Drivel

Madison was right on the edge of the Arctic cold front/mega-snow dump that buried the rest of the Midwest. We had to drive to work in a flurry but the snow stopped falling around ten-ish, and by noon the sun was out and walking around outside was almost pleasant unless you made the mistake of letting your eyes wander off the pavement, which was ice-covered and slippery. Then you’d break your butt.

Getting to work this morning wasn’t all that bad, even though the roads were covered in drifting snow. Just about everybody was driving carefully. I wish I could say the pedestrians were behaving themselves as well. I almost ran over a young lady who stepped off the curb into Willy Street right in front of me. I stamped on the brakes, the anti-lock braking system fluttered, the wheels broke traction with the pavement anyway and the car kept right on going. So did the young lady, although she put her hand out, whether to signal me to stop or because she was from Krypton and was preparing to stiff arm my car to a halt, I don’t know.

I locked up as tightly as the brakes. It didn’t even occur to me to honk the horn until much later. All I could do was grit my teeth. Also, when she looked at me I yelled “I CAN’T STOP!” at her, as if she could hear me. She kept right on going. I must have come within inches of running right over her when the wheels finally found something under the snow to grip and the car shuddered to a halt. She waved to me as she hopped up onto the curb.

My heart was still pounding five blocks further down the road.

We’re back to the family photos again. This one comes from an album I got in the mail years ago and haven’t seen since then.

I spent the day in the basement moving stuff around. It’s a little more than a hobby, a little less than an occupation these days. I wanted to move a bunch of the book cases into the corner room of the basement, called “dad’s lair” by the rest of the O-folk. To move a book case you have to take all the books out of it, of course, and I was moving four book cases, so the project took me just about all afternoon and cost me a nap.

The up side is that I found at least a dozen crap books to throw away and two or three dozen more books that were duplicates, or books that we had read and would never read again, or that we’d forgotten we had and didn’t know why we were still hanging on to them. I set them aside to be sacrificed to the retail god e-bay or the slavering monster called Half-Price Books.

No, wait — the up side was finding this photo album. I’ve seen some of these photos over and over, but quite a few of them are like-new to me. This one, for instance. That’s my Dad, Chuck, on the right, and his dad, Leo, on the left. I’m pretty sure this is a gag photo. They don’t really mean to fix the hapless electronic gadget on the table between them, unless it can somehow be fixed by hacksawing it to pieces, which Leo seems ready to do. Chuck’s already at it with a brace and bit. The chassis of that radio doesn’t stand a chance of surviving this encounter, which leads me to believe Dad wanted to goof around with the camera and Leo was all too willing to go along with the fun. That, and the smirk on Leo’s face.

Speaking of posed photos, have you ever seen two worse actors? The gaping disbelief on the face of my brother, the look of studious concentration on my own visage — what a couple of gooberheads!

Dad probably stopped to take a holiday snapshot and we hammed it up for him. I can just imagine how he rolled his eyes at our performance as he walked away from snapping this photo. We’re taking part in the annual ritual you would have seen in our house whenever it was too freaking cold to go outside: assembling the holiday jigsaw puzzle. There was a puzzle on a desk or folding table somewhere in whatever O-Home was hosting the Christmas dinner that year. It looks as though this was my freshman or sophomore year at UW-Eau Claire, to judge from the mousy tufts of beard on my chinny-chin-chin.

Dad could sit and stare at a jigsaw puzzle for hours. Then either Pete or I would come along and start “helping” him, but no matter how much we messed up his sytem he would never give up. The man was one determined puzzle solver.

A newly-released book on the market has collected the doodles of past presidents. I don’t recall that a lot of presidents doodled, just Reagan. The press got a lot of mileage out of printing his doodles, mostly head-and-shoulders sketches of cowboys and what his generation would have called Indians.

This is not one of them, by the way. I was cleaning up in the basement yesterday afternoon and found this and a whole brace of other portraits on the back of an algebra work sheet in a box filled with Tim’s homework papers. An Indian chief wearing Groucho glasses tickled me so much I had to save it. Top that, Mister President.

Just think of it: An American man can rise to the position of the most powerful office in the land and be remembered forever for the wandering scribbles he made in the margins of the economic report to keep from being bored to tears by the treasury secretary.

The press has never, to my knowledge, published W’s doodles. I wonder if there’s a grim reason for that. As gruff as Reagan could sometimes be, having him for a president was like having an amiable, if opinionated codger for an uncle who couldn’t tell a joke to save his life, but when he pointed at you and said, “Pull my finger!” you could count on him to fart with the basso rumble and duration of a growling junkyard dog. And it didn’t hurt that he always had a pocket full of Jelly Bellies.

Footnote: I don’t literally mean that Reagan farted at state dinners for the sake of getting a cheap laugh. But, be honest: In a private, unguarded moment, something like that from a guy nicknamed “Dutch” wouldn’t surprise you at all, would it?

Big Pete describes commercial airline travel, in the context of civil rights: “I wasn’t aware that we had civil rights on airplanes. I’m usually sitting there freezing, starving, dried out, strapped in, trying to pop my ears, holding my pee. They bring me a rubbery chicken wing with a half-cup of orange juice and tell me to stop pushing my call button. All they need to do is put a hood over my head, take my pants off, waterboard me and it’s like Gitmo in the sky.”

GufFAW! This is why I don’t fly any more.

Another doodle from Tim’s homework. Enjoy.

Most of my dreams are just plain weird. It’s no use trying to decipher the deep inner meaning of an elm tree speaking in the voice of my Darling B, or figure out how the cat learned to play Smoke On The Water on the piano. It’s a dream. It doesn’t mean anything. I can shake my head and it’s gone.

Some dreams are horror movies, so spooky that they not only wake me up, I make myself stay awake for five or ten minutes, even get up and walk around a bit, to make sure the monsters go away and don’t come back for the second act.

This morning’s dream was a little of both. When the alarm clock woke me this morning, a young woman was staring deeply into my eyes as she held a cutlass to my throat. Dream or not, it’s hard to shake an image like that.

I’m not always in my dreams. Sometimes I just watch. This morning’s dream began like that. I was sitting in front of a television set in my living room, watching a documentary about a military academy. It wasn’t an academy where the cadets sternly marched from class to class with a deep, inner sense of purpose and destiny, like Tom Cruise in Lords of Destiny, or where they beat the crap out of each other the way they do at places like VMI. This was more like a bunch of high school kids at a drum & bugle corps training camp, but without drums or bugles. Seemed to me they were kids who were really into wearing cavalry uniforms.

At some point I got sucked into the story. I was taking part in the ceremony where the cadets were awarded their sabers. Are cutlasses different from sabers? Because I’m pretty sure the cavalry carried sabers. Sailors carried cutlasses. Never mind.

It was my turn to get my cutlass. The drill instructor tossed it to one of the cadets, a young woman about a head and a half shorter than me. She was supposed to look me in the eyes, swing the cutlass at my throat and stop within a fraction of an inch from my Adam’s apple. She put the edge of the sword against my neck. It was cold and hot at the same time. I was having some difficulty concentrating enough to stand at attention. She nodded almost imperceptibly, her arm tensed, the steel quivered against my neck, and the freaking alarm went off. Scared the snot out of me.

“We need a bigger bathroom,” Tim said, as his mother stood patiently in the hall, waiting for him to finish brushing his teeth so she could blow-dry her hair.

