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Grandparents

“At Church. Beer in fridge. Love, Grandma”.  The note was taped to the front door of my grandparent’s house. My college roommate and I had just rolled up after 10 hours on the road in my 1970’s camper van, “Chocolate Thunder”: orange shag carpet inside, tantalizing brown color outside.

Moments after we had let ourselves in to my grandparent’s house they burst through the door and smothered us in hugs and kisses.

I asked grandma how she was doing. “Busier than a fart in a hot skillet”, she replied. She really said that.

Grandpa went to the fridge and returned with cans of Miller Lite. He also brought out the small glass cups: refined people never drink their Miller Lite directly from the can. My roommate stared wide eyed.

Grandma broke out the Wonder Bread and bologna and invited us to make sandwiches. In an effort to be polite, my roommate cut a modest slice of bologna. Without asking, Grandma reached over and manhandled his sandwich. She slapped on a second chunk of bologna the size of Rhode Island and teased, “You polite Canadians and your anemic sandwiches!” My roommate dutifully choked it down, aided by gulps of Miller Lite.

We had just moved into the living room to watch the Cubs game when an old family friend arrived. Out came more Miller Lite and another small glass. He regaled us with stories about his time years before in seminary, where he routinely snuck into the kitchen for a late night snack. Once, when he heard the head priest coming, he was forced to hide under a table for 20 minutes to avoid being caught. He re-enacted the event by crawling under the coffee table in my grandparent’s living room. We all laughed so hard we cried.

My roommate and I retired to the guest room. We had separate little Bert and Ernie beds with knitted bed covers. Above my bed was a crocheted wall hanging of a Sioux warrior. Above his there hung a felt church banner that read “This is the day that the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.” We turned off the lights.

Through the thin walls we could hear grandma humming the Beer Barrel Polka as she washed up the glasses. Grandpa was listening to his police scanner radio. In the dark my roommate quietly remarked, “My God, I wish I had your grandparents”.

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Belgian Chocolate

I was not thrilled with the prospect of having to dig a hole in my suburban back yard to do my business. But I had no choice.

Earlier that day the septic system in our century-old house in Belgium had backed up, filling our basement with ick. This was the fourth backup in as many months. Something was seriously amiss.

The landlady sent over a crew with a camera. They put the gear down the manhole. They turned it on. With cigarettes dangling from their mouths they uttered a single exclamation: “Catastrophe!” The landlady had a serious problem on her hands.

She sent a crew over to dig up the crumbling septic tank and the broken pipes running to the street. I imagine these materials had been installed in pre-Roman times. There was mostly nothing left to dig up, except for the soiled soil, care of 1,000 flushes directly into our yard. To describe the excavated pile as smelly and gross would be the understatement of the year. It was also a health hazard.

The crew finished for the day. The crew leader then casually mentioned to my wife that they would be back to recommence work…IN ONE MONTH. My wife asked him to repeat himself. She wanted to be sure she understood. Her French is not parfait.

He looked at her quizzically and explained that the official holiday period began the very next day. The company would be closing for one month. The entire Belgian septic industry would be closing for one month.

My wife gently pointed out that there was a mountain of dirt and raw sewage on our front lawn. She asked what happened for all other such septic emergencies during the holiday period. The septic worker puffed sympathetically on his cigarette. He shrugged and said, “meh”. Then he left on holiday.

Which left me that evening wearing my rubber boots, with toilet paper and trowel in hand, trudging towards our back yard in a light Belgian rain to respond to nature’s inconvenient call.

To add insult to injury, we had houseguests. As I dug the hole of shame near the backyard hedge, they looked on from the window and cheered. Then, mercifully for all involved, they closed the blinds.

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

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Fat Ass

My donkey was not happy.  With every step, he let everyone know it.

Earlier, my brother, my wife and I had walked through a mountain village in Ethiopia with our guide. In the pre-dawn light we approached a group of tethered donkeys. They had been arranged to take us up to an Orthodox Monastery, perched high above on a mountain ledge.

The donkeys looked as us. Then they turned plaintively towards me as one, as if to say “Please God, not the big feller”. As we mounted up, my donkey let out a loud hissing sound like air escaping from a tire. He then added some frustrated stomping and braying for effect. The guides giggled. My wife and my brother giggled. The donkey and I did not giggle.

We plodded off in the dim light. Each step brought an exaggerated, labored wheezing sound from the donkey. Imagine a goose being struck by a truck. That was the sound he made with every step.  At this point, the guides and my family began laughing outright. I named the donkey “Grunter”.

