Closed for the Summer

This is my 50th(!) post, and I think it's time for a hiatus. Actually, I have no choice -- my brain is on strike and refuses to negotiate. So I'm going to take the next few months to come up with some fresh ideas (maybe) and return in the fall (probably). This will be good for me, as I've been neglecting my other writing duties lately. There's a chance I'll pop in now and then if something interesting occurs to me (don't hold your breath). Otherwise, see you in September (The Happenings, 1966).

Credits:

This blog has been brought to you courtesy of the following downtown Boise sponsors. (Not really. They have nothing to do with this. But I like these places and you should, too.)

Rainbow Books (say hi to Laurie and Lindy!)

Blooms Flower Studio (say hi to Julie and her dog Charlie!)

Yokozuna Teriyaki (don't say hi because I don't know anyone there, but they have the best teriyaki in town)

DK Donuts (don't say hi there either because I've given up donuts and I'm sure they've forgotten me, but try the maple bars)

The Flicks movie theater (nope, nobody, but if you show them my picture I'm sure they'll recognize me)

Klutz

I like to think of myself as being couth, coordinated, even graceful. But I need to face reality: I'm just clumsy. Most people would probably say I'm no clumsier than they are, but when it's you being clumsy all the time, it's hard to be objective.

Cases in point:

When I was eight, I broke my arm trying to ride my bike over one of those parking lot bumper curbs. Two other boys were doing it, too, but I was the one with the bright idea of turning the curb around so that the straight vertical side was facing me. Six weeks in a cast. Years later, I was riding a bike along the side of the road when my front tire got caught in the rut of the curb (a different kind of curb, but still a curb) and flipped me down onto the street. Two broken ribs. I've learned to stay away from curbs of all kinds. I don't even curb my appetite.

When I was ten, I slipped off the end of a diving board at summer camp and hit my head on the way down. I had to be fished out by one of the counselors in front of all the other boys. Birds and stars over my head. He suggested I walk to the end of the board instead of running, and I haven't run since. I didn't even dive for a few decades. When I finally decided to, though (just a few weeks ago, in fact), I found I'd lost the knack and could only belly flop. Red stomach.

One of my high school jobs was stocking dairy products in the cooler of a 7-11. I was the kid whose hand you'd see shoving the milk and eggs up to the front of the rows behind the glass doors. As you probably know, the entrance to those coolers is a door very large and extremely heavy. The one at this store also swung open left toward the glass door farthest to the right. It's just common sense to assume those doors have springs to stop their momentum when you pull them open. Ha. One night, with my hands full, I managed to crack open the door just enough to get my shoe inside and swing it wide enough to let me in. Next thing I knew, I heard the shattering of glass and the "Whoa!" of my fellow employee. I'd lasted at that job a full week, which at that point was a record for me.

I don't know if you can technically call the next series of accidents "accidents" in the sense that it was my fault. My knees are built funny. Each leg has one tiny bone missing that helps support the patella on the side facing the patella in the other leg. In other words, on rare occasions, I'm prone to dislocation. This is the worst pain I've ever felt (worse than a cortisone shot or listening to Madonna give an interview). The first time it happened, I was climbing up a grassy slope beside a canal. It's funny how the mind works. Because it had never happened before, I had no idea what had just happened and therefore it didn't hurt as much as the others would later on. In fact, as the paramedics were helping me to the ambulance, the kneecap just simply slipped back into place. Easy peasy.

The second time it happened, I was doing cartwheels in a friend's front yard at night. (OK, yes, I was all of 17, but I was a silly 17.) This was just a few months after the first knee had given way, and I think I'd been relying too heavily on the second one to support my weight. This time the thunk of it even told my friend something was terribly wrong, and I was in considerable agony there on the grass. An ambulance showed up, and one of the paramedics threw a sheet over me to keep me warm until they could get the stretcher out of the back. Maybe this paramedic was new or something, but he draped the sheet right up over my head. Meanwhile, my friend's parents drove up and promptly panicked. They were certain their son was lying dead on their front lawn. His mother rushed over, lifted the sheet just far enough to see that I wasn't her son, cried, "Oh, thank God," and covered my face again. She liked me, really she did.

The last time it happened, I was vacuuming. (Let this be a lesson to you clean freaks.) I crouched down to pull some wires out of the way beneath a table, and I made the mistake of twisting my body too far in one direction with my legs still in full crouch mode. Down I went. What made this the worst dislocation of all was that I was alone and not expecting visitors, so in order to get to the phone to call for assistance, I had to slap the knee back into place myself. I only made things worse, though, when I slapped it in the wrong direction. I ended up in a major, all-but-debilitating splint and crutches for many weeks. When I hobbled into work my first day back and told my coworkers what had happened, one of the guys whispered, "Shh! For God's sake, tell people it was a football injury."

Boot camp. I was too uncoordinated to carry a rifle (or "piece"), so I was a guide-on, which meant I carried one of the flags ahead of the company when we were marching. The flag was attached to a long, hollow, metal pole. One day, I heard something rattling inside the pole, maybe a tiny pebble. I shoved my finger inside of it as if this was going to do anything but get my finger stuck, which is what happened. The guys all crowded around me in the head as our Recruit Chief Petty Officer tried to remove my finger with warm soap and water. It was a festive atmosphere. Weeks later, just before graduation, two of the guys told me that was their favorite part of boot camp.

I see I'm being longwinded again (or "longfingered," since I'm typing), so here are some other highlights in brief:

Discovering that I have no equilibrium when wearing French earplugs. A sign language class I took in college went on a soundless field trip to a local sub shop for lunch, and I kept knocking the student beside me off the sidewalk and into the gutter.

Falling down during an 8-mile run and tearing a rotator cuff, only I didn't discover it for months until I turned my arm just right. Because it had been so long, bursitis had developed, and the surgeon said afterwards that it had been one of his most interesting procedures. He even pulled out some nifty color photos to show me.

Dropping a plate of flaming cherries jubilee onto someone's table at a church dinner.

Leaning on a friend's lit cigarette on a pool table.

Trying to stop a fire in my fondue pot by putting it under running water, which promptly scorched my ceiling. (Yes, I know now to cover it instead.)

Leaning my hand on a heavy wooden TV stand with a humungous old box TV on it and having the whole thing come crashing down with me on top of it. (I was dusting at the time. I really need to stop doing housework.) Two years later, I still have the remnant of a scrape across my stomach, which someone recently mistook for a surgical scar.

Finally, last week I cut myself opening a new box of tin foil. I was being very careful, sliding my finger inch by inch beneath the sealed flap, but I guess I wasn't careful enough. Those little metal teeth are fierce, and the pain was somewhere between a Madonna interview and listening to "The Twelve Days of Christmas." A Band-Aid wouldn't do it, as this was more than a cut; it was an open flap of skin through which my blood couldn't wait to flee from, as if it feared my next mishap. I had to wrap my finger in a gauze pad and hold it firm with a rubber band. Almost as painful: trying to lift the gauze pad off to replace it. Yikes!

So there you have it, Exhibits A through N. I could just as easily have rattled off a list of times when I didn't have an accident, but would a list of exhibits A through C even be worth it?

Famous People I Have (Never) Known

Welcome to Vince's Blog, Namedropper Edition. I've run across numerous famous people over the years, and I thought I'd take this special time to tiptoe barefoot through the memories of just some of these illustrious personages (as if they'd care). I'm omitting celebrities seen in concert, since I've been to a lot of concerts and anyway it's not the same thing. I'm also skipping Broadway actors and actresses I met outside stage doors with other fans, since I saw a lot of shows back when they were affordable to ordinary humans.

The first famous person I ever "saw" was John F. Kennedy, though I wouldn't know this if my father hadn't told me at the time. We were stuck in traffic somewhere in Miami during JFK's presidency, and it turned out that the jam was because his motorcade was crossing the intersection ahead of us. All I remember is the roar of motorcycles and someone's arm waving from a convertible. I assume it was his and not Jackie's.

But that didn't make me a Democrat any more than this made me a Republican. In 1968, when the GOP arrived in Miami for its presidential convention, two conservative friends of mine who were volunteering for Nixon invited me to join them as a volunteer. I had no allegiances and no political leanings at all, so I said sure, why not? We went to Miami International Airport to greet Spiro Agnew's plane on the tarmac with a throng of other supporters. Agnew was Nixon's VP running mate (who, like the latter, would turn out to be a criminal just a few years later). He came down the airplane steps and stopped to sign the bumper stickers wrapped around our Styrofoam campaign hats. I didn't have a bumper sticker on mine, but I handed my hat to him anyway. His pen broke right through. I told him that was OK, the little wet blot would do.

When our family moved into a brand-new housing development in Hialeah a few years earlier, Dan Blocker of Bonanza fame signed autographs in the model home that served as the development company's office. I have no idea why he was there -- Palm Springs North wasn't exactly the Ponderosa -- but he was very friendly, and when he shook my hand it was like the Jolly Green Giant crushing Tom Thumb.

In the early '70s, I was one degree of separation from Sonny Bono. He and Cher were performing at the Deauville Hotel on the beach, and my girlfriend was working there when she saw him cross the lobby with photographers in tow. She told me later he was the most handsome man she had ever seen. (What did that say about me?)

When I moved north and worked and went to school in New York City, I ran into my share of famous people on the streets, a semi-common occurrence there.

I saw Otto Preminger drop a dollar into a blind man's cup. This was contrary to his reputation, and I took a good look to be sure it was Preminger. It was.

I was crossing a side street in the theater district, not watching where I was going, when I literally ran into Jason Robards Jr. coming from the opposite direction. Since we both had to keep from tumbling down, I decided it was too awkward a moment to ask for his autograph. Anyway, I had such great respect for him as an actor that I'm sure I would have been tongue-tied. (His cameo in Melvin and Howard is one of the greatest supporting performances I've ever seen.)

My wife and I were walking through Central Park when Welcome Back, Kotter's Robert Hegyes (Juan Epstein) and his wife stopped us to ask for directions. That was a defining moment, since I finally felt like a real New Yorker, having someone else ask me how to get somewhere. There was a memorable moment when I first opened my mouth to say I knew who he was but he smiled in a knowing way that meant, "Yeah, it's me, but please don't make a fuss." They were friendly, regular folks, and I hoped we didn't get them too lost.

