kenlassblog

Okay my sweet little grandkids, it’s time to put down the Ipads and head off to bed. What’s that? You want grandpa to tell you a bedtime story? Well….let’s see…..okay got one. Snuggle under the covers and I’ll tell you a TV story.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a world where there were only three TV stations…..a world where you had to actually get up out of the chair and walk to the TV set and turn a dial to change the channel…..a world where the TV screen was part of a large piece of furniture that rested on the floor, not on the wall. It was called Antenna World, named after the long, thin metal protrusions that rested on its top.

There were only three networks broadcasting on Antenna World, NBC, ABC and CBS. Actually there was a fourth network. It was called PBS. But it existed in that snowy, murky land called UHF. No one really understood much about UHF, except that there were a bunch of school type shows on it, mostly teachers in classrooms standing in front of blackboards doing math or science lessons……like anybody was going to watch that! And anyway, it was almost impossible to get a nice clean picture on UHF. Usually it would fade in and out like a burst of wind.

There was no color on Antenna World. There was only black and white and shades of gray. Strangest of all, there was no strong violence or bad language or naughty romantic shenanigans on the shows. When the good guys would shoot the bad guys, they would just fall down. Oh, and that’s another thing. In Antenna World the good guys would always win. And you could tell who they were. Some of them wore white hats. On the funny shows they would try to make you laugh by just being silly. They didn’t have to use bad words and naughty jokes. Sometimes they would just hit somebody in the face with a pie, or fall through a trap door.

Everything was fine on Antenna World until one day it was invaded by the Satellite People. The Satellite People attached long cables and weird looking dishes on the roofs of people’s houses and brought in hundreds of networks and channels. Suddenly there was much, much more than NBC, ABC and CBS. And every channel was aimed at a special group of people. There were channels for golfers and tennis players and race car drivers, for people who liked cooking, and remodeling and travelling, for fans of old movies, mushy movies, and funny movies, for Jews and Catholics and Scientologists. There were even channels for people who didn’t speak English.

The Satellite People worried that there would not be enough folks to watch all of these channels, so they started making them nastier and naughtier and more disrespectful. They were also charging a lot of money to see all of their channels. As time went by the number of channels kept growing and growing. There were channels for children and teenagers and very old people. Channels for music videos and government hearings and cowboy western shows. And some of the shows kept getting nastier and nastier and naughtier and naughtier. It got so bad that some of the people on Antenna World had had enough. They told the Satellite People to go away. They started cutting those cables and taking the dishes off of their roofs. They went back to the long, thin metal protrusions on top of their TV’s. They found they could still get more channels than just NBC, ABC, and CBS, but most of them just showed those old programs that were funny and silly and nice.

The people of Antenna World had learned a very important lesson. That more is not always better. That we can laugh and cry and pay attention to things without them being nasty and naughty. That it was silly to spend all that money for hundreds of channels that they don’t even watch! Why, they even discovered they didn’t have to watch so much TV at all. They started talking to each other and spending time together. They were very pleased. And they lived happily ever after. The end.

Now go to sleep my little buddies. Tomorrow we’ll take a break from Disney Plus and maybe play catch.

There is more out there. More than you know. More than you want. More than you can take. I’m talking about Christmas music. There is more out there than Bing Crosby, Burl Ives, Dean Martin, Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis and Mannheim Steamroller. More than Brenda Lee, Josh Groban, Elvis and Frank Sinatra.

In fact, if you’ll pardon the grammar, in the music biz, you ain’t nobody til you record a Christmas album. Just out of curiosity, and also because I basically have no life, I decided to surf the internet to find the Christmas music you DON’T hear on the radio and in the retail stores. Here’s a few examples of albums that I found guaranteed to make your holiday season a little more……….unique?

A JAMES BROWN FUNKY CHRISTMAS….One of the cuts is titled “Santa’s Goin’ to the Ghetto”. It’s yuletide tunes designed to make you feel good like you knew that you would.

A COLONEL SANDERS CHRISTMAS……and you thought all he did was make fried chicken.

CHRISTMAS IN THE STARS: A STAR WARS CHRISTMAS…..various sounds of the season sung by, hold your breath, C-3PO and Artoo. I think I might have heard the Wookie in the background. The force was definitely not with them.

