Hobie Cat's Last Ride

 Our cat of 10 years ago, Hobie (get it, Hobie Cat), was certifiably insane. We got an inkling of this when she began to eat plastic dry cleaning bags, or portions of them anyway, and throw up disgusting things in the house. So she was banished to (shudder shudder) the outdoors. This necessitated that I become involved in the logistics of making her excommunication as humane as possible. We didn’t want to be cruel. So I had to put in two cat doors that would allow Hobie to come into the garage to get warm, and on into the laundry room where we would keep bowls of water and cat food for her.

*insert here clip from The Godfather where Vito Corleone says to Tom Hagen “We’re not murderers, regardless of what this undertaker thinks”*

A determined albeit unskilled do-it-yourselfer, I began the task of installing the two cat doors (not good for resale) starting with the laundry room door. I discovered that they sell pet doors but they don’t tell you how to install them. So, under the influence of that old handyman adage: “measure twice – cut once”, I measured and measured and measured. Only problem was, I had the door off its hinges, lying across two sawhorses when this measuring was done. So it was only after I had finished installing the pet door and had begun to put the utility room door back on the hinges that I discovered a problem.  I had installed the pet door, not in the bottom left corner as planned, but in the top left corner.  I told no one. I just sneaked back to Lowe’s for another door.

Hobie grew progressively worse in the psychiatric department. She hid in the crawlspace beneath the neighbor’s house and uttered moans that could only be described as macabre. Maybe blood curdling. Anyway, they were loud, long and guttural sounds that frightened the neighbor's two small children in the middle of the night. The neighbor’s name was Jamie. He came over one day while I was outside and began the conversation with, “Is that your cat?” I knew this wouldn’t turn out well.

He told me about the moaning. He was nice about it, but the message was clear. Also disturbing was the fact that Hobie had begun the nasty habit of bringing home trophy kills and depositing them on the welcome mat. Mice, mostly. Some song birds. One very large Blue Jay. I wondered how in the world she managed to catch these birds. Were birds really that slow? I have to say I was as impressed as I was disgusted.

Although we did our best to care for her, Hobie's health soon began to fail and on the rare occasions when we saw her it was shocking to see her looking so scraggly.

“Just do it and don’t tell me about it until after it’s over,” Lorraine said to me one day.

“Do what?” I asked.

“You know… take care of Hobie,” she said.

“Oh… you mean eliminate her,” I said, doing my best mobster impersonation. “Wax her. Neutralize her. Take her out of action. Do her. ”

“Stop it!” she cried.

I was still going. “The big sleep. Off her. Turn out her lights….”

“I mean put her out of her misery,” she said quietly. I shut up.

I agreed to do it but I was uncomfortable about it. I understood mercy killing….when other people did it. But this was different. I guess my job in relation to the family pets was to serve as installer of custom entry doors and, oh yeah, hit man.

A few days later I caught a glimpse of Hobie, slinking around the front porch. She had just deposited a fresh kill at the front door and was waiting for someone to find it. It was then that an idea was born. It would give Hobie a chance at life and keep me from being a cat assassin. I put Hobie in the trunk of the car muttering, “We’re going for a little ride in the country, old girl,"

I drove west until I found the bucolic scene for which I was searching. There, in the twilight, was a small, friendly wood-frame farm house with outbuildings. A scene right out of “The Waltons” I reckoned. A driveway bordered by a wood fence curved up from the main road toward the front door. It was early spring and a wisp of smoke curled up from a red brick chimney and the windows of the small house glowed orange in the fading light. What an idyllic rural setting for Hobie’s new life! There was a pond nearby and I think I saw another cat or two, but I can’t be sure. In any case, I drove down the driveway as far as I dared, as if to turn around, and popped the trunk and let Hobie out. I wished her well and hoped that some kind soul would adopt her. If they didn’t, I reasoned, she would still be all right, wouldn’t she? Hadn’t she already proven her hunting skills beyond any reasonable doubt? If she was that good at living off the land, then certainly she would come to a better end here than she would at the hands of the evil Doctor VetVorkian!

Satisfied, I headed home. My cell phone rang and I answered it. It was a friend and they asked me what I was up to. So I told them about “taking Hobie for a ride” and didn’t think anything about it. He told his wife, however, and she told my wife and I got the hysterical call at work the following day.

