Friends, A Lake Setting, and Old School Schlitz

We often enjoy the camaraderie experienced when we gather with a dinner club with which Suzie has been associated for about three decades. As is commonly the case with such groups, the location of dinner club events is rotated among the homes of the participating couples. We additionally get together for a shared meal at a restaurant on occasion.

One of the couples shares with siblings in the family a quintessential lake house near Laurie, Missouri, at the Lake of the Ozarks, and the rest of us are blessed by invitation to relax there over a weekend and bask in collective friendship a time or two each year. We enjoyed just such a gathering two weekends ago.

We boated all over the lake. Suzie proved her continuing youthfulness by waterskiing as adeptly as a teenager. Unfortunately for me, she was at the tail end of her endurance when she failed to catch my favorite bucket hat with her knees when it blew off of my head and flew between her legs. Games such as Apples to Apples and Catch Phrase were played to stave off the diminishment of our old minds. Way too much good food was consumed, and as a Louisiana native, I fully endorse such behavior.

It seems that there is always some bonus moment associated with these trips to the lake. On one occasion, Suzie and I stopped at an antique shop in the little town of Cole Camp on the way home. We found for a bargain price a silver plate tomato spoon that has added to our joy of eating sliced homegrowns each season. This time one of the dinner club guys brought a half-case of Schlitz beer. I had been seeing news items and ads that mentioned that Schlitz was being reintroduced with its original formula that put it in the top two American beers in the Sixties and Seventies.

When I was in college, I had to develop a taste for beer. Had might seem to be a strong word, but I was in school in Louisiana, so it truly was a necessity. As I did so, I finally settled on Schlitz as my brew of choice. Formula changes, a strike, and a buyout by Stroh’s of Detroit queered the beer. Now under ownership of Pabst and using the old original formula, Schlitz is back! When I took my first swallow two weekends ago, I knew my favorite beer had returned in all its original splendor. It was like a swallow of the longneck I ordered on the first day they sold beer at the LSU Union back in 1969.

Finally, here's another bonus moment by means of a picture of a billboard advertising a drinking establishment near the Lake of the Ozarks. I'll bet an Old School Schlitz could be enjoyed there.

The Applied Science of Turns of Phrase

A writer I am, and it has nothing to do with “green eggs and ham.” As such, I am an avid fan of those who have mastered the art of turning a phrase. In this regard, I confess that I indulge in the sincerest form of flattery. My emulation has on occasion resulted in my phrases being called twisted rather than turned. I admit that I do it on purpose to make my readers think about what I have written.

A famous New York editor recently told me that some of my twisting is okay, and some should go away. That and other of her suggestions are why I am in process of rewriting parts of my novel about a twisted serial killer and his pursuers. Apparently, there are many out there who can be emulated. "Simplify, simplify."

We are all familiar with masters like Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, and Will Rogers. In Poor Richard’s Almanac, Franklin said, “Fish and visitors stink after three days.” When I stay with her in Baton Rouge, my mom would tell you that his aphorism holds true.

One group of guys who have been known to turn a good phrase is Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, Bill Engvall and Ron White of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. Foxworthy has even mastered bleeding a phrase like a turnip with that redneck thing.

Yogi Berra is another fellow who I think fits the mold of blue collar wordsmith. He would probably fit right in on the tour. It is indisputable that he can grind the language with the best of them: Dubya, Joe Biden, Dan Quayle. Both as a catcher and a manager, he certainly proved he knew “strategery.”

Suzie and I were riding our bikes one day when I pulled to a stop on a cul-de-sac and bent over to pick something up. She turned and asked why I had halted. I held up the cheap stainless fork I had plucked from the pavement and then stored it away in my bike pouch. When she asked why I wanted it, I matter-of-factly reminded her that the venerable philosopher, Lawrence Peter Berra, said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” I liken this “Yogiism” to this excerpt from Frost:

“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

The eating utensil is now one of the treasures stored in a shadowbox hanging on the wall of my study, a manifest version of “memories pressed between the pages of my mind.” One of the items contained there is the napkin on which I wrote Suzie’s address and phone number on Halloween night in 1992 so I could ask her out for the very first time.

Now I take you back to the beginning and the “green eggs and ham.” Theodor Seuss Geisel didn’t turn his phrases or even twist them, I have found. It seems to me he curved them to meet each other in “identicality” of sound.

We Need Ahnold to the Rescue!

An Associated Press article with a Chino, California, dateline on Yahoo! News caught my attention with the headline, “Some Calif. kids may get 34 extra school days.” The problem stems from the occasional trimming of school days to allow for teacher preparation.

Here is the gist of the article:

State law requires that shortened days must be at least 180 minutes in length. According to an internal audit, 34 days at two elementary schools in Chino did not meet that standard, having been trimmed to 170 or 175 minutes. Consequently, those days do not count at all toward the minimum number of days required to equal a school year. A spokesperson for State Department of Higher Education said the legislature made the requirements stringent on purpose to dissuade school districts from committing willy-nilly day shaving.

Leave it to the bureaucrats to try to cover their tracks. A district associate superintendent who is already scheduled to retire this year has taken blame. The district’s PR machine is trumpeting benefits of the mandatory summer school session that will “feature extra arts, music and science and give students a head start on next year’s curriculum.”

What about the enrichment those kids will lose by not attending the summer camps for which their parents booked them? What about the vacation reservations made by families that will now have to be foregone? What about the teachers who had summer employment lined up? What about a lot of stuff that is taking a backseat to bureaucratic stupidity and the so-called tough stance of the legislature?