A MEOWY CHRISTMAS……Sure Bing Crosby did an okay job of singing Little Drummer Boy, but you haven’t really experienced it until you’ve heard it sung by cats. Just make sure your dog is not in the room when you play it.

YULETIDE DISCO……Yes my friends, get out those leisure suits and polka dotted shirts because Disco is not dead! It lives on in this collection of traditional Christmas songs done to a disco beat. It’s like having John Travolta and the Bee Gees in your living room. You will have to invest in a strobe light to get the full effect.

A TWISTED CHRISTMAS……Don’t like disco? How about heavy metal? Twisted Sister puts fuzz tone guitars and pounding bass on to the classics. I’ll bet you never knew that Silent Night had a drum solo.

HUNG FOR THE HOLIDAYS…….Remember reality show wannabe William Hung? He had his 5 minutes of fame years ago but he used about three of those minutes to put together this medley of holiday offerings. Once again, the judges were not impressed.

JINGLE BABIES…..A gaggle of babies cooing and ooing and ahhing to various sounds of the season. Wonder how many times the recording session had to be stopped for diaper changes.

CHRISTMAS ON DEATH ROW…..I skipped right past this one. I don’t want to know.

A WAFFLE HOUSE CHRISTMAS…..Apparently all the wonderful tunes you enjoyed while wolfing down those omelets are now available on LP. By the way, it’s available 24 hours a day.

I hope you and your family have a most wonderful and blessed Christmas and New Year. And after reading this, if you want to stick with Bing and Burl, I will totally understand.

So I’m in my car the other day listening to the news on the radio and the guy comes on with a health report about the dangers of an inactive lifestyle. Too many people are spending too much time sitting, he says. Studies, he says, show sitting too much can do irreparable damage to your body over the long term. He goes so far as to say sitting is the new smoking.

Really? This is distressing to me. You see, sitting is one of my favorite things. It’s one of the things I do best. I’ve gotten really good at it. I can sit in multiple positions for hours and never stiffen up. I can do the standard upright arms-at-your-side technique, transition seamlessly into the right side elbow lean, switch to the left, ooze down into the slump, snap into the legs underneath pose (we used to call this Indian style but I guess that’s politically incorrect now), and finally….spectacularly….whip my legs over the side of the chair and do the sideways sit. For me it’s beyond relaxing. It’s an art form, a kind of ballet of laziness.

Now you tell me this can be as bad for me as smoking? Wow. It got me thinking about how much sitting we actually do in a typical day. (I was sitting when I thought about this).

What’s the first thing you do when you get up in the morning? Go to the bathroom right? And promptly sit on the throne to take care of business. After bathroom duty, it’s breakfast time, where you sit to enjoy your corn flakes and orange juice. Actually, I do know a person who stands while she eats. She always looks like she’s in a hurry, like she’s at an airport at one of those standing tables wolfing down a quick bite while trying not to miss her plane.

Then it’s either off to work or, for the retired, settling down into some relaxing activities. Either way, you’re sitting. In the car or in your recliner. If you have a desk job, you sit all day, interrupted by lunch where you sit at a restaurant. After a hard day’s work, you can’t wait to get back in your car (sitting), drive home, eat dinner (sitting), and then unwind with your favorite TV shows (sitting). If you no longer work, you likely spend a good chunk of your day doing stuff like reading (sitting), crossword puzzles (yep), movies (uh-huh), sewing (oh yeah), in my case writing (hard to type in a standing position), and of course snacking (sitting…or, if still in bed, laying).

But wait you say. You work out right? You get your walk in, your treadmill, your stair climber, your jog, your free weights(some of which is done sitting). You’re good right?
Not good enough says the man on the radio. It’s not how much time you spend doing yoga, it’s how much total time you spend sitting.

What’s the answer? Stand America! Stand while you eat! Stand while you work! Stand while you watch TV! Stand in church! (which will be a bit awkward when everyone else is sitting) Stand when you read! Stand when you pet your dog! Stand when you tie your shoes (also good for the hamstrings). Stand and stand some more!

Whew! It’s all so exhausting. Might as well face the truth. We can’t stand standing. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to stand up for my right to sit down. Just pick me up on your way out of the spin class.