We drove to the scene of the "crime" and combed the woods near the farm house calling the cat’s name, but of course there was no Hobie. I went to the farm house to inquire if they had seen a lost cat. Nope. We eventually sold that house with its superflous cat doors (very bad for resale) and what happened to Hobie is still a touchy subject. Lorraine’s vision is one of a small, helpless, Kibbles N Bits-fed little kitty being torn to pieces by feral dogs. I see a kind hearted farmer's wife, her gray hair in a bun, sitting by a fire, knitting, rocking, with Hobie softly purring by her slippered feet.

Hurricane Hype

The following rant is brought to you by the makers of the new anti-hysteria medication, Damitall.  Ask your doctor if you are a candidate for Damitall. You may need a dose if you have been watching the weather channel lately and had your stress level escalated by all the hype and hysteria associated with Hurricane Irene. 

Irene is the first significant storm of the year and the Weather Channel is making the most of it.  I'm right here, aren't I? I mean, the weather channel has nothing to do most of the year, right?  Warm front here, cold front there, highs, lows, rain, sun.  Yawwwwnnnnnnn!  But buddy let a hurricane crank up out in the atlantic and they are all over it like a fat kid on a piece of cake. 

Update!!! (dramatic music) A guy in a flack jacket comes on screen.  He stands in front of a bush (leaves blowing in the wind make for good footage).  If there is no wind, he's not above getting one of the boys from the truck to turn on a big fan.  Maybe toss a few palm fronds up in the air and let them whiz by the camera. No, I don't know that for sure, but you know they're thinking it!  I mean they want it to be bad so badly! 

And talk about your superlatives!  They sling around shock words like confetti on New Year's Eve!  It's not a category 3 storm... It's a category 3 MONSTER. And it's not "moving" across the Bahamas... it's SLASHING across the Bahamas. Their producers must grade them on how many alarming adjectives and nouns they can cram into one sentence. Like:  

"This category 3 "BEHEMOTH" is "PACKING" 115 mph winds and will "SLAM" into the coast tonight, "WREAKING HAVOC" on the southeast portion of the state!!  In other words, "Run for your lives!  We're all going to die!"

We lived in Florida when three hurricanes came ashore in 2004.  We heeded the hysteria and left town for the first two storms.  Nothing happened.  Never lost a shingle.  So we stayed home for the third one.  Lost three shingles.  All I'm saying is hold your fire, weather folk.  If you call 'em all "monsters" then we won't believe it when a real one comes along... like Katrina maybe. 

Bowl Games





Arrrgggghhh!  The agony of defeat!

  



      I am finally tired of college football.
      I'm sorry, folks, but it’s just gone over the top now. I mean, last night I was watching the “Frito-Lay-CrackerJacks-On-Sale-Now-At-Your-Local Stop-N-Shop Bowl" pitting the hapless "Fighting Mollusks" of  Wotsitoo U against the loss-ridden Bean Station College “Raging Roosters”.

     Of course I'm exaggerating. But I do suffer from Bowl Game Overdose!  Whatever happened to the good old days when you had five bowls and they were all played on New Years Day? And the names made sense, too, like Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl, Rose Bowl. It was bad enough that my beloved (but pitiable this year) Tennessee Vols had to play an equally nondescript North Carolina team in the superfluous “Music City Bowl”. But then some fat cats went and sold their name rights to, of all things, a mortgage company, and it became the linguistically challenged “Franklin American Mortgage Music City Bowl”, or call it the the “13-syllable-hard-to-say-Bowl” for all the difference it makes.

     Sure, I’m a little bitter about how the game came out. “We wuz ROBBED, I tell you…. ROBBBBED!” But that’s another story.

     Do you know why they call them “bowl” games? Back in 1916, Michigan and Stanford began the tradition of playing in the “Tournament of Roses” game. It was kind of an East-West thing they did at the end of the year. Then they built Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, California, which, naturally, was shaped like a oval bowl. The name stuck. Now they call any major football event a “bowl”. Like when brothers Peyton and Eli Manning played against each other earlier this NFL season. They called it the “Manning Bowl”. And isn't the Auburn-Alabama game called the “Iron Bowl?”

