For anyone who's thinking I haven't been posting much lately, or who's wondering why I've taken so long to respond to comments:
I've been in the Bahamas since June 22, and the "high-speed" internet at the hotel (The Atlantis, in case you're wondering) reminds me of the heyday of "fast" internet, when we all logged on at the breakneck speed of 9600bps! Mrs. Farrago suggested that the internet is moving at island pace. "No problem, maahn!" Hence, it's a little annoying to wait for the stupid pages to load, even more so when I'm supposed to have a high-speed connection.
So I'll check in on Blogger only once every few days until I get home July 3, but I may not respond immediately due to the fact that I could be home before anything I send actually posts!
Take care! Send money!
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Friday, June 23, 2006
Eulogy For My Father
First off, he isn’t dead. I’m a firm believer that if you love someone, you should tell him or her that you do before the day comes when it will forever be too late to do it. Or if you think someone is great or special, you should tell that person why you think so sooner rather than later. Or tell the world.My father was born in 1923, the fifth child to Italian immigrants. By age five he had lost his father to blood poisoning, the result of an otherwise minor accident at the steel mill where he worked. The following year, his widowed mother, his six siblings, and the rest of the nation tumbled headlong into the Great Depression. Already dirt poor, they were probably better able to cope than those of middle income in that day, for they already knew how to live on next to nothing. My grandmother had a house. Her husband had nearly finished building it when he fell ill. The home was completed by local workers paid by associates of one Alphonse Capone, a great story in itself, to be told some other time.
My father, and others of his generation, grew up learning how to survive. At times his family had to endure meals of jelly-and-onion sandwiches because that was all there was to eat. My grandmother was a strict woman and her methods, though probably frowned upon today, brought up respectable, law-abiding citizens. There weren’t many things that a swift hand or an accurately wielded broomstick couldn’t correct.
My father was the only of his mother’s children to graduate high school. He and four of his brothers fought in, and returned intact from, World War II. It was one of his duties in the Army that eventually led him to his own enterprise – barber. Upon his discharge he did factory work until he determined that he could succeed as a barber. He also married and began a family. Ten years and six children after getting married, he opened his own shop, one block from the home where he grew up.
I can’t imagine the challenges he faced and overcame: the Great Depression through his entire childhood. Four years away from home fighting a war. Learning, without his own father’s example, how to be a father as his family grew. Raising with his wife five of his seven children through the1960s and losing not one to drugs or Vietnam.
I came along in the ‘60s. I am largely ignorant to the family’s rich history in its sixteen years before I was born. My oldest sibling had moved out and joined the military practically before I had any cognitive knowledge of his existence. But the remaining siblings demonstrated a respect for my father that I had no option, no other example, than to follow. From the day I realized that other kids had fathers, too, I have been somewhat in awe of mine.
As my father I always knew him to be stern and strict, and the disciplinarian of our family, though my siblings will tell anyone who will listen that I, the youngest, had it easier than any of them. He dealt justice with a razor strop – three strips of leather clamped together at one end and used by a barber to condition a straight razor before shaving someone. He was never cruel with it, nor vicious. It was a plain and simple fact: if you misbehaved past his last warning, you got a swat or two across the rear with “the strap.” I don’t think contact with “the strap” ever hurt as much as knowing you had earned it.
I also always knew him to be a very funny comedian. During my kindergarten class’s spring picnic, mine was the only father to be a “room mother” for the event. The other kids made fun of me because my father came along, until we got to the park and every kid fought to play with him because he was so much fun. I’m sure he also managed to flirt with the teachers and the other kids’ mothers in between.
He often had me along when he visited with friends, and there was usually a lot of laughter – and foul language. I was always astounded at the two different people my father was, at home versus with friends. At home I never heard him say the ‘f’- word. With his friends, I never heard anyone say the ‘f’-word more! But it was always good-natured, always bracketed with laughter.
And he was generous. Since he had no money, all he could give you was his time and his expertise. As a young man, in order to survive, he had acquired many different skills – some with which to make money, and some with which to save it – which, later in life, he gave as a wealthy man would give money. If a friend’s mother or somebody needed some carpentry work done, or plumbing, or painting, or demolishing, my father was there, that jack of all trades, master of none. Sometimes he would accept money for his time or effort, other times he would not. If an elderly customer came to his shop for a haircut, he would refuse to let the customer pay, often insulting his friend in the process until he either accepted the money or let his friend leave the shop offended. If he heard a friend was in the hospital or laid up at home, he would go in the evening with his traveling barber kit to his friend once a week for as long as the person was laid up – man or woman – and provide a haircut with no expectation, no demand, of payment.