But he was wrong. We don’t need a bigger bathroom, we need three bathrooms, one in each bedroom and one in the hall. That’s the only way we might ease the morning rush.

It’ll never happen. We need a bigger kitchen, too, but the only practical way we’ll get that is the same way we’ll get a bigger bathroom: Dynamite the house and rebuild.

Barb thinks we can have a bigger kitchen if we add on. “All we have to do is knock that wall down — ” here she waves her arms at the outside wall of the kitchen; I half-expect that she hopes the walls will vanish when she does that “ — and add about ten feet that way.” She stiff-arms the wall this time, holding her hand open and shoving away.

I’ve told her the sweeping gestures don’t quite cut it, that she might be able to make the wall move if she threw a ton of money at it instead. She never does. The wall’s still there, the kitchen’s still small. So’s the bathroom. Somehow we make do.

Madison was freaking cold today. The temps hung around ten this morning and never got higher than twenty today. If you were walking anywhere, even a block down to the corner Starbucks, you had to keep moving if you wanted to live. A little old lady slipped on a patch of ice right in front of me and, although I tried to help her up, she pushed me away. “I’m done for,” she said. “Save yourself!” By the time I got to the corner and stole one last glance over my shoulder at her, she was Popsicle-ized.

Matilla the Hug? Matilla the Hud? Matilla the Hua? It’s definitely “Matilla,” but that modifier at the end has me stumped. Scar’s a nice touch, don’t you think?

I finally finished reading David Maraniss’s book, They Marched Into Sunlight, last night; it was an easy read but a pretty thick book, about the size of a Tom Clancy potboiler. Much more interesting, though. Then again, the label of a peanut butter jar is more interesting to me than a Tom Clancy novel.

They Marched Into Sunlight is about one day in October, 1967, when an anti-war demonstration on the campus of the University of Wisconsin in Madison turned sour, and two army companies on patrol in Vietnam were almost completely wiped out after walking into an ambush.

In Madison, police were called in to remove students who jammed the hallways of the Commerce building, trying to obstruct recruiters for the Dow chemical corporation, makers of napalm. Police were called in to clear the students from the building, which might have broke up the demonstration if they hadn’t waded in with nightsticks swinging. The students responded by rioting. It became the first violent anti-war protest in the country.

In Vietnam, the ambushed army companies were looking for victory in battle that could be made into front-page news, in an attempt to shore up support for the war at home as well as turn the tide on the battlefield. The few men who survived the ambush barely managed to escape, and its famous commander and nearly all his officers were killed.

I was just six years old when the events described in the book unfolded; my bedtime prayers included a request for a blessing on “Uncle Jim and all the soldiers fighting in Vietnam” but my understanding of the whole mess is pretty weak, mostly because American culture of that time — anticommunist hysteria, counterculture hippies, race riots and such — are more alien to me than anything in my experience.

Maraniss’s book did a pretty admirable job of illustrating that world. It didn’t hurt that I was also reading about a significant chapter in the history of Madison, either. At 550 pages it was a pretty daunting read, but well worth it.

Tammy, one of the women I work with, usually sneezes in threes. Another one, Ami, almost never sneezes less than half a dozen times in a fit. When we get a new person in the office, the first mistake they make is calling out, “Bless you!” after they hear Ami’s first sneeze. “Choo! Choo! Choo! Choo! Choo! Choo! Choo! Choo!” is Ami’s response. And then everybody else chimes in: “Bless you!”

“When you’re driving,” I asked her after a really long, staccato burst of sneezes the other day, “do you have to pull over to sneeze?” I would probably have to, if my sneezes came in paragraphs, instead of a single, exclamatory blast. No, she said, she just forces her eyes open after every sneeze. She hasn’t hit anybody yet.

Utterly bereft of even a single stray thought he might use to generate drivel, your faithful O-man will now resort to recycling newspaper squibs, because the show must go on:

Did you hear the one about the woman who not only got kicked off the plane for lighting matches, she got everybody else kicked off? And they removed all the baggage and searched it? All because she was too embarrassed to admit she was the one doing it. She wasn’t trying to light the fuse on an explosive tennis shoe, she was only trying to cover the stink of her own gas. Now that’s self-conscious.

Something will have to be said about the weather. It was cold enough to freeze my nostrils shut on the short walk from the car to the front door of the bank. I had to breathe through my teeth. That really hurts when it’s so cold. I also couldn’t see, because the freezing wind made my eyes puddle up, which made my eyelids stick together just like my nostrils. And to think I came back to Wisconsin because I missed the seasons.

If you’re wondering what to get me for Christmas, I need a dart gun. Not the kind of darts that have needles, but the rubbery orange plastic ones with suckers that stick to windows and, sometimes, the refrigerator, but almost nothing else. I’m not interested in whether or not they stick to anything, though. I just want to keep one at my bedside to shoot at cats in the morning. It doesn’t have to shoot more than one dart, I don’t need distance, and it doesn’t even have to be especially accurate, because I’ll be shooting at point-blank range, often with the sucker-cup just inches from the cat’s nose. I guess I could even use one of those cartoon hand guns that shoots a boxing glove from a barrel as big as a roll of paper towels. I only ask for reliability. I have to be able to count on getting the shot every time I pick the gun up off my nightstand. I’ve had it with these wake-up calls at four-thirty in the morning.

I’m not going to see Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto and I’ll tell you why: Because it’s called Apocalypto. That’s a made-up word. Worse, it’s a made-up word that sounds stupid. “Apocalypto.” Sheesh.

I know it’s getting pretty good reviews, and most reviewers say it’s got even more gore that Braveheart had, although that’s hard to imagine. Doesn’t matter. There’s no way I’ll give Mel the satisfaction of knowing I handed twenty bucks to the girl at the box office and said, “Two tickets to Apocalypto, please.” Not gonna happen. Not even going to rent it when it comes out on DVD.

The wine tasting at the liquor store this morning was a bust. Not a complete bust: Barb and I each got a sip of some champagne so dry it sucked a sirocco of desert wind through every sinus cavity in my head. After that one sip, though, there didn’t seem to be any more wine forthcoming. Pretty much a bust.

When we read that Scott’s liquor store would host an all-day wine tasting and blind champagne challenge with cheese and sausage, we pictured something different from what they had planned. I was thinking perhaps they would have a separate room with several tables, each featuring wine from a different region, or winery, or whatever wine snots call the different flavors like cabernet, pinot and Chablis. The room might be crowded with dozens of people happily sipping wine, maybe getting a little tight, and exchanging knowledgeable assessments of the wine they were currently sipping: “Hard-bodied with a bridal bouquet and just a hint of asphalt.”

The reality, though, was quite a bit different. The event was so low-key that for five or ten minutes we couldn’t tell it was going on; we searched from one side of the store to the other before we accidentally ran across a guy in the middle aisle handing out teensy-tiny cups. He poured a sip of wine into each cup as he babbled something about where the wine was made and how it tasted. I peered down into my cup, smaller than the shot glass on top of a NyQuil bottle, and swirled the champagne a bit before slamming it. The sensation was like trying to gulp a teardrop.

So in retrospect, I probably wouldn’t drive across town to do it again, but so long as we were there we did take the opportunity to buy some delicious beer, several bottles of which went into a big stock pot My Darling B was using to make beer cheese soup, a dish she enjoys more than almost anything. I enjoyed a bowl of it as well, with a big hunk of sourdough bread for a sop, but being lactose intolerant I’ll probably pay for it later. Hardly matters; the game was worth the candle.

