There are more kabuki pictures on the way. We have a new show, and this time I’m the hero who fights off three guys menacing me with papers umbrellas. Okay, maybe “hero” is too strong a word for a guy who wins a fight against umbrellas-wielding attackers. Actually, I don’t know if there is a more apt description.
I was listening to some Japanese rap on the radio the other night, trying to figure out why it didn’t sound right, and I think it’s because the guy doing it didn’t sound pissed off. They were all way too happy about having a recording contract, and none of the words were bleeped out, which means they weren’t cussing at all, unless the Japanese swear like sailors on the radio, but how would I ever know?
There’s nothing quite as invigorating as waking up to the sound of a shrieking alarm clock early in the morning so you can go get your teeth drilled.
“How’s your morning going?” the dental tech asked me.
“Oh, pretty good, except for the part where somebody’s going to drill a hole in my tooth,” I answered.
“Aw, c’mon,” she said, trying to make light, “it’s not that bad.”
“And how many cavities do you have?” I asked her. I think she was about nineteen years old. “Any of them in the front?” I especially hate having my front teeth drilled, or rather, it’s not the drilling I mind so much, it’s when the doc sticks the Novocain needle into my gum until she hits bone. And then pushes on it. And leaves it there while she s-l-o-w-l-y injects the Novocain. That part really sucks.
“Well, I can try to drill it without the Novocain,” the doctor offered. I didn’t see her come in behind me while I was whining about all this to the airman.
“Really?” I asked. “You’d do that?” Air Force dentists don’t usually give you the option. When you sit down in their chair, that’s the last choice you make until they tip you back up, but this one wasn’t kidding. She really did give me option, so I asked her to try it without injecting me. But that was the only choice I got; she tried to smother me with that rubber sheet, just like every other military dentist, even though I offered her money, but, just like the last dentist, she thought I was kidding, and anyway that’s something they have to do or they’ll get busted to airman fifth class and get stuck with mandatory latrine monitor duty until the end of their enlistment.
In the evening, I went to the last kabuki practice before the show on Sunday. Our performance is pretty short, so we went through it three or four times in the hour we met, and either I was doing it perfectly or Bando-san figured nobody would be looking at me while I stumbled through my routine.
So many teenaged sons look at their dads as freakish nerds with embarrassing social habits that force them to avoid any kind of interaction at all for years, and my son’s no exception, but I’m always looking for ways to keep in touch with him, and one of the greatest things we have in common is breaking wind. Not only is it an ice-breaker, a conversation-starter, and a way to get back at each other when we’re fighting, it’s also a contest in which we rate each other on duration, bouquet, and of course volume, much like the way we hone our skills at belching. In public, he still can’t stand to be seen with me, and who can? But at home we get along famously. And when I’m older, I’m looking forward to being the grandfather who gets his kids to pull my finger.
Eliza went back to the animal shelter today, which is kind of a pity because we had all gotten so used to having her sit in our laps while we surfed the internet or answered e-mail. The vet’s finished treating her, though, and we’ve got to place her in a new home because she can’t come home with us, so it’s back to PAWS for some face time with prospective owners. Looking for a cat?
Story time with Uncle Knuckles: The Goat That Ate Sean’s Hand
I don’t know why they puts goats in petting zoos, do you?. Goats are pretty creepy-looking animals. They’re kind of skeletal with all those boney bumps, they’ve got demon eyes, and they’re always jerking around as if their own personal invisible devil is jabbing them up the behind with a sharpened, flaming stick. Yeh, let’s throw our children into a cage with hyperactive, scary-looking animals. Good idea.
But we were a young couple, and we had a young boy who loved barnyard animals, and on a trip to the Berlin zoo we walked past a petting zoo filled with all kinds of cute little fluffy animal babies. Most of them were in small pens, but there was a large, open area in the middle filled with chickens and ducks and goats and other seemingly harmless livestock. Sean wanted to pet them all.