You could step into his barbershop to witness every waiting chair occupied, to hear a lively discussion on just about any topic – though his education was limited to high school, my father was always listening, always aware of the day’s current events, and he always had an opinion. And he always had a knack for opposing you on a topic, wrestling with you over it, and suddenly you’d find yourself arguing FOR his earlier point and against yours! And then, with all those people in the waiting chairs, he would finish with the person in the barber chair and then look at you and say, “You’re next.” The others in the waiting chairs would all look at you, and you’d realize that they’re all there for the conversation.
When times got tough, my father stepped up. During the late 1970s he had three part-time jobs in addition to his Tuesday-through-Saturday eight-hour days at the barbershop. He would lock the door to the shop by 5:30, but then finish the remaining customers who were waiting. He would stop at the bar adjoining his shop, run by the owner of the building, and have a beer or three, and then he would go home. After dinner he would then go to 20th Century Bowling Lanes where he ran the counter, tended bar and gave free bowling lessons until closing, usually around 12:30 or 1:00am. He’d then come home, sleep until 4:00am and get up to clean the office at a finance company. From there, around 6:00, he would go to a strip mall a few miles north and pick up trash and dump garbage cans into a dumpster. He would arrive home around 8:00am, lay down for a nap, and then he would open the shop again at 9:00.
To say the man had boundless energy would not be accurate, as he more often than not fell asleep within minutes of sitting down to watch a television show or football game, when he had the time to do so. More accurate would be to say that he had abnormally high determination and willpower. And patience. After 40 years of smoking, he quit – cold-turkey – once. He and my mother took out a second mortgage on our home so they could buy a lot with a dilapidated house near a river. On weekends and days off over the next seven or eight years or so, he pretty much single-handedly gutted the house, raised it onto cinder-blocks, and rehabbed it to quite a comfortable condition, if a little rustic and eclectic of décor.
Time has caught up with him, however. After cutting back his shop hours to three days a week for about 15 years, he finally sold the shop and retired completely, at age 81. The wear and tear of essentially 55 years of barbering have taken their toll, with numbness in his hands and feet, the result of irreversible nerve damage from the years of standing, and of holding vibrating clippers in raised arms. After nearly 20 years of living in the river house – most of them alone since my mother’s death in 1993 – and now unable to take care of it himself, he has sold it and moved in with one of my sisters.
The change was gradual, and maybe it was connected to his advance in age, but he went from being the rough, gruff, single-emotion disciplinarian of my youth, to a softer, gentler, more affectionate father in my adult years. I had only seen the man cry twice – at the funerals of his mother and of one of his brothers, about four years apart, in the early- to mid-1970s. He didn’t cry at sad movies. He didn’t cry at weddings. Tough as nails. Then there was the visit by my oldest brother, who had joined the military 15 years earlier for what had become his career. He brought with him his older child to meet her grandparents for the first time. It was a joyous event for the whole family in the summer after my high school graduation. When it was time for my brother to leave I was shocked to see my father first choke up as he said good-bye, and then break into sobs as he hugged my brother. I was moved to tears myself. The old man cracked! It was to be understood. This was his oldest child, someone he had only seen a few times in the past 15 years.
Nearly two years later I returned home from the first 18 weeks of my military stint, a brief break on my way into my future. I was only able to manage a week at home before I was to drive off to Montana. On the day of my departure it was almost a carbon copy of the day with my brother. And as my parents said good-bye, my father’s voice cracked, and tears welled up in his eyes. For ME?! It didn’t affect me until I arrived at my duty station in Montana three days later, that first night there, the first night of my real adult life. I lay there in bed, helpless to fight off the tears of homesickness, of loneliness, for how much I missed my family, and, now, for how much I realized my father missed me.
There’s a quote, by whom I don’t know, that goes something like, “He is not poor who has friends.” If this is true, then my father is one of the wealthiest men alive. Through his kindness, his sense of humor, and his endless generosity, he has collected more friends in his long life than anyone I know.
While I was growing up, there were things I resented about being his son. Other kids’ parents were wealthier. They had more toys, bigger houses. They were allowed to go places, to do things, to stay out at night to hours that my parents would not allow me. They went on family trips to places like Disney World. They had air conditioning in their homes.
But one evening juswt a few years back, while mingling with my elderly father and a few of his friends, one of the people nearer my age spoke to me in regard to my father. “You’re his son?” he asked.
I nodded.
“He is such a great man. It must be so incredible to have grown up with him as a father.” The man could not stop raving about how much he admired my father, how much he envied me my childhood with him. It was the first of several such exchanges, with several different people, over the period of a few years. That’s when I was struck by how many people, of all ages, love my father. It is not a massive fortune for which they admire him. It is not fame that draws them. He’s the genuine article. The real deal.
And so it is, a week late for Father’s Day, that I pay humble tribute to a man whom I admire beyond quantification, beyond the grasp of words, the greatest man nobody knows.
I Love You, Dad.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Can't We All Just Get Along?