After dinner we enjoyed a delicious holiday treat: rumballs. My Grandmother O used to make rumballs every Christmas (along with pfeffernus, yum!) and My Darling B has enlisted Tim to help carry on the tradition. He enjoys the destructive part: crushing the Nilla wafers with a rolling pin. Then, after B mixed up the ingredients, they both sat at the table and rolled the sticky goop into balls while I stood by with a spray can of canola oil to grease their palms, so to speak, so they could let go. That corn oil is like crazy glue.

Somewhere on the other side of town, near the liquor store with the wine tasting, there’s a store that sells spices. Couldn’t tell you the name of it off the top of my head ... I’ll google it for you ... here it is: Penzey’s Spices. A whole store that sells nothing but spices. That seems a little over-specialized to me, sort of like a store that sells nothing but light bulbs, but maybe my view of the world is too narrow. I thought Barb had a lot of spices in her kitchen cupboard (and she’s got a truckload), but she’s only filled the left half of the bottom shelf. She’s hardly gotten started.

I’m not much interested in spices. I like salt, garlic, and pepper, and when I’m feeling especially creative I’ll add a dash of basil (to chicken) or dill (to fish) but beyond that, my taste buds can’t tell the difference. If we go to a new restaurant, Barb will thoughtfully mull over every mouthful of each new dish, trying all through the meal to decipher the ingredients and asking me foolish questions like, “Do you taste cumin? I think there’s a dash of cumin in this.” My evaluation of the food stopped at, “Hey, this is good!”

I went into the store with her anyways, because a store that sells spices also sells the nifty little glass jars that spices usually come in, and I wanted a bunch of those. Five, to be precise. Several years ago I walked the beaches of Normandy, visiting each of the five named landing zones of the D-Day invasion and collecting a bit of sand at each visit. My plan had been to put each bit of sand in its own little spice jar, but I had yet to glom onto five spice jars. They’ve been squirreled away in a small box since I brought them home, waiting for the day I finally got hold of those jars. Today was the day.

What should have happened when I got the jars home was, I should have been absolutely, mind-bogglingly unable to find the box with the packets of sand. I had them just a few weeks ago while I was moving book cases around in the basement and found the box, and in theory it should have still been where I left it, up there on top of the book case, but that’s rarely the way these things happen, is it? Somebody else runs across the box and decides it’s much too important to leave in such an odd place, or gremlins sneak off with it in the middle of the night, or a freak rift in the space-time continuum sucks it into a parallel dimension, or it spontaneously combusts. Anything could happen, but the one thing that will never happen is, it won’t be where I left it.

But guess what? Not only was the box still where I left it, the packets of sand were still in the box! It was almost enough to infarct my heart. (Sounds dirty, doesn’t it?)

The first beach we visited was Omaha. That was the only beach we planned to visit; I wanted to see the memorial and walk the beach and that was all, and it was so cold that day that we very nearly packed up and went straight back but Barb talked me into going to see Utah, just a few more miles further on. “You know you’ll kick yourself for the rest of your life if you don’t,” she said, and she was right. She usually is. But before we left I grabbed an empty film canister from the car (thank goodness I didn’t have a digital camera then!) and scooped up a bit of sand from the beach. I did the same at Utah and used my last film canister at Gold, so when we got to Sword and Juno I grabbed a discarded plastic packet from the floor of the car and wrapped the sand in that.

I unwrapped the plastic packets first. Each one of them held about a handful of sand and a tiny scrap of paper; one had “Juno” neatly printed on it, the other “Sword.” Pretty good thinking, that. Not so good thinking with the three film canisters, none of which held a note or carried any identifying marks. Just three identical beige canisters. The sand in each was different, but I have no memory of what the sand was like on each beach. One of the canisters held a bit of sea shell, maybe to help me identify it, maybe just an accident. I’ll never know. But I finally got those glass jars.

Thanks for sticking with me to read all this drek. I’m trying to work through an miserable case of writer’s block and I have this idea that if I open the spigot that normally holds back the rush of drivel and let fly with everything I’ve got, no matter how inane, that the flow of the stream I wanted to go down will be restored and I can find my way again. Seems to be working.

It’s a tradition as old as, ah — well, as old as Tim, now that I think about it: The O-Folk brought the Christmas tree home today and trimmed it as we usually do on the second weekend of the month. Not an especially long-established tradition, as traditions go, but good enough for us.

This year we did something a little different and went to one of those “cut it yourself” tree farms, the first time we’ve tried that. It was ridiculously quick and easy. We should have started doing this years ago. The farmer, a well-insulated guy in a hunter’s had, asked us what kind of tree we’d like. “What kinds to you have?” I asked. His farm was divided up into trees with short needles and trees with medium-long needles. We went for the short needles, up on the ridge; I forget what they’re called. A tannenbaum by any other name.

The farmer handed us a bow saw and we tromped up to an open field behind the farm house where we quickly began to trip over stumps. Most people didn’t want to walk far; the good trees were all up over the top of the ridge, but we found a nice one about a hundred yards on, made a quick survey of the immediate area to make sure there was nothing really nice that we’d immediately wish we’d picked after we cut another one down. Once we were sure we had the one we would be happy with, Tim got underneath it with the bow saw and hacked it down in less than a minute. Barb hardly had enough time to snap a photo.

And that was it: Get directions, tramp across the field, hack it down, carry it back. They baled it for us so I could easily stuff it in the trunk of the car while Barb paid. We were on the road less than fifteen minutes after arriving. The car didn’t even cool off.

Back at home we were faced with the unfortunate task of trying to find the ornaments and lights, which were ... downstairs ... somewhere ... in a box. Or maybe a Tupperware tub. Turned out they were scattered to all corners of the basement in both, and we didn’t find them all, but we found enough ornaments to trim the tree and way more than enough lights. We’ve been collecting strings of lights for as long as we’ve been married. If we plugged them all in at the same time, lights would dim all over the neighborhood and airline pilots would crash their planes after being dazzled by the light.

It was nice having our old ornaments back again. We bought a couple boxes of ornaments at an estate sale last year because our stuff was still in storage. Seeing it all again was like an early Christmas present.

I got a letter addressed to “Poppa Dave” this evening. In an age when you have to show two forms of photo identification to use a public toilet I’m a little surprised that a government agency like the post office lets people get away with using nicknames to address an envelope, even though they are semi-privatized. Seems like a serious breach of security if you ask me. How do they know I’m “Poppa Dave?” Sure, it’s got my address, but lots of Daves out there are dads. And what if there’s a terrorist cell out there with a nefarious leader known only as “Poppa Dave?” I don’t want to be associated with him!

Hey, what’s the guy in that black van across the street looking at that’s so important he’s got to use binoculars? And why’s he taking pictures?

My Darling B has found a recipe for beer cheese soup that doesn’t turn me inside out. I mean — beer cheese soup! The sound of that alone should be more than enough to make a person as lactose-intolerant as I am go BOOM!

But it didn’t. She mixed up a big batch of the stuff night before last and I timidly ate a bowl after dosing myself with a couple of lactaid pills, thinking to myself the whole time that they haven’t been helping much anymore but that I had nothing to lose if they didn’t and everything to gain if they did. I waited all night for my guts to growl and churn, but nary a peep was heard (nor poop) (you know I had to say that). In the morning, no bellyache. It had no effect whatsoever. Weird. I should have ignited like the Hindenburg.