    I have a few more bowl games to add to the already glutted post-season college football landscape:

TOILET BOWL - game for the two teams with the most penalties (they play dirty, get it?)
EMPTY BOWL - game for the two teams with the poorest attendance records.
DUST BOWL – game for the two teams with the worst offensive records (all they do is just run up and down the field, kicking up dust but never scoring, get it?)
FAST FOOD CAREER BOWL – game for the two teams with the worst academic records.
FURTHER REVIEW BOWL - game played just for officials. They get to review every play. The game will last two days and there will be no clear winner. Even the end of the game will be reviewed until the score becomes moot because no one cares (You would have to have seen the “Franklin-American-Mortgage-Music-City-Bowl” to understand).

Burnt Biscuits

Dad, Mom, Sister Judy and "Granny"

     Got an inspirational e-mail today... a story about a considerate husband whose wife burned the biscuits but he ate them anyway, pretending they were just fine. The couple’s young daughter notices this. She relates: Later that night, I went to kiss Daddy good night and I asked him if he really liked his biscuits burned. He wrapped me in his arms and said, "Your Momma put in a hard day at work today and she's real tired. And besides - a little burnt biscuit never hurt anyone! You know, life is full of imperfect things... and imperfect people. I'm not the best at hardly anything, and I forget things just like everyone else. What I've learned over the years is that learning to accept each other’s faults - and choosing to celebrate each other’s differences - is one of the most important keys to creating a healthy, growing, and lasting relationship”  

Mom three years ago in front of our old house


     Guess you can't argue with that!  But it made me think of my own childhood.  I have no biscuit story to tell you.  Truth is, my parents argued a lot. I remember at six years of age being awakened by the sound of shattering glass and loud voices. I cracked open the bedroom door and had a clear view of the kitchen where Mother was throwing the family dishes at Dad, one at a time. Each of her angry outbursts was punctuated by the sound of a cup or a saucer crashing into the wall behind my father, who ducked and dodged each one like he knew Kung Fu.  When mother ran out of the ceramic grenades, she ran from the room, crying, and locked herself in the bathroom.  My father told her that if she didn’t unlock the door he was going to break it down. He pounded convincingly on it a few times and then I heard a click.  He opened the door and went in.  Hiding in the dark, I listened, waiting for round two.  But all I could hear were their urgent voices, more muted now.  I closed my door and crawled back into bed, heart pounding. 

Dad and Mom in the early 1950's

     I lay in the dark envisioning our family disentegrating, wondering with which relative I would be sent to live. None of them were acceptable, not even the kindest, my aunt Iris, the hairdresser (called a “beauty operator"in those days). I sobbed until sleep overtook me.
     I awoke the next morning with a sense of deep dread and entered the kitchen cautiously, awaiting the awful announcement.  But it was as if nothing had happened!  No sign of the pottery shards on the linoleum floor...no angry looks on my parents' faces!  My sister,who is four years older than I, showed no signs of having witnessed the fracas. Maybe she was a veteran of such combat and knew it was like a summer evening storm, the thunder and lightning sure to be followed by a cloudless quiet. We ate our oatmeal and toast while Mom busied about, getting us ready for school. Dad hugged her, said something that her laugh, kissed her on the cheek and left for work.
     I knew what I had seen had really happened.  But I figured that if everybody else wanted to erase the ugliness and start over, I, too, would pretend.  So, nothing was ever said about it.
      Looking back, my mother and father were passionate about everything. They could go at it like territorial bantams one day and coo like turtledoves the next. They made up with the same enthusiasm with which they fought. They were as tender as they were vitriolic.
     They had been together 64 years when Dad died.  Mother still keeps, beside her bed in the nursing home, a framed photograph of the two of them dancing on their 50th wedding anniversary. Each time I visit her she she will ask me, often multiple times, to reassure her that she will be buried next to Dad when she dies. She loves it when I tell her stories about their young life together, and I tell them to her over and over, knowing that, because of the Alzheimers',  she will remember but for the moment.  But the stories never include burnt biscuits

Beach in Winter

Beach in Winter

       It has been some time, but I checked this week. The ocean is still there, right where the map says it should be… on the right, a big blue expanse with no writing on it.

       It’s not really blue in North Carolina, you know. The water along the eastern seaboard seems to opt out of blue until somewhere below latitude 30… around Miami I think. Here, on the Carolina coast, it is a mottled green, like the back of a muddy turtle.