One of the great mysteries of life is how we can surround ourselves with the right people…or not… and how we can isolate ourselves from possibly enriching relationships, all based on first impressions and misconceptions. And then we can mature to the point where we can analyze our behavior and change our opinions.
I grew up in an all-white neighborhood. Back then I called my family middle-class when the reality is we were pretty darn poor. I just didn’t know it. I also told everybody I was Italian, though I’m only half; my mother was of German, English and Irish heritage. Why her ethnic history was invisible, I don’t know. I grew up identifying exclusively with my father’s heritage.
There were a couple of other Italian families on our block, but only one of those families had a kid my age. He was Fiore (properly pronounced, it's F'YOH-ray' (roll the 'R' lightly), though we usually pronounced it 'Fyor') Santaniello. Both his parents were Italian immigrants, so for the full-blooded Italian I believed myself to be, he truly was. And maybe that was the wedge. I don’t know.
You would think that our shared heritage, no matter how pure one’s or the other’s might be, would be a binding glue, but it was far from it. You see, Fiore and I never really got along. Sometimes we could play together, but I think we were both too wrapped up in trying to make things go our own individual ways. There’s my childhood creative impulses I mentioned in an earlier post. Maybe he had the same impulses, something I rejected or resisted. He also seemed more imaginative than I, able to conjure better jargon from military or police or space genres than I could in our play together, which gave him a more worldly air and, hence, my impression of his superior intelligence or, perhaps more accurately, my impression of him trying to appear superior.
Whatever the reason, we could go from the highest heights of camaraderie to the deepest depths of adversarial animosity, sometimes within minutes. From grades K through 6, Fiore was the only kid I ever actually fought with. There were other conflicts, with bullies for instance, and a shoving match once with Robert Buckner. But Fiore was the only kid with whom I ever traded fisticuffs, throwing punches, really trying to hurt each other. The funniest part about it is in the probably three years of animosity and violent encounters, in all the punches we threw at each other, neither of us ever landed one! There was bloodshed, though – mine – and depending on your point of view, you might even say it was my fault.
Fiore and I were in the summer either between 4th and 5th grades or between 5th and 6th. I was in Little League baseball that season (for what proved to be my last) and a mid-day practice had just ended on the field at our school’s playground. As the other kids from my team filtered away in the directions of their various homes, Fiore, who had heckled and taunted me and others all while he watched us practice, hopped on my Schwinn Sting Ray bike and began taunting me, refusing to give me back my bike. He rode in circles around me as I tried to convince him, force him or capture him to give it back, occasionally swinging really close to me, but always darting away before I could reach him.
I don’t remember the words, but they were the perfect words, and I said them. They had the effect I had intended – his anger – but an unintended result: he turned the handlebars and rode straight at me, rage in his eyes. I threw my baseball mitt to the asphalt of the school playground and squared to face him straight on. I wasn’t scared at that moment, but I was at best as angry as he was, and if he was going to try to hurt me by running me down with my own bike, I was sure as hell going to try to hurt him back for his efforts.
And he did come right at me! I grabbed the handlebars and wrenched them to one side. His momentum stopped suddenly, and his balance thrown off, he toppled to the asphalt. I wrestled with the bike to get it off of him, ready to pounce on him and begin the fistfight of my life when…he started laughing . Laughing and pointing at me. Just then I felt a cool sensation on my upper lip. I reached up and wiped at it, and looked at my hand. Blood. LOTS of blood! I hadn’t even noticed it, but when I wrenched the bike’s handlebars, one side had slipped free of his hand and whacked me right in the side of the nose. It was a faucet!
Horror-struck, embarrassed, angry all at once, I started crying. I ran home, pulling the bike alongside me with one hand and holding my nose with the other. When I got home my youngest sister, seven years my senior, saw the bloody, blubbering mess that walked in the front door, and had what I think I can safely describe as a conniption. Her reaction made my emotional state even worse. She finally got me calmed down enough to tell her what happened, only that made EVERYTHING worse, because she tore off down the street and got into a shouting match with Mrs. Santaniello! Now, not only was I upset, angry and embarrassed, but I was humiliated because my big sister went and fought my fight.
Our last fight happened the following winter. We verbally taunted each other along the two-block walk from our school to our street, and then, on the corner just one door from my house, we came to blows. Again, we each struck out, as we were probably the worst pugilists who ever lived. But I got the advantage when, as Fiore threw a wild fist, he happened to be standing on a patch of ice. His effort pulled him off balance, and his feet slipped out from beneath him. Once again I had the upper hand: Fiore was on the ground. Again I was ready to pounce on him when, out of nowhere I heard my mother’s voice: “(FARRAGO!) Knock it off RIGHT NOW!” She had managed to get out of work early that day (memory fails me…was it perhaps the last Friday before Christmas?), and was standing on our front stoop, glaring at us. DAMN her timing! Fiore got up and ran off since, in those days, other kids’ mothers were feared even worse than bullies. I can’t help but wonder if Mom stood at the door and watched us flailing at each other until the point when Fiore fell, and then intervened when there was the potential of somebody actually getting hurt. Or maybe she didn’t feel she could take Fiore’s mother in the second fight that would ensue. I also wonder why I never got in trouble. Maybe for the same reason. I got the upper hand. I fought a fight I didn’t start (though who really knows who started it?), and by falls I had won. End it.