There is apparently no longer a “slow” time of year at the Happiest Place on Earth. My wife, daughter, son-in-law, their three toddlers and I spent a week there in early October. The tour books rated that an “off” season. I would hate to see the busy season. Crowds were huge all week long. The economy must be good because great hordes of people seem to be able to afford expensive vacations. And Disney is expensive. A columnist once described it as “a giant vacuum cleaner aimed at your wallet”.

That said, I was stunned at how friendly, courteous and considerate most everyone seemed to be, despite crowded waiting lines in hot sun. In those conditions it’s inevitable that you’re going to get smacked by ladies purses, get the back of your shoe stepped on, or get jostled and/or cut off by somebody crossing the lines. There was always a quick “Please excuse me” and an empathetic smile. It’s contagious. I found myself being much more polite than my usual curmudgeonly self. Many went out of their way to make room for our little toddlers so they would have a better view of the parades and fireworks, or skooch over on the bench so we would have a place to sit. People of all races and creeds working together for the benefit of all. What a concept!

How long would you wait in line to get on a ride at Disney World? What’s the absolute longest you would wait? Would you wait 4 hours? That was the waiting time for the Avatar ride in Animal Kingdom. Fortunately we had a Fast Pass for that attraction. Lots of dirty looks from those poor souls in line as we walked past them. I’ve been trying to think of something….anything…for which I would stand in line for four hours. I haven’t come up with anything yet. (By the way, the ride was outstanding…but not four hours outstanding.)

Those Fast Passes are definitely the way to go. Get as many of them as the system will allow. Guard them, protect them, cherish them, love them as your own. They will save your experience.

It’s possible to have too much money. Occasionally while waiting in line we would see a family come in through a side door at the last minute, and immediately be ushered in to a front row seat. A man in line in front of us told us those people had purchased a private tour of the park at a cost of $15 thousand per person! For a family of four, that would be $60 thousand dollars!

I love reading the funny t-shirts people wear to the park. One woman’s read “I wear the ears”, while her husband’s read “I buy the beers”. Another had a picture of the seven dwarfs with the inscription “I’m Grumpy. Deal with it”.

Please…no more photos framed so that the subject appears to be holding up the big silver ball in EPCOT. It’s been done and it’s kinda lame.

No matter how meticulously you budgeted for your Disney trip, at some point you will have thrown your credit card out there so often you’ll have absolutely no idea how much money you’ve spent.

My wife Sharon thought it would be fun for all of us to wear identical t-shirts. At first I thought it was a bit silly but it actually became useful as it helped Disney ushers recognize we were all in the same party and keep us together…no small feat in these crowds.

Going in, we told ourselves we would save money by visiting a grocery store outside of the Disney property, loading up on food, and eating meals in the hotel room. Yeah, that never happened. In the morning we wanted to start early to beat the crowds to the parks. By evening we were too tired and sweaty to make the trip. If you have similar ambitions, do the shopping before you get there.

Oh, and about that beating the crowds thing….you can’t do it. There will be as many folks in line at 7am as there will be at 2pm. Might as well sleep in and take your time.

Disney is constantly replacing old attractions with new ones, but a few of the classics remain and thankfully so. Even after all these years, I still can’t get enough of “It’s a Small World”, “Pirates of the Caribbean”, and Space Mountain.

I get why children would be ecstatic to have their picture taken with the Disney movie princess characters, but I was stunned by the number of adults who wanted to be photographed with them.

Speaking of the princesses, I see now why they have to go to school to learn how to do this. I was fascinated to observe how they have mastered the subtle art of over-emoting with hand gestures and smiles and photographic poses and acting….well….like a princess. What they do is not easy and requires talent and poise.

In general I would say the food was good, however I paid twelve dollars for a massive foot long hot dog that looked and tasted more like a piece of PVC pipe.

As I lifted and carried and held toddlers through long lines in blistering hot weather I told myself I would never do this again. But by the time we got home I was thinking I can’t wait to go back.

So the toddler grandkids are coming over to spend the weekend eh? And you’re afraid they will be bored with the same old toys you’ve had around the house for months. Yep, it’s time to venture out into that vast, complicated and costly expanse known as “New Toyland”. But how do you know what to get them? There are countless options out there. What will be a hit? What will get discarded after 30 seconds?

