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The Injury

April Fool’s Day is no laughing matter. April 1st is seared into my memory as the Day of the Great Injury.

I was perhaps 7 or 8 years old. Spring had come early that year. April 1st was the very first day I could wear shorts outside and ride my bike. I had happily ridden that afternoon to my piano lesson. The warm breeze tickled my pale legs.

When the lesson was over I mounted my bike. I began to roll down the long, sloping driveway. I turned to wave goodbye to my piano teacher. I picked up speed as he disappeared back inside his house. Then I turned to look where I was going.

Too late. My bicycle slammed into the front of my piano teacher’s car parked at the end of his driveway. I distinctly remember that his car was a Dodge. I also remember thinking to myself, “too late”.

I catapulted over the handlebars, doing a somersault in the air. I then slid, butt-first, up the hood of the car. My momentum was abruptly stopped by my private bits as they encountered the base of the windshield wiper. There was a searing pain.

I lay on the hood of the car gasping for breath. I managed to pry myself off the windscreen and roll off the car. I lay in the grass clutching my unmentionables, fearing the accident might leave a deep scar to more than my psyche.

Adding to the humiliation, my best friend’s mother had witnessed the entire thing. She rushed out of her house across the street, picked me up, and drove me home. What’s more, she is an upstanding church lady of the highest order, so there was no discussion of The Injury. She asked instead about my piano lesson. I just whimpered.

Dad met us at the front door. He just stood there blinking. Unable or unwilling to describe what she had witnessed, my friend’s mother merely said: “Charlie has injured himself”.

She then felt the need to add, “In a foundational area”.

My dad blinked again, trying to process it all. Then he just said “Better come inside and put some ice on that”.

[If you know others who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

Image Source: Reddit

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The Accident

“Sir”, he said, bursting into the room where I was conducting a job interview, “May I use the power saw?” Not the question one expects during a job interview.

With a confused look I nodded yes. Our driver dashed to the office tool locker, grabbed the power saw, and disappeared. I apologized to the interviewee, and we resumed our discussion.

This being Uganda, the windows were wide open. We soon heard the power saw in action from somewhere down the road. The interviewee and I were both distracted, listening intently to the grind of the saw on something very unforgiving.

Moments later the project driver re-appeared, sweaty and breathless. “Sir”, he said. “May I borrow 10,000 Shillings?” (about $3.00). He looked at me pleadingly.

I turned to the interviewee to apologize once more, then I asked our driver what was going on.

There had been an accident. A bread truck had crashed through the gates of our project house and smashed into a concrete pillar. The driver of the truck was pinned behind the steering wheel with cracked ribs. Our power saw had been used to cut through the steering column of the truck to free him. But the 10,0000 Shillings?

They had called an ambulance from the accident scene. Alas, the ambulance reported that they could not come because they were “out of fuel”. This was a thinly veiled request for a bribe. Hence the 10,000 Shillings. The irony is that we actually worked on the same compound as the hospital. So our project driver just drove the injured person there himself.

It turns out the injured person was the 16-year-old nephew of the actual bread truck driver. The latter had been drinking and was fast asleep in the passenger seat. The nephew was driving with no license, no shoes, no experience, and apparently no functional brakes.

We got things sorted and I concluded the interview. In my distracted state I offered the candidate the job. Worst hire of my career.  By contrast, that project driver – with his pro-active, get-it-done, common sense – now manages a national fleet of hundreds of vehicles and drivers.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

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Saint Patrick’s Day

Saint Patrick’s Day was the high holy day of holiday shenanigans in our house growing up. Sure, Christmas and Easter were the main event. But no day was more treasured for sheer silliness.

And there were competitors. Take Robbie Burns night, the holiday where Scots honour their great poet. On this solemn eve, my dad dimmed the lights and lit black votive candles on the dining room table. He then “piped in the haggis”, on a kazoo. The “haggis” being a balloon he pulled from the refrigerator filled with frozen jello and bits of fruit. He stood with carving knife in hand, speaking in a faux brogue, then “opened the haggis”. We kids were traumatized. Mom swooned in admiration.