Fiore started getting into trouble as we approached adolescence, though he never took a total turn for the worst. Our friend/foe seesaw ended when he one day thought it would be funny to lure my friend and next-door neighbor, Ben Fonseca’s 6-month old puppy with a treat down to his house where he unleashed his bad-tempered dog on it. The puppy never had a chance to begin with, but the dogfight ended prematurely when both dogs were hit by a passing car. The puppy died within minutes, and the Santaniellos’ family dog ran off and disappeared, but was found the next day under their back porch, dead. Away from his parents, Fiore never expressed remorse for what happened that day, for what he did that day. I couldn’t see my way around it, and our relationship, stormy as it was, ended.
Four years ago I met and spoke briefly with Fiore at our 20-year high school reunion. He had left our school at some point to attend a big local Catholic high school, and I had been unaware that he ever returned to ours to finish his education. He had done a four-year stint in the Marines, which I knew about, and then I heard nothing more until our reunion. We spoke so briefly that I didn’t get much information. He drives a truck these days. I don’t know if he’s divorced or never married, but at the time of the reunion he was not married. His younger brother, whom Therese Ballassone liked more than she liked me when I was in sixth grade, and who swore from as early as the fourth grade that he would be a doctor when he grew up, grew up to be a doctor – a surgeon, in fact. I always got along with him, even when he was “stealing” the girl of my dreams.
I recall in those few moments while I spoke with Fiore that I never once thought about the fights, the animosity, the poor dogs. I was in the moment and wanted to know what the hell else he had been up to over the prior twenty years, and wished in that moment that we could spend an hour to find out who each other had become.
A couple days after the reunion a simple fact dawned on me, at which point I had to kick myself for never knowing during our childhood, and therefore never being able to use against him in all our fights, the fact that his name, in Italian, means “flower.”
I grew up in an all-white neighborhood. Back then I called my family middle-class when the reality is we were pretty darn poor. I just didn’t know it. I also told everybody I was Italian, though I’m only half; my mother was of German, English and Irish heritage. Why her ethnic history was invisible, I don’t know. I grew up identifying exclusively with my father’s heritage.
There were a couple of other Italian families on our block, but only one of those families had a kid my age. He was Fiore (properly pronounced, it's F'YOH-ray' (roll the 'R' lightly), though we usually pronounced it 'Fyor') Santaniello. Both his parents were Italian immigrants, so for the full-blooded Italian I believed myself to be, he truly was. And maybe that was the wedge. I don’t know.
You would think that our shared heritage, no matter how pure one’s or the other’s might be, would be a binding glue, but it was far from it. You see, Fiore and I never really got along. Sometimes we could play together, but I think we were both too wrapped up in trying to make things go our own individual ways. There’s my childhood creative impulses I mentioned in an earlier post. Maybe he had the same impulses, something I rejected or resisted. He also seemed more imaginative than I, able to conjure better jargon from military or police or space genres than I could in our play together, which gave him a more worldly air and, hence, my impression of his superior intelligence or, perhaps more accurately, my impression of him trying to appear superior.
Whatever the reason, we could go from the highest heights of camaraderie to the deepest depths of adversarial animosity, sometimes within minutes. From grades K through 6, Fiore was the only kid I ever actually fought with. There were other conflicts, with bullies for instance, and a shoving match once with Robert Buckner. But Fiore was the only kid with whom I ever traded fisticuffs, throwing punches, really trying to hurt each other. The funniest part about it is in the probably three years of animosity and violent encounters, in all the punches we threw at each other, neither of us ever landed one! There was bloodshed, though – mine – and depending on your point of view, you might even say it was my fault.
Fiore and I were in the summer either between 4th and 5th grades or between 5th and 6th. I was in Little League baseball that season (for what proved to be my last) and a mid-day practice had just ended on the field at our school’s playground. As the other kids from my team filtered away in the directions of their various homes, Fiore, who had heckled and taunted me and others all while he watched us practice, hopped on my Schwinn Sting Ray bike and began taunting me, refusing to give me back my bike. He rode in circles around me as I tried to convince him, force him or capture him to give it back, occasionally swinging really close to me, but always darting away before I could reach him.