It’s always a roll of the dice. I remember last December buying my toddler grands a toy Christmas tree with different color ornaments they could hang and arrange in different ways. In terms of holding their interest it was an epic fail. They did, however, take a liking to the box the tree came in, turning it into a fort and climbing in and out of it for hours. Sigh.

Oh sure, you can cop out and buy them some character from the “Frozen” movies. I guess that’s okay if you don’t mind listening to the dang thing play the chorus from “Let It Go” incessantly. We’ve gone that route. I have come to despise that song. I hear it in my head everywhere I go. It’s playing in my dreams. Somehow, some way I’ll get back at Disney for doing this to me. The worst versions of this toy are the ones that are motion-sensitive. They start playing the song just by picking up vibrations around them. Every time Sharon and I walk through our den we hear the song kick in, no doubt from a Frozen doll that was buried under the furniture or stowed away in the fireplace. You can’t escape it!

For this reason I recommend skipping the Frozen toys this time around, or any toy that sings, buzzes, rings, or recites poetry. You want nice, quiet, soft, benevolent toys. Yet engaging and fun. For my money you can’t go wrong with building blocks…..nice, quiet building blocks. Legos are always a winner, but I found a few others that I would think would be cool if I was a toddler.

One of them is called Suction Kupz. They are brightly colored silicone cups with suction edges at the top and bottom. Kids can stack them and stick them on to walls, windows, tables, almost any surface…or just drink their juice from them. A set of six sells for $14.95.

Another version of this sort of toy is called Tobbles Neo. They are uniquely shaped and weighted and can be stacked. The ad says kids never get tired of the blocks toppling, spinning, balancing, wobbling, tilting, and wiggling. A set of 84 units is listed at $26.95.

As a kid I always loved dominoes. Now there is a modern day version called Zoo-Ominoes. The dominoes are animal and tree shaped and come with obstacles, staircases and other contraptions. A young mind could set up all sorts of creative chain reactions. The kit contains 200 units and the price is $29.95.

I found these and other ideas at a website called fatbraintoys.com.

Best of all….not a single one of them plays “Let It Go.”

Ah, summer in Alabama….the temperature is hot, the kids are out of school, vacation time is available, and you are ready to break out of that daily work routine. If you listen oh so carefully, you will hear it….the rolling of the waves, the gentle screech of the seagull, the burp of the guy swilling beer on the next blanket. Yes my friend…the beach is calling you.

Since the birth of our kids over 30 years ago, my wife Sharon and I have attempted to make an annual summer pilgrimage to the Alabama gulf coast. We’ve only missed a few years when life events prevented us from getting around to it. We have so many wonderful memories of our times there and the photos to prove it.

But, having grown up in the Midwest, it took us awhile to catch on to the fundamentals of a good beach vacation. We made a lot of rookie mistakes. For example, making sure your glasses are fastened around your neck with a strap. There was the time my young son and I were playing in the shallow water, both wearing our glasses. My boy spotted a shell on the bottom and, facing the beach, stooped over to pick it up. At that moment, a huge wave gushed over his back, sweeping his glasses right off his head and into the rapidly moving waters. Suddenly unable to see anything clearly, he burst out crying and begged me to find his glasses.

So I did what any intelligent, quick thinking, mature adult father would do. I also bent over and peered into the surf, my back to the on-rushing current. Of course, the next huge wave tore my glasses off as well and sent them flying into the sea. There we stood. Both of us blind as a bat. No way we were going to find those glasses, which were well on their way to Mexico. Somewhere in Cancun there is a near sighted guy wearing my lenses.

There was the time I woke up early and decided to take a relaxing dip in the pool, before all the kids poured into it. I was the only one there. It was so peaceful and relaxing. I walked into water about shoulder high and just leaned on the sidewall, closing my eyes and rejoicing in the feel of the morning sun on my face and the pool around my body. When my arms got a bit tired from straddling the top of the pool wall, I let them slowly slide down my side. But when my hand got as far down as my swimsuit pocket, I felt something inside. It was my phone. Talk about a mood killer.