We started the steep ascent to the monastery. Grunter now added to his symphony by loudly passing wind. He wanted us to think it was from exertion. I think he was just an attention seeking ass. Regardless, it was loud. It was foul. And it was frequent. This went on for 30 minutes. The guides began laughing so hard they could barely walk. My wife and my brother were forced to mouth-breathe from the stench.

We finally reached the summit. The monastery was stunning. The morning sun shone over an endless view of the wild Ethiopian mountains. We stood in quiet wonder. Timeless. Holy. Beside us, monks wrapped in simple blankets were deep in morning prayer.

The donkeys saw us approach them to begin our descent. Grunter tried to bolt. Inspired by the peace of the monastery, and simply resigned to the obvious drama that awaited us, I opted to walk down.

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Mountain Men

Swiss mountains are unforgettable. So too are the people you meet up there.

Last year my wife and I were hiking a remote trail high in the Alps. We came upon a farmer repairing a stone wall. He was a burly fellow with a mutton chop mustache. He looked like Obelix the cartoon character, or an agrarian version of Lemmy from Motorhead.

As we passed I wished him a “Guten Tag”, this being the German part of the country and greetings an essential part of Swiss culture. He raised his hand in a Roman salute and responded “Salve”. His greeting was Romansh, an ancient derivative of Latin used by only a handful of Swiss, yet still one of their four official languages. It was a moment straight out of another millennium.

I regularly hike up a mountain trail behind our house.  Three hikes out of five I will find a man there, sitting alone on a mountainside bench. He is my age and from the Middle East, either an immigrant or an asylum seeker. He sits and smokes and gazes with sad eyes over the broad Lake Geneva valley. We nod and smile at each other as I pass by, but we have never conversed: he speaks neither English nor French nor German. Still, he has become a fixture on the mountain. I miss seeing him when I find the bench empty.

Just today I was hiking alone in high mountain pastures when a storm boiled in. It began to rain hard as I made for the shelter of a stone cattle barn. I sat there under the eaves as a wicked thunderstorm rolled through. It was glorious.

Then out of nowhere three Swiss farmers appeared. We greeted each other. They began to prepare the barn to milk cattle. One of the farmers wore a baseball hat that featured a Canadian maple leaf and the silhouette of a bull. I pointed to the hat and said, with some pride, “Vive le Canada!” He responded with a smile and perfect English, “Yes! Canada! That’s where I get all my bull semen from”.

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

 

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The Motorcycle

I rolled up on my little motorbike behind a dozen Hell’s Angels waiting for a traffic light. This was a moment that could define a lifetime. Or end it.

So I honked my horn. Because that’s what motorcycle guys do when they see one another. And because I was only 17 at the time and had a different understanding of risk and consequence.

I should note that I was on a teeny, weeny motorcycle. It was robin egg blue. The horn sounded like a clown wooga-wooga squeeze horn, but falsetto.

Also, I was dressed like a flower. I was on my way to a Hawaiian party sporting a flowered shirt, flowered shorts, and sandals. I had a bowling ball motorcycle helmet. It was orange with sparkles.

The Hell’s Angels turned in their seats and stared at me. They were enormous. Their Harleys were enormous. Their girlfriend’s, perched on the back of the Harleys, were enormous. They looked like a herd of leather-jacketed bison with Nazi helmets. Time stood still.

Then I waved to them and smiled, because that’s what motorcycle guys do when they see one another. As one they burst out laughing. They motioned for me to ride up among them.

I gunned my little bike and rolled up to take my place among the thundering hogs. Their bikes sounded like the deep rumble of marine engines. Mine sounded like a tiny swarm of bees with asthma.

The light turned green. The Harleys roared away. I tried to follow but could not keep pace. As they disappeared, a few of them pumped their fists in the air. I like to think this was an act of solidarity. I suspect it was an act of good-natured mockery. Regardless: ride on, brothers.

 

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

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The Motel

The diaper exploded in the motel swimming pool. Then the offending infant sealed the deal by throwing up in the shallow end. They closed the pool for cleaning. Our children returned to the motel room, downcast.

We had chosen this motel, a classic 1950’s two story walk-up, specifically because it had a pool. That was our treat for the kids as our family toured the historic battlefield of Gettysburg. Our only fallback now was the allure of the make-it-yourself waffle iron at the breakfast bar the next morning.

That night the Boy Scout troop in the room above us began bouncing off the walls. Their leaping and tackling reverberated like thunderclaps in our room below. At 10:00 PM I went up and kindly asked them to be quiet. At 11:00 PM I did the same. By midnight, I had had enough. I threw back the covers. My wife immediately registered concern. She knows that when Panda dad switches to Grizzly dad, it can get unpleasant. I assured her I was under control. I strolled purposefully up to the second floor walkway in my plaid boxer shorts and thin sleeping t-shirt.