I don’t remember the words, but they were the perfect words, and I said them. They had the effect I had intended – his anger – but an unintended result: he turned the handlebars and rode straight at me, rage in his eyes. I threw my baseball mitt to the asphalt of the school playground and squared to face him straight on. I wasn’t scared at that moment, but I was at best as angry as he was, and if he was going to try to hurt me by running me down with my own bike, I was sure as hell going to try to hurt him back for his efforts.
And he did come right at me! I grabbed the handlebars and wrenched them to one side. His momentum stopped suddenly, and his balance thrown off, he toppled to the asphalt. I wrestled with the bike to get it off of him, ready to pounce on him and begin the fistfight of my life when…he started laughing . Laughing and pointing at me. Just then I felt a cool sensation on my upper lip. I reached up and wiped at it, and looked at my hand. Blood. LOTS of blood! I hadn’t even noticed it, but when I wrenched the bike’s handlebars, one side had slipped free of his hand and whacked me right in the side of the nose. It was a faucet!
Horror-struck, embarrassed, angry all at once, I started crying. I ran home, pulling the bike alongside me with one hand and holding my nose with the other. When I got home my youngest sister, seven years my senior, saw the bloody, blubbering mess that walked in the front door, and had what I think I can safely describe as a conniption. Her reaction made my emotional state even worse. She finally got me calmed down enough to tell her what happened, only that made EVERYTHING worse, because she tore off down the street and got into a shouting match with Mrs. Santaniello! Now, not only was I upset, angry and embarrassed, but I was humiliated because my big sister went and fought my fight.
Our last fight happened the following winter. We verbally taunted each other along the two-block walk from our school to our street, and then, on the corner just one door from my house, we came to blows. Again, we each struck out, as we were probably the worst pugilists who ever lived. But I got the advantage when, as Fiore threw a wild fist, he happened to be standing on a patch of ice. His effort pulled him off balance, and his feet slipped out from beneath him. Once again I had the upper hand: Fiore was on the ground. Again I was ready to pounce on him when, out of nowhere I heard my mother’s voice: “(FARRAGO!) Knock it off RIGHT NOW!” She had managed to get out of work early that day (memory fails me…was it perhaps the last Friday before Christmas?), and was standing on our front stoop, glaring at us. DAMN her timing! Fiore got up and ran off since, in those days, other kids’ mothers were feared even worse than bullies. I can’t help but wonder if Mom stood at the door and watched us flailing at each other until the point when Fiore fell, and then intervened when there was the potential of somebody actually getting hurt. Or maybe she didn’t feel she could take Fiore’s mother in the second fight that would ensue. I also wonder why I never got in trouble. Maybe for the same reason. I got the upper hand. I fought a fight I didn’t start (though who really knows who started it?), and by falls I had won. End it.
Fiore started getting into trouble as we approached adolescence, though he never took a total turn for the worst. Our friend/foe seesaw ended when he one day thought it would be funny to lure my friend and next-door neighbor, Ben Fonseca’s 6-month old puppy with a treat down to his house where he unleashed his bad-tempered dog on it. The puppy never had a chance to begin with, but the dogfight ended prematurely when both dogs were hit by a passing car. The puppy died within minutes, and the Santaniellos’ family dog ran off and disappeared, but was found the next day under their back porch, dead. Away from his parents, Fiore never expressed remorse for what happened that day, for what he did that day. I couldn’t see my way around it, and our relationship, stormy as it was, ended.
Four years ago I met and spoke briefly with Fiore at our 20-year high school reunion. He had left our school at some point to attend a big local Catholic high school, and I had been unaware that he ever returned to ours to finish his education. He had done a four-year stint in the Marines, which I knew about, and then I heard nothing more until our reunion. We spoke so briefly that I didn’t get much information. He drives a truck these days. I don’t know if he’s divorced or never married, but at the time of the reunion he was not married. His younger brother, whom Therese Ballassone liked more than she liked me when I was in sixth grade, and who swore from as early as the fourth grade that he would be a doctor when he grew up, grew up to be a doctor – a surgeon, in fact. I always got along with him, even when he was “stealing” the girl of my dreams.
I recall in those few moments while I spoke with Fiore that I never once thought about the fights, the animosity, the poor dogs. I was in the moment and wanted to know what the hell else he had been up to over the prior twenty years, and wished in that moment that we could spend an hour to find out who each other had become.
A couple days after the reunion a simple fact dawned on me, at which point I had to kick myself for never knowing during our childhood, and therefore never being able to use against him in all our fights, the fact that his name, in Italian, means “flower.”
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
The Draw of the Brew
I would bet that most little kids who ever take a drink of Mommy’s or Daddy’s coffee can’t stand the taste of it, and never attempt it again until they’re teenagers or college students cramming for tests or to finish a semester-long project they gave themselves a week to do.