The goats had absolutely no interest in us. We tried to pet them and they just walked away, not like they were afraid of us, but like they had something better to do. Then one of us spotted the coin-operated feed dispenser and figured maybe we could catch the attention of a few goats if we had some yummy green pellets to feed them, so we led Sean over to the machine, showed him how to cup his hands under the chute, dropped ten pfennig into the slot, and turned the handle. And that’s when the goats attacked.
Cranking the handle on that machine was like ringing a dinner bell. When we turned around, every darn goat in the petting zoo was rushing us like stoned teenagers trying to trample each other at a rock concert. I tried to keep Sean calm by casually encouraging him to offer the goats his handful of food pellets.
Big mistake. Bigger even than the idea of buying the pellets in the first place, because every one of those goats wanted to eat every pellet in Sean’s outstretched hand, and the goat that won was the one that sucked Sean’s entire hand into his mouth. Sean freaked and tried to pull his hand out of there, but of course the goat wasn’t letting go until he ate all the feed. And every other goat was trampling at the one who was hogging the little boy all to himself.
Barb and I both did what we could to get the goat to let go, but my brain was short-circuiting and I’m afraid I wasn’t much help. Great. It’ll take years of therapy and a keg of Zoloft to put this behind him, and even then he’ll be haunted by those weird eyes. Parents worry that everything’s going to screw up their first kid. But it didn’t. He’s normal. Nearly. Okay, he’s a lot more normal than I am, but now that you mention it, is that really any great comfort?
Speaking of When Animals Attack, I’ve been deliberately avoiding the chimp attack story that’s been on all the news channels because I had a nasty feeling it would involve a grisly description of horrible dismemberment, but the Stars & Stripes ran the story with the headline, “Man tried to ‘reason’ with chimps,” and I just had to find out how you do that. Telepathy? Did the chimp know sign language? But they didn’t explain it at all. And they didn’t disappoint my expectations of a grisly description:
St. James Davis lost all the fingers from both hands, an eye, part of his nose, cheek, lips and part of his buttocks ... one of his feet was mutilated ... [and] his genitals were mauled.
“Right now what they are trying to do is keep his breathing constant,” his wife said. “I told him he can’t leave me. He has to be strong.”
If I were in that guy’s place, I’d show her was strong was. I’d devote the rest of my life to getting strong enough to breathe on my own again, rising from my hospital bed under my own power, and beating the living crap out of her with my fingerless hands for keeping me alive after crazed, screeching chimps ate my face and hands, gnawed on my feet, did a buttectomy on half my backside, and chewed on my goolies. What was she thinking? A few months of physio and he’d be good as new?
Friday, dear Friday, another working week come to an end, another short weekend to flash by me before the next working week starts, another day to cross off my short-timer’s calendar. My god! am I ever ready to shuck my stripes and get my civilian life started. I hate to put it that way, but there you are. Greyhounds waiting in their starting boxes don’t feel anticipation more keenly.
My boss said she’d found a replacement for me, but he wouldn’t report to work in our office until April. Gad. Fourteen working days yet. Tenterhooks, pins & needles — they’re all over me now. My breath is so bated that the flesh under my fingernails has turned blue.
My retirement ceremony – my last day at work – will be Friday, May 20th, when Barb and Tim get to see me wear my service dress uniform for the last time. The group vice commander will pin a medal on my chest, pose briefly for a photo, then ask me to say a few words to the assembled airmen who showed up for the cake. I have no idea what to say to them, other than, “Let’s eat!” Really. I’m not trying to be flip. You’d think that, after twenty-one years of service, I’d be able to say something of gravity, but I can’t think of a single weighty thing. I’m weightless.
I think what I’d like to do is look Barb and Tim straight in the eye and give them my sincerest thanks; without them, I would have lost my balance long ago, floundered, and probably never have been seen nor heard from again, except perhaps occasionally in newspaper photographs, accepting gloves and socks from social workers on frigid nights in some Midwestern city. If only Sean could be here, so I could thank him, too. For the rest of the audience, I may simply wish them the best of luck in the years to come. And then it’ll be cake time. I can’t wait to mash some in Barb’s face.