But as I didn’t, I happily loaded my bowl up with leftovers last night, came back for seconds, and still never felt any ill effects. We’ve gone over the ingredients again and again, and as near as we can figure, the only wild card in the mix is the cheese. Different cheeses affect me to different degrees. Gorgonzola is one of those cheeses I’ve never gotten around to trying until now; it must be one of those cheeses that doesn't beat me up internally. Wowzers. I'm liking this.

I’m trying to type with a band-aid on my thumb, the tip of which has developed a tiny but very painful split from the dry winter air. Touch-typists use their thumbs only to hit the space bar, but the band-aid keeps getting hung up on the keys in the bottom row. Mosquitoes are less irritating.

Sunday’s edition of the Wisconsin State Journal listed the top twenty-five most-played holiday tunes on radio, as tracked by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. Betcha that’s a group you want to party with, eh?

Because I’m always looking for ways to contribute to society, I’ve taken an exhaustive look — perused it, you might say (if you’ve been paying attention) — and determined that not only are the songs on this list in the wrong order (way wrong), some of them aren’t fit for human ears. In the interests of making sure Posterity doesn’t get the wrong idea about us, here are the first eleven songs as listed, along with my comments and corrections, of course:

1. The Christmas Song by Nat King Cole — right where it should be at number one. No problemo here.

2. 3. Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas by The Pretenders — The Pretenders? Great googly-moogly, I like The Pretenders, too, but how does their version trump Bing’s? Or Harry Connick’s? Or anybody else’s? Okay, not Mariah Carey’s, but almost anybody else’s. And besides, this song should be in third place, and I’ll soon make it clear why.

3. Winter Wonderland by The Eurythmics — sorry, Annie and Dave overdid the techno sound on this arrangement. It has to go. Dump it and get another version. Sinatra’s, say. It should probably stay in the top five, although I’m frankly pretty ambivalent about this number.

4. Santa Claus Is Coming To Town by Bruce Springsteen — I’ll tolerate an awful lot of Springsteen for the sake of people who like him, but this is one Springsteen track that’s intolerable, a major suck-o-rama. I’d go so far as to say he’s going to hell for recording this one. Not only should it not be on the list, all recordings of it should be rounded up and buried under the wreckage of Chernobyl.

5. 4. White Christmas by Bing Crosby — no problem with the song, but move it up a notch to number four.

6. Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! by Andy Williams — not a bad song, but I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for the Leon Redbone version. Don’t particularly care where it stands on the list.

7. Jingle Bell Rock by Bobby Helms — I’m not sure who Bobby Helms is, so I withhold judgment.

8. Little Drummer Boy by The Harry Simeone Chorale & Orchestra — I’ve got a dirty little Christmastime secret: I loathe this song. I know, I know, it’s so sweet how that wonderful little drummer boy learned the meaning of Christmas by giving baby Jesus the only thing he had to give, a Krupaesque rumpa-pum-pum from his beat-up drum, but yechhh! Could a story be more sloppily sentimental? Treacle isn’t this smarmy! And the tune’s a major drag! I don’t expect that my once-secret hatred of this dirge will reduce its popularity at all, now that I’ve spoken it out loud, but I feel better for saying it. Thanks, ASCAP.

9. Sleigh Ride by The Ronettes — I’d guess these are the girls who sing the Motown version (“ding-a-ling-a-ling a-ding dong ding!”) which is not as traditional as the traditional orchestral version, or as cool as Harry Connick’s swing version, but it’s kind of fun, so I guess it’s all right.

10. Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer by Gene Autry — gets to say on the list because it’s Gene Autry. Nuff said.

11. 2. It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year by Andy Williams — what in the name of suffering succotash is this song doing at number eleven? This easily Top Five material, and I’d put it at number two over Bing’s White Christmas, but that’s just because I’m always daring to offend people.

I’m not going any farther than number eleven because a list any longer than ten gets tiresome. I only went to number eleven because I couldn’t believe that Andy Williams number was hanging way down there. I saw a couple other unbelievables, like Elvis’s Blue Christmas at number 16 and There’s No Place Like Home For The Holidays by at number twenty-four, but I’m not going to bust a vein over them.

One song they missed, though, and I can’t say I’m disappointed, only a little puzzled: You know that morose John Lennon song that starts, “And so this is Christmas ...” just before a choir of wet cats begins to whine in the background? How’s that not on the list? I thought the FCC required all stations to play it. Radio stations that aren’t playing Christmas music all day will pop that one in every so often. Country stations play it. They squeeze it in on talk radio during the station break. I can’t believe it’s not on the list. Too bad it’s not on the air.

I got one heck of a lot of grief at work for not telling anybody that yesterday was my birthday. “If you’d given us time to plan it, we could have had a party that would’ve gotten us out of work all afternoon!” I can’t believe all the work I haven’t gotten out of because I don’t think of this stuff. Maybe one day next week we can all take a training day and they can give me the lowdown on all the other party days I can tip them to.

One of the part-timers working in our office was listening to her iPod when she stopped and made the sound that kids make when they step on earthworms in the rain, “Eewwwww!” She spun the little wheel that made it skip a song, then looked up to see us all watching her for an explanation. “I forgot that Michael Jackson music was in there.”

Oh. Yeh, too bad about Michael. The oldies station has been playing The Jackson Five’s recording of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, which was a cute Christmas favorite for years until Michael turned into Mister Weirdness. I can’t listen to it now without getting the creeps. Way to screw up the legacy, Mike.

Just for the record, Borders book store on University Avenue doesn’t have free wi-fi. I’m not implying they should have it, but the teensy-tiny coffee shops in town can somehow find the spare change to provide free access to the web. How’s it that corporate mega-stores like Borders are scrimping on this simple perk?

“How do you feel about working without Novocain, doc?” I asked my dentist as he was getting ready to drill holes in three of the teeth in the front of my mouth.

Those are bad teeth. I’ve had a lot of work done on them, and none of it brings back pleasant memories. In particular, the weekend I spent on my back while an ex-Navy dentist augered his way through the front four is a memory that’s up near the top of my list of The Most Excruciatingly Bad Days Of My Life.

Today marked my first visit in ten years to what I would’ve once called a “civilian” dentist, although since my transition from the military to the real world I’m much more likely to refer to him simply as a dentist, and the last one I saw as a “military dentist,” or, to be more colorfully descriptive, “The Cackling Bringer of Pain.”

Not to put all military dentists down; I visited one or two good ones over the years, but I also saw several more who were rather casual about the way they rushed through the procedure of drilling holes in my teeth with power tools, and there were a few I would charitably call slapdash. And I wouldn’t go back to that ex-Navy guy for all the rich, dark, hand-made chocolate I could carry.

To his credit, the dentist I saw today was ready to humor me. “That one on the bottom is very shallow,” he said. “I’ll drill that one first and you can decide after that whether or not you really want to forego the painkillers.” Then he carefully, gently drilled that one. I think I took it pretty manfully, but I couldn’t deny it hurt. He slipped his mask off and said, “I think I’m going to have to recommend the shot.”

And I agreed that taking the painkillers would probably be the best course of action. “But here’s what I’m worried about,” I said, and described how other dentists had sunk their Novocain needles into my gum until they hit bone. It was usually at least as bad as being drilled without Novocain, but often it was worse, so what’s the point? Makes me whimper and my eyes puddle up to recall it now. Even he winced as I revealed my deepest fear.