I went to see The Steinettes in a little uptown club, where they'd made the move from street corner singing to cabaret. Glenda Jackson came in and sat a few tables away. I felt bad for the Steinettes, because after the show the entire small audience rushed to Jackson's table to touch the hem of her garment. (I mean, heck, they don't even rate boldface here.)

Since I've always been on the periphery of po biz, I won't mention the various poets I've encountered, except for two: Down in Greenwich Village, at Chumley's, a literary bar that used to be a speakeasy back in the 1920s, I went to see Marilyn Hacker read her works. Another poet, Marie Ponsot, was sitting beside her. What makes the moment so memorable is that just as Hacker rose to approach the front of the room, Ponsot tugged on her blouse and whispered that her fly was down. I was seated behind them and overheard this. I love Hacker's formalist poetry and had eagerly awaited this reading, but that's the only single moment I remember from that day.

I saw a dead ringer for George McGovern at Mid-Continent Airport in Wichita, Kansas, and was so tempted to walk up and say who he reminded me of, but I didn't. Sure enough, a couple hours later, I learned that George McGovern was in town to speak at Wichita State that evening. He'd been one of my few political heroes, and I'm still kicking myself. (With each passing campaign season, he looks better and better.)

Here's the strangest encounter I had: In 1976, I made a pilgrimage to Massachusetts to visit Winthrop and Wellesley, the towns where Sylvia Plath had lived first as a child and then as a young woman. I was an ardent devotee of her poetry (especially Ariel), and, as a fledgling poet myself as well as a college English major whose focus was on Plath's entire oeuvre, I felt compelled to be there. Call it a pricey field trip. Anyway, in Wellesley, I found the house she'd lived in through her school years and where she'd attempted the suicide that became the focus of her only novel, The Bell Jar. I was a cocky lad and went right up and knocked on the front door, planning to say who I was and what I was doing there and ask if the current owners had any thoughts about the house's famous former resident. Well, the door opened, and my voice curled up in my throat and took a nose dive into my stomach. Aurelia Plath, Sylvia's elderly mother, was standing there. It had never occurred to me that she might not only still be alive but be living in the same house. I stammered something about her daughter and my admiration, and she sweetly acknowledged that yes, Sylvia certainly was her daughter, all the while fumbling for a pair of white gloves from a table beside the door. I suspect this strange guy trembling in the doorway spooked her, because as she put on the gloves she apologized for having to go out and excused me if she didn't continue our conversation. I thanked her for her time and walked out to the sidewalk and right into a tree. I kept looking back at the house for a couple of blocks, and sure enough she never did go out. I didn't blame her.

Finally, my greatest celebrity memory, forever etched in the stone obelisk of my brain:

I finagled an interview with Liza Minnelli for my high school paper in 1970. She was staying at the Playboy Hotel on Miami Beach, and for some reason I'd thought she'd be fielding questions in one of the big banquet rooms. Instead, I was directed to a room on one of the higher floors, where she sat curled up on a sofa while six or seven legitimate journalists were engaged in mid-conversation with her. They'd evidently been at it for some time, as Minnelli's publicist (or whoever) broke it up shortly afterwards. She had two white poodles milling around, and when I stepped into the long hallway, one of Minnelli's poodles tore through the door and made a dash for the opposite end. The publicist came out behind me and called him back. Well, he came running back all right, but instead of following her into the room, he latched onto one of my legs and started humping away. This, folks, is my greatest brush with fame. Envious, aren't you?

Water

I wrote about ducks in a recent post. Now I want to write about water. A logical progression.

Seventy percent of our bodies is water. Experts say we should drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day, presumably to make up for the other thirty percent. I drink bottled water, which isn't the same as drinking out of glasses; I wonder if that counts.

I used to think people who drank bottled water were just being pretentious. "Oh, look at me, I drink bottled water, it's your serve, Muffy." Then I realized I wasn't drinking enough water by the glass. Too much trouble walking out to the well and back every hour. And what about when I was out and about? Carrying all those glasses to fill at water fountains was just cumbersome. So one day I noticed that a gazillion bottles of water only cost about $3 at my local supermarket. We'd gone from Perrier to generic house brands in just two decades. I realized it was OK for me to drink bottled water without having to tie a cashmere sweater around my neck. I've been drinking it ever since.

I think we've gotten past the era when what we drank was an indication of our social status (unless it's a bottle of Domaine Armaud Rousseau Pere et Fils Chambertin Grand Cru, which is French for "I'm better than you"). Today we'd just laugh at a Coke commercial I saw back in the '80s, which showed a guy on a tennis court holding up a bottle of Coke and saying -- I'm not making this up -- "It's conducive to my personal lifestyle." Coke contains orthophosphoric acid, which is highly corrosive. I hope that guy is rusting in a junkyard somewhere.

Of course, water serves many purposes. I grew up swimming in it. That's a no-win situation, though. Salt water in the ocean is bad for you if you swallow it. I swallowed lots of it when my family took my sister and me to the beach every weekend. It's hard to keep your mouth closed when you're eight years old and a wave that could sink a battleship slams into you. (Actually, they were just gentle swells, but I was a puny eight-year-old.) I felt much safer swimming in community pools. But chlorinated water can lead to respiratory defects, neurological dysfunction, and colorectal cancer. I guess I was just lucky. These days, no one seems to mind when I wear my armored diving suit to the Y.

I guess water is becoming scarce in this country. Most of the restaurants I eat at only serve water on request. That didn't used to be the case. Requesting water in a restaurant is tantamount to hearing "Press 1 for English" on the phone. It should be a given, right? Down the street at my neighborhood ice cream stand, where I go for my weekly dipped cone (my doctor says I'm not getting enough chocolate), it costs extra for a cup of water. The cost -- I'm not making this up, either -- is for "material and labor." I'll bet you didn't know that each Styrofoam cup is constructed by a crew of Teamsters back in the kitchen and that it takes three employees to haul one to the pickup window.

Water is also essential for taking a shower or, if you're fabulously wealthy, a bath. I used to have a bathtub, but I'm on a fixed income now. Still, I'm better off than I once was, when renting an affordable apartment depended on where the nearest bush was. I like my showers warm, but not hot. I know people who aren't satisfied until they can feel the water searing their flesh. To me, that's like ordering chili so hot you need a tongue transplant. Why go to extremes? Same goes for cold water. You'll never catch me taking one of those "polar plunges," where, in the name of charity, otherwise sane people run screaming with glee into water so cold even penguins stand on the shore just shaking their heads. I know I sound like Goldilocks, but warm water is just right.

Irrigation is another purpose water serves. I can't think of anything to say about that.

As Americans, we take water for granted. In many other countries, water is no laughing matter. But this post is supposed to be a lighthearted romp, so I won't say anything about that, either. (But check out www.water.org and don't say I sent you.)

In fact, I think I've said everything there is to say about water. Oh, except that our eyes produce their own water when we hear a good joke or someone we know is killed in a mine shaft explosion. Be careful to keep your mouth closed, though, when tears are running down your face. They contain salt, and you could die laughing.

My Personal Academy of the Underrated

A few weeks ago, I presented my Personal Academy of the Overrated, inspired by Michael Murphy and Diane Keaton's own list in Manhattan. Now it's time for the sequel -- those people and things that haven't received the attention and acclaim I think they deserve. Hence . . . my Personal Academy of the Underrated!

Most Underrated State: Kansas

When you mention Kansas to most people, only two things come to mind: flatness and Dorothy. Well, many people come from Kansas -- Detroit Lions running back Barry Sanders, Alf Landon, the poet William Stafford, Martina McBride, Vivian Vance, the Clutter family, not to mention thousands of people nobody ever heard of -- and Dorothy isn't even a real person. As for flatness, I've driven across the state many times as a former resident of Wichita, and Kansas is not flat. It's a landscape of gorgeous rolling hills that enable a person to see grain silos from miles away. If it were flat, I never could have stayed awake during all those excursions. You want to talk about flat? South Florida is flat. Just think -- if the Everglades were comprised of rolling hills, alligators would be turning up in canals and people's backyards all over the surrounding municipalities. (Oh, wait -- they already do.)

Most Underrated Sport: Curling

What would the Winter Olympics be without curling? Curling is like shuffleboard on ice, only the disc is replaced by a round polished granite stone, and what I find to be an endless source of fascination is watching the two players ahead of the stone sweeping frantically with brooms. I have a broom at home, and if I could sweep that fast, my housecleaning would be over in seconds.

Most Underrated Performance By A Movie Actress in a Leading Role:
Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miami Blues

Generally speaking, crime dramas aren't usually noticed during awards season, and, as a result, actors and actresses in those movies get overlooked as well. But in Miami Blues, Leigh gives a positively Streepesque performance that I can't even try to be funny about. She plays a hooker/college student who gets involved with a deadly ex-con played by Alec Baldwin, who also has never been better. Leigh doesn't merely embody this role; she lives it. Her inflections, her quirky body language, her manifestations of doubt and grief, are all totally unlike anything she has played before or since, and they're true to her character. Just watch her in the supermarket scene where Fred Ward, also outstanding as a cop (this movie is filled with terrific performances), is informing her that her boyfriend is a murderer. She had promised Ward, who previously shared a dinner with her and Baldwin at her apartment, a homemade recipe, and as she tells it to him, her delivery is a perfectly modulated blend of ordinary chit chat and slowly mounting heartbreak. The movie is based on a novel by crime writer Charles Willeford, whom I mention because he, too is underrated.

Most Underrated TV Show: Then Came Bronson

This series ran from 1969 to 1970, which gives you some idea of how underrated it was. Michael Parks played Jim Bronson, a newspaperman who takes to the open road on a 1969 Harley Davidson Sportster after a friend's suicide and his overall disgust with "working for the Man." Each episode opened with Bronson pulling up to a stoplight beside an average-looking guy in an average-looking car. The dialogue is a perfect mix of Shakespeare and European existentialism:

Driver: "Taking a trip?"

Bronson: "What's that?"

Driver: "Taking a trip?"

Bronson: "Yeah."

Driver: "Where to?"

Bronson: "Oh, I don't know. Wherever I end up, I guess."

Driver: "Man, I wish I was you."

Bronson: "Really?"

Driver: "Yeah."

Bronson: "Well, hang in there."