I just finished reading Forever, by Pete Hamill. It’s a neat idea for a fantasy novel: the main character is granted the gift of eternal life, so long as he remains on the island of Manhattan. And the author obviously has not only a great love of Manhattan, but a nearly bottomless knowledge of the island’s history. But I can’t recommend this book. The author offers only ideas that long ago became very ordinary questions about eternal life; nothing new here, unless you’ve never thought about it before. And most of the glimpses into Mahnattan's history are merely window dressing; none of it seems to make a difference in the main character's life. He remains pretty flat throughout the novel. In the end, I just didn’t see the point.
For lunch, I was jonesing for a turkey wrap, and I wanted to invite Barb to come along, but there’s just one place in Misawa to get a turkey wrap: the café Mokuteki, where Barb fills sandwich orders all week long. I didn’t think she’d want to go, any more than a steel worker would want to go with me to see the foundry because the documentary on the Discovery channel looked so interesting. But she surprised me by happily agreeing, and we split a chicken wrap and had a side of fries and onion rings besides. Wonderful.
I had to stop at the commissary on the way home from the café because Tim was out of his own special kind of milk. The people in our family each require a certain fat content in their milk, the way cars depend on a certain weight of motor oil to sustain their performance. The Misawa Top Three, what is locally known as a “professional organization,” was having a bake sale in the lobby, curse them. Bake sales are my weakness, particularly when they have fudge, brownies, and *sigh* chocolate-chip cookies. I plucked one Ziploc baggie filled with two saucer-sized cookies, another with a couple of fudge brownies in it, and offered the guy behind the table a fiver, because there were no set prices – they were taking donations, and I knew that plenty of tightwads were dropping quarters in their jar for these delicious treats. When I passed him the fiver, there was no end of the “thank-yous” he gave me as he heaped cupcakes, slices of banana bread, and more cookies into my hands. I didn’t need all that, but as I said, it’s my weakness, and we parted, all very happy.
Tim’s been sick. He missed school Thursday and Friday, curled up in bed most of the time, sleeping with his mouth open because there was enough sludge up his nose to clog all the storm sewers in Portland, Oregon. In the few hours that he was awake each day, I fed him some eggs but not much else, and although I poked my head into his room hourly to check on him and ask if there was anything he needed, all he wanted was to use up every box of Kleenex in the house and drink quarts of water. He’s a rather low-maintenance flu patient.
How many drinking glasses do you think a person would use in an average day? I ask because in my family the answer is, “less than the number of glasses left in the cupboard plus those in the dishwasher, if Tim hasn’t unloaded it yet,” but “more than four,” a sum I arrived at using the recently-developed Theorem of Tumblers, m + o = x, where m is the number of glasses used in a day at mealtimes, in this case three, and o being the constant one, because none of the O-folk use the minimum number.
We’re all like that little girl in the movie Signs who takes one sip out of a freshly-drawn glass of water, then puts it down and walks away from it, leaving a forest of nearly-full water glasses sprouting from the tops of every table, cabinet, chest of drawers, and countertop in the house, and we’re getting worse. I thought it was mostly Tim that was getting worse, but before I start the dishwasher I make a quick reconnaissance of the house, and I always come back with as many glasses as I can carry. On several of those recent trips I realized with a pang of guilt that I was the one who used most of the glasses I found.
Barb is not far behind me; in fact, I think she may be no more than a nose in the rear, although I have a pretty long nose, so she’s not as bad off as I make it sound. Her trail is distinctive, because she’s usually eating a banana as she walks off with her glass of water, or orange juice, or mug of coffee, so if you happen across her abandoned cup later in the day, or sometimes the next day, you find that there’s a folded-up banana skin tucked neatly into it. bleh.
Tim’s trail of glasses is slightly different, because they’re all empties; nothing but a drying scum of milk left on the sides and bottom. Sometimes, I’d almost rather find the banana skin.