Assume a 10 minute shave for each of the 34 days in question. That’s 340 minutes. A regular day for elementary students is, what, 360 minutes, including lunch and recesses. So, all of this havoc and deprivation of childhood is, in essence, all about a tad less than one regular school day.

Give me a break. I think the Kindergarten Cop, AKA The Governator, needs to get involved here. Come on, Ahnold, make these yahoos do the right thing, and give these kids their summer vacation back.

Bearly Getting By

My grandfather came from Iowa farming stock, but a congenital heart problem prevented his pursuit of the farming life. The bad ticker eventually took him away from us at the young age of 52 back in 1958. Being an artistic young man, he took to the road and made a living for a while as a sign painter, first in Jackson, Mississippi, and then in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

One of the gigs often available for sign painters in that day was the painting of showroom windows for automobile dealerships, and my grandfather came to regularly decorate the windows of a Chevrolet dealership in Big BR with slogans, announcements of sales, and the like. The dealer liked him and told him he thought he could make more money selling cars for him than painting his windows. Dee-Daddy, which is what I called my grandfather, took him up on the offer, found the dealer was right, and ultimately started his own Chevy dealership a few years later.

One of the first jobs Dee-Daddy did as a sign painter in Red Stick (English for Baton Rouge) was to paint a sign for a local retail outlet called Hebert Store. Being from Iowa, he thought Hebert was pronounced Hee-Bert. Through his involvement in the creation of the Hebert Store signage, he learned that it was actually pronounced A-Bear. That’s how the store’s original sign came to include a picture of a big A with a bear leaning against it.

I now live in a Kansas suburb just across the state line from Kansas City, Missouri. My drive home from work each day has in recent months started stirring nostalgic thoughts of my grandfather and my old hometown. The St. Agnes School has adorned its front lawn with a large plaster cast of its mascot. As you can see he is a handsome bear wearing a jersey bearing (get it) a big A for Agnes.

The fiction writer in me likes to think this is manifest evidence of the creativity of Louisianans as they make their way through a tough economy. You’ve got to give credit to that Hebert fellow for poking around and finding a school mascot job all the way up here in the Midwest. Of course, he might not be so happy with the position when he finds out how hard it is to get crawfish here.

Smoke and Mirrors

My last cigarette was smoked on August 30, 2005. Suzie and I were joined in wedlock on that date two years prior. As our nuptials approached and for a goodly period before that, my daughters and her daughters often hammered us about needing to leave tobacco behind. To shut them up, I said that we would quit two years after our wedding. I’ll be damned if they didn’t remember my promise.

Suzie’s crutch was a pill called Wellbutrin. I had read that heavier smokers had better success with Nicorette gum, so that was what I used. In my heart of hearts, I did not think I would be able to pull it off. Despite that, I started weeks ahead of time psyching myself up for the huge challenge. I began with a 100-count box of gum at the 4 mg nicotine strength. Then I did two boxes at the 2 mg strength. When I finally switched to regular rather than nicotine gum, it was early February and only a few 2 mg pieces remained.

I found that my level of addiction to nicotine was lower than I thought. The gum label said you could use up to eight pieces a day, but I never used more than four. The oral fixation was apparently a big deal for me. One piece of the gum might last me four or five hours, way beyond the 15 minutes it takes for the nicotine to be used up and long after the not-too-good-anyway flavor was gone.

Though I read a lot of material about quitting before leaping off the cliff, I never saw anything about what turned out to be the final piece of the puzzle for me. Though cigarettes are stimulants due to their nicotine content, most smokers will tell you that they get a sense of relaxation from them. I was doing okay early on, but something was missing. About a week after my last cigarette, I discovered that the relaxation did not come from the nicotine. No. It came from the deep breaths taken with the first drag or two on a cigarette. From that point forward, I was pretty much home free. Every time I felt like I needed that relaxing feeling, I’d suck in and exhale a breath or two of air in much the same way I might take a couple of long drags. It worked for me.

I’m glad I quit and wish I had done it sooner. Whatever long-term health consequences there will be, I don’t know. It is my hope that the stories you hear about how pink your lungs get a while down the road are true. I breathe better now. I’m not always hacking and coughing anymore. Being a non-smoker is a good thing.

All that said, I have a few smoking stories that might provide a chuckle:

Some comedian was on the Tonight Show back in the Carson days. As Dean Martin used to do, this guy was holding a drink in one hand and a smoke in the other. All during his stand-up routine, this fellow waived and poked the cigarette hand around to add emphasis or color to his stories and jokes. Near the end, he let the cigarette catch his eye then looked sheepishly beyond it at the audience. He said, “Yeah, I know I should quit, but I’ve made a commitment here. I’m in it for the duration. Besides, the way I figure, maybe two or three months from now there’ll be, what, three or four of us treading water out at the three-mile limit.

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One day about 13 or 14 years ago, a co-worker passed by some smoker buddies and me in the parking lot of the building in which we worked. It was a below-freezing day, and he said, “I don’t know how you guys can stand being out here in the cold to smoke.”

I said, “Well, what you don’t understand is that when the nuclear winter does come, I will be used to the severe temperatures and you will not. I will live, and you will die. The bonus is that the radiation will cure my cancer.”

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People smoke with their booze and with their coffee. They smoke after meals and after sex. There are some folks, though, who smoke during sex, some because they're good at it and others because they're bored.


Now that the smoke is gone, I can see myself better in the mirror.