What did I tell you? I couldn't get enough of it back then -- that is, when I could hear it. You see, Parks was one of a new breed of Method actors who tried to sound and act like their ultimate rebel hero, Marlon Brando. In Parks' case, this meant lots of mumbling. I would watch it with my parents, and my father was forever going, "What the hell did he just say?" He didn't understand what being cool was all about. Then a few years ago, I came across a copy of one of the episodes, and after a few minutes, I found myself going, "What the hell did he just say?" I no longer understood was being cool was all about. I had joined the Establishment.

Bronson spoke to the free spirit I wanted to be at 16. I wanted to own my own Harley and travel the country and meet people at pivotal points in their lives and make everything OK before riding away again until the next episode. By the 2000's, though, I'd had enough of traveling, I thought motorcycles were rolling death traps, and people at pivotal points in their lives would have to solve their own problems; I had my own. Ah, youth.

Most Underrated Athlete: Floyd Patterson

Talk about boxing today and it's Ali this, Ali that. If not, it's Tyson this, Tyson that. You don't hear much about Floyd Patterson (1935-2006) anymore, and that's a shame. He's the only fighter I'd like to have met and shared a meal with. I won't bore you with the stats, except this: He fought and lost to Ali twice, the first time in 1965. (The second time was in 1972, when the fight was called after six rounds due to a cut and swelling that Ali gave him.) Ali had called Patterson an Uncle Tom because Patterson wouldn't call him Muhammad Ali after he dropped the name Cassius Clay. Ali considered this an offense to Islam. Patterson wasn't all that interested in Islam to begin with; he was a staunch civil rights activist, and this ran counter to Islam's beliefs (or something like that; I'm not sure exactly what the conflict was). Legend has it that because of this, Ali toyed with and tormented Patterson throughout the fight just to prolong the humiliation. But Patterson was suffering from a slipped disk he'd gotten during training, and it became evident pretty quickly that he was in considerable pain. Ali saw this and pulled back, thinking the ref would stop the fight. But the ref didn't stop it. Patterson said later that Ali's punches grew softer as the minutes went by, and he wondered if indeed Ali was mocking him. Ali ultimately won the fight with a TKO. Hmm . . . I thought I knew where I was going with this. It doesn't speak as much to Patterson's character as it does to Ali's, does it? Ignore this paragraph.

Point is, though, that Patterson was an activist who fought for desegregation, and, nearly as important to me, he was by all accounts a perfect gentleman to everyone he met throughout his life. Hence, our meal together.

Most Underrated Plant: Dandelion

Dandelions just want to be our friends. They look so cute with their little white afros, and they give us hours of pleasure when we blow on them. If you can't blow on them because you're weak from hunger, they're also edible. That's how much they love us.

Most Underrated Rumor: Millard Fillmore's Bathtub

It's long been an accepted fact that President Millard Fillmore installed the White House's first bathtub in 1850. He didn't. This was a hoax perpetrated by journalist H.L. Mencken in 1917 in one of his columns. He later admitted it was a prank and that he had only tried to boost morale during WWI. I'm sure our troops and their loved ones here at home rested easy knowing that Millard Fillmore went to bed clean every night. So I call this rumor underrated because I can't think of many others that have been so fully integrated into the national consciousness. Heck, I believed it my whole life until ten minutes ago. (Love you, Wikipedia!)

Most Underrated Band: Doug and the Slugs

Doug and the Slugs was a Canadian pop band that formed in 1977 and lasted until 1992. They had trouble getting gigs in the early days because of their name (can't imagine why), but they went on to become a very popular band in Canada and achieved a modest success here. Their (few) hits included "Making It Work" and "Too Bad" ("Too Bad" became the theme song for a sitcom called The Norm Show. If you remember it, then voila, you've heard of them.) I like them because they were quirky and self-deprecating, because their lead singer, Doug Bennett, wrote good lyrics, and because they had a smooth sound that I found infectious. Theirs were some of MTV's earliest music videos, and hey, I just happen to have one of them right here. The song is "Real Enough," a song I still can't get enough of. Just listen to this harmony. These cats swing!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoRgcUJ66SY

And Now A Word From Our Sponsor

Commercials kill me. That's why I stopped watching them months ago. But unfortunately I have a steel trap memory.

Consider Cialis, for example. I never saw ads for erectile dysfunction when I was growing up, although I suspect it's been a problem for as long as there have been penises (which would exclude the 1950s). But if you have to advertise this particular malady, I don't think the brains behind the Cialis campaign have the right idea. You see a man and a woman holding hands or looking lovingly into each other's eyes while a doctorly voice warns us of all the reasons you shouldn't take Cialis. We're led to believe that the man in the commercial doesn't suffer from those side effects and has already taken a dose. So where do he and his beloved end up at the end? In bed? On the kitchen floor? No -- in bathwater. In two separate tubs. Outdoors, for goodness sake. I mean, come on, at the very least share a tub if this is foreplay. (I'll bet he'd be sharing a tub if he were walking hand in hand with one of the models from those Carl's Jr. ads.)

Then there's Jake from State Farm, or, rather, the guy on the phone with Jake from State Farm. Just why is he calling Jake in the middle of the night? Must be an insurance emergency, right? Then why doesn't his wife know? Can't it wait until regular business hours? And what is she doing up at that hour? She evidently already suspected him of talking to another woman. Could there in fact be another woman? Could it be he was talking to Jake about his wife's life insurance policy? Is she about to be bumped off? Will Jake squeal when the cops come down on him? Already I can see Oliver Platt as Jake and Vince Vaughan as the husband. I wonder who'll direct.

Of course, there is such a thing as a clever and successful TV ad. When I talk to people about commercials (which isn't often), Geico is the clear favorite. The company has come far in its evolution from cavemen to geckos, and now it's moved on to parodies, two of which are among my all-time favorite anything:

The first one features the cowboy who rides far off into the sunset because "I'm a loner, and a loner's gotta be alone." The Geico logo appears onscreen just in time for him to hit one of the letters and fall off his horse. Bravo!

My top favorite is the takeoff on horror movies, with four demographically correct millennials running in terror from something in the night. They come upon an old house and can't decide whether to hide in the attic or the basement. One of them cries, "Why can't we just get in the running car?" while pointing to, sure enough, a sporty red convertible idling behind them. "Are you crazy?" the guy beside her says. "Let's hide behind those chainsaws!" So they run behind a row of chainsaws hanging over the doorway of a shed while a creepy guy behind them lifts the mask he's wearing and shakes his head in bland disbelief. In the final shot, we see our four heroes running out from the shed with one of the guys yelling, "Head for the cemetery!" I really haven't laughed that loud over a commercial in years and years. Not even during the Super Bowl.

Being a guy, I tend to notice women in commercials more than I do men. The customer service character Lily of AT&T -- she of the bright smile and simple blue blouse -- is infinitely more appealing than Miss September chowing down on a Mile High bacon cheeseburger. At least it's clear what Lily is selling. Also, Southwest Airlines had a spot last year called "Dance Party" that featured a very energetic young woman dancing up a storm in three separate settings. What was notable was that she seemed to be having a genuinely good time. She made me want to run out and buy something so I could feel that way, too. The only thing wrong with that campaign (and Southwest has a sequel now called "Wedding Party") is that the dancer and the setting don't have an awful lot to do with airplanes. I don't come away thinking, "Book me on the next flight."

The character Flo, who's appeared in more than 100 Progressive Insurance commercials, isn't particularly funny or alluring (and let's face it -- Madison Avenue is all about alluring), so I don't know why that campaign has been so successful. But nothing else matters if Flo is selling lots of insurance, and for some reason more and more people are buying insurance from Flo.

We've covered the good and the bad. Now it's time to confront the ugly.

I don't care how cute the cartoon baby bear is -- he's got scraps of toilet paper stuck to his butt, and we know Charmin Ultra isn't for cartoon baby bears. I'd very much enjoy never seeing that one again.

A few years ago, Orkin, the pest control experts, came up with the idea of having a cockroach crawl diagonally across the TV screen in the middle of an otherwise ordinary commercial. The idea was that I'd think there really was a cockroach in my living room. I didn't go, "Wow, thanks, Orkin! I guess I'll use your product now in case a real cockroach crawls diagonally across my TV screen." No, I was thinking, "Boy, that was close. Another two inches and my shoe might have gone right through the set."

Then there are the Gross-out Twins. Instead of thinking, "I'll buy that product," I'm thinking, "I hope I can make it to the bathroom before I start blowing chunks." The twins are, of course, Mr. Mucus from the Mucinex commercial and Digger, the talking toenail fungus from Lamisil. Who thinks this stuff up? These are the anti-Cialis ads, guaranteed to ruin any mood (and without those pesky side effects).

I'd planned to move on to some of the more egregious TV infomercials, but that last paragraph just ruined my mood. Just as well, huh?

Fraidy Cat

I get afraid of stuff just like everybody else. When someone says, "He's afraid of his own shadow," I can relate. Shadows aren't inherently scary, but because I'm high-strung, a sudden something in my peripheral vision can startle me. Sometimes that can be a shadow. So sue me.

The first two scary entities in my life were women (sort of). My parents gave me a yellow 78 r.p.m. record of someone reading "Snow White" when I must have been three or four. The evil queen terrified me. I remember an aunt and uncle coming over to visit and my parents telling me to put the record on, but I wouldn't. I didn't even feel safe with four adults in the room, and I stopped eating apples. Right around that time, I had a dream in which I was trapped in our building's basement with a female mannequin who wanted to kill me. I tried to talk her out of it by inviting her to become part of our family. If she'd known my family, she would have run screaming to the nearest department store.

That was when I lived in New Jersey until the age of five. In Miami, where I did my growing up, my sister and I discovered the horrifying world of tropical bugs. Worst of all was the palmetto bug, basically a giant flying cockroach. Terry still won't go back to Florida. Some bugs you could find anywhere, like wasps. Why did God make wasps? I can't figure it out. However, just last week I read about a newly discovered species of wasp that actually does serve a purpose. It injects a venom into cockroaches that renders them nearly immobile, then eats them. I forget which country this is in, but Terry might like to go sometime.

I lived for movies and television, and I had a love/hate relationship with my favorite movies and TV shows because they were all scary. I was a masochist even then.