If you know anybody who’s been stationed at Misawa Air Base — and I put it to you: Who doesn’t? — ask them if they’ve ever caught The Misawa Crud and see what kind of reaction you get. The doctors at the clinic say it’s not the flu, but they don’t know what it is; they just know how to recognize it. They poke one of those flashlight/telescopes up your nose until you’d swear it’s at least six inches into your brains, hum thoughtfully to themselves, and say, “You’ve got the crud. It’s going around,” as if you hadn’t realized that. Then they send you home with a two-week supply of Motrin capsules that are so big, you can’t seriously believe they mean for you to swallow one. If I bent over and snapped one of these between my knees to Brett Favre, the first thing he’d think of doing with it is throwing a long, beautifully spiraled pass up the field to Ahman Green.
Now I finally caught the crud. I can’t figure out how it took this long. For the last three or four weeks, everybody in my office has been hacking and weeping, sneezing and dribbling all over every desk, chair, keyboard, door knob and table. What makes somebody come to work when they’re like that? I sure don’t know. Whenever one of them got up and walked away from a computer, I’d run over and rap off a quick e-mail, trying to touch as many of the keys as possible, then rub my nose and eyes, but no matter how many of their germs I tried to soak up, I didn’t come down with so much as a runny nose until Tim got sick.
He was feeling a little congestion in his head and a sore throat on Wednesday, and by Thursday morning all he would wake up for was to grab every single Kleenex he could find, leaving sodden heaps of them in the vicinity of the nearest trash can. By Sunday morning he’d emptied a bottle of NyQuil – the generic kind they sell at the exchange, with the label that brags, “Original Taste!” Is anybody out there drinking NyQuil for the taste? Wait, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.
And on Monday morning, my sinuses were filled to the scuppers with sewer water. My boss let me go home in the afternoon, bless her, and I slept until supper, when I got up and searched in vain for a box of Kleenex. Thank goodness we had another bottle of generic NyQuil; I chugged a shot of that and slept pretty well. Congestion’s still clogging all the usual drainage routes today, though, so tomorrow I’m just going to let the doctor invade my orifices with his manifold instruments of torture.
Even though I haven’t left Misawa yet, and won’t leave for five months, give or take a week or so, I have already begun to apply for jobs back home in Wisconsin. At first, this seemed a little like jumping the gun, but I kept finding jobs that I’d like to apply for, and I eventually figured they could say no to me now, or they could say no to me later, so what it came down to was I had nothing to lose.
One of the applications was a simple web form with check boxes and windows to fill in. One of the windows asked for my desired salary, which is a reasonable question, but there were actually two windows – they wanted me to give them the lowest salary and highest salary I’d consider. Doesn’t that seem logically wrong? If I told them the lowest salary I’d work for, why would they consider paying me more? And why would I ever peg an upper limit? Does anybody and an upper limit for any job? “I couldn’t possibly flip burgers for more than $750,000 a year!”
I’ve also been looking at houses, again mostly just for fun because I’m assuming none of the houses that are on the market now will be available in August. Still, it’s fun to look. I ran across one old two-story farm house that looks really cool, but the description uses the phrase “fixer-upper” about a half-dozen times, and I figure we’d have to spend roughly fifteen grand on a fixer-upper. Multiplied six times, and we’re talking about a pretty hefty investment.
The road to Towada is so familiar after all these weeks of kabuki practice that I can do it pretty much on autopilot now. There are only two or three tricky parts.
The first trick is getting out of town, which can take just five minutes, or can take as long as twenty. The key is to get out of town after the train arrives. I know just one way to Towada, and that’s past the train station, and if a train’s due to arrive, every damned taxi in town is lined up in the street that goes past the train station.
The second trick is making the turn where the Morioka toll road interrupts the highway to Towada. I think it used to be a straight shot, because now there’s a sharp S-turn before I have to make a hard right through a traffic light. The S-turn scrambles my sense of direction, and the traffic lights are cocked at funny angles, so every time I make that turn I wonder, “Will today be the day I get flattened by a dump truck at this corner?”