Not me. I don’t remember the day, or what age I was, when I first tried coffee, but I had the distinct advantage of a father who liked to put some coffee in his cup of milk and sugar. Mom was the “barista” of the house. She and Dad grew up in the waning heyday of coffee brewing, with stove-top percolator and “manual” drip methods being the most prevalent. Until Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio – a face and name which I’m sure appealed to people of my parents’ generation – popped up hawking for Mr. Coffee automatic drip coffee makers (hell, I thought he WAS Mr. Coffee for most of my young life!), Mom made coffee the old-fashioned way: put the water on the boil in a tea-kettle, put a filter in the basket, put the basket in the top of the pot, dump the appropriate number of scoops of ground coffee into the filter and basket, pour the boiled water into the basket, filling it once, letting it drain completely through the grounds, and then filling it again for a full pot. Every single morning the house would fill with the warming aroma of coffee. Yep, whatever age I was, I was hooked early. And strict as they were in general, my parents quite regularly allowed me to indulge my nascent caffeine jones: on weekends when the pot sat cooling on the counter and Mom and Dad had both had their fixes, I would ask – usually Mom, as Dad worked on Saturdays – if I could have some. Had my mother been at all concerned with my potential future habits, she would have made sure not to put in any sugar, yet letting me believe she had; or better yet, insisted that I drink it like she did – black, which was just absolutely FOUL! – and I would probably have stayed away from the obnoxious brew. But no, she laced it with a half-pound of sugar and a full udder’s worth of milk, and I eased into the taste of coffee.
On the rare occasion that we went out for breakfast, I fascinated myself first with the tiny cream pots, and later with the individual half & half mini-tubs that were found on the tables, plus the sugar packets, and Mom and Dad would supervise as I prepared my own fix. I’m sure that, afterward, continuing on to wherever we were going, or on the way back home, I was as a rubber ball in the back seat of the car!
I spent the larger part of my childhood and adolescence as the only person in my group of friends who drank coffee. Occasionally a friend would ask why I liked coffee, and the honest answer was that I liked the taste. Hell! With all that sugar, who wouldn’t?! There was just something about that milk-chocolate-brown liquid, the smell, the warmth, the mouth-filling, slightly “dark” taste that I could never leave alone if the opportunity arose.
During my teen years, Dad, the unwitting enabler of my addiction, added another wrinkle to my affection for coffee. If I may make a few assumptions about my pre-cognizant life, it would seem apparent that Dad rarely, if ever, made his own coffee, even right up to Mom’s death in 1993. However, once Mom had to go to work in the early 1970s – after she told the Catholic church to shove it, and went on the pill so the babies would stop arriving – Dad found himself more often re-heating the coffee when he woke up that Mom had made before she went to work earlier. Thus began his almost ritual, absent-minded, daily boiling of the coffee that occurred while he attended to his other morning ritual which, if you didn’t get in there before he did, would make you want to avoid the bathroom until around noon! I became accustomed to the distinctly stronger – nay, foul – flavor of boiled coffee, which steeled me to the many rather nasty concoctions I would encounter later in life. In other words, Dad broadened my coffee horizons, preventing me from becoming a coffee snob. What? The coffee sucks? Sure! Pour me a cup!
(The only cup of coffee I COULDN’T drink was one I poured while in the Air Force. I was participating with the rest of the Group in a war exercise, and we were “tactical,” meaning we couldn’t make noise or use flashlights at night. It was the middle of the night, I had just been waken from my sleep to take over guard duty. I had only about 15 minutes to get ready, so I set to boiling some water (the chemical flame was hidden) and pulling the freeze-dried coffee and condiment packages out of a MRE (Meal, Ready to Eat) bag. There were some really handy things in there; in addition to salt and pepper, there was coffee creamer, cocoa powder…there was even powdered ketchup to be reconstituted and put on reconstituted hash browns or the hot dogs! The water boiled, I opened the coffee packet and dumped it in the cup. I fumbled around in the dark for the packet of creamer, opened it and poured it in. I stirred everything up and took that first sip…and spit it all out! I had dumped the powdered ketchup into the cup instead of the creamer! ACK! Feeling the need for caffeine outweighed my disgust at the flavor, however, I choked down half the cup before I just couldn’t take it any more.)
As an adult, drinking coffee because I could, I learned that it isn’t the stimulant effect of caffeine in the coffee that can keep me awake at night; it’s the diuretic effect. Coffee won’t chase away the afternoon nods at the office, but if I drink too much coffee before bedtime, the term “wee hours” takes on an entirely different meaning!!
A few years ago I read The Sugar Busters, a book which scared the hell out of me for the amount of sugar I was taking into my body daily. I set my mind to try drinking coffee without sugar, and I tried it and…it wasn’t bad! Not too long after, I learned that it was cream in my coffee, among other dairy products, that was exacerbating my near-chronic post-nasal drip. So it was either start drinking coffee black, or quit drinking coffee all together.