Five early films fried me:

Psycho (1960) (not even Mother was as unnerving as that psychiatrist in the last scene)
13 Ghosts (same year) (I lasted about 45 minutes)
The Haunting (1963) ("Whose hand was I holding?" -- scariest line in movie history)
Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) (so scary I actually peed in other people's pants)
Wait Until Dark (1967) (so much fun watching all that popcorn go airborne during the climax)

These three TV shows -- and three episodes in particular -- also destroyed me:

The Twilight Zone ("The New Exhibit" -- wax figures of famous murderers come to life -- eek!)
The Outer Limits ("The Zanti Misfits" -- ants from space with human faces -- yikes!)
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (which became The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1962) ("An Unlocked Window" -- dead of night, old dark house, serial killer on the loose, the biggest shock ending of its time for TV -- holy crap!)

I also had an unnatural fear of quicksand in those days. Blame it on Tarzan movies.

I enjoy flying on airplanes, but it's an enjoyment mixed with dread. I never, ever remove my seat belt. Absolutely any occurrence out of the ordinary, besides the occasional turbulence, and the words "next of kin" start floating through my head. What's worst is that I've yet to be on a plane when something unusual happens where the crew actually tells us what's going on. I was on a flight that had just taken off but didn't climb for what seemed like two whole minutes. Dogs were chasing us below. Yet the flight attendants said nothing. On another flight, we were this close to landing when, instead of doing it, the plane rose back up and completely circled the area before finally setting down. No word from the pilot. I just hate when that happens.

Oddly, I don't share the fear of public speaking that others have. I've read my poems in cafes and bars in New York City and stood before a decade's worth of classrooms in Kansas. The fear turns into adrenaline in those instances, and I feel almost a kind of power and control, because, unlike with airplanes, if anything's going to go wrong, the fault is only mine. I learned a lesson about fear through one of these experiences: Before giving a reading in a public library, I told myself that the adrenaline I was feeling was silly -- I was mistaking it for fear -- and I repressed it. Lousiest reading I ever gave. The lesson was that fear serves a purpose, and now I embrace it. Not that you'll ever catch me reading in public or teaching these days -- I mean, I'm not an idiot.

Maybe I live in  Idaho because it's a catastrophe-free zone. Here are the natural (and not-so-natural) disasters that have threatened me all my life:

Florida: hurricanes
New York: smog so thick that sometimes you can't see across the Hudson from Jersey to Manhattan
Kansas: tornadoes
Washington: earthquakes
Maine: Nor'easters and Governor LePage

So far I think the worst I've had to fear in Boise are temperature inversions and the occasional stray mountain lion. And oh, of course, my shadow on sunny days.

Duck!

I know that many of you reading this right now have often said to yourselves, "I wish I were a duck." I don't blame you; most people do. Or maybe I'm merely projecting -- until recently, I wished I were a duck.

See, I always liked ducks -- mallards, mainly -- because I felt an affinity for them that I could never explain. Maybe it's because I'm a guy and I think the males would make good role models for guys: they're great-looking and have a good manly name -- Drake. When a drake steps into the pond, you hear a collective sigh from all the females. The females are pretty but in a plain-Jane kind of way, and they don't even have a special name. They're just Duck, or Hen, which is even worse because a hen is already a hen. A duck calling herself a hen simply confuses everyone, especially baby hens (called chicks, which is also what -- never mind). So she's just duck, or ducky, if the two of you are on a nickname basis.

Nothing relaxes me more in life than to sit on the grass at the edge of a lake and have ducks feed out of my hand. Ducks aren't like gulls. When ducks are done feeding, at least I still have my hand. Their bills on my palm are like butterflies landing and taking off. When gulls feed from my hand, they're like miners trying to excavate with pick axes.

At the outset, I used the past tense when I spoke of wishing I were a duck. My original intent had been to rhapsodize about the glory and splendor that is duck. But then I started collecting information to support my hypothesis, and what I found sent my web-footed role models flying off their pedestals and high-tailing it south for the winter. That's because, as it turns out, a duck's life is no waddle in the park.


For instance, ducks get no respect when we talk about them:

We don't simply say we have a slight problem. Instead, we're dead ducks.

Obama can't just be in his second term of office. No, he has to be a lame duck.

No one says, "Hey, look out for that anvil!" They say, "You're a sitting duck." A duck who's just sitting wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the anvil.

"Duck" as a verb means to drop down low in order to avoid something, like a bullet or, when I was a kid, an atom bomb (as in "duck and cover"). So of course ducks are cowards now, too.

Certainly the most offensive expression (cover your eyes if you're sensitive) is "f*** a duck." No duck I know would willingly let this happen; therefore, we're sanctioning violence. It would almost be better to be shot down from the sky, which is the fate of so many ducks who've already spent a lifetime having to listen to us degrade them.

It's a good thing we have the saying, "Lord love a duck," since no one else will.


Another strike ducks have against them is that they're tasty:

Peking duck
duck a l'orange
duck tacos
duck poppers
duck pastrami
duck pot pie
duck confit quesadillas

Not to mention duck sauce over everything. Do you want to know how many different duck dishes there are?

483!

I ate sweet and sour duck once when I was young and naïve. It tasted OK. No -- it tasted great! But sometimes we just have to sacrifice our happiness for the greater good. Next time you get a hankering for duck, try peanut butter and jelly instead. No animals are harmed in the making of your sandwich. (It's especially good if you squish the sandwich down before eating it.)


Yes, you might be thinking, but what about ducks in popular culture? Aren't they respectable representatives of their amatine family? (Amatine -- just like "bovine" or "canine," but for ducks -- I looked it up.) Well, ha, I say, ha! Take a look:

Walt Disney gave us Donald Duck. What's his claim to fame? He's a whiner. All he does is complain and throw tantrums. He must absolutely terrify his three nephews. It's a wonder Daisy never moved out and issued a restraining order.

Warner Brothers gave us Daffy Duck. His trademark? He's a psychopath. He bounces off the edges of the TV screen in fits of hysteria, heedless of the safety of others. He also lisps, which is highly offensive (not to people who lisp, but to people whose job it is to be offended by cartoon characters).

The comic pages feature Mallard Fillmore, who has his own strip. Very nice -- but what, no Democratic ducks? Why should our only political duck have to be partisan at all and alienate half the eligible voters this country? I say we write in a third-party duck on next year's ballot, someone soft on immigration (who'll let ducks from other countries fly north for the summer).

Movies: Howard the Duck. If I'd been a duck in 1986, I'd have renounced my species and moved to Antarctica to become a penguin.

Music: "Disco Duck." Yes, millennials, I confess, baby boomers actually danced to this back when men wore white polyester and women suffered nosebleeds and vertigo from their platform shoes.

Advertising: The Aflac duck made a comfortable living shilling for an insurance company. All he had to do was yell "Aflac!" for thirty seconds. But even his reputation was tarnished. A few years ago, it was revealed that the duck didn't say his own lines at all, but bill-synced them while Gilbert Gottfried did the voice. I understand that Gottfried, who is a comedian and not exactly an actor, spent months with a dialogue coach working on his big (his only) line. He was exposed as the duck's stunt voice when he was fired for tweeting jokes about the terrible Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011. Aflac had to comply with the duck's long-term contract, however, so they covered up by having him lose his voice in a mine shaft explosion while they searched for a new voice. When they learned that Sam Kinison was dead, they approached Fran Drescher, whose people are currently talking to their people.

Finally, sports mascots: You'd think college football mascots would be the lone beacons of purity and animal values. Well, think again. In 2007, the University of Oregon's mascot, known as the Fighting Duck, attacked Shasta, the University of Houston's mascot, and was suspended for one game. It was the only recorded instance of a duck beating up a cougar.

So is it any wonder why I have trouble admitting to people my rapidly waning admiration for ducks? I think I'm even going to start keeping my rubber duck collection under the bathroom sink from now on. (I still have my battleships.)

My Personal Academy of the Overrated

In Woody Allen's 1979 masterpiece Manhattan, Diane Keaton and Michael Murphy play lovers who try to impress Allen by rattling off a partial list of what they call the "Academy of the Overrated," including such luminaries as Goethe, Jung, Lenny Bruce, Norman Mailer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Isak Dinesen, and, to Allen's disbelief, Ingmar Bergman. He says, "I think those people are all terrific, every one that you've mentioned. What about Mozart? You guys don't want to leave him out. I mean, while you're trashing people..." We never do find out whether Mozart is on their list, but I've always wondered what such a list of my own might look like. So I'm about to prove I can be as pretentious as they are. (Your list might well include Manhattan itself, which only shows how subjective this post will be.)

Film: Pleasantville

Pleasantville starts out as nostalgic comedy, then does a complete 180, shaming viewers for enjoying what they've seen so far and spending the rest of the story applauding itself over the way the filmmakers believe things should have been. In the process, it manages to confuse fiction with reality, love with sex, and -- oh, stop me before my blood pressure goes up. (Had Don Knotts even read the script before saying yes to this?)

Singer: Madonna

Madonna is the only singer I know who repeatedly refers to what she does as her "art." Do real artists need to point that out? What exactly is her art, anyway? She's a pop singer posing as some sort of sex symbol who's telling us she's empowering women (or tweens, anyway). But do women really need Madonna telling them anything? I think she's actually telling herself that in an attempt to be the artist she's always reminding us she is. I've heard more than one person say she's no entertainer but that she is a good businessperson. I agree. She's an industry of one, changing her persona the way other people change socks, trying to stay relevant by upping the shock factor. She's on the cover of the new issue of Cosmo, and the header reads, "Madonna -- Need We Say More?" Yes, actually, a lot more, because I still don't get her. She's been wearing the empress's new clothes all these years. If she represents power, someone should turn off the juice. Her pretensions are exceeded only by her arrogance. Once, during an interview, she said Lady Gaga's music was "reductive," and when the interviewer asked what that meant, she replied, "Look it up." Need I say more?

Writer: Stephen King

His detractors say his novels need an editor with a chainsaw. I think maybe his characters need to go to military school. They're like undisciplined offspring whom King can't keep under control. It's one thing when characters take on a life of their own; I believe that's the most fun a novelist can have. It's another thing when we as readers can see the writer is out of control. It's the way I feel when trying to read his stuff. Bag of Bones was most disappointing -- the most promising opening chapters, then the sense that King was traveling without a map. I've restarted it twice and always hit the same speed bump. On the plus side, On Writing is one of the best books of its kind. Plus, he seems like an awfully nice guy. I just can't read him.