The last trick is the lead foot. There’s always one guy who’s in such a hurry to get to Towada that nobody’s going fast enough for him. The only thing that makes him tricky is that, even though I’m expecting him to go blasting up the middle of the road as soon as we hit the highway, he still takes me by surprise as he roars by.
I never know what to do when I see the police car with its warning lights flashing. I don’t even back off the gas anymore, even when I'm going fifteen klicks over the limit to keep up with traffic. In the four years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen anybody pull aside to let a police car or fire truck go by, and although they’ve got the lights flashing, they never seem to be in a hurry. They even stop and wait for traffic lights.
There’s a set of train tracks that runs alongside the road, and I have to cross them when I get to Towada. The crossing has the usual red lights and crossing gates, and then there’s a blinking warning sign, which of course I can’t read, that always seems to be lit up when I get to the crossing, even when there’s never a train around. All the other cars roar over the tracks when the warning’s flashing, so I do, too.
I chased the train on the way home.
It’s Sunday already, cleaning day and just a snooze away from Monday. Did you know I have forty-five working days left in Misawa? There is packaged food in the pantry with more time before their “use by” dates than I’ve got on my short-time calendar. I am so short that I barely have enough time left to spell “short.”
Cleaning day generates a mound of dirty rags, which I pitch directly into the wash machine, and then into the dryer. When I clean the dryer’s lint trap after drying a load of rags, there’s enough lint to make at least three new rags. One day I expect they’ll all turn to fluff and when I open the dryer I’ll find no rags at all.
I’ve been washing dirty clothes all day long. I can’t believe I wear so many clothes in one week – just the number of socks I wear is boggling. I’m sure there are still millions of people in the world who go through most of their lives without wearing socks at all, yet somehow I can dirty two dozen pairs in a week. You’d think I was a centipede.
One day, I’d like to poke my head into the computer room, ask Tim when I can expect to be able to sit down and use the computer, and get an answer in under ten seconds. As it is, I’m lucky to get an answer in under two minutes.
Here’s me, sticking my head into the room:
“When do you suppose I could use the computer?”
“When I’m done with my game?” he almost-states, blasting the flack jacket off a couple virtual soldiers in the distant background of the computer monitor.
“And when would that be?”
“Mom said I could have my usual computer time a half-hour late today.”
“So you’ll be done at five-thirty?”
“I started a little later than four-thirty.”
I take a deep breath. “At. What. Time. Will. You. Be. Done?”
He’s beginning to sense my mounting frustration. “Well, I could get off as soon as I get killed.”
“WHEN! WILL! THAT! BE?”
He glances at the screen timer. “Pretty soon now.” It has freaking minutes and seconds, but I don’t see any reference to “pretty soon now.”
“I’ll be back in ten minutes,” I tell him, “and if you’re not off —” I singe the hair off his head with a scorching breath to illustrate how mad I will be.
And that’s an easy day.
Everybody knows that the biggest problem with computers in an office is that, when the network goes down, nobody can do anything. It’s like there was never a world before computers. You walk into the office, and everybody’s standing around. You can even tell how long the network’s been down by what they’re not doing: if they’ve all got blank looks on their faces, the network went down a few minutes ago, but if they’re in little groups, drinking cokes and telling jokes, the network’s been down for more than twenty minutes. After a half-hour, they’ll start to find ways to sneak out.
But even sillier than that is this: When my computer went off the network this week, I couldn’t do anything. I was dead in the water. There’s just one computer for each person in our office. There’s no sharing, because everybody needs their computers to do all of their work. Nobody fills out forms by hand. The only typewriter in the office is broken. It was pointless to try to write anything with a pen and paper, because all the files I needed to refer to were in the computer. I couldn’t even use the computer as a typewriter, because the tech who was trying to fix it had logged in, locked the screen, then disappeared for the rest of the day.