On Saint Patrick’s Day things got even sillier. Green everything. Irish drinking songs blaring on the stereo from dawn until dusk. My parents dancing jigs in the kitchen while waiting for their coffee to percolate. Beef stew with Guinness. Oat cakes. Once again, we kids were traumatized.

Except my little brother.  He would dress himself in green and pretend to be a leprechaun. He would flit around the house trying not to be seen. When we spied him hiding under a table he would waddle off at speed to another room, giggling all the way. He cut up pieces of aluminum foil to make “gold coins” which he slipped under people’s doors and left on chairs. It was very cute. And kind of weird.

One Saint Patrick’s Day, when he was perhaps 6, he outdid himself. My parents were at the kitchen table. In walked my brother with dad’s prized bottle of single malt whisky, a surefire Irish tradition. Except the whisky had been turned electric, neon green. In honor of Saint Patrick, My brother had dumped an entire bottle of green food coloring into my dad’s prized whisky. To be a good sport, dad drank a bit. His lips turned green. I suspect it may also have discolored his urine.

My father kept the ruined bottle of whisky. He would serve it to guests in dark whisky glasses, then say nothing as their lips turned green. He only did this to guests with a good sense of humor. Or so I believe. Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

Image Credit: Freaking News

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KA-BOOM

The fireball engulfed my arm before igniting the fuel canister in my hand. Fearing an explosion, I hurled the burning can into the empty field beside our campsite.

Moments before I had been re-filling the fuel reservoir in our camp stove. The stove was not completely off. A tiny blue flame lingered around the burner. I did not see it. I was a teenager. It is not the most observant period in one’s life.

As I began to pour the fuel, the tiny ring of fire ignited the vapour from the can. I jerked my arm back, splashing cooking fuel up my arm and all over the fuel canister itself. Both objects caught on fire. I hurled the can as far as I could, then tamped out my arm. Thankfully it was just singed. To my surprise the canister did not explode. It merely burbled and melted until it was half destroyed.

Our family collected itself after all the excitement. I was tasked with getting rid of the remaining fuel in and the half-melted canister lying the field. I took the well-worn teenage path of least resistance. I dumped the remaining fuel down the outhouse beside the campsite, then threw the remains of the empty container in the trash.

For some reason unknown to me to this day, I glanced down the hole of the outhouse into which I had just dumped the fuel. An oil slick of cooking gas was forming on top of the cesspool. It was quite distinct, shimmering unmistakably in the depths.

I got my dad. He looked down the outhouse. Then he looked at me.  Then he did something I had never seen him do before, or since. He acted quickly.

“Let’s go”, he said, trotting back to the campsite with speed. “Time to pack ‘er up and get on the road”.

Haste and decisiveness were totally foreign to my parents. We normally didn’t get on the road until early afternoon. But on this day we packed up camp and hit the road in 20 record-breaking minutes.

I did not fully grasp the situation. I asked dad what all the rush was about as we sped away from the park. He began to giggle. Then he began to laugh until he almost could not drive.

“Son”, he said. “I want you to imagine what is going to happen the next time some unsuspecting camper goes into the outhouse. Now imagine they have a newspaper and a cigarette. Now imagine what they do with that cigarette once they’re done smoking. Now image what happens next….”

The life lesson dad taught me that day was to speed when fleeing from responsibility.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

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Cat Pee

My wife found me in the morning, lying across the threshold of our open front door. I was asleep in a pool of my own drool. In my hand was a half-eaten raw potato.

For weeks a foul stench had come through the wall separating our half of the duplex from that of our neighbour. The smell was so bad it made our eyes water. The only way to keep it at bay was to open all our windows, even though this was Canada in early spring. Brrrrrrrr.

