Bell, Bat and Bone

I think it’s a safe assumption that those three things don’t go well together.  It’s a play on words with the title of a 1958 Jimmy Stewart movie that also starred Jack Lemmon, Ernie Kovacs and Kim Novak, “Bell, Book and Candle,” a comedy about love potions and such.  It has nothing to do with this, but if you haven’t seen the movie, well, I love Jimmy Stewart movies.  Mr. Stewart was quite the poet, also, in case you didn’t know.  He used to pull a sheet of paper out of his jacket pocket on “The Tonight Show” and read them.  I have a book on my bookshelf titled “Jimmy Stewart and His Poems.”  I highly recommend it.  One of my favorites is “The Top Step In The Hotel In Junin.”  (It’s pronounced “Who-neen” and is a small town in western Argentina called “Junin de las Altos.”  I have no idea what junin means, but the rest of it means high, so it must be high up somewhere…oh, yeah, Argentina.)  Here’s a little excerpt: (and I’m damn proud that I spelled that word right the first time.)

“But this top step has something quite special.

A very ingenious device:

It’s half an inch higher than the other steps.

A whole inch to be more precise.

And it uses this inch as a weapon.

The guests of the place to harass:

For when you reach the third floor

          of that hotel in Junin, 

the top step trips you right on your ass.”

Like I said, this has nothing to do with a bell, a book or a candle.  It was Father’s Day.  A rather pleasant day in fact.  My two oldest daughters and their families came over and cooked me steaks on MY grill.  I mention that only because men know how to cook on a grill, women, not so much.  Maybe there are women out there that have mastered the art of grilling, maybe, but burning meat on a grill is what men do.  We are expert at it.  If you hand a man a piece of raw meat he will grill it to perfection, whether he uses charcoal, as my son-in-law swears by, or the more efficient propane grill.  I’m convinced that it is in the male genes.  Something passed down from caveman times shortly after someone discovered fire…which, I’m sure, was also a man.  Just sayin’.  Although I’m also sure it was probably by total accident.

We were sitting around the outdoor table, under the covered patio, digesting a very acceptable meal, in fact talking about the methods of grilling, propane versus “Kingsford,” when I noticed my grandson hitting an aluminum bat against the roof edge of the covered patio, directly behind my oldest daughter who was sitting on the end of the table.  The bat was there because we had intended to play softball in the “back 40” during the afternoon, but the sun was hot and there wasn’t much if any shade out there, so everyone decided softball was out.  The bat was left laying there on the patio.

Now, there is something that tells you things are not going to go well as you’re sitting there watching your grandson hold a bat over his head and pound it against the roof eave, pretty much directly in line with the head of his aunt.  And sure enough, he lost his grip on the bat and it headed directly for said head.  As it bounced off unconstrained, while the grandson tried desperately to recapture it in his grip, it made a distinct bell sound as it recoiled away to the ground.

Unlike “Chicken Little” his aunt thought the sky was falling.  In the split seconds between hit and pain, she thought a large ceramic bell, that I have hanging a good distance away from where she was sitting, had fallen on her head.  I watched as her face went from shock, to, bless her heart, intense pain.  Then tears.  Panic.  Everyone on the attack.  All directed at the grandson who now took off at brisk pace through the back yard gate, followed at a run by his mother.

Of course, all the rest of us around the table were now concerned about the condition of the victim.  Did she feel dizzy?  Was there blurred vision?  Did she have a headache?  (I thought that was a rather stupid question.)  Was there blood?  A bump?  Yes there was a bump.  I was expecting someone to start searching “WebMD” on their smart phone.  A zip lock bag of ice materialized and she convinced us all that she was going to be okay, but we kept asking anyway.

Grandma was able to calm down the now completely overwrought eleven-year-old boy that was, by now, convinced that he had inexplicably inflicted severe damage to his aunt’s head.  There is something about a boy that age, I don’t know, they just can’t process the simple action-reaction event.  “If I do this, what could happen?” doesn’t enter into their thinking.  Consequence is just not part of a boy’s composition.  We learn it over time, to think before we act, but not when we’re eleven.  We just do it.  Consequences be damned.

The oldest daughter is fine now.  The bump is gone and, more interestingly, the dent in her bumper miraculously disappeared.  Let me explain.

 Someone crunched her rear bumper in a parking lot and, in rare fashion, left a note on her car apologizing for the damage and giving all the identification and insurance information necessary.  She contacted the insurance company and was paid for the damage.  The estimate in the $600 range.  Needing the money for other things, as is often the case, she worried how she would later afford to fix the vehicle.  