I took care of one or two things outside the office, then wandered from desk to desk, bothering everybody else at least once, the luckier ones two and three times. I went to the stock room a couple times to tidy up the inventory and clean it with rags and brooms. I went through my inbox and shredded nearly everything. And I still hadn’t wasted enough time to leave without looking like a slacker. Well, I guess that a slacker is just what I’ll have to be.
I think that every military member on base had his own little Christmas this morning. We had been scheduled for a readiness run at dawn, one of those team-building activities that’s supposed to be so good for our morale. When I looked out the window and saw snow flurries and a heavy, wet blanket of very slippery slush on the ground, I let out a happy little squeak and ran down to turn on the television set. It’s a pretty good bet everybody else on base was doing exactly the same thing at about the same time. There was just one slide on the bulletin board we call the Commander’s Access Channel, and it said the run was cancelled. If you cold have harnessed the collective power of everybody sighing “Phew!” as one, you could have heated every apartment building in the city of Chicago for a week.
As Tim was watching me write some changes to a few web pages this morning, he very unexpectedly opened a giant economy-sized can of whup-ass on me for using an apostrophe incorrectly when I wrote, “Dave’s Web Page”.
“That’s how you show possession,” I said.
“Geeze, Dad, tell me you’re kidding!” he said.
This was weird. Usually I’m the one going ballistic over misplaced apostrophes. “No, that’s how you do it.”
But he wouldn’t stop beating me up. “There’s no way this is possible! You’ve got a degree in English!”
I tried to find a grammar text, but the bookcase was jammed with book after book of Japanese primers. Not even a dictionary. I was starting to feel a little nervous. “Look, there’s got to be a grammar downstairs. Bring it here.”
He went, but he didn’t bring any book back with him. “Okay, I had a brain fart,” he said. I was so relieved not to be in Bizarro World that I didn’t have any fight left to beat him up a little.
About two weeks ago, a teacher from one of the English schools Barb worked at asked her if she would sponsor some Japanese to eat Sunday brunch at the club. Apparently they do that a couple times a year, but their regular sponsor was deployed to Iraq. Barb said, “Sure,” little knowing what was in store for her.
She called the club to find out what she would have to do to get seating for twenty people. They told her she would have to buy tickets ahead of time, so on her next day off she went in with a wad of cash and asked to buy tickets. “We aren’t selling tickets to the Sunday brunch,” the cashier told her, and gave her the phone number of the manager, who was supposed to help her arrange to get seating for such a large number of guests.
When Barb called the manager, he said, “Oh, you’ll have to buy tickets for that many people.”
Jiminy Cricket on a break-away crutch!
Barb explained that she’d already gone to the club once to buy tickets, but the manager said she would have to make reservations and pay in advance at the very least, so once again Barb tripped down to the club on her day off to make the arrangements.
Do you think anybody at the club helped her make those arrangements? Of course they didn’t. You’d have to be a nincompoop to think so, or at least as trusting as Barb was, which is pretty amazing given the way she was being jerked around. She reminded them that she was bringing quite a large group to brunch, and the manager himself assured her that he would have a place set aside for her.
When we showed up for the brunch today, there must’ve been thirty trillion people in the lobby at the club. There was a line from the door of the dining room that went all the way to Schenectady, New York, and they were waiting to get on the list! When we got to the front of the line, I told the cashier that we had a party of seventeen, and she hooked an eyebrow at me and asked, “Are you for real?”
“I’m for real,” I told her.
“With that many people, you should have made a reservation,” she said. When Barb overheard that remark, her eyes bugged out, her hair burst into flame, long, hook-like claws sprouted from the ends of her fingers and she sprang on the cashier like a pouncing leopard, hungrily devouring her entrails in a ghastly display of bestial rage.
Kidding. Nobody even mentioned reservations to us; in fact, they chuckled at the suggestion, when I made it, explaining that “too many people make reservations and then don’t show.” I suppose long lines of people waiting forty-five minutes for a table is much more preferable.