I knocked on the door. The room went silent. I knocked again. A boy scout opened the door and peered out, wide-eyed.

“Where is the scoutmaster?”, I asked calmly.

The scout became immediately contrite. “I am sorry”, he said. “We’ll tone it down”.

“Please answer my question”, I said with Vladimir-Putin-lack-of-emotion and half-lidded eyes, “and tell me where I can find the scoutmaster”.

“I promise we’ll be quiet”, said the scout.

“Son”, I said, “I am going to knock on every door on this floor until I find the scoutmaster. You can either come with me, or I can march back down here with him when I find him. What’s it going to be?”

Before he could answer, a door opened further down the walkway. Out stepped a man who turned out to be the scoutmaster. He looked puzzlingly at my boxer shorts. I explained calmly and politely what was going on. He said he’d take care of it. He did. Not another peep out of those guys.

The next morning our family was sitting in the breakfast room eating waffles. At the table beside us were several obese men. They were dressed in Civil War period uniforms and had waffle batter on their chins. As they discussed their upcoming battle re-enactment one of them remarked, “You know what I don’t understand? It’s those wussies that re-enact the War of 1812. I mean, that was just a totally sucky war, man”. Our family quietly challenged one another to think of anything less cool than battle re-enactment guys with waffle drizzle on their chins talking trash about other battle re-enactment guys. Our son identified “diapers exploding in a motel pool” as being way, way less cool.

In walked the scout troop. The entire troop came up and apologized. They looked us in the eyes. They shook our hands. They took responsibility. Later, we commended the scout leader on their exemplary morning conduct, and we asked him to convey our sincere appreciation.

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

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The Possum

I would like to thank Eloise, Wordsfortheweary editor, for her guest blog post last week about a Ugandan chicken. Her story was in large part the inspiration for this one, which took place in Canada. Different continents, same absurdity.

It was past midnight, and there was trouble at the henhouse.

The shrieking chickens woke the farmer from a deep winter’s sleep. He threw back the covers. It was bitterly cold, and he usually slept in the nude. He fumbled in the dark for his shotgun. He stepped through the door to the bedroom balcony to get a better view.

But in his bleary state he had neglected one crucial detail: there was no bedroom balcony. It had not yet been built. So instead, he stepped through the door into thin air and plunged two stories into a deep snowdrift. He still clutched the shotgun. He was still nude.

Now very much awake and with a chapped butt, he struggled out of the drift and through the snowy field towards the chaos in the henhouse. He flung open the door. There sat a large possum, contentedly making a meal of one of the hens. The possum was dispatched. With order restored, the farmer walked back through the snowy darkness to the farmhouse.

Which was of course locked. The only thing open was the door up where a bedroom balcony was supposed to be. He stood in the snow calling up to his wife. Nothing. He yelled. Nothing. He went round and knocked on the front door. Still nothing. Then he pounded on the door with all his might.

Finally the farmer’s wife rose from a deep winter’s sleep. She threw back the covers. It was bitterly cold, but she slept in a sensible flannel nightgown. Thankfully, she did not venture through the void to the unbuilt balcony. Instead she trudged downstairs and wearily opened the front door for her shivering husband. He was nude, he was holding a shotgun, and he had some explaining to do.

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

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The Chicken

This Week’s Post is Written by WordsfortheWeary’s Editor, not Author. 

A two week trip to East Africa is always memorable, but Uganda is particularly so. What began with a breakdown ended with chasing a chicken, and nothing but adventure in the middle.

It began with a week in Tanzania. When our car broke down in the dark on some lonely roadside within a couple of kilometres of the airport, our family laughed. We truly were back in Africa. A friendly driver was flagged down by our driver/guide/general-care-taker Chris, and we were taken along random back routes to find an isolated but stunning coffee plantation that hosted us the first night.

The rest of the trip in Tanzania was spent driving across the country to enjoy safari, as well as tour Olduvai Gorge – actually pronounced ‘Oldupai’, but was misspelt by a European explorer in their letters and was named incorrectly. The ‘cradle of humanity’ is host to dozens of early hominid skeletons of varying ages and species, with layers of rock dating 2 million years back. To get there from our hotel, we had a Maasai guide walking us across the bush for 2 hours. It was how he began the walk talking about possibly seeing leopards whilst on foot, or showing us the track of a hyena that had been there “a couple of hours earlier”. Looking at the large knife he had tied to his waist, I suddenly found myself concerned about this walk in the wild. Happily, the most adventurous thing we saw was the afterbirth of a wildebeest, and herds of them and Zebra wandering about the plains.