“I’m not going to do it that way,” he promised. And whaddaya know? He didn’t. I never felt a thing. It didn’t even bother me after the Novocain wore off. Hear me, good people: Dentistry doesn’t have to hurt. Demand painless dental drilling!

Without a lot of soul-searching or too much discussion, we agreed this year to keep our celebration of Christmas very simple. We have a tree, and we have stockings, but other than that we’ve all promised to restrain our spending to an absolute minimum. We already donated most of the Christmas budget to various charities, so other than an exchange of presents, everything should be taken care of already, although My Darling B came home from shopping today with a bag I was required to turn my back on, so she may have already gone a teensy bit overboard, as is her wont.

I had just one gift in particular I wanted to get. I can’t be more specific than that right now, of course, because she reads this, too. It was a fairly well-stocked item not all that long ago, common enough that I’d see it on the end caps of the aisles and at the check out lanes of Shopko and Target and Staples, even Copp’s Foods, for crying out loud.

In accordance with cosmic law, though, no store anywhere in the Four Lakes Region has it now that I want it. I’ve looked for it all over town these past two weeks — nothing. I drove to specialty stores along East Washington Avenue, thinking surely they’ll have this item in stock at this time of year — nothing. I was desperate enough to venture into the East Towne Mall — still nothing. I’m so screwed.

It’s a revealing measure of my desperation that I went into the mall. There are certain places where it’s not at all out of the ordinary to see people stroll to and fro every day, but which periodically become unfit for human habitation, and the mall at Christmas is one of them. How I got in and out of there alive, I will never be able to explain. How I did it in less than half an hour is so weird as to be ripped from the pages of pulp fiction — you suspend disbelief while you’re experiencing it, but afterward there’s no way to explain the events without sounding stupid.

I woke today very, very early in the morning — or, more accurately, I was awakened, by cats, one of them noisy, the other one silent but provocative. The plan did not call for this. The plan called for feeding them last night until they couldn’t stand to eat any more. (Did that.) The plan assumed they would let me sleep in this morning for at least a couple hours. (Wishful thinking.) And, as they say, the best-laid plans of mice and men something something something else.

Four-thirty. The loud one wandered into the bedroom at four-freaking-thirty.

Did I mention I like cats? We adopted both the cats in our house from the shelter. For a long time we had no pets at all, and liked it that way. No worries about kenneling them or finding a sitter, no cleaning up after them, no vet bills for de-worming. That all changed when I brought home a cute little stray kitten who followed me home (I swear I’m not making that up). And I’m the one who fed the cats first thing in the morning when I got out of bed, so they got used to it. I’ve got nobody to blame for my current condition but myself.

Well, I’m done with that. I got out of bed at five because I’m a light sleeper and the sound of the cat’s claws on the hardwood floor alone kept waking me up, to say nothing of his whining. I made myself some coffee, fetched the paper from the driveway and read the news while breakfasting on toast with jam. The cats sat beside their dishes looking as hopefully up at every bite I ate, but I did not feed them. And after I finished the paper and topped off my coffee mug, I retired to my basement lair. Upstairs, the sounds of a minor catastrophe filtered down to my ears, followed by a rush and thump of movement across the floor, then silence again. The cats did not come downstairs to bother me, and they didn’t get anything to eat until eight o’clock, yet somehow they survived.

I may sleep on the sofa in my lair, until it doesn’t throw them off any more.

A clear blue sky and a fresh breeze were just pleasant enough to lure me into taking a walk through the neighborhood this morning. I haven’t done this often enough. We’ve lived here since May and I hardly know the names of the streets in this part of town. I used to be a much more die-hard walker than this, and not too many years ago I took my bike out whenever I got the chance, but I just don’t pound the pavement the way I used to, and not because I don’t enjoy it as much now. It’s mostly because I don’t have the spare time I used to have, and walking, ostensibly a leisure activity, usually gets bumped when other priorities emerge to claim my time. That’s a pity, because I really should know the names of the roads around here by now.

Our road is Sylvan Lane. It’s not much more than a mile from end to end, running north-south through a pocket of two- and three-bedroom bungalows making up this classic-1950’s development. Our house is sited on one of an unbroken row of thirteen quarter-acre lots that march from Frostwoods Road on the north end to the intersection with Woody Lane on the south. The two corner lots at either end might be a skosh bigger than a quarter-acre, but not so you’d notice.

All the lots are generously shaded by mature maples, pines, cedars and other firs, but especially maples. The developer must’ve gotten a discount on maples. They’re everywhere, and all kinds of them. I can pick out red maples and silver maples pretty reliably, and sugar maples about half the time. I can usually recognize a box elder, but beyond that I’m lost. And factually, I didn’t know that box elders were maples until I looked it up.

I’m jealous about the big maples. Our lot is barren of trees, unless you count the two small flowering crabs, a towering cedar trying to reach the street light by the road out front, a ragged line of feral lilacs along the rear lot line and a mulberry gone scraggly from trying to fight off the lilacs. Neighbors tell me that there was once a big, beautiful maple in the middle of the front yard and a walnut, also described as mature enough to shade the back yard, both gone now. Where the maple once stood out front, though, a cluster of shoots popped up over the summer. I caged them to keep the rabbits from nibbling them down to nubs, then pruned back all but the two tallest shoots. Whichever survives the winter gets to claim the spot and grow triumphantly over the front yard.

This morning’s walk took me north from the house, up Sylvan Lane to the point where it T’s against Frostwoods Road, the main road out of this part of the development up to Monona Drive. I hung a right on Frostwoods but only to go about twenty yards or so before heading north again on Anthony Place. Bungalows on the left and rentals on the right, it’s as bedroom community as these things get. There’s one place I love especially, right on the corner, a cozy little bungalow, with simple lines, a shallow-pitched roof looking futuristic in that boomerang style of the sixties, original siding painted rust with peppermint green trim. I haven’t worked up the gumption yet to approach the couple living there; they’re old enough that they’re probably the original owners, like many of the residents in this neighborhood.

Against all odds, I remembered to water the plants yesterday. If they could speak, they would’ve still been giving me the smack-down as late as this morning, while I tied my shoes to go, surprised that I knew where the watering cans were or that live plants still grew in our house. Our plants may come from different species, but after living with us for the past six months they’ve got the same sarcastic attitude.

I’ve never been all that good at keeping plants, and my failing almost always comes down to forgetting to water them. Even the most low-maintenance plants, the kind that get top billing under the “thrives on neglect” subheading, will succumb to my lack of attention, and when I say lack, I’m not talking about forgetting one day a week because I got distracted by other demands on my time. For many of the plants that have spent their brief lives dependent on my hand for hydration, I’m embarrassed to have to admit that the day I brought them into the house and set them on a windowsill is the one day I watered them.

A few lucky plants, sitting where they literally block my path every day (hanging in a doorway, for instance) have fared a little better, but a surprising number of plants look remarkably healthy up until the day they curl up and die. I simply don’t think about watering a pert, green plant, and a desiccated, brown plant is obviously gone beyond the point that water, no matter how penitently offered, is going to help.

The potted parsley by the back door has become my water barometer. When its shoots are drooping in surrender I know it’s been at least a week since I filled the watering can and I’m in a three- or four-day window of forgiveness to make up for it. I try to tank up and make the rounds right then, if I’m not on the way out the door to work (and once, even though I was, the situation was obviously so dire that I paused long enough to splash a little water on them all in one lightening pass).