       Of course, to be fair, I make this observation on an overcast day in late December from the 11th floor balcony of a high-rise condo overlooking the grand strand of a virtually deserted North Myrtle beach. What’s left of this tourist Mecca is shivering under a teeth-chattering cold snap. Fact: The Official Myrtle Beach Area Visitors Guide lists the average air temperature in January as a balmy 58 degrees. That’s almost tropical, I thought, eying the book’s happy couple, strolling past wind bent sea oats toward the inviting surf. But the weather obviously doesn’t consult the visitor’s guide and this day was definitely NOT in the brochure.

       Maybe that’s why there was such a deep discount on the condo? Yuh think?

     Catamarans versus Monohulls
     Speaking of, I do miss the water. Selling my 34-foot sloop “Sails Call” was the right thing to do, of course. It was just time. She was built in 1984. She was almost 90 in dog years. And, I was beginning to spend more time repairing the sails than setting them. I would like to get another boat some day but my recent catamaran charters in the Caribbean have spoiled me. I told myself that the slip fees alone would more than pay for an annual charter in the British Virgin Islands. And they did! But, thanks entirely to The Moorings, I now want a boat bigger thanI can afford! I mean, once you sit in the captain’s chair of a 46’ x 24’ twin-hull monster that costs over a half-million dollars, your sailing gyroscope will never spin the same! Sailing catamarans have one drawback – they don’t sail very well to windward. Aside from that, there are no negatives that I can see.

     • DOCKING – Catamarans turn on a dime and park like Smart Car. By comparison, a monohull is a log in the water at the dock and can be painfully difficult to moor in a high wind.

     • CABIN SPACE - No comparison! It’s like you’re in a house or something. My first monohull was a 23-foot O’Day. You could ALMOST standup in the center. The next one was a 30-foot Catalina. You could stand up in the center but you couldn’t move very far without ducking down. The 34-footer was much roomier. But the CATAMARAN! Think floating apartment! 

     • SAILING - Like butter! When you hoist the mainsail, you are sliding the leech up 60 feet (or more) of mast (you may need some help with this) But once sail-deployed, this dude has a lot of speed! Sure, in a light wind, it’s slow going. But anything between 10 and 20 knots is a pure dream! Virtually no heeling, either. I am a cruiser, not a thrill-seeker. Hey, If a pontoon even hints at catching air, I’m lowering sail and motoring toward the nearest port! Know what I mean, fellow chicken hearts?

     • ANCHORING -- No sweat as long as the anchorage isn’t crowded. Last April at White Bay, Yost Van Dyke, BVI, we dropped a 50-pound plow anchor into 15 feet of turquoise water and held just fine in not the best ground.  Come to think of it, we were surrounded by boats and never came close to bumping one of them! 

Like I was saying...

     I like the way this ocean draws a sand line and dares the high-rise buildings and the neon glitz to come any further. “Do all of that over there, behind those dunes,” it seems to say. “Come any closer and you’ll be under water, fool.”

     And so the mad sprawl stops. The Tsunami of pavement and lights and piled up concrete freezes in mid crest, giving way to the placid mottled green of its ancient neighbor.

High School

Nostalgia is a colorless, ordorless, narcosis-inducing gas which, once inhaled, goes straight from the nostrils to the frontal lobe of the brain and takes control. I think this may be why I visited my old high school last week. Or, more probably, it was the fact that a rock slide had closed I-40, forcing me to take the alternate route of I-81 to Tennessee to visit my mother, who still languishes in a Knoxville nursing home. Alzheimer’s takes away a little more of her each time I see her. Her thickening mental haze has now rendered her unable to complete whole sentences. It’s like she runs out of “thought”, like people run out of breath, and then a puzzled look comes over her white face as if to say, “What was I talking about?”

So I’m driving back home, thinking about all that depressing stuff, and the mellow voice of James Taylor comes through the stereo speakers opining that “The secret of life is enjoying the passing of time”. I am contemplating that when I catch sight of the green highway sign overhead that reads: “Tri-Cities Airport 1 Mile”. I am only four miles away from Holston High School where I spent four years of my adolescence between 1961 and 1965. On impulse, I take the exit, concluding that while enjoying the passing of time is not necessarily the secret of life, it is nonetheless a good thing to do if you can do it. Of course when he wrote that song, ol’ JT”s enjoyment of the passing of time was probably chemically induced, if you catch my drift.