The source of the smell was our neighbour’s cats. Or more precisely, their “leavings”. Multiple cats had been using the neighbour’s half of the duplex as a litter box for years. Their apartment was saturated with cat urine and faeces, of which we were now the olfactory beneficiaries.

We spoke about it with our neighbours on several occasions. They responded by putting bleach on their basement floor. This merely changed the nature of the stench from “cat pee” to “World War I trench cat pee”.

My dad came to visit. He had bad allergies. The stench was so overpowering he had to go stay in a hotel. That night, in addition to the windows, we opened the front door to get maximum ventilation. We lived in a sketchy neighbourhood (see this post). So for security reasons I rolled out my sleeping bag and slept in the threshold of the open front door.

I woke in the night to the sound of a small tinkling bell. I roused myself. There, on our kitchen table, was one of the offending cats grooming themselves in a most unseemly manner. I snapped.

In sleep-deprived derangement I stumbled into our kitchen, seeking a projectile to drive the cat from our home. My eyes landed on a raw potato. I went back into our dining area and reared back to drill this cat with a potato. But even in my fuzzy state, something in my brain told me that at this close range I might actually kill the cat. Besides, the cat was innocent: by rights I should be throwing the potato at my neighbour. So I bit the raw potato into pieces and hurled a tiny fragment at the cat.

Of course I missed, splattering potato on the wall. But the cat got the message and ran. I stumbled back to my sleeping bag, clutching the remainder of the potato lest I need it later. That’s how my wife found me in the morning.

After all diplomacy was exhausted we called social services, because our neighbours actually had a new baby living in that cesspool. We broke our lease. Later the health department condemned the entire building.

Months afterwards I was cycling home from work. My route led past the old apartment. I was stopped in my tracks by a familiar stench. There, on the front lawn of the duplex, was a dumpster full of sodden floorboards. Apparently they had been so saturated with cat urine the building owner was forced to strip the neighbour’s apartment back to the studs.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

[Image credit to imgflip]

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The Russians

I was on a long haul flight. Four Russian sailors were seated in the row in front of me. What could possibly go wrong?

Before we had even taken off the flight attendant came round and offered me free drinks.

“Trust me” she said, firing a glance at the four men in their matching blue-striped sailor t-shirts, “When those guys get going you are going to want a little something to take the edge off. Besides, they usually drink all the booze. So you had better get some now”.

I ordered a whisky and asked her to tell me more.

“They’re Russian sailors”, she said. “They sail oil tankers across the Pacific and then fly back to pick up the next tanker. Every month they fly with us. It is always the same routine…”

As I discovered first hand, their routine happened in the following order:

  1. Drink an insane amount of hard liquor. I suspect they had already started before they even got on the airplane.

  1. Hang out near the lavatory and try to pick up women. This is difficult when (a) you are blocking access to the toilet for women who need to pee, (b) you have too much chest hair, (c) you behave like a Russian-accented Burt Reynolds, and (d) you absolutely reek of booze. Just an observation.

  1. Hug your buddies and sing Russian sailor songs very, very loudly. Continue to drink.

  1. Throw up into to your air sick bag while your buddies laugh at you. You laugh at them when it is their turn to throw up.

  1. Take off all clothes except underwear. No kidding: they all stripped down to their undies.

  1. Get on your knees, facing your airline seat, and pray to God in Russian while moaning and periodically throwing up.

I asked the flight attendant about the clothing removal.

“Yeah. I don’t know about that part”, she said. “We can’t tell if that is a Russian thing or a sailor thing”.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

[Image credit: Quikmeme]

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Chaos

While in the States I attended a fundraiser for the local elementary school at a neighborhood restaurant.  The event made me ponder the upside of celibacy.

Picture pressurized busloads of children suddenly and simultaneously being released into a contained yet public space. Several dozens of children, some of them birthed right there in the restaurant I swear, soon overwhelmed the capacity of the kitchen to produce food and the capacity of the wait staff to deliver it. It was like being in a battle scene from Braveheart.