Black is beautiful. I don’t know if my mother made it so strong that it even kept cockroaches away from the house, or if “they” are just making coffee more mellow these days, but I made the transition to black coffee with no effort. It seems to me that as children, our taste buds are so sensitive that we really CAN’T stomach flavors like coffee, or brussels sprouts, or snails, and everything goes better with sugar. But as we mature, so do our taste buds.
Or have we just killed them with coffee?
Tell me how it is that you came into coffee’s clutches, or how you’ve managed to avoid getting caught in its aromatic grasp. What is it that you like most about coffee? What is it that you hate? When is your favorite time of day to have a cup? How do you take yours?
Not me. I don’t remember the day, or what age I was, when I first tried coffee, but I had the distinct advantage of a father who liked to put some coffee in his cup of milk and sugar. Mom was the “barista” of the house. She and Dad grew up in the waning heyday of coffee brewing, with stove-top percolator and “manual” drip methods being the most prevalent. Until Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio – a face and name which I’m sure appealed to people of my parents’ generation – popped up hawking for Mr. Coffee automatic drip coffee makers (hell, I thought he WAS Mr. Coffee for most of my young life!), Mom made coffee the old-fashioned way: put the water on the boil in a tea-kettle, put a filter in the basket, put the basket in the top of the pot, dump the appropriate number of scoops of ground coffee into the filter and basket, pour the boiled water into the basket, filling it once, letting it drain completely through the grounds, and then filling it again for a full pot. Every single morning the house would fill with the warming aroma of coffee. Yep, whatever age I was, I was hooked early. And strict as they were in general, my parents quite regularly allowed me to indulge my nascent caffeine jones: on weekends when the pot sat cooling on the counter and Mom and Dad had both had their fixes, I would ask – usually Mom, as Dad worked on Saturdays – if I could have some. Had my mother been at all concerned with my potential future habits, she would have made sure not to put in any sugar, yet letting me believe she had; or better yet, insisted that I drink it like she did – black, which was just absolutely FOUL! – and I would probably have stayed away from the obnoxious brew. But no, she laced it with a half-pound of sugar and a full udder’s worth of milk, and I eased into the taste of coffee.
On the rare occasion that we went out for breakfast, I fascinated myself first with the tiny cream pots, and later with the individual half & half mini-tubs that were found on the tables, plus the sugar packets, and Mom and Dad would supervise as I prepared my own fix. I’m sure that, afterward, continuing on to wherever we were going, or on the way back home, I was as a rubber ball in the back seat of the car!
I spent the larger part of my childhood and adolescence as the only person in my group of friends who drank coffee. Occasionally a friend would ask why I liked coffee, and the honest answer was that I liked the taste. Hell! With all that sugar, who wouldn’t?! There was just something about that milk-chocolate-brown liquid, the smell, the warmth, the mouth-filling, slightly “dark” taste that I could never leave alone if the opportunity arose.
During my teen years, Dad, the unwitting enabler of my addiction, added another wrinkle to my affection for coffee. If I may make a few assumptions about my pre-cognizant life, it would seem apparent that Dad rarely, if ever, made his own coffee, even right up to Mom’s death in 1993. However, once Mom had to go to work in the early 1970s – after she told the Catholic church to shove it, and went on the pill so the babies would stop arriving – Dad found himself more often re-heating the coffee when he woke up that Mom had made before she went to work earlier. Thus began his almost ritual, absent-minded, daily boiling of the coffee that occurred while he attended to his other morning ritual which, if you didn’t get in there before he did, would make you want to avoid the bathroom until around noon! I became accustomed to the distinctly stronger – nay, foul – flavor of boiled coffee, which steeled me to the many rather nasty concoctions I would encounter later in life. In other words, Dad broadened my coffee horizons, preventing me from becoming a coffee snob. What? The coffee sucks? Sure! Pour me a cup!
(The only cup of coffee I COULDN’T drink was one I poured while in the Air Force. I was participating with the rest of the Group in a war exercise, and we were “tactical,” meaning we couldn’t make noise or use flashlights at night. It was the middle of the night, I had just been waken from my sleep to take over guard duty. I had only about 15 minutes to get ready, so I set to boiling some water (the chemical flame was hidden) and pulling the freeze-dried coffee and condiment packages out of a MRE (Meal, Ready to Eat) bag. There were some really handy things in there; in addition to salt and pepper, there was coffee creamer, cocoa powder…there was even powdered ketchup to be reconstituted and put on reconstituted hash browns or the hot dogs! The water boiled, I opened the coffee packet and dumped it in the cup. I fumbled around in the dark for the packet of creamer, opened it and poured it in. I stirred everything up and took that first sip…and spit it all out! I had dumped the powdered ketchup into the cup instead of the creamer! ACK! Feeling the need for caffeine outweighed my disgust at the flavor, however, I choked down half the cup before I just couldn’t take it any more.)