Food: Yogurt

I know, I know -- it's both tasty and good for you. But it looks like pus and almost made me gag the one time I tried it. Same goes for Spam (which doesn't look like pus but rather bologna left out on a highway).

Cartoon character: Scooby-Doo

Personally, I think a cartoon dog should either bark or speak. But Scooby-Doo is some sort of genetic mutation, not quite barking and not quite talking. He sounds as if he's trying not to swallow a mouthful of ball bearings. "Ruh-roh"? That's not human.

TV series: Friends

It's not the worst I've seen, but in proportion to its popularity it might be. Debuting as close as it did on the heels of Seinfeld, it smelled too much like a rip-off to me, and the laugh track wasn't there simply to tell us what was funny, it was there to bludgeon us into submission. The characters and performances were good, and admittedly some of the scripts were funny. But I never got hooked, and I never stop to watch the reruns when I come across them. Also, how could I laugh while feeling sorry for those poor actors who, judging from the actresses' blouses, had to perform in studio temperatures hovering around -20?

TV commercial: Carl's Jr.

Since when are hamburgers supposed to induce orgasms? These supposedly erotic ads also qualify as science fiction, since, as a friend pointed out, there's no way a woman is going to eat 1,200 calories at a clip and still look like that.

Movie actor: Adam Sandler

Sometimes funny on SNL. Never funny since. Probably a nice guy like Stephen King, but so what?

Movie Actress: Shirley MacLaine

It would take a lot for me to dislike the actress who gave us Fran Kubelik in The Apartment (1960), but unfortunately MacLaine makes it easy. She's still a good actress, but she just isn't very likeable in interviews. Of all the lives she's lived, why did she have to pick this one to come back in while I'm around?

Multi-billionaire: Donald Trump

It's the hair. I just can't get past it. Oh, yeah, and the ego, too. Can't forget the ego.

TV personality: Rosie O'Donnell

She was once known as the "Queen of Nice" on daytime TV, remember? Then she decided people might be interested in her opinions, and she turned into Ursula from The Little Mermaid.

State: Texas

Maybe if they just didn't think so much of themselves. No one likes a conceited person, much less a whole state. Texas has a rich and illustrious past; too bad they're still stuck in it. (Would I feel the same if I'd grown up there? Probably not. That's why I count my blessings every night.)

Poet: Maya Angelou

I'm likely stepping on some toes here, as Angelou is obviously some sort of national treasure to much of America. She led a fascinating, multi-faceted life, she survived a horrific childhood and wrote about it beautifully in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she was a true role model, and she was really really tall. But note the classification above: Maya Angelou was not a great poet. You can still be an admirable person and not be a great poet, and Maya Angelou was not a great poet. From one of her most beloved poems, "Phenomenal Woman":

’Cause I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.
  

What's for "Desert"?

I found out today that Marie Antoinette never said, "Let them eat cake." She was only ten years old when Rousseau coined the phrase in his Confessions, although what he actually wrote was, "Let them eat brioche." Brioche is a French pastry that's more of a bread than a cake, but does it matter? Point is, if someone thinks they're doing me a disservice by insisting I eat cake or brioche, who am I to argue? "No, no, whatever you do, please don't force me to eat those vile petits four!" I'd have to do my best to mimic the throes of agony while begging them not to give me a fifth serving along with a glass of cold milk.

As you might have surmised by now, I like dessert. A lot. Probably most people do, but not all, which is fine as it means more for the rest of us.

Although I was twice school spelling champ when I was 11 and 12, I never could get "dessert" right. It wasn't atypical to see this sort of sentence in my essays: "I would like to live in the Mojave Dessert." In that instance, I would get marked off for spelling as well as for wanting to live in the Mojave. I had even more trouble with "desert," as in, "What's for desert?" I don't think people have as much trouble distinguishing the two words spoken as they do written. "Desert" was very likely coined before "dessert," but given that, whose idea was it to add an "s" to a word that already served a perfectly fine purpose? Did the first bakers taste their experimental concoctions and go, "Needs more
water"? We'll never know, I guess.

My favorite desserts are pies, particularly French silk, chocolate cream, and Key lime. I grew up in South Florida and never tasted Key lime until I was much older. A deprived childhood.

I've never eaten a banana split and never will. When my sister was very small, our family pulled up to an ice cream shop and bought a banana split for them to share with Terry and a vanilla cone just for me. For some reason, we were eating them in the car out in the parking lot. The three of them were in the front seat, and after they'd given Terry a few bites of a dessert she'd never eaten before, she promptly threw up all over the dashboard. That was the end of banana splits as far as I was concerned. Bananas belong in cereal, anyway. (Also in soup, but that was my mother's predilection and one I outgrew once I left home.)

My sister also instigated my lifelong boycott of mangos. Mangoes were plentiful in Miami, and when my parents gave her one for the first time, she became deathly ill. (Apparently they hadn't learned anything from the banana split.) I hadn't tried mangoes before then, and I thought it was a good idea to go on not trying them, just in case this reaction was genetic. Many years later -- last year, in fact -- Terry told me that in fact she hadn't tasted the mango at all. She'd touched it and developed a serious allergic reaction. So I could have spent all these years eating mangoes (while someone else held them for me). But I'm so used to not eating them that I think I'll just leave things as they are.

It's amazing how many desserts I've never tried. I had my first cherry cobbler and my first cheesecake only this year. I haven't eaten blueberries or blackberries. No squash. I don't even know from pomegranates. The only fruit pies I've had are apple and maybe peach. I've gone through 61 Thanksgivings without trying cranberry sauce. I've tasted pumpkin pie and don't like it, which always surprises me because it's so pretty to look at, and Yankee Candle makes a great spiced pumpkin scent. (Between my distaste for pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce, Thanksgiving meals have been pretty vanilla.) I like cookies, but don't even come near me with a Fig Newton. I tried a kiwi once, and I liked it a lot, but kiwis are something I just never think of when I'm shopping. Let's see, what else? I've never had an avocado, so I avoided guacamole for years, also because it looks like something that shouldn't even be a food. When I finally tried a friend's recipe, I was amazed that I'd deprived myself all those years.

I haven't included candy in this rundown because I consider dessert something that comes after a meal and not something you eat when you're not supposed to because it's almost mealtime. I doubt many dinners end with the words, "OK, now who wants a fresh Snickers?" It's the same with anything made by a certain pastry company I won't name here because I don't know a whole lot about libel laws, although I think I can name their products. "Is everyone ready for some Ding Dongs?" Frankly, I haven't eaten a Ding Dong or a Ho-Ho since speaking with a friend who once worked in the booming Twinkie industry. She asked me why I thought those little pastries stay so fresh so long. Turns out, she explained, they're baked in their own chemicals. This has been shot down as an urban myth, and I no longer believe it (hear that, libel attorneys? I NO LONGER BELIEVE IT), but I have to wonder why my friend developed a facial tic whenever I mentioned little chocolate donuts. (Little chocolate donuts were a staple of my long car trips, along with Mountain Dews. This might explain why I always showed up an hour or two ahead of schedule.)

So really, I'm not the most qualified person to be writing about desserts. Don't most people, though, latch onto a favorite food without seeing the need to try something else? Is it just me? I have my regular ice cream standbys and would never give a thought to rocky road or cookies and cream. You'll only see certain cakes in my fridge and never a fruitcake or a coconut cake or a fat rascal (British -- you don't even want to know). I think it's significant that fruitcakes are primarily gifts and that I've never actually seen anyone eat them.

If you have a dessert you think I might like, keep it, as I likely won't. But the jury is still out on mint chocolate chip ice cream and double fudge cake, so feel free to send me a sample so that I can be certain.

(That was a joke, by the way. But if you're considering Hostess products, feel free, since I NO LONGER BELIEVE THEY'RE BAKED IN THEIR OWN CHEMICALS! REALLY!)

Chairs

My first chair was a yellow rocker with a lamb painted on it. I must have been two or three. In restaurants, waitresses sat me in booster seats, which made it easier for the food I threw up to land clear across the table. Child safety seats weren't mandatory yet and neither were seat belts (though both existed at the time). So I sat unencumbered in the backseat with my sister, laughing at death every time our father pulled away from the curb.

Student desks in our grade school were big metal affairs with wooden tops that we lifted to store our books, notebooks, and used gum. The wooden tops had two recessed areas for pencils and a hole between them for the inkwell. Inkwells had gone out of fashion by around 1682, so none of us had any idea why our desktops had a hole in them. The desks stood just tall enough on their legs for us to be able to crawl underneath during emergency drills. These emergency drills were known as "duck and cover" exercises and were our best defense against an atomic bomb blast. We were just young enough to believe that this procedure -- and the solid reinforcement of our desks -- would protect us from a 300,000 degree fireball. (We also believed Underdog could fly.)

I mention the desks because we sat behind them in simple wooden chairs that were actually very sophisticated to a six-year-old -- no lambs, no boosting. We sat in the same kinds of chairs used by ten-year-olds, so we felt just a step away from adulthood. My first accident that I can remember happened in one of those chairs. I was an incorrigible kid. I was sent to the principal's office so many times that I ended up moving my desk there; when he'd had enough of me, he would send me to the classroom as punishment. One day in class, I was showing off for the other kids, holding onto the edge of my desk and leaning back on my chair's two back legs. I'd done this before and been reprimanded for it. So when the chair legs finally slid out from under me and the back of my head hit the floor, making a sound not unlike Roger Maris hitting one out of the park, our teacher, E. Braun, instructed the other students to ignore me and concentrate on Chapter 2 of Dick and Jane Survive an Atomic Blast. I ended up with a mild concussion, though unfortunately I was sent back to school two days later, where I was bound and gagged and left out in the hallway to rot.

I've sat in many chairs over the last 62 years, two centuries, and two millennia (concurrently of course, or else I'd be way dead). I can safely say that every friend I've had has sat in at least 10 or 12 of them. Let's take a moment to marvel at this timeless and ubiquitous necessity of everyday life.




OK, let's continue.