I also remember climbing into my inner tube and having a restful float, gently bouncing around in the waves about 30 feet off the shore. Eventually I opened my eyes and noticed myself surrounded by what looked like a bunch of ladies nylon stockings. I thought nothing of it until I climbed out of the water and discovered I was covered with small, red blotches. I would later learn this was my first encounter with jellyfish. That was a rough night.

One year we were driving down to Gulf Shores with our toddler daughter strapped in the back car seat when suddenly we sniffed that unmistakable odor that young parents know so well. Our little girl decided to have a diaper explosion that continued all over her seat, the rest of the car seat, and much of the beach gear we had piled up back there. It was so bad we had to pull over to the side of the freeway and make repairs. One nice family pulled over and asked if they could help. But how exactly do you respond in that situation?

We always rent the beach chairs and umbrellas and usually we have pretty good luck with the location being close to the water. But one year the cabana boy (is that what you would call them?) kept setting us up deep in the fourth or fifth row, our view mostly blocked by the umbrellas in front of us. When I finally questioned him about it, he said we were the only ones who had not payed in advance and he thought we were going to try to get away without paying. I didn’t know we were supposed to pay in advance. I hate it when you think you’re justifiably mad at somebody and then it turns out to be your fault.

Gradually even I learned the ropes of a successful beach vacation. Things like: Always stop for peach ice cream when you pass through Chilton County. Spend the extra money to get the ocean view. It’s no fun drinking your morning coffee while staring at the tennis court. Make sure you use sun block. I finally figured out what that SPF number means. The higher it is, the colder it feels when someone sprays it on your back.

And take plenty of pictures. How else are you going to rub it in to your land locked friends on Facebook?

Welcome friends to another edition of How To Be A Grandparent. I offer this series of posts as a public service, and also because my therapist recommends it. I base my expertise on the fact that I watched an entire episode on this topic on Dr. Phil. I have learned many insights, and some day may actually make use of them.

Today’s subject is spanking. If you debated whether to spank your own children, chances are you will have an even greater debate when it comes to your grandkids. After all, they are not YOUR children. Then again, they are often in YOUR care, dismantling YOUR keepsakes, and drawing stick men on YOUR bedroom walls with permanent marker.

At this point we need to define what is meant by the term “spank”. We are referring here to one stroke to the backside. This should not be confused with multiple strokes, usually referred to as a “butt whuppin”, “tanning your hide”, or the popular term from my childhood “being taken to the woodshed”. This method is not recommended, as your grandkids will get revenge when they are old enough to post about you on social media (usually about age three).

Since you only get one swipe at this, you must use this tactic judiciously and creatively. The following options are the most common:

The Warning Spank: This consists of giving a stern verbal warning to stop the behavior in question, followed by a very light tap on the rump. The goal is to get across the idea that the next one coming will be harder and more intense. This option doesn’t work well on kids still in diapers as they probably don’t even feel it.

The Countdown Spank: Very popular among parents, this method is growing in popularity among grandparents as well. You simply state to the child that if he doesn’t stop misbehaving by the time you get to 1, a spank is coming. Then you start counting backwards from five, getting louder with each number. The downside to this option is children often choose to roll the dice and call your bluff, forcing you to break down into fractions when you get to 2, or start at a higher number, like 25.

The Designated Spanker: One of the grandparents, usually the one who is not present at the moment, is designated as the enforcer, as in “if you don’t stop now, grandpa is going to spank you when you get home.” Unfortunately, most young children really have no sense of how long that will be and quickly lose the fear of it. Not to mention grandpa gets tired of his grandkids treating him like Darth Vader and hiding in the closet when he actually does get home.

The Misdirection Spank: This consists of warning the child they had better stop or they are going to get “one of these”. Whereupon you smack an object close to them, like an end table or a piece of furniture as hard as you can. Side effects of this method include injuries to small sensitive bones in the hand and fingers.

The Phantom Spank: This is similar to the Warning Spank, except you make sure the child sees you winding up and swinging forward with full force, only to stop just short of the target. The idea being the child will feel as though she has gotten a reprieve from God and will not risk that sort of misbehavior again. The life span of effectiveness of this technique is not long so it helps to put on your best “mad grandma” face and say things that are not true, such as “this will hurt me more than it does you”.