Then yesterday, while she was gassing up the car, she noticed that the dent in the bumper was gone!  A serious dent, as she described it, that creased the bumper, made of plastic as most car parts are these days.  The bumper had completely resumed its place in the back of her car, almost like it had never happened.  A few minuscule scratches is all you can see.  I know, because I looked at it.  It’s been in the high 90’s the last couple of days, and the only explanation we can come up with is that the heat of the day popped the dent out of the bumper and returned it to it’s natural curve.  Go figure.  Kind of like her head.  WTF. 

 

More…Ramblings From The Land Of Enchantment.

The “Romero Fire” as seen east of where I live.

Seems like it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on “What the Fluffy.”  In itself, what the fluffy is up with that?  Well, it’s called a jay oh bee, and it’s cutting into things I like to do, like write this blog.  I’ve been taking advantage of working overtime to make a few extra bucks – and I’m not joking, it’s only a few extra bucks – but it kept the DirecTV from being cut off last Saturday.  Well, it didn’t really prevent it from being cut off, but we did get it back on within a few minutes after parting with every cent we had left in the checking account.  So much for extra bucks.  Gotta have your 250 channels of nothing at all to watch.  Who needs food?

I’m going to give you my “State of the State” address in just a few words.  The whole state is on fire, it’s hot and windy, and we’re in a severe drought.  In fact, I forgot how windy it gets here, which is odd because I HATE wind.  I always say I’m going to find the one place in the whole of the United States where the wind doesn’t blow and I’m going to move there, only I’m not ever moving again.  It’s so windy here – how windy is it? – they have a wind forecast every day on the news.  They give a “Wind Forecast” for four periods of the day.  Seems pointless, since it’s windy in the morning, windy in the afternoon, windy in the evening and windy at night.  They tell you how windy it’s going to be though, so I guess that helps.  You’ll know whether the fence is going to blow over, or just lean a little more than usual.

Here are some of the fires burning currently in New Mexico: “The Whitewater Baldy-Complex Fire,” the largest fire in the state’s history, burning 296,726 acres, which is 464 square miles (It became a “complex” when the two fires joined together.), “The Little Bear Fire,”approximately 42,995 acres, “The Blanco Fire,” “The Turley Fire,” and yesterday afternoon, a few miles from my house, the “Romero Fire” which is burning in the Rio Grande Bosque.

What the hell is a bosque, right?  Well, let’s get scientific.  We’ll go straight to Wikipedia, because everything on Wikipedia is gospel: “Bosque is the name for areas of gallery forest found along the riparian flood plains of stream and river banks in the southwestern United States.  It derives its name from the Spanish word for woodlands.”   Sounds right.  We generally call it a river bank, but in the Land of Enchantment, about the only place you’ll find “woodlands” is on both sides of a “river” bank.  I put “bunny ears” around the word river, because you can jump most of the rivers around here, or, at least, wade across them without rolling your pant legs much past your knees.  The bosque burns like a torch, and the wind, well, the wind just makes it worse.  What makes the fire really difficult to fight is that it jumps from tree-top to tree-top and the firefighters can’t stop the flames spreading from the ground.  They’re saying that fire is now 80% contained.

What exactly does that mean?  You’d think, logically, that it means that only 20% of the fire is still burning, but that’s not right.  What they mean when they say a fire is “contained” is that they have a line around a percentage of the fire that they don’t expect it will jump.  Unless, of course, conditions change, like heat, and wind, and bad luck.  Lightning caused the largest fire in New Mexico history.  They have it 60% contained.  When a fire is 100% contained it’s still burning all the available fuel, just not expected to get any bigger.

Then you have the serious problem of erosion if, and that’s a big “if” it seems, the monsoon season ever materializes.  The monsoon season is now, and we haven’t had a drop of rain, or any rain forecasted in the week to come.  When it rains here during the monsoon season, it’s rather incredible.  The ground around here can’t absorb moisture worth a damn, even though it’s desperate for it, so all the water turns into torrential rivers called arroyos.  Arroyo is the Spanish word for stream.  Actually the arroyos are the dry ditches that the rain water will run into and form raging rivers that wash cars, people and land away in an instant.  Still, we need the rain.  Our average rainfall by this time of year is 2.1 inches.  We are at 1.87.  Seems ridiculous because I’ve seen twelve inches of rain running down the street when I tried to float my truck home one day in April.