Finally going from plant to plant, I can see that they all exhibit their own particular, although more subtle signs of distress: a leaf that has withered and dropped off, a vine that has lost its cling, but nothing as blatant as the parsley’s, which in contrast is doing the arboreal equivalent of jumping up and down, waving its arms and shouting. I wonder if the other plants are somehow dimly aware that parsley plant has saved every one of their lives a dozen times over to date. If it ever croaks, they’re all doomed.

I stayed late at the office because B elected to take the ten hours of overtime the DMV offered her, thinking that we could use the financial padding. This may be the last time she goes down that road, though. After working a couple late nights last week and again today, she’s getting the feeling that the game’s not worth the candle.

I brought my laptop to work and holed up in my cubicle after everybody else had gone home. After a half hour of tapping out drivel on the keyboard I got up to visit the men’s room and came back to find that my card key wouldn’t open the office door. What the hell? It worked this morning; why wouldn’t it work now? There wasn’t a sensible answer to my rhetorical question, so I waved my card key at the reader again, but tugging on the knob got the same result: no entry.

My coat and hat, backpack and laptop were all in there. I didn’t even have my wallet on me. Some really hot, loud and completely inappropriate cussing would have gone a long way to satisfy me in a strictly visceral way just then, but one or two of my coworkers were still in their offices and I like them enough to want to spare them that side of myself.

I’ve stayed in the office after hours often enough to know that a cleaning crew goes through the building, luckily for me, so I hunted down the boss and asked him to open the door for me, which he very helpfully did.

Barb picked me up shortly after six and we rode straight home, threading quickly through the thinned remains of the evening rush hour. At the kitchen table waiting for our soup to warm I told her I’d made a couple charges on the credit card, and reached into my pack for my wallet, where I’d stashed a corner of paper torn from a legal pad with the amounts jotted on it in a cramped hand. Finding the wallet wasn’t there, I went to the closet to dig it out of the inside pocket of my overcoat, only it wasn’t there, either. I went back to the pack and emptied every pocket, then did the same to the overcoat. No wallet. Well, crap.

It must have fallen out of the pocket of my overcoat, either when I folded it over my arm in the office, or later when I did the same in the break room. There was nobody at work I could call. I had to drive back there and look for it myself.

Thankfully, it’s a mere ten-minute trip along the Beltline and up John Nolen Drive. My card still didn’t open the door to the office, of course, so I had to find the boss of the cleaning gang again to open it for me. I found him almost right away, but there was no wallet anywhere in the office. Ditto the floor of the break room, anywhere in the stair well, or in the parking lot. “I can’t find it anywhere,” I said to B on the cell phone. “I think we should cancel the cards,” and told her which cards I had in my wallet. Then I got back in the car and headed straight home, figuring that I would probably have to tell them myself that I wanted the cards cancelled.

As the car rolled up the driveway and the garage door yawned open to my remote-controlled command, there in the headlights, jackknifed open on the floor of the garage, was my wallet. I could see my face on my driver’s license. I scooped it up and held it over my head as I ran in through the back door. Luckily, B was still on the phone with the first card rep she called. The computers weren’t working right and they’d just begun to fill out an emergency back-up paper form. “Never mind,” B said. “He just found it.” In the nick of time.

This is that time of year when every desk in every office in the building has a plate of cookies, chocolates or hard candy on it. At first I made excuses to go to offices I’d never had occasion to visit before, and exchanged notes with coworkers when I found a delicious new sweet or an old favorite. This year there was plenty of baking smothered in chocolate and powdered sugar, but after all these years I’m still partial to the rock-solid dependability of the sugar cookie. There were plenty to go around.

When I was young and indestructible I could eat holiday sweets until I made myself sick, then suck down a pint of clear water, park on the edge of Grandma’s sofa to give it time to settle and be ready to load up again inside a quarter-hour. That kind of durability is long gone. I can still pack away a respectable stack of sugar cookies, even if they’re thickly frosted and heavily sprinkled with glitter, but one seven-layer bar will put me under the table.

Either my aunt Sue has lost her tolerance, too, or she was fishing for a cheap laugh this afternoon when she entered the office stage left and delivered the line, “Salty nuts! I’ve got to have something salty!” I turned an open bag of pretzels toward her but stifled the urge to speak until I could trust myself not to say anything inappropriate.

A small clutch of folks in the office were very seriously considering the question about which obnoxious jerk should get voted off the show Survivor just as I was reaching to squelch the volume on the radio in order to stop Bruce Springsteen from bellowing yet another iteration of Santa Claus Is Coming To Town. In that serendipitous moment, two ideas merged into one as if brought together by the Great Cosmic Conflator.

Just think of it: A single radio station, especially one with an all-Christmas-song format, could almost certainly fill Camp Randall stadium with a heap of money that would tower over the sky boxes if, each day, the DJs asked listeners for a small contribution in exchange for the privilege of voting their least favorite songs out of the rotation. I personally would pledge a double sawbuck toward getting that Springsteen song off the air.

Even if they called for a vote morning, noon and night from Thanksgiving to Christmas, that’s just ninety songs, give or take, eliminated from a lineup that by this time has to number in the thousands, considering the number of Christmas albums cranked out year after year by everyone from Harry Connick and Diana Krall to Clay Aiken and Aimee Mann (An Aimee Mann Christmas album? What’s it titled? Tortured Anguish To You?). In this last week before Christmas, they could even up the ante by calling for a vote every hour, and never come close to being threatened by an embarrassing silence.

“The refrigerator’s not working,” Tim called to tell me, and at first I thought he meant the whole appliance was dead and gone until he added, “The lights are on but the milk’s warm. I tried to adjust the settings to make it colder, but the readout’s a straight line instead of numbers.”

I had to hang up the phone and think it over for a couple minutes, but when it came to me the fix was so obvious. “Unplug the fridge,” I told Tim after I called him back. He had to put the phone down to scoot the refrigerator away from the wall, making so much noise that it sounded to me on the distant end as though he was remodeling the kitchen with a fire axe.

“I unplugged it,” he said a little breathlessly when he came back on the line.

“Okay, thanks,” I said, “now plug it back in.” He made a deflated sound before putting the phone down. There was more crashing. He must’ve dropped the plug on the floor behind the fridge when he yanked it, so he had to roll the whole shebang out of its narrow pocket between the chimney and the stove in order to pick up the power cord.

He came back on the phone once more. “Works now.” Well, of course it does. A modern refrigerator’s got a computer in it now. It didn’t hit me when Tim said it, but that bit about getting a flat line on the readout clued me in after a minute; the computer needed resetting, and although your friendly neighborhood IT guy hates to hear a user like me say it, a power cycle is the quickest and simplest way to do that.

I wonder: Where does the ‘d’ come from when you shorten refrigerator to fridge?

I finished reading Truck: A Love Story by Michael Perry a day or two ago and I’m happy to report it was every bit as much fun to read as his earlier book, Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren At A Time.

As with so many other authors that I’ve come to love over the years, my Mother introduced me to Michael Perry; she has yet to steer me wrong. Perry made a personal appearance at a local library and Mom read Population: 485 either in preparation for his visit or after it. She liked his writing voice as much as his speaking voice and recommended him to me repeatedly afterward. Eventually she gave me Population: 485 as a gift for my birthday, or maybe it was Christmas (I’m one of those December babies — she doesn’t double up, but the gifts blur together in my faulty memory).