Chairs are everywhere, and they span the entire social spectrum. It's the only piece of furniture used by both kings and death row inmates. Curiously, a king's throne is also an informal name for a toilet. What do you suppose a king calls his toilet? Does he say to his court eunuch, "Watch my throne -- I'm going to use the throne"? This must perplex the eunuch no end. No, he likely assigns them ranks, in which case the royal throne would be "Throne #1" and the potty "Throne #2." If he wants to be specific, he might tell his eunuch, "Keep an eye on #1. I'm off to #2 to do #1 and maybe #2." The poor confused eunuch is likely looking for other employment opportunities by now.

Movie theater seats have certainly improved over time. It used to be that theater seats were simply functional: a seat for your seat, a back for your back. All seats were at the same level, so that if you sat behind Shaquille O'Neal or a woman wearing an Easter bonnet from 1890, you might as well just count your Goobers for two hours. (Actually, two hours' worth of Goobers is a pretty good deal.)

Nowadays, I think people go to the movies just to sit in the seats. They're tiered, so you never have to crane your neck to see over or around the person in front of you. They're ergonomically molded with lumbar support and restful cushioning, they rock so you can relax and even lull yourself to sleep if you're ever watching a revival of The English Patient. They come with movable armrests that you can lift for making out loveseat-style, particularly handy if you know the person sitting beside you. They have cup holders built into the armrests, though they're not large enough to hold the uber-mega-ultra-hyper cherry Slurpee you've bought at the concession stand for roughly the price of a 2015 Lamborghini Huracan. Warning: Be careful your date doesn't yank the armrest up while your refreshing beverage is in the cup holder, or the person behind you is apt to dry himself off using your face for a squeegee.

Speaking of movies, one of the all-time great visual effects is that wobbly chair John Cazale sits on in The Godfather Part 2. Fredo is telling Michael (Al Pacino) that he isn't dumb like the rest of the Corleone family thinks he is, that he's smart and deserves respect. But meanwhile the chair is saying, "He's a wimp, don't listen to him." It's such a perfect extension of his character. There should be an Golden Globe category for Best Chair in a Motion Picture (Drama). That's one acceptance speech I'd like to hear.

These days, furniture has taken its rightful place as an essential element in the business world. Only in a company meeting could you hear someone say, "The chair will table that for now." You wouldn't have heard that 50 years ago, before the non-human rights movement demanded that all furniture be treated equal. People began to realize that tables and chairs were more than just four pretty legs and some drawers.

Finally, I'd have to say that my favorite chair these days is the wingback. It's ideal for reading, which consumes roughly 23 hours of my day. Its arms feel as if they're embracing you, and you can rest your head against the high back for extra comfort. Give me a cushy wingback chair and an ottoman and you can keep your world peace. I could also make a compelling argument for chaise longues, but let's table that chair for another time.

Our Traffic Is Worse Than Your Traffic

Last December, Yahoo! posted a list that certainly sounded authoritative enough: "What Every State in the U.S. Is Worst at." I can only vouch for the ones I've lived in, and these days I live in Idaho, whose claim to infamy is its "worst drivers." In Yahoo's! defense, it does say that we don't cause the most accidents, mainly because there aren't very many of us. But it concludes that "Idaho's drivers are just total jerks behind the wheel." You'd think Idahoans would be incensed at such a slur, but my friends here in Boise will be the first to tell you -- we do suck.

The problem with Boise is that its population is growing faster than the infrastructure can support it. This is most obvious during rush hour, when crosstown traffic rushes so slowly that it actually begins moving backwards. This breeds understandable frustration, and yet road rage between Boise drivers is not the epidemic it is in other cities, mainly because our drivers save their rage for bicyclists.

I don't drive here and never have, so I'm not an expert. However, I am an expert pedestrian, and I can state here and now that pedestrianing in Boise can be hazardous to your health.

The problems with negotiating local crosswalks is the same as it is in other parts of the country, I'm sure. But drivers in other parts of the country can't kill me because I don't walk there, whereas I'm a moving target for anyone with an Idaho license plate (or a California one -- no western state is immune to those).

It comes down to one thing: people are treating their cars these days as extensions of their homes. Fixing makeup, reading a book, chatting with the GPS lady, making toast and then looking for the jam jar -- there is little that drivers won't do to avoid focusing on that pesky thing in front of them known as a road. Or a red light. I've stepped off the curb as soon as I see the little green walking guy on the sign across the street, only to stop just in time as the cartoon blur of a car goes whizzing past, the driver preoccupied with clipping his toenails. It's no wonder their dogs are always hanging their faces out the window. They're not enjoying the ride; they're saying, "For the love of God, get me out of here!" Animals are always smarter than people. Even Idaho chickens know they'll never get across the road; they're just suicidal. Farmers all over the state are always finding little farewell notes in their chicken coops.

Personally, I think Boise drivers would do much better if they only had enough roads to accommodate them. In the other places where I've lived, however, I've been less optimistic.

In Miami Beach, for instance -- and I'm speaking now of fifty years ago -- most of the cars were rentals driven by visitors from Up North who were born there during the Paleozoic era. These were cautious and courteous drivers, using their turn signals to let us know they'd be exiting Collins Avenue in about 20 years. Those turning onto Collins Avenue would leave their signals on to proudly remind us how careful they'd been negotiating that tricky turn back when Dade County was a swamp. Honestly, it's a good thing they weren't driving all the way back home, or their families would never see them again.

I'm trying to imagine those same drivers surviving in their natural habitat. The Founding Sadists of New Jersey came up with something called the "jughandle." I think they used it as a form of torture to use on seditious colonists. The idea, as I remember it, is that as you approach a highway full of speeding, homicidal drivers, you circle this very short, curving road doing a full 60 m.p.h. and fling yourself into the maelstrom the way a discus thrower spins and then releases a heavy, unwieldy object without knowing where it will land or whom it might kill.

The New Jersey Department of Transportation classifies three types of jughandles: type "A," your standard jughandle; type "B," a more complicated jughandle; and type "C," which includes a rest stop 30 feet from the highway where you can have your last will and testament notarized and even meet with a priest who will absolve you of all your sins.

Wichita, Kansas, would get a lot of farmers driving in from outlying rural towns. That's the only explanation I have. I don't think the farmers knew it, though. Many Sedgwick County drivers commit what I dubbed the "Kansas turn." Let's say you're at a four-way stoplight with four lanes of two-way traffic on all sides. If you want to make a left, and you're a normal person, you make your turn wide enough to avoid the two nearest lanes of waiting traffic. But often, driving through Wichita, I'd see drivers who apparently weren't aware that there were two nearer lanes of waiting traffic. Their turns were tight enough to brush the left hand curb and alarm pedestrians. Of course, this usually happened when there was no waiting traffic. But every once in a while, you'd see a terror-stricken driver frantically trying to back up as a driver with a ball cap and a Slurpee came right at them. (Note: None of my Kansas friends ever did such a thing. I have to say that in case they see this.)

Seattle drivers only had one problem, and that had to do with their memory. Each winter, with the first infrequent snowfall, traffic would come to a standstill as everyone groped through their glove compartments looking for the instruction manual that would explain how to drive in 1/8th of an inch of snow. To Seattle's credit, many of these drivers had California plates on their beemers. (Actually, "beemer" refers to BMW motorcycles, and the slang term for a BMW car is "bimmer." But I'll start saying "bimmer" when you do.)

It's the same with rain. If Seattle goes two weeks without rain and then it begins to sprinkle, drivers abandon their cars on I-5 to run screaming for the nearest shelter. But again, many of these drivers are abandoning California bimmers. (See? I think it sounds silly, too.)

I lived in Seattle for 14 years, and I can still fondly recall those fifteen minutes in 1998 when the sun appeared. It was quite an event, with people from every walk of life stepping outside to point and marvel at the strange yellow orb over their heads. Mothers wept. New religions were founded. I think this happens every 75 years, like Halley's Comet.

So buck up, Boise. We're not as bad as we think we are. At least we still have our sense of humor, as evidenced by our bumper stickers, my favorite of which says, "My Doberman Can Eat Your Honor Student."

My First Pets

My first pet was named George. George was a moth.

I'd never had a pet before. A lot of South Florida homes come with jalousie windows, which are parallel glass louvers you open and close by turning a small crank at the bottom. Our apartment had at least one set in each room. As with many homes, the lower halves of ours were frosted, and the rest were clear. Security from peeping toms and all that. I know, I know, just wait -- there's a point to this.

So one afternoon in 1960, when I was about to turn seven, my bedroom jalousies were open when a moth flew against the screen and decided to rest there in the shade. I don't have to tell you Miami can get pretty hot. I started talking to the moth, and once you start talking to a bug, you run the risk of anthropomorphizing it and thinking it can talk back. Calling it George only complicates things further. So we had a fine conversation all that afternoon, me telling George about the travails of first grade and George recounting his adventures in the great outdoors and asking if I had any sweaters lying around. I knew we were friends because he didn't want to fly away. Finally it grew dark, and I had grown too attached to him to let him go now. So I closed the jalousies, which gave him just enough room to flit up and down without getting squished. I told him we could talk some more tomorrow before I left for school.

Well, I'm sure you saw this coming. When I woke up the next morning, George was lying upside down on the window sill. I had a bad feeling about it -- I was dumb enough to shut him in overnight but not too dumb to realize he wasn't asleep. When my mother asked why I was crying at the breakfast table, I told her George died. You know about being six -- I just assumed the whole world knew what I was talking about. So I showed her George's inert little body and asked her if we could bury him in the yard, maybe wrap him in a nice cardigan. I don't remember what she actually did -- probably just opened the jalousies and blew through the screen so it would fall outside. But she was evidently touched by this star-crossed friendship, and she did the next best thing to throwing a burial. She promised I could get a real pet.

On Saturday we went to a bright, airy shop filled with ferns and garden implements and small friendly creatures that included fish, gerbils, iguanas, and birds. My mother had never been partial to pets (you never saw pets traipsing around in Better Homes and Gardens), so this would be a sacrifice for her.

Then we saw the turtles. In her mind she must have been thinking, OK, these wouldn't be expensive to maintain, they're not related to rats, they won't shed skin all over the place, and they can't talk back. These were box turtles, a prehistoric creature that lived way back when they could be sold legally before fear of salmonella overcame us all. (I mean way back, even before Justin Bieber's voice broke.) They looked so cute in their 18-inch, clear plastic wading pools. My mother asked me if I'd like one, and I said I'd like two. This time, my pet wasn't going to croak on me in the middle of the night, not with another turtle there to keep an eye on it and vice versa.