Our friends from the English school didn’t seem to mind waiting, however, and it looked to me that they liked every bit of the food they tried from the many buffet lines, so I wouldn’t call it totally frustrating.
They took my desk away from me today. The sergeant in charge of facilities pointed at it and told me, “I need that desk,” and almost before I knew what was happening, they were hauling it away. I say almost because I had to clean my stuff off it and unscrew a few parts to make it easier to carry. Yes, they not only took my desk away, they made me disassemble it, too.
Technically, of course, it’s not my desk, it belongs to the Department of Defense, so they can move it wherever they please, and they did, in fact, bring me another desk soon after. That was pretty nice of them. They didn’t have to do that, after all. They could even send me to the desert with a pencil and some paper and have me do supply work there, but they haven’t done that yet, so I’m not complaining.
You may have noticed that you can’t get the usual sterling services you’ve come to expect from o-broze.com, such as a steady supply of drivel and a few strange photos now and again. Our lease ran out on the o-broze.com domain name, so we rented the o-broze.net domain name, which was way too easy. Actually getting it to work turned out to be the catch.
If you want a domain name, you rent it from a registrar, but if you want a web site, you rent it from an internet service provider (ISP). We already had an ISP, and the ISP recognizes that I registered the o-broze.net domain, but no matter what I try, I can’t get them to swap the o-broze.com domain for the o-broze.net domain.
“I’m o-broze.net,” I tell the helpful transfer software.
“Yep, that’s you,” it tells me, after running a check.
“So what’s my name?”
“o-broze.com,” it says.
“No, I’m o-broze.net,” I remind it.
“Yep, that’s you,” it admits.
“So what’s my name?” I ask again.
“o-broze.com,” it says.
And so on. It’s a tad frustrating, so I can only bang my head against that wall for about a half-hour before I get cross-eyed and have to push away from the keyboard to do something less stressful, like go to work.
This is the real Air Force symbol. It was first sketched in 1944 by General Hap Arnold on the blank side of an alcohol-soaked beer coaster during a “wing-ding,” the general’s term for a night of bacchanalian mayhem. Two sergeants, whose heroism will shine forever though their names are now forgotten, were detailed to put the pen back in the general’s hand every time he dropped it, which was pretty often. The design originally included a naked maiden hurling a 1,000-pound bomb over her shoulder, but when the design was cleaned up by Disney artists, they omitted that element. Okay, I made all that up, but this is a symbol with history! This is a symbol that incorporates valor and honor! This is a symbol that’s been worn on U.S. Air Force uniforms since before there was a U.S. Air Force, and it should stay there, and nobody should mess with it!
This is the crap made-for-TV Air Force symbol. A team of overpaid advertising geeks produced it based on the recommendations of a focus group which determined that what young people these days respond to is flashy action movies, so they came up with a symbol that looks as though it should be worn on the chest of a overmuscled, bullet-proof superhero in purple tights, a black mask and a flowing cape. This symbol is hype, this symbol is all fluff and no substance, and this symbol is strangely loved by just about everybody, it seems. They put it on every hat, every t-shirt, every coffee mug and every other Air Force memento and accessory for sale in the military clothing store and base exchange, and it’s even officially sanctioned for wear on the lightweight blue Air Force uniform jacket.
There’s a guy at work who is putting on quite a nice show for my retirement ceremony. I told him I wanted the very simplest ceremony he thought I could get away with and still satisfy decorum. He still wants to add a few special bells and whistles, bless his decent heart, and today he wanted me to pick out a shadow box, which is a case with medals and ribbons and a flag in it. “I found this web site with some pretty cool shadow boxes,” he said, showing me a printout, and the first one he showed me was a shadowbox in the shape of the gaudy chrome crackerjack toy! I took a deep breath, toed my soap box off to on side, and told him, Thank you very much for wanting to do such a wonderful thing, but I didn’t want that one. Thanks. Or at least I hope I sounded that calm.