There were children under tables, on top of tables, crawling between tables, wearing menus on their head as a hat, and having meltdowns with the consistency of Old Faithful. The din was constant as the children outshouted one another. Madness I tell you.

The ratio of food being worn vs. food being consumed was about 1:1. I actually saw a kid with a meatball in his ear. How is that even possible?

Oblivious to the unwashed masses were the parents. They spent most of their time not knowing where their children were, nor if they had eaten, nor in fact acting as if they had children at all. Instead each table of adults was deep in conversation, alcohol consumption, and frequent breastfeeding. The fashion scene was ripe with the it-looks-suspiciously-like-a-veteran-homeschooler-length skirt and handmade knitwear.

Rising above it all was the Principal. Parting the sea of children like Moses, she floated between the tables cracking jokes and glad-handing with grace and bemusement. This was her night off: not my kids, not my problem.

Supporting the school was of course worth it. And I confess I felt very much alive from being part of the experience. But next year I am just going to mail in the donation from the comfort of my own kitchen table.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

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My Wife is Always Right

Led down an alley in Morocco by a stranger, far from other tourists. Any idiot could sense that perhaps we were in danger. Except this idiot.

We had earlier been approached by a suspicious looking character in the tangled web of small streets in Marrakech. He offered to take us to a nearby Berber leather market. Of course we said no. Any idiot knows not to follow a stranger offering directions in Marrakech. Even this idiot.

But the leather market did sound pretty cool.

Sometime later a friendly Moroccan in line with us at a shop asked where we were from. As we chatted, he casually mentioned the Berber leather market as something worth seeing. He paid for his items, wished us well and headed off. No weird vibes from this guy. He hadn’t offered to take us anywhere.

Independent corroboration that the market existed. Now we were really interested.

After we walked some distance in search of the market, we happened upon the friendly guy standing outside a shop with several friends. He said hello and asked how things were going. No mention of the Berber market. It was I who said that we were trying to find it. The man then said something to one of the friends who was about to leave the shop. He turned to us and said, “Ahmed here works near the market. He is heading that way now. He can show you the way if you want”. He did not push. It was up to us.

I enthusiastically agreed. We all wanted to see the market. This gift of a guide was our way to do it. But my wife’s radar went off at the offer. She wasn’t so sure. Naturally I became annoyed – we needed help to find the market, and we had clearly avoided the earlier scam. Time to live a little.

Ignoring her protests, we began to follow the man through the impossible web of tangled alleys. Each was filled with tiny shops selling all manner of goods and with smells from open air butcher shops, the sweat of donkeys, sewage, spices. It was exhilarating and overwhelming. We soon left the tourist district behind us.

Now the children joined my wife in protest. Too much walking. But just then we began to see signs for the tannery and leather district of Marrakech. The smell became overwhelming as we passed courtyards filled with leather hides being stretched in the sun. We MUST be almost at the market!

We rounded a corner and came upon a tacky tourist shop called “Berber Leather Market”. Several intimidatingly large men stood outside. It was immediately obvious, even to this idiot, that (a) we had been scammed and (b) we were someplace we ought not to be. We beat a hasty retreat to the safety of the main road, without further incident.

As we trudged back to the tourist district, I was a mix of contrition and annoyance. Both aimed squarely at myself. I apologized to the family. I moped. I placated the children with chocolate. Then I promised my wife that I would write a blog about how she is always right and how I should always listen to her. What kind of idiot makes such a promise?

PS: It turns out the Marrakech leather district scam is well known to those who read tourist blogs.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

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Birthday Girl

A bolt of electricity went through me the first time I held her. I didn’t know it was possible to love anyone so much. Then I saw my wife’s open abdomen from the c-section and I nearly fainted.

Her difficult arrival did come with some levity.  During the labor, a nurse asked my wife if she would like to have a mirror wheeled into the delivery room.

“Why would she want a mirror?” I asked naïvely.

“Some mothers want to witness the miracle of birth”, the nurse replied.