So we brought them home and set the wading pool in the kitchen window where there was plenty of light. I named them Jimmy and Johnny. (Funny, I never thought about them when I used to eat at Jimmy John's.) I tapped their tiny food canister over the water promptly every day. I picked them up and put them down again. (Not too much you can do with a turtle.)

Well, maybe you saw this coming, too. Jimmy was faster than Johnny and always got to the food first. Johnny died of starvation, and then Jimmy died of loneliness. At least that's how my parents explained it to me. They probably came up with this story because that way I wouldn't feel responsible. They must have thought I blamed myself for George's demise. The irony there is I didn't blame myself half as much for that as I blamed my mother for blowing him off the window ledge. I mean, who does that to a beloved pet?

Four years later, we owned our own house, and my father came home from work one afternoon with a brand new puppy, a cross between a German shepherd and a husky (a Gerky?). My mother named him Eli. Right away it was, "George and Jimmy and Johnny who?" Mom kept Eli on the porch and in the back yard (she never saw any dogs in Good Housekeeping), so that's where my younger sister and I spent as much of our time as possible. Eli was the best friend we ever had.

Well. If I told you what happened to Eli, there wouldn't be enough Puffs Plus in the world. Suffice it to say the story would make Old Yeller look like A Night at the Opera, and we never had another family pet after that. Oh, except for the bunny Terry brought home from high school one day. I don't remember how she'd gotten it or what she thought she was going to do with it in our mother's house. Mom told her it could stay overnight in the small utility room where she kept the washer and dryer, but in the morning it had to go.

So my sister feeds the bunny in the utility room before going out with friends for the evening. Mom explicitly tells her to be sure the door to the room is closed before she leaves. Apparently Terry didn't hear her. An hour later, our folks are watching TV when my mother looks down and sees the bunny sitting between her couch and my father's recliner, watching TV with them. What makes this story precious (and absolutely true) is that they were watching Wild Kingdom at the time.

I'll tell you what brought these memories to mind. Not long ago, I found a tiny spider web in the space between one side of my window air conditioner and the window frame. The spider in it was almost kind of cute, no larger than a mosquito. However, I guess I inherited my mother's distaste for things growing in her house, so I came back a few minutes later, saw that the spider was gone, and brushed away the web. I figured I was doing the little intruder a favor, since she wasn't going to find any bugs in my kitchen.

About an hour later, I return to the kitchen, and guess what -- same spider, different web. I absolutely marveled at the sheer chutzpah and tenacity of my newfound friend. She certainly showed me who was boss! She had earned the right to stay as long as she liked, and I even wished I had some bugs for her to dine on.

By morning she had moved on, and I kept the web up for the rest of the day in case she missed me. Oh, well. It was a perfectly good web. Maybe I should have placed a roommate ad in Bug Club Magazine.*


*A real publication put out by the Amateur Entomologists' Society (AES).

Dreamland

My grade-school classmates and I used to convene on the playground during recess and have deep philosophical confabs about the nature of the universe. I vividly remember one topic that generated the briefest discourse: "Would you rather fly or be invisible?" Everyone immediately agreed that flying was the neatest superpower. After all, we had Superman as our role model. Who could invisible people look up to -- Claude Rains? Anyway, we couldn't look up to a superhero we couldn't see. No, we all wanted to fly. End of discussion.

I was already having flying dreams by then. Do you have them? The earliest dream I can remember took place right at that same school, Little River Elementary. The building formed a horseshoe around a vast lawn, and I was hovering over the grass near the library. I wasn't literally flying, I guess, but I was suspended in mid-air, which was cool enough.

My flying dreams since then have taken on a general pattern that rarely changes. Someone is chasing me. It's an urban setting, because I'm usually flying vertically to the safety of rooftops. My pursuer or pursuers are always earthbound, but they're good climbers, and I often have to kick them off the edge of the building. When they hit the ground, they just start climbing again, and that's when I soar horizontally to the next rooftop. These are intense dreams, always fraught with an element of panic. You'd think flying dreams would be fun, but they're usually a matter of life and death.

If I thought I'd be flying like Superman when I was a kid, I was wrong. I always have to make a running start, and then when I shove off of the ground, I often drop after a height of just two or three feet and have to try again. This can be unnerving when someone is trying to kill me. Even once I'm airborne, I sometimes have to struggle in midair to reach a safe altitude. Once in a while, the bad guy will jump up and touch my feet, but I shake him off and keep going.

Only one dream motif feels like a blessing. Whenever I'm descending a flight of stairs (usually a stairwell with many levels), I can jump from the top step and gently land on the bottom one, almost in slow motion. I always try to do this when other people are around so they can envy my agility. If there's a stairwell in my dream, I know I can breathe easily -- it means no one is after me. When I awaken after these dreams, I always feel a touch of disappointment that I can't really do that (whereas after a panic dream, I'm understandably relieved).

Many friends I've spoken to over the years have also had flying dreams. There's one aspect of my dreams, though, that not many people I've known share with me: the settings are always the same. If it's a work dream, it's the same position at the same job with the same co-workers. The stores I go to are the same, as are the homes where I live. This would be normal, I suppose, if these places were an extension of my reality, but they're all dream places. Although I really was an editor for a huge law firm, the law firm in my dreams is completely imaginary and yet never varies. In fact, I recently changed dream jobs and now work in a smaller dream office. Even the streets and neighborhoods are the same, and I've never been there. The only things that change are the plots of each dream. Not only do different things happen, but subsequent dreams pick up where the previous dreams left off. My sister calls these my "sitcom dreams." If there were a laugh track, I'd probably wake up screaming.

Do you dream in color? I found out that I did years ago when I noticed someone in my dream wearing a red shirt. Then a long time later, someone was hurt and I saw their red blood. Red is the only color I'm aware of in my dreams; maybe they're monochromatic. (See my May 7 post about red being my ex-favorite color.)

Every once in a while, I'll dream that I'm reading a book that's real but which I've never really read. When I wake up the next day, I have to rush out and buy it. I was a teenager the first time this happened. The book was Myra Breckenridge by Gore Vidal, a bestseller at the time. I went to Waldenbooks in my local mall and began reading it that night. Yikes. It was a good book, but not one I was quite ready for at 16. Sometimes I'll dream I'm seeing a real movie I've never seen. If it's in theaters, I have to go see it, or I have to rent the DVD or get it from the library. It's a good thing I never dream I'm seeing a house fire or I might wake up and have to go start one.

Do you ever dream you're not the main character? I've observed myself at a distance doing something or talking to someone. I have no idea who the "I" who's watching is supposed to be. But I've found that I'm pretty boring to watch, so I don't have too many of those.

I've heard from various sources that you can never actually dream that you're dead or else you'd be dead for real. (But if you're dead for real, how can you be dreaming?) The closest I came was to see myself (again at a distance) get shot, then disappear through a doorway and drop dead where I can't see me. So I was dead once removed and was able to wake up and still be alive (needless to say).

Why is it that people who say they never dream are so defensive about it? If someone tells me they never dream and I tell them that everyone dreams or else they'd go insane, they raise their voice and tell me in certain terms (as opposed to "no uncertain terms," an unnecessary double negative) that THEY DON'Y DREAM. Why is that? Do they dream shameful things? Do they dream they're dead and think that if they told me, it would come true? Do they dream they belong to the Tea Party? It puzzles me.

Finally, I'm reminded of something Freud said in The Interpretation of Dreams that I always found fascinating. In fact, it's the only part of that book I remember. He said that every dream is a wish fulfillment. As a result, I analyze every dream I have, especially the nightmares, to figure out what it is I really want. My dreams are easy:

I want to fly.
I want to wear something red.
I want to read good books and see good movies.
I never want to join the Tea Party.
I never want to be dead.

Now about being invisible. . . .

THU MAY 14: Packing to Move

If my math is correct, I've moved 17 times since leaving my home state of Florida in 1977. Let's see -- that's three times in New Jersey, four times in Kansas, seven times in Washington, twice in Maine, and once here in Idaho. (God, let it be once here in Idaho!) Yep, 17 moves in 38 years. Sort of makes Richard Kimble look like a couch potato, doesn't it?

Of course, I never actually plan on moving once I settle in to a place. Four of those moves were with friends and family, jumping-off points to elsewhere. But the other 13 moves were meant to be permanent. I can't help but remember what Jack Nicholson's character said to his ailing father in Five Easy Pieces: "I move around a lot, not because I'm looking for anything really, but 'cause I'm getting away from things that get bad if I stay." (That has nothing to do with me, of course; it's just one of my favorite movie lines. I love saying it.)

My point here is that after a few moves, you become pretty adept at organizing and packing. After 17 of them, you could offer your services on Craig's List. Packing was mostly trial-and-error for me at first; actually, more error than trial. But I got good enough to where I think I can talk about it like a normal person and maybe even help you in your own next move. Or not. Whatever.

Before I can begin packing, I have to figure out what I'm going to take and what I'm going to leave behind. So I make five piles -- one for keeping, one for donating, one for selling, one for giving away to friends, and one for burning on the pyre I've built in the back yard. (This system is also helpful if you're just organizing but not moving. But if you're moving and not organizing, this won't help you at all.)

For each item I select, I have to ask some pertinent questions: Why am I keeping this? Can I live without it? How much sentimental value does it hold? Can I just blot out Dick Cheney's autograph at the bottom? Answers to the first three questions will determine what stays and what goes. The answer to the fourth question can be found on the pyre in my backyard (which begs the question, "What was I doing with it in the first place?").

For me, the most difficult decisions to make always come down to books. I love my books, and I've always hated to purge them. But sometimes large, heavy collections of anything can become extremely costly and cumbersome to transport. When I lived in New Jersey in the late 1970s, my book collection filled six tall bookcases. By the time I'd moved from New Jersey to Kansas and then to Washington, my collection filled an industrial front-loading washer. Now that I've moved from Washington to Maine and finally to Idaho, I keep my collection inside a bottle of zero-calorie Dr. Pepper. (I'd never have the room if the calories were included.)