Uganda hosted the usual assault of brilliance for the week after Tanzania. Within an hour of landing we were reunited with old friends and chatting to the later evening – which later proved a mistake, as mosquito bites coated us the next day. We spent our time catching up with our community and the clinic my parents had built and being roasted by the sun. Occupying a strange place in time, not much had changed. A few new high rise buildings and some new roads, but the same people, places and beauty.

The best story from our week in Uganda would be that of the chicken. Some years ago, dad had come home with a goat in the back of his car. It was meant to be a very fresh gift of food, but with a vegetarian mother and sister, that wasn’t a preferable option. Gerald was adopted and lived with us until he ate my dad’s beloved roses, at which point he was sent to a farm for breeding purposes. It was perhaps, then, predictable that a Ugandan family friend would bring us a cockerel. Large, white and pooing on the veranda and gardens of the Makindye Country Club, this chicken presented a problem.

He came to us with tethered legs, but slipped his tether and was running around at full speed. Despite numerous offers from the kitchen staff, we did not want him slaughtered for us. Dad decided he wanted to try and catch it. For a surprisingly stupid animal, the score was 4 – 0 in its favour. Dad merely caught feathers. It was only when our former househelp-turned-chicken-farmer came to visit that the chicken was successfully caught and gifted to another Ugandan friend with a farm. And we came back to Europe, sunburnt and aching for Uganda.

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

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The Concert

This particular elementary school concert was the musical equivalent of waterboarding.

The concert, to celebrate Black History Month, was preceded by “Food Fiesta” in the cafeteria. Much of the school was Latino. So “Food Fiesta” was basically code for burritos. They were excellent. Everyone ate way too many. Then we waddled down to the gym like bloated cows on clover to partake in the musical extravaganza.

The teacher in charge of the evening worked the mic like a drunk relative at a wedding who won’t take a hint. Not that I have any experience in that area.

At one point he introduced three 6th graders of modest musical talent. They were to play Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” on their poorly-tuned violins. He then announced they would play the song as a round, noting “those of you who are musically trained may detect that this song was not actually written as a round”. He was right. It sounded like multiple cat claws being dragged across a chalk board for a tortuous eternity. The proud parents swooned and took video.

Interspersed with the music were stirring readings from African American luminaries such as Doctor Martin Luther King, Langston Hughes, and Frederick Douglas. Regrettably, the microphone stand was set at “drunk relative” height, which was far too tall for the children doing the readings. As a result, we could only hear a small percentage of what they actually said. During one such reading of the famous “I have a Dream” speech by Dr. King, our 5 year old leaned over and asked in a rather loud voice, “Daddy, did that boy just say that he’s been to the muffin top?”

When it finally ended we stampeded back to the cafeteria to mop up the leftover burritos.

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

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Ça-va?

“I don’t know”, he said, “This looks like one prolonged groin injury to me”. Neither of us were good cross-country skiers. We stood atop a steep hill in Switzerland and weighed our options.

As we did, a senior citizen glided past us. Like most Swiss seniors she was impressively, even annoyingly, fit. As she sailed down the hill, she called back in a singsong voice, “Ça-va?” (saw-va).

Loosely translated “Ça-va?” means, “Is everything OK?” In reality she was saying, “You guys look like you really stink at cross country skiing. Otherwise you would be down the hill by now. And if I really cared I probably would have stopped instead of shaming you with my skiing prowess. Lay off the cheeseburgers.”

Ça-va: comprehensive condemnation in just two small words.

I went first. It was ugly. My feet slid in every direction, as if I were wearing two greased spatulas on my feet. I soon broke the sound barrier and decided to abort the mission before I hurt myself. I careened around a corner and headed straight for a welcoming snowbank into which I cratered at top speed.

As I lay there, another elderly couple glided by. “Ça-va?” they sang out. I nodded meekly. Perfectly ça-va, I thought. Couldn’t be more ça-va. Why else would I be lying here crumpled in the snow?

My friend eventually came screaming around the corner. The whites of his eyes told the story. Since I already occupied the preferred snowbank, he was forced to veer wildly. His arms pinwheeled as he slammed into the snowbank on the other side of the trail. We lay there laughing, happy to be alive.

Yet another elderly couple skied up to us and stopped. They were British. They proceeded to point out the many faults in our skiing, all wrapped in the thin veneer of encouraging self-improvement. Their pep talk was wasted on us. Why not just cut to the chase with an efficient “Ça-va?”

They finally skied away. We lumbered back to our feet and skied out the final hill. By now the wax was gone from my skis. So I had to push frantically with my poles, my arms moving like two hampsters on a treadmill, just to get down the hill.

[photo credit: my wife on a similar, not ça-va, ski outing]

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