The roads had changed a bit over the decades but I found the old building with no trouble. From the outside it looked almost frozen in time. But a closer look told me that it was no longer a functioning school. I peered through a dirty window into what used to be Mrs. Reynolds music classroom, now stacked with boxes gathering dust. A chain had been looped around the push bars of the main building’s double doors. But I could see inside. The hallway, which I had remembered as a colorful place 45 years ago, with the din of colliding conversations and slamming locker doors, was now an achromatic, silent tomb. I thought of a scene from the movie Titanic and imagined a fade-in of boys and girls walking the old wooden floors. But the place remained empty and dark.

I would learn later that the building had been condemned as a fire hazard sometime in the 70’s and was now some kind of warehouse for the Sullivan County School System. The main building of what was then called Holston Institute, had been built of stone around 1911. Over the years it had been cobbled onto to become a hodgepodge of wings and additions with mismatched bricks and windows. In 1960 the anachronistic “Institute” was dropped and it simply became known as “Holston High School”.

I got back into my car to drive away and I passed the old gym, which I think had been built sometime in the 1940’s. There were signs of neglect and disuse here as well. The gym steps, which had been a favorite posing area for class photographs, were now covered with vines. Plywood covered the windows. I drove onto the two-lane road that took me back to the interstate. As I merged with the northbound traffic, the sun was a fading orange ball in my rearview mirror and headlights of oncoming cars began began to wink on in the advancing gloom. As the miles rolled by, I thought of the life lessons learned in high school:

People can be cruel - One day in gym class Crandall Crane and Johnny Gobble got into a fist fight. Crandall was bigger, stronger and a clever boxer. His punches were smacking hard into Johnny’s face. I looked around for Coach Maddux. Surely he would stop it. I saw him nonchalantly watching the beating from a doorway, his arms akimbo, a slight smile on his face. Crandall’s next punch landed hard. Johnny went down, blood spurting from his mouth where he had lost a tooth. Only then did Coach Maddux put his whistle to his mouth and amble over to break it up.

People can be kind - I was a lumpy kid in the ninth grade and did not outgrow it until senior year. I remember Dorothy Rose, a ninth grade English teacher, who praised my work in her class and made me feel worthwhile. She inspired me to read and love books. As an adult, I meant to find her and thank her but I never did.

E.B. Sanders, who taught math, and knew I struggled with the subject, gave me passing grades even though I did not deserve them. I remember him winking at me when he passed back a final exam paper that I desperately needed to do well on in order to pass his class. I had missed 40 of 60 Algebra problems, guessing at many of them. But, to my sweet relief, he had scrawled a “B” in red grease marker in the upper right-hand corner of the paper! I never forgot his kindness but never thanked him either.

Life isn’t fair - Some of the boys who graduated back there in 1965 went on to colleges or they had low draft numbers and dodged the Viet Nam war. Others weren’t so lucky. I’m not sure, but I think one was badly wounded and I think one was killed. In those days, boys our age were prime fodder.

Some of the girls were blessed with beauty and charm; some weren’t. Like I said…life isn’t fair. Not all the pretty girls were coquettes, but it was clear that they enjoyed their position in the caste system. I remember senior year, seeing one girl in particular sweep the table of awards and nominations and elections. She was truly a queen, and to top it all, she actually seemed genuinely gracious about all of it, like the good queen in a Disney Movie fairy tale, which served to even enhance her regalness. Everybody eventually comes to earth in the real world. I wonder if she did.

Smedley and the Harson Hardly Hearer

It took years for Smedley Harson to perfect his hardly hearing machine, witch he did one strange night quite by an accidental twist of fade. When Smedley was just a wee libby toady, his first wards were “huh?” and “wot”, which came out like “huhhhh?” and “whaaat?” because he was hardly hearing and had a speaker disorder too.

As things turned out, which they often did, Smediey and his lab assistant were busily one night inventing the hardly hearing device, which Smedly had cleverly named “The Harson Hardley Hearer”, when all up and a sudden the lab assistant yelled out for Smedley to turn up the watts.
“Wot?”, Smedley yelled back, which came out “whaaat?”.

“Yes,” yelled the the lab assistant.

“Yes wot???” Smedly yelled, now clearly disturbed. And with that he whacked the contraption which began to work quite perfectly and did from then on.

“What just happened?” yelped ,the lab assistant.

“Yes, it certainly did!” replied a smiling Smedley, who could hear quite nicely now.