Perry’s from New Auburn, Wisconsin. He grew up on a farm there, went to school just down the road at UW-Eau Claire to learn a trade as a nurse, then roamed the world a bit before coming back to settle in New Auburn once again.

Population: 485 is a collection of stories that revolve around his observations of the people in his town, gleaned from his experiences as an EMT and volunteer fireman there. Although the emergency runs make for dramatic storytelling, I think the book is strongest for the descriptions of the personalities in the town, which Perry illustrates with an easy, lyrical style.

Truck is partly about rebuilding the International pickup truck he’s driven since he was a young man, partly about reordering his life as he falls in love and sidles toward marriage after years of living alone, thinking he was always going to be a bachelor. There was a nifty bonus in this book for me: I took several classes in creative writing at UW-Eau Claire from the poet he quotes several times, Bruce Taylor, and a couple more from John Hildebrand, who shows up late in the book’s final chapters.

You can find out more about the books, and about Perry’s other writing projects, on his web site, www.sneezingcow.com

Took the day off from work, stayed home, napped, went to a lovely party.

Life is good.

Today’s Christmas feast was at Mom’s house. Thanks, Mom! Just one more to go, our own here at The Humble O-Bode, and a good thing, too. I don’t know if I can go on eating like this.

I like to eat a lot and I’ve got a metabolism that would let me eat big meals morning, noon and night, but when I do that I quickly run up against certain physical limitations. I’m not a large man. I’m not even what most people would call a person of average build. In fact, what others call me most often is “skinny.” Tipping the scales at a buck and a half in my street clothes, I simply don’t have the capacity to handle three big meals every day, or, when it comes down to it, one really big feast every day.

Not that I’ve been to one big feast every day this week, but I have been to quite few more than I’m accustomed to. Our office had a pot luck on Monday and the bosses at the bank hosted another on Thursday; both meals featured big helpings of delicious home made entrees, to say nothing of the Christmas cookies and candies that have been on the desks of everyone’s offices since mid-month. Then one of Barb’s coworkers invited her to bring me to a party on Friday. They served an Italian dish that sounded like “sugu” and tasted like barbequed beef sauce on pasta. It was so good I went back for seconds despite my busting beltline.

Today I had a good old ham and potato dinner at Mom’s, the first meal I’d eaten all day. My gut was still working on last night’s sugu when I got up this morning, so breakfast was a hot cuppa joe. Gave me all the more room to enjoy Mom’s hospitality.

I’ve got all day tomorrow to ease off until Christmas dinner on Monday. Luckily there aren’t any sugar cookies or other treats lying around the house screaming, “Eat Me!” like some big cake from the Delta House boys.

It’s the day before Christmas, the gifts have been purchased and wrapped, the relatives have been visited — it’s all over but the shouting, folks!

Local Madison-area radio station WOLX (94.9 on your FM dial) has been playing nothing but Christmas songs since the day after Thanksgiving. “We know it’s a lot of songs,” one of the commercials apologizes, “but it’s only until December 26th. Until then, Happy Holidays!” That’s a festive attitude, isn’t it?

As it turns out, our car radio can pick up WOLX all the way up to Manawa, where we drove yesterday, over the river and through the wood, to gather with family at Mom’s and, for reasons that I doubt any of us can explain, we listened to it all morning on the way there and all night on the way back. That’s three hours of the same Christmas songs we’ve been listening to for three weeks. You can’t listen to that much Christmas cheer and not find out the ugly secrets of the other people in the car. Like, for instance, Tim likes the Springsteen recording of Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.

In a similar vein, my brother seems to be showing signs that he’s been a tiny bit overloaded by the holiday festivities:

Merry Christmas. It's Christmas time, you know. Christmas Christmas Christmas. Christmas. Christmas season. Christmas in America. It's Christmas time! Christmas specials are on TV celebrating Christmas. We're having Christmas parties with Christmas candy hanging from Christmas trees and buying Christmas presents and Christmas sales. We'll all have Christmas money to go to the after Christmas sales. It's Christmas.

This was very nearly The Christmas That Wasn’t. I woke at about seven this morning, but since nobody else was making any sounds like they were ready to get up I curled up tight in my nice, warm bed and stayed there until seven-thirty, when I got up to start making breakfast and lots of noise. I’m not sure, but that may be the latest I’ve ever gotten out of bed for Christmas in my life.

No matter how much noise I made — knocking around the kitchen, loudly opening and closing the front door to get the paper (they print a paper on Christmas?), cranking up Christmas tunes on the stereo — it became obvious to me that the rest of the O-folk were going to get out of bed in their own sweet time, so I went downstairs to play with the toys I already had. I made sure to tromp up the stairs extra loud when I refilled my coffee cup, but it made no difference. I puttered around in the basement until nine-thirty before the pitter-patter of feet upstairs told me that somebody was finally up and moving around.

That somebody was Barb, and she was looking pretty beat up. “What’s wrong?” I asked her. “I’m sick,” she whimpered, and put her head on my shoulder for me to pat. There are certainly worse things, but for Barb, coming down with a head cold on Christmas is in the top ten. She wasn’t going to let it cheat her out of a good time, though. After she tottered into the kitchen to get a cuppa joe in her she was feeling a little better. A jolt of daytime cold medicine didn’t hurt, either.

After exchanging gifts and unstuffing our stockings, Barb served up the breakfast leftovers and we settled in for a Christmas movie — Tim got a recording of Elf, just the right mix of slapstick, fun and sappy sentimentalism. After the movie I opened the jigsaw I got so we could reinitiate the O-family custom of picking over the puzzle all day and all night, stopping every so often to refill glasses, eat a few cookies, and pop every major joint in our legs and backs.

Dinner was the traditional turkey with a side of stuffing and jellied cranberries. And that’s all. None of us needed a big meal, especially Tim, who’d been eating cookies and candy non-stop since we dug half a ton of chocolates and other sweets out of our stockings in the morning. He got a box of candy called “Nerds” that I tried, just to see what it tasted like — popping a handful in my mouth, I felt as though I had just been force-fed a shovel full of sugar. I had to drink a big glass of water to wash it down. Tim laughed and laughed at me. I hope he’s not still on my insurance the day he pops a bunch of those in his mouth and all his teeth pop right out of his gums like rats from a sinking ship.

Barb and I puzzled over the jigsaw the rest of the evening while we sung along with the Christmas songs on the stereo. Tim, apparently having had enough of the Christmas spirit pretty early in the day, retreated to his room to play video games until his bloodshot eyes dangled against his cheeks from their stalks.

The jigsaw puzzle, an O-family tradition that goes back at least twenty years — maybe as much as thirty! We are a people of roots.

My dad was the jigsaw nerd. I can’t remember if he got a new one every holiday season or if he just dug an old one out of some corner in the basement, but when Thanksgiving rolled around he always had one going, and same for Christmas. I think it was the same puzzle. (I just made that up. Sounded funny.)

Other people in our family followed his lead on the jigsaw, I think, or maybe it was such an established part of the holiday culture by the time I came to it that they were all doing it anyway and it only looked as though he thought of it.

There would always be a card table at one end of the room that was just big enough to hold the finished jigsaw puzzle, or a pile of puzzle pieces, but not all the pieces when they were all turned face up but weren’t yet put together. I think those twisted freaks at the card table factory are in cahoots with the sick minds at the jigsaw design shop, I don’t care how paranoid that sounds.

