsons.

That grandson came to visit us this summer, and we took him and his older brother to the basketball court, hard by the local beach, and he slam dunked the basketball.

Time flies, Hal. It’s nice you made it stand still in the watercolor for us.

Dying Is Easy; Watercolors Are Hard

Harold Printup is a prince of a guy.

I’ve only met him a few times, but he has a sort of gravitational pull of bonhomie about him. He and his wife Marilyn share a sunny disposition that is written right on their faces. A birthmark of happiness.

Harold, or Hal, if you will, paints watercolors. He is an amateur, in the true sense of the word. He does it for the love of the thing. But there isn’t even a hint of visual karaoke about his work. There’s no “crummy and blissfully unaware” in evidence in his work, and certainly no ” crummy on purpose as a pose,” either. He’s good, and he’s good.

He likes to go to Huntington Lake, apparently, and remember what he was looking at by painting it.

Now, I’ve seen a lot of plein air work in my day. I don’t like most of it. It might be because I’ve fooled around with painting with every darn medium, bad at all of them, but watercolors are impossible. I see watercolors by people like John Singer Sargent and say bah! Get the oils.

Never mind me. I can’t do it. Hal Printup can. Watercolors are immediate, and fast, and capture a scene and mood faster than any medium other than taking a picture. I take that back. The camera just gapes at everything. The photographer must capture with his method as surely as any artist. The end is just more immediate, especially since they’ve begun to rely on ones and zeroes and not silver and chemicals.

Hal and his brethren must go, and look, and see, and feel, and distill, and then inscribe. They are as contemplative as any philosopher, and as skilled as any lapidary.

It’s hard to do, and I hate Harold Printup for his ability where I have none. I asked my brother, his son-in-law, to send me his latest, so I can hang it up next to the others I’ve saved for decades and execrate Hal every day of my life when I see it.

I figured I’d post it on the internet, so you can hate the guy, too. He’s very pleasant, as I’ve said, and needs to be detested for his manifest ability by more people.