At this point, mid-contraction, my wife sat up and hissed “Listen! If God wanted me to see that miracle He would have put my head on my butt!” So many reasons to love my wife.

I have clear memories of calling my parents with the watershed news. This was our first child, and the first of a new generation for the entire family.

Our daughter spent her first four years in Africa. She learned to be flexible. Passed around the market by delighted African mothers? No problem. Carried into the kitchen to be spoiled by African restaurant staff? No problem. Hippo pooping just outside her front door on safari? No problem.

She became resilient in our move from Africa to Belgium. Overnight she went from being outside every day, speaking English, and running with a pack of African children to being indoors, hearing French, and being alone. She would collect rocks on our various outings and pile them by the door. I asked her about it and she said, “Oh dad, these are my friends”. Thankfully, once she made some real friends, the pile reverted to being mere rocks.

Her heart is tender and open. During our years in Washington, DC she became the steady guidance system for her ballistic younger brother and his friends. She loved being close to our extended family, and being friends with people of all stripes and differences.  She enjoys horses, but thankfully she never became a weird horsey girl. Mostly, I think she liked the overnight stay at her aunt’s house beside the horse farm.

Our move to Switzerland has been the hardest for her. But it has propelled her towards adventure and independence. And it has revealed deep courage in her character. In the recent week leading up to her beloved grandfather’s death, she sat at his bedside for long periods just holding his hand. As I watched her do so I asked myself once again: how is it possible to love anyone so much?

[This story is for our daughter on her 17th birthday. Love you, birthday girl.]

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

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The Iguana

[I would like to thank the many people who have reached out to me in response to last week’s post about dad’s death. Your support has been overwhelming and uplifting. I am deeply grateful.]

After the recent death of my father, I have now turned to the task of “taming the iguana” – dad’s own term for the hundreds of random sticky notes, files, and mislabelled boxes that fill his home. Doing so has uncorked both laughter and tears, as well it should. These two emotions often arrive together.

Facing the iguana is like living in a scene from “A Beautiful Mind”: number of yellow sticky pads strewn randomly about dad’s house–114; number of yellow sticky pads containing useful information–7.  Almost every box is simply labelled “mementos”. Thanks dad.

I have yet to locate an original copy of dad’s will. But I have found three boxes of interstate roadmaps from the 1970s. I also came across water bills from 1992. They were in a box labelled “mementos”.

There are two bedroom closets upstairs. One contains just two pieces of clothing: my mother’s wedding dress and dad’s old boy scout uniform. The other contains dad’s extensive collection of flannel pajama pants and nerdy t-shirts.  My favourite is one that says “Technically, Moses was the first person to download data from the cloud to a tablet”. I once gave him a shirt from the CERN particle accelerator that says “I think your Boson is giving me a Hadron”. But I can’t find the shirt. I think dad must have discarded it for fear of appearing rude.  I have no such scruples.

Dad supported dozens of charities. His desk is piled high with aid appeals from dozens more that he had not yet gotten round to supporting but that he did not have the heart to turn down.

I smile each time I encounter dad’s two prized refrigerator magnets (which is often). One says:

o   “To Do is to Be” – Nietzsche

o   “To Be is to Do” – Kant

o   “Do Be Do Be Do” – Sinatra

The other magnet simply states: “Without ice cream, there would be darkness and chaos”.

It is the photographs that most elicit laughter and tears. Each one is a physical reminder of dad with my mother, with grandkids, family, and beloved friends. This is also true of the photos we have received in recent weeks from friends and family. Like the one enclosed. When my son’s best friend heard of the death, he commemorated dad on his basketball shoes.

The Irish have a term, “thin place”. It is where this world and the next one are barely indistinguishable, like the wardrobe in Narnia. The hospital room during dad’s final moments was a “thin place”. If you reached out there you could almost push through into where dad was going. In recent weeks, Dad’s house has become a “thin place”, thanks to the iguana.

 

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]