Speaking of driving, I’ve decided, now that I’m commuting to work every day, that speed limits in The Land Of Enchantment are not even suggestions, they are challenges.  The goal of which is to see how fast over the posted speed limit you can go, without ramming into someone in front of you because you put on your blinker, which automatically gives you the right to change lanes in that direction – or the other- and the speeding car in the other lane won’t let you because it will slow them down.  This morning, I sped right along next to a Rio Rancho Police car that was accepting the same challenge, I guess.  They could easily make their quota for tickets on Paseo del Norte, loosely translated, the “ride north,” a six-lane roadway that connects Albuquerque with the “west side,” of which I am a resident, but I have yet to see a car pulled over for speeding on this ride east.  Yeah, that’s right, the road goes east- west and is called the north ride.  Okay, well, it is north of Albuquerque, so to speak.  There really is nowhere to pull a car over on this bridge road over the Rio Grande though.  The posted speed limit is 60, I drive 70 – because I have to -, and the cars fly by me like I’m parked.  I’m guessing that the Autobahn in Germany is very much like Paseo del Norte, although I’ve only heard about the Autobahn.  I’m sure, that if it’s like any freeway in the world, it doesn’t move any faster in rush-hour traffic than the non-posted standard of ten miles per hour.

Another thing I notice, is that a lot of cars in The Land Of Enchantment, more than any other state I’ve lived in, have a headlight out.  They also have cracked windshields, just like I do.  I wonder why that is?

Okay, I’ve exceeded my thousand words, so I’ll leave you with this question for my next story:  Does an aluminum baseball bat make a bell sound when it bounces off of someone’s head?

 

Stairway Over The Barbed-Wire Fence – The Silver Bullet

This is the Chris-Craft Limited Edition Silver Bullet . Our Silver Bullet looked NOTHING like this.

“I’m going over to Doug’s house, Mom,” I said for the third time that week.

“What are you boys up to?  You’ve been going over there a lot lately, and gone the whole day.”

“We’re just building something,” I said trying not to offer up too much information.

“Building what?”

Well, I couldn’t say we were building a boat.  That would connect immediately to the river, and it wouldn’t be good if I even said the word.

“We’re working on a coaster car.  Like a soap box derby car to run down Thurmond Hill,” I lied.

“That sounds dangerous.  You can’t be on the street with cars coming.”

I guess she didn’t know we played in the street all the time.  We played baseball in the street, football in the street, we pretty much played in the street most of the time.  We used Dr. Shunk’s parking lot behind our house for the baseball infield and the street was the outfield.  Football field was curb to curb but just out of eye-shot because the garage blocked the view from the kitchen.  Even worse, we not only coasted down Thurmond Hill on everything with wheels, but we went down Whitney Hill which crossed over Thurmond Street at the bottom.  We hadn’t hit a car yet, or, more accurately, a car hadn’t hit us yet, but there were some close calls.  Bikes coasting down the hill could be stopped, a soap box derby car, probably not, at least not with the kind of brakes we designed, if the car had any at all.  Most of the time our cars had “Flintstone” brakes.  You just put your feet out and dragged them.  Rough on the Keds.

“We’ll find some other hill to run it on, Mom, there’s plenty of hills without cars on them most of the day.”  And that was relatively true.

 I still believe we invented skate boarding when I was nine or ten.  Yes, that’s right, long before it was an acceptable pastime, even a mode of transportation, and way before they started discussing it as an Olympic sport.  We dismantled any skates we could find, and attached the wheels to a board, rounded off the corners with a saw, spray-painted them up. –  Yeah, we could still go into “Woolworth’s” and buy paint.  We didn’t invent tagging. – We would then ride them down Thurmond Hill at high speeds, often losing our balance and forced to jump off mid-hill, allowing the board to continue it’s potentially deadly trip down looking for a victim in the crowd watching at the bottom.  These “runs” down Thurmond Hill were done without helmets, knee-pads, elbow-pads, or shin-pads, and, with the exception of a few road burns, where a silver-dollar-sized piece of skin is rubbed off your arm or leg, no one was ever seriously hurt.   

We learned you could slalom the board by shifting your weight on the ride down.  That was about all the “tricks” we ever did on them.  I watch what they do on those things now, and it amazes me.  I still want to see them handle Thurmond Hill though.  It probably doesn’t amaze you that the “sisters” in the neighborhood were not very happy about their missing skates.