There are several other options to try but this should suffice for now. Try one or all of them the next time your little goombah gets into the pantry and empties an entire package of flour on your new sofa. One of them is sure to work, and if it does, please let me know.

Please.

Recently Sharon and I took part in a group tour of the Bible History Museum in LaGrange, Georgia. We saw replicas of homes, workplaces and worship centers during the time Jesus walked the earth. We learned some of the curious pagan traditions, rituals, beliefs and gadgets of that era, many of which seem silly to us today. We were even treated to a typical feast of the Bible era. Man, I don’t know how they survived without fried chicken and banana pudding.

On the bus ride home, I couldn’t help thinking that a thousand years from now, someone will create a 21st Century museum, where they will reproduce scenes from our time and try to explain our culture. So we take you now to the year 3019 where this blog post might go something like this:

“Greetings fellow droids. My carbon-based companion unit and I recently transported to a new attraction. It’s a 21st century museum! It’s located a few galaxies south so it was a long trip. Probably took at least 5 or 6 seconds and we were a little jet-lagged from that body cell re-integration but its well worth the journey to study this curious section of history.

The early 21st century was still the skin and bone era. Titanium bodies would not become the norm for another several hundred years. So these people were susceptible to disease and injury. They only lived about 70 to 100 years! Can you imagine? That’s not even long enough to travel to the Quatong quadrant for a sensory recharge! And they had funny names, like ‘Michael’ and ‘Susan’ and ‘Jason’, so weird-sounding compared to common names like XJ50695T32 (or XJ for short).

They had no nutrient shock waves to supply their feeding needs. They actually spent hours preparing and consuming an array of ‘foods’. The strangest part of this ritual is that the ‘food’ was damaging to their skin and bone bodies. It would bloat them up and cause them to malfunction. They knew this would happen but they did it anyway! There may be an explanation for this in one of their favorite expressions: ‘You only live once’. Haha! Those of us getting up there in our 7th and 8th life cycles can relate!

We saw artifacts of their ancient communication devices. I believe one of them was called ‘I-phone’. They had to type or speak into the device to get a message to someone. Must have taken several seconds. Makes you wonder what we did before telepathy chips. I know what you’re thinking (I mean I literally KNOW what you’re thinking). What a waste of time!

We saw ancient entertainment tools called ‘TV sets’. They would play stories of love, war and romance with occasional recitations of current events, most of which were quite depressing. There was nothing as funny and engaging as some of our current holograms like ‘Everybody Loves Meepzorp’ and ‘Milky Way’s Got Talent’.

We were taken to a re-creation of a tall, oval structure they called a ‘stadium’. Thousands of them would gather there to watch competitions where the object was to knock each other down and carry a ball to the end of a field, only then to give it back to the other team and then knock them down. Meanwhile the audience would shout things that didn’t make any sense, like ‘Rammer jammer yellow hammer’, or ‘Weagle weagle’.

Weirdest of all, the female of the species facilitated the reproduction process by actually carrying the baby in her body for nine months! The baby would then be delivered, skin and bone and all, with great pain and ‘labor’.
Whew! Sure am glad my 27 test tube daughters won’t have to endure that!

All in all it was a great tour. I highly recommend it. Now I have to wrap this up. My infant son VZ495621L is going to trip and fall in ten seconds.”

Once upon a time there was a little boy who lived in the country in a very cold place. The little boy had very few other kids to play with so he spent a lot of time watching television to pass the time. His favorite thing to watch was football. He especially liked to watch his favorite team. Every Sunday he and his father would sit in front of their black and white TV and cheer on their team.

The team was very, very good. They won almost all of the games they played, and the best player on the team was the quarterback. He called all the plays and always seemed to be one step ahead of the other team. Though there were many good players on the team, there was no doubt he was the Star……a shining Star.

Yet the Star did not act like he felt he was important. He never bragged about how good he was. He always gave credit to everyone around him. For this he was much loved by everyone, especially the little boy, who thought of him as a hero. In fact the boy would imagine himself playing for the team, maybe even catching passes from the Star. It was an exciting thought, but alas, the boy knew it was just a fantasy, for he was very small in stature and not very athletic.