Members of the family would come to the card table to muse over the pieces, then wander away to nosh on some holiday treats, as the mood suited them. Dad, who emerged as the die-hard jigsaw puzzle solver, seemed to hover over the pieces longest. He was determined to finish that puzzle if he had to stay up all night to do it, hovering over the card table long after everybody else quit stopping by to see if they could tap one more piece into a blank space.

He had a system. I’m not claiming it’s solely his, mind you. For all I know it’s an internationally-known puzzle-solving algorithm known to jigsaw geeks everywhere that I haven’t been officially initiated to. Dad would usually work from the edges of the puzzle inward. He would always start with the border of the puzzle itself until he had it all linked up, then pick a landmark object in the puzzle picture and complete the edges of that, and so on. When there weren’t any more edges to complete, he was reduced to looking for a particular color, or a certain shape of puzzle piece.

We had a jigsaw this holiday because a week or two ago I said something about putting a puzzle together when Barb asked during dinner what we all wanted to do during our Christmas break. Then, almost as if she had been scheming behind my back, yesterday morning I had a gift-wrapped puzzle under the tree. Did she have an ulterior motive for asking what we wanted to do? I think so!

The puzzle was a print of a steam locomotive at a station. It had all the trickiest bits: Clouds on a blue sky, to be easily confused with the steam coming from the loco; a sidewalk surrounded by a brick border that all looked about the same; and the ends of the railroad cross ties actually did all look the same and could only be assembled by trial and error.

But the worst was the freaking locomotive, which I thought was going to be easy. WAS I EVER WRONG ABOUT THAT! There were teeny-tiny parts of it that came together rather quickly, like the bell and the headlamp, but the rest of it was plumbing — miles and miles of pipe in black and shades of gray. Even my Dad would’ve been reduced to a weeping wreck.

The puzzle held its hypnotic grip over us until eleven thirty last night, when I finally had to give up to hit the hay. There were perhaps a dozen or two pieces left, but they all looked the same, and there were holes left that were just plain impossible to fill. One of them had three innies and an outie, for instance, and although I tried every last freaking piece in that configuration, none of them fit. And none of them will until all the other pieces have been fitted, leaving just one piece that will drop into place so easily it’ll make me bust like a balloon.

I very nearly lost my lunch to a cat this morning. I’ve had a dog snatch food from my hands before when I momentarily lost my grip on a sandwich and the family pet, who had been watching me without blinking, saw his chance and rushing in while I was juggling it. It was pretty funny for everybody at the time, even me, because he was famous for siezing the moment. But forfeiting a sandwich to a cat would’ve been downright unmanning.

And I should have known better, because this morning was the second time it happened this week. I thought I had a handle on the situation. Bonkers, the cat who came so close to swiping my sandwich while I put it together on the kitchen table yesterday morning, was perched on the back of a chair in the living room. I had him on my radar screen as I spread out the sliced bread and tore the turkey into strips. This time, though, it was Boo, lurking under the table, who had her eye on my meal.

Boo hates people food, the first pet I’ve ever seen who’s like that. She won’t eat anything off the table: No fish, no ragged bit of beef fat, and no fowl of any kind, stuff which Bonkers will happily gobble down if you’re clearing the table and take your eye off him for a second. Boo will cry when she smells it, as she did this morning, but I never expected her to make a go of nabbing it away from me. She disappeared under the table and suddenly her head popped up from under the edge of the table cloth, snuffing at the air right beside my sandwich to get her bearings.

Luckily I hooked my foot around the leg of the chair and scooted her out of the way before she could decide on a course of action and make me look like an even bigger dummy than I already was by trusting her in the first place.

There wasn’t enough coffee in Columbia to wake me up this morning. I don’t know why. I couldn’t seem to get my brain in gear no matter what I did. I always feel pretty scruffy when I roll out of bed, but I can usually count on a hot, steamy shower to snap me out of it. When I was done and toweling off, though, I was still yawning and the jangles from the alarm clock hadn’t gone away. Do you get those, too?

Even though I made it to work somehow, I still spent the day fighting to keep my eyes open and walking sideways into every hallway corner I tried to get around. Not even a spread sheet project, my secret weapon for staving off my afternoon nap reflex, could stop my eyes from slamming shut. I had to get up and walk to the break room, crashing into doors, to splash water on my face. After I got home again and changed my clothes I sat down in the recliner to “rest my eyes” for just a minute or two, and not to fall asleep or snore like a drunken old truck driver. Don’t believe a word Barb tells you.

Must go now. I had to rewrite that last paragraph twice after finishing it each time with my forehead.

ZZZZzzzzzzz...

My Darling B gave me a gift certificate good for fifty dollars at a local hobby store, local meaning one in the Madison metro area but not especially local in relation to Our Humble O-Bode. It’s about as far across town as we can get and still be in Madison, out on Mineral Point Road past Whitney Way, about a twenty-minute drive if I take the Beltway, forty minutes if I’m not feeling quite brave enough to endure that kind of white-knuckle ride and take the surface roads instead.

After lunch today I felt full of piss and vinegar, though, and besides that money was burning a hole in my pocket, so I crushed the accelerator under my foot and swung the car into the center lane from South Towne Drive. I won’t usually take the left lane unless I’m feeling a positively Andretti-like rush of hormones and it wasn’t there today. All I could manage the gumption for was about sixty-five, maybe sixty-eight miles per hour tops, and you’ve got to go at least seventy-five if you expect to use the left lane and live to tell the tale.

I spent about an hour blissfully wandering the aisles of the hobby store, and if I told you any more it’d just be the kind of nerdy stuff, like how excited I am about a new kind of track they make now, that’d make you roll your eyes and groan, so I’m not going to get into that at all.

Even though I used the Beltline again on the way back I got home safely and spent the rest of the afternoon in the basement playing with my new toys and otherwise spending my time unconstructively. I love Saturdays.

After having trouble sleeping through Wednesday and Thursday night I was so tired Friday that I didn’t dare attempt to write an entry last night. This is drivel, after all. I have standards.

Indigestion was the culprit. Eating tons of rich, home made holiday food finally caught up to me. “Holiday food” included lots of honest-to-pete meat-and-potatoes pot luck dinners, but for every chicken drum stick, slick of honey ham or forkful of noodle salad I easily ate ten times that much cookies and cupcakes. I’m frankly a little thankful I only suffered two nights of indigestion; I should have messily exploded all over the landscape.

It’s going to be an especially low-key New Year’s celebration here at the O-Home this year, I think. We were talking about going out; we were even invited to a party in Mount Horeb where one of Barb’s DMV pals will be playing in a band, but Barb’s not crazy about being on the road with other revelers after hours, so if we go anywhere for a drink it’ll probably be no farther than two or three blocks up the road to a corner bar on Monona Drive for a quick one. More likely than not, though, we’ll end up staying right here with the youngest O-man, noshing on snack food, likely watching a movie or playing a board game while we wait for the hour to arrive when the ball will drop and we can raise our glasses to the New Year.

There’s no telling what today’s drenching rain portends for the New Year, unless I were one of the primary characters in a film noir, in which case I’d be completely unaware that our story had advanced to the closing reel and somebody, quite possibly I myself, was going to get a bullet between the eyes soon. If I were a lead in a romantic film, on the other hand, I would probably meet the female lead on a crowded street and crush her lips to mine as the music swelled. Funny how the readings of a simple portent like incessant rain can diverge as wildly as that.

 
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