The aluminum had arrived from “Montgomery Ward” on Saturday.  We snuck down to Main Street, paid the ten dollars plus tax that we had amassed from our allowances and piggy banks and had a few dollars to spare.  I knew from a previous experience at “Monkey Ward,” that I would need more than the $10 catalog price because of the tax.  Although I had no idea how much more that was going to be. 

I learned later in life that what we had purchased to “skin” our boat was for roofing.  Called “valley flashing” it’s put down in the roof valleys and then asphalt shingles are applied over the top on either side.  I had found the material in the “Montgomery Ward ‘Home'” catalog.  They had several specialty catalogs and I had checked them all looking for a roll of aluminum.  Montgomery Ward had everything.  This looked like it would work, and was within the budget.  We bought a hundred half-inch sheet metal screws and planned out the work.

A couple of things about valley flashing.  It’s not interested in lying flat, not without some extreme effort, after having been in a tight roll for so long.  The effort causes it to crease and dent, so the smooth surface, when it is unrolled, now looks like its been pelted with gravel.  The closer to the center of the roll you get, the worse it gets.  It has very sharp edges and is very difficult to cut straight, or at all, with the hand shears we had found in one of the garages, particularly without cutting yourself.  We found this out early when we had our first finger fatality.  Well, it didn’t really die, but it got slashed pretty good and Opie got sent home for medical attention with strict instructions not to tell how he cut that finger…almost off.  Those assigned to the aluminum-cutting used gloves after that which made it even more difficult to cut.

We laid each section over the wood frame and secured the aluminum down with the half-inch screws after drilling a pilot hole.  It was an assembly line crew.  One guy drilling, the next one starting the screw, the next one finishing it, the last one making sure it was tight.  We went through the first hundred screws pretty fast and had to use some of our slush fund to buy more.

The boat was taking shape.  What shape that was exactly, was uncertain.  It looked like the nose cone of a rocket with a flat side that had a hole cut in it where you sat.  It was shiny, I’ll give it that.  The seams didn’t look anything like the “AirStream” trailer surface I had envisioned.  Instead they were lumpy, with obvious leaks that we seemed not to notice, or decided weren’t going to be an issue.  Within three days the “Silver Bullet” was ready to launch, but how to sneak it out of the garage?  We’d have to move it under cover of darkness.

Any idea that I might sneak out of the house in the middle of the night was simply ridiculous, so the movement of the boat was assigned to three other boat builders that met up at an assigned point, went to the garage and quietly lowered the boat through the attic opening.  Walking it up the street and over to the stairway must have been a sight.  The shiny three foot boat shimmering in the street lights, looking like everything but a boat.  Thankfully most folks were asleep at that hour during a work week.  They got the boat to the river, launched it in the water and tethered it to a tree.  It floated!  They were ecstatic and hurried home back to their beds, unnoticed, by all accounts.

The next morning, early, we gathered at the corner two blocks away, out of sight of my house, and headed for the stairs.  We were going to officially launch the Silver Bullet.  Excitement was in the air, as was an argument about who was going to make the maiden voyage.  Doug won out.  It was his garage attic that housed the project after all.

When we got to the river, the boat was gone!

“Where did you tie it up?” I yelled.

“I tied it up right there,” Jimmy said, pointing.  “See, the rope is still tied to the tree.”

The rope was, indeed, still tied to the tree.  At the other end, submerged a foot below the surface was a silver object.  We tried to move it, but completely filled with water, it wouldn’t budge.  There it sits, probably to this day, resembling the nose cone of an Atlas rocket, still shiny after all these years.  Not rusted, because aluminum doesn’t rust, it corrodes.  The Silver Bullet.  My only attempt at boat-building, albeit rather unsuccessful, but Jimmy did say it floated.  They had seen her, proudly floating in the current of Goose Creek, when they left her last night.   Guess those seams weren’t water-tight after all.

Boats are always “shes” for some reason.  No male boats out there, I guess.  “She’s a beauty,” they’ll say.  “How much did she cost you?”  “She sure handles nice.”  I’ve heard it’s because she shows her topsides, hides her bottom and, coming into port always heads for the buoys.   When war correspondents asked Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz at the end of the Pacific War, why boats were always referred to as “she”, his response, although many would consider it sexist today, was “Because it costs so much to keep them in paint and powder.”

As far as our Silver Bullet, she wasn’t a beauty for sure, she cost us ten bucks and change, and we really never found out how well she handled, but she sure sunk good.