Once you've amassed your pile of things to sell, it's time to have a garage sale. Garage sales can be very dangerous. You could get hit by a car while taping your sign to a tree by the side of the highway. You could be knifed by a buyer who takes it personally that you're not haggling. You could also be knifed by a motorist who keeps seeing your sign weeks after the sale is over. (Always remember to take them down. That means you, too, political volunteers! I've been tempted to knife you myself.)

Once the sale is over, you have to go start the whole selection process over again. What shall I do with the remaining items? Donate? Give to friends? Bonfires need love, too. Might as well light everything up. (But save those gallon drums of jet fuel for Goodwill. Jet fuel can be flammable. It can also be inflammable. This can become confusing, especially to English majors. To determine whether your jet fuel is flammable or inflammable, gauge the approximate degree of your flamm.)

Now that you know exactly what you're keeping, it's time to hunt for boxes. I know some manly men here who hunt for deer and elk. Let them try hunting for boxes and you'll find them huddled in a corner of their garage sucking their thumbs in a fetal position. It takes guts and sheer tenacity to find just the right boxes for all your valuables. (If they're not all valuables, go back to paragraphs 4 and 5, print them out, and make some flash cards.) Here are a few places to find boxes ranked from "Yay, boxes!" to "You call those boxes?" (Keep in mind this list isn't comprehensive and is limited by my inability to think straight when I have to move.)

1. Stores that sell paper by the ream because boxes that carry reams of paper are sturdy and have great lids. Places to find them:

Staples
Office Depot
Office Max
Kinko's (oops -- Kinko's went away and now there is only FedEx Kinko's and FedEx Kinko's can't help you)
Dunder Mifflin (oops -- you can't get boxes there anymore because they went off the air)

2. Liquor stores (before I thought of #1). Their boxes are pretty reliable if you can grab them before the store owner flattens them on their way out the back door. One problem with some of these boxes, though, especially wine boxes, is that they have these built-in corrugated cardboard dividers you can't remove, so you can basically pack only vases and straws.

3. Grocery stores (before I thought of #2). I would always ask for empty boxes from the fruit section. Most fruit boxes such as apple boxes are fine, but watch out for the banana boxes. They come with one big hole in the bottom so tarantulas can get air. If you do get these boxes, pack flat things like books and tortillas that won't fall out. They're not good for vases or straws.

4. U-Haul. Before I knew anything about moving, I went to my local U-Haul store and bought put-it-together-yourself boxes. That's right -- not only did I have to pay for them, I had to build them myself. If those other stores are giving boxes away for free, shouldn't U-Haul be paying me for my time and trouble? I think U-Haul customers should form a union and demand a living wage.

So these are just a few helpful hints to help make your moving experience a moving experience. Oh, and one more thing -- before you pull away in your 36-foot rental van from U-Haul (even though you're not speaking to them), don't forget to stamp out that raging inferno in the backyard. It's better that your neighbors hear about your move from you than from Wolf Blitzer.

Yee-haw!

I remember that evening like it was yesterday. February 8, 1989, a Thursday. The night Augustus McCrae died.

I watched all four installments of the CBS miniseries Lonesome Dove that week, which was uncharacteristic of me because I didn't like Westerns movies. I didn't like Western novels, either, but because Larry McMurtry was one of my favorite writers, I'd read his magnum opus four years earlier and been moved almost beyond words. But that didn't mean I was now a Western fan of books or movies, and I was planning to bypass the TV adaptation when I first heard about it. But when casting was announced and I read that Robert Duvall was on board, I knew I had a moral obligation to tune in.

I was already a blubbery mess by the time Gus's leg was amputated by the exhausted doctor in that Miles City hotel. I even knew what was going to happen next, but that didn't matter -- McMurtry's characters had me in their grip once again. By the time McCrae opened his eyes for the last time and said to his old partner Woodrow Call (Tommy Lee Jones), "'I God, Woodrow, it's been quite a party, ain't it?" I was wringing out my third bath towel. As the final credits rolled, I knew I was a changed man at 36. I liked Westerns.

That means that for the last 26 years, I've been taking a crash course in Western movies to make up for decades of lost time. I could sit here and pontificate on the role of the Western in contemporary American culture and other grad school topics, but I have a better idea. Let's get right down to it with some of my favorite movies, lines, and moments. (Warning: a few spoilers ahead.)

Who else to begin reflections of the movie Western with than John Wayne? I didn't like him for a very long time. I thought he was a bad actor (before I even saw much of anything he'd done), he walked funny, and his politics were somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun. Well, I got one right, at least. He turns out to be a terrific actor with just the right walk for a man of his mythic stature. My favorites are Red River and Rio Bravo. Red River is a classic in every sense, while Rio Bravo isn't quite. Ricky Nelson's performance might make Glen Campbell in True Grit look like Olivier, but my life is richer for having seen him step out on that porch just as Angie Dickinson sends a vase of flowers crashing through the window. I also like Stagecoach, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and the aforementioned Grit. He was never better than in The Searchers, a movie I want to like as much as the critics and film polls, but when Wayne lifts Natalie Wood up in his arms at the end and says, "Let's go home, Debbie," I want to yell at the screen, "That's not who you are! You haven't earned that!" Finally, I hate to say it because it was such a fitting plot idea for the Duke's final film, but The Shootist really disappointed me. It had the look and feel of a TV show (even Wayne reportedly complained to the director about that), and that final climactic shootout just felt so contrived. Those three bad guys were only there to give Wayne an excuse to go out in a blaze of glory. I never could figure them out. Their stories were woefully underwritten.

Just as Wayne is our finest Western star, I also agree that John Ford is our one great Western director. He is to Monument Valley what Wile E. Coyote is to anvils -- you can never see one without thinking of the other. My pick for the all-time best American Western is Ford's My Darling Clementine. I'd be here all day trying to explain why. Every shot is perfect. Even Ford's characteristic wit, which I usually cringe at, is refreshingly understated. Twice, someone remarks to Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) about the fragrant open air, and each time he reluctantly replies, "That's me. Barber." My favorite exchange is when Henry Fonda says, "Mac, you ever been in love?" and Mac says, "No I've been a bartender all my life." How perfect -- even profound -- is that? Victor Mature, who played Doc Holliday, was too humble when, upon being rejected by a country club years later because he was an actor, he told them, "I'm not an actor -- and I've got sixty-four films to prove it!" He did a great job. The final image of the fence in the foreground (civilization) and the distant Monuments (the untamed West) is one of my favorite closing shots of any movie. (Still, I wonder what Clementine [Cathy Downs] is doing in the middle of nowhere. How's she going to get back to town?)

OK, let's pick up the pace a little:

Ride the High Country -- I think this is a better Peckinpah Western than The Wild Bunch. They're both elegies, but that final shot of Judd (Joel McCrae) sinking slowly down to die as he casts a last look behind him to the mountains he loves is as elegiac and moving as movies get.

Shane -- This is one Western I don't think you have to be a fan of Westerns to enjoy. Alan Ladd makes a great hero, but Jack Palance as Wilson is one villain who should be on everyone's list of cinematic bad guys, yet I rarely see him there. Wilson's killing of Stonewall (Elisha Cook Jr.) in the middle of a muddy street is a triumph of suspense and tragedy. Speaking of elegies, who can forget little Joey (Brandon de Wilde) at the very end, calling out to the wounded Shane as the gunfighter rides away, "Shane! Come back!"

The Westerner -- If you only know Walter Brennan as a crotchety old limping codger (see Rio Bravo for starters or The Real McCoys on TV), you need to see a younger Brennan hold his own with Gary Cooper in this one. He won the first of three Oscars as Judge Roy Bean, and it's just plain scary watching his expression flash from friendly to murderous in about two seconds. That climactic scene in the theater gives me absolute chills whenever I see it. It's amazing that Brennan allows us to feel a measure of sympathy for Bean in his backstage death scene. (For some reason, he always reminds me of Foghorn Leghorn when he sits out in the auditorium wearing his military uniform, waiting for the curtain to rise.)

Clint Eastwood movies: I don't think his acting is up there with the Duke's, except for one movie -- Unforgiven. He was terrific in that. The screenplay has to be one of the best examples of airtight storytelling, from the plot that coils in on itself like a snake to the period vernacular of the dialogue. For my money, Unforgiven includes the single best line Eastwood ever spoke on film: When the Schofield Kid, trying to sound tough after his first killing, says, "Yeah, well, I guess they had it coming," Eastwood gives us a nice long pause before replying, "We all have it coming, kid." His brief speech in the saloon before gunning down just about everyone in sight is the stuff of movie legend. I won't even spoil this one.

More concerning Clint: The Outlaw Josey Wales was recommended to me by a friend, and I'm really glad he did. Another Eastwood movie I enjoy is The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I resisted "spaghetti Westerns" if only because the term sounded so, I don't know, un-American. But Eli Wallach as Tuco gives some of his best work, and the ultimate three-way showdown with Wallach, Eastwood, and Lee Van Cleef is a real nail biter. I also liked Hang 'em High for its original plot. (I once saw a middle-aged woman wearing a T-shirt with two perfectly positioned nooses printed over her chest with the words "Hang 'em High" above them. Let's just say her hangin' days were over and leave it at that.)

Honorable mentions: The Ox-Bow Incident, High Noon (the movie Wayne and Howard Hawks hated so much that they up and made Rio Bravo as a rebuttal), the Coen brothers' remake of True Grit (which, heretical though it may be, I prefer to the original), 3:10 to Yuma (here, too, I like the remake more), and Bad Day at Black Rock (a contemporary Western, but with all the hallmarks of a classic Western thriller).

I know I'm leaving out so much, and I'll kick myself for it later, but I'm not sure how many of you would really want a Part 2. I will say, though, that some Westerns have never felt like real Westerns to me. Dances With Wolves, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Silverado, Doc, Little Big Man -- I enjoyed them all (well, all except Doc, which carried the term "revisionist" to extremes), but something is lacking in them, and I can't pin down what it is (though Little Big Man comes closest to the real thing for me). Oh, and you can add The Outlaw to this list as well. Howard Hughes wasn't half as concerned with the West as he was with making Jane Russell a star. Well, he picked the right genre for her. Russell provided her own Monuments with their own valley. I doubt male filmgoers at the time could have told you who else was in the movie, what it was about, what theater they were sitting in, or what their name was.

Well, pilgrim, we've come to the end of the trail. It only seems fitting to let the immortal John Wayne have the last word on the subject:

"Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!"