One night the boy had an incredible dream. In the dream he had grown up to be a man. He was still too small and still not athletic enough to play for his favorite team, but he had learned to do the next best thing….he dreamed he was a reporter covering the team! And sometimes he even got to be the announcer for the team! The Star was still on the team, except now he was the head coach. The boy got to meet the Star and talk to him after all the games and after practices during the week! The boy felt he shouldn’t let on how awestruck he was in the Star’s presence. He tried to stay calm and act in a professional manner, but inside he couldn’t believe all this was true.

The boy would find himself at all kinds of events with the Star outside of football games. They would talk about all kinds of things. They were actually………friends!!! The boy found the Star to be exactly the way he seemed to be, humble and kind and generous.

But in the dream the team was not the same. They did not win most all of their games. In fact they lost more games than they won. This made the fans of the team sad. Some of the fans were very angry and they blamed the Star. Newspapers wrote terrible things about him, many of which were out of context in an effort to mock him. The boy was afraid all of this adversity would change the Star and make him bitter and nasty. He watched as the Star kept his faith, kept picking himself up off the ground and keep trying. The Star never became mean and ugly. The boy learned much about courage, bravery and persistence. One day the team said they didn’t want the Star to be the coach any more. He said goodbye with courtesy and class and all the fans of the team loved him again…..

When the boy woke up from the dream he realized he must have been asleep for a very long time. The Star had grown old and gotten very sick and passed away. All the people were saying what a great man he was. They had gatherings to honor him. Because he was asleep for so long, the boy didn’t get to go to any of the gatherings to say goodbye to the Star. But he would never forget the dream. It seemed so real…..but it couldn’t be real, could it? Nobody would believe it.

The boy couldn’t even believe it himself.

The End

I’ve been trying to hide it for most of my adult life, but it’s time to come out. I think it’s been getting more and more obvious anyway so people were bound to start talking. I don’t want this to be any more embarrassing to my wife and family than it has to be. So let’s just get it out there: I have flunked the man test.

What? No, I’m not gay. But it’s time to confess that I am simply no good with tools. I can’t build or fix anything. While all of my man friends seem to be able to hang a false ceiling, build a sun room, lay a hardwood floor, construct a bedroom dresser, and assemble a backyard swing set, I struggle to drill a screw into a block of wood.

I blame television. My dad could do all those things. I should have been at his side like most young sons, watching and learning and being his apprentice. But the lure of sitting and watching football, Star Trek, Andy Griffith, Looney Tunes, The Lone Ranger, Bewitched, test patterns (remember those?), basically anything on TV, was too strong.

Bottom line, I just didn’t care about building things. It was much more important to find out if Gilligan was going to wind up with Ginger or Mary Ann. Problem is, now that entertainment television is basically garbage, I find myself actually looking for projects to take on. Sadly, that almost always involves tools.

Even in high school I knew tools were going to be anathema. In Shop class we were supposed to carve a bread board for our mothers out of a block of wood. I couldn’t seem to get the handle in the middle of the board. It was always too far to one side. So I just kept shaving the handle, first on one side and then the other. I wound up with a bread board that looked more like some sort of ancient Indian spear. The handle was so thin and pointed you could use it to tack a calendar on a poster board.

Another project was to construct a watering can. After cutting the metal to form the can and spout, we had to solder the two together. I think I melted about three full bars of solder into the can before getting the spout to stick. I had the only watering can in class that weighed 40 pounds.

It never got better. I assembled a bed frame in our guest room that collapsed when I tried to lay on the mattress. I changed the oil in my lawnmower only to overfill it. When I fired the mower up it started spewing hot oil like a Hawaiian volcano. Most recently Sharon asked me to put up a few metal plant hangers on our porch. There were just two screws to fasten the hangers. But when I tried to drill the first one into the wood, it went about half way in and then bent into a horrible shape that resembled some sort of balloon animal. And just to top it off, when I grabbed the screw to pull it back out, I learned that the friction of the screw and the wood makes it really hot! I have the burn blisters on my fingers to prove it.

So I give up. I’m never going to be the fix it man that I so want to be.

Wonder what’s on TV tonight?