As an adult, drinking coffee because I could, I learned that it isn’t the stimulant effect of caffeine in the coffee that can keep me awake at night; it’s the diuretic effect. Coffee won’t chase away the afternoon nods at the office, but if I drink too much coffee before bedtime, the term “wee hours” takes on an entirely different meaning!!
A few years ago I read The Sugar Busters, a book which scared the hell out of me for the amount of sugar I was taking into my body daily. I set my mind to try drinking coffee without sugar, and I tried it and…it wasn’t bad! Not too long after, I learned that it was cream in my coffee, among other dairy products, that was exacerbating my near-chronic post-nasal drip. So it was either start drinking coffee black, or quit drinking coffee all together.
Black is beautiful. I don’t know if my mother made it so strong that it even kept cockroaches away from the house, or if “they” are just making coffee more mellow these days, but I made the transition to black coffee with no effort. It seems to me that as children, our taste buds are so sensitive that we really CAN’T stomach flavors like coffee, or brussels sprouts, or snails, and everything goes better with sugar. But as we mature, so do our taste buds.
Or have we just killed them with coffee?
Tell me how it is that you came into coffee’s clutches, or how you’ve managed to avoid getting caught in its aromatic grasp. What is it that you like most about coffee? What is it that you hate? When is your favorite time of day to have a cup? How do you take yours?
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Who the Heck Reads This?!
Holy Crap! I've had nearly 1000 hits to my blog!! That means that it's an average of 333.33 hits per reader!! No, wait. I figure I have at least 100 of those hits just posting, swearing, correcting my idiot mistakes and reposting, so that puts each of you at about 300 each.
Thank You!
Pay attention to the counter over the next few months, and be sure to drop a comment to me if you're number 1000. If you are lucky number 1000, you win the grand prize: a naked picture of me! (I sure hope I'm not number 1000. I HATE looking at that picture.)
Cross your fingers, and read, read, read!
...No... read ME.
Thank You!
Pay attention to the counter over the next few months, and be sure to drop a comment to me if you're number 1000. If you are lucky number 1000, you win the grand prize: a naked picture of me! (I sure hope I'm not number 1000. I HATE looking at that picture.)
Cross your fingers, and read, read, read!
...No... read ME.
Luck or Suck
In the course of my travels I have come to realize that there is a fine line between luck and suck. I have written of earlier highs and lows as a wayward traveler. And this most recent trip has had both.
I flew to Phoenix from Chicago on May 30. Uneventful flight, no drama. I have a good friend in Phoenix, and I was fortunate enough to get two evenings free, spending one at dinner with him, and the other at his home dining with his him, his wife, and their two painfully adorable kids. Luck.
On June 3 I flew to Los Angeles – again no drama – and met at LAX bag claim my client’s producer/director with whom I was to shoot a video piece. From there we rented a minivan and drove leisurely to our hotel in the Thousand Oaks area, in the northwest reaches of the megalopolis that is the City of Angels. Fortune smiled upon me that day as the subject of the video had informed us that he had a wedding to attend Saturday, so the original plans to shoot on that day were off. We had the afternoon and evening free! Luck. The producer/director and I have become friends over the past year, so, with a free evening we planned to get a bite to eat and then see about catching “The DaVinci Code” at a local theater.
If you've never been to Los Angeles, suffice it to say that it is a veritable source overload for anything you might be looking for. We asked the hotel front desk clerk if there were any decent restaurants close to the hotel, and she handed us a three-page list, stapled at a corner, of restaurants that were within a 2-mile radius! We were both in the mood for steak, so we wound up at a Stuart Anderson’s Black Angus restaurant. When we arrived there it was approximately 6:15pm, and I fully expected to have to wait in line, but when we walked in, the hostess – who looked all of 12 years old – walked us straight to a table. Luck. We ordered, got our food – cooked, if not to perfection, at least to order (Luck) – and we left. We used the Hertz Neverlost GPS system in the minivan to find us the nearest movie theater, where we walked in to the ticket lobby at 7:34pm. “The DaVinci Code” was listed to start at 7:30. Both my client and I have read the book, so I wasn’t too worried if we missed the first few minutes. There was a line, so we probably didn’t get into the auditorium until nearly 7:45pm.
We sat down, saw two trailers, a short film titled, “Buy Your Popcorn, Sit Down, Turn Off Your Cell Phones and Shut Up," and our movie started! Luck!
The next day it only got better. The subject of our video is quite well to do. He has an incredible house made into a beautiful home by his professional interior decorator wife. Generous to a fault – after we finished taping for the day, during which he fed us lunch – he insisted that we stay for dinner and a sit-down in the hot tub with cigars and wine. Luck. (Yes, this IS California. No, we were NOT naked Luck. …well, I was (SUCK!))
On Monday we had more shooting to do at the man’s office, and then at his home again. I had discovered that this man’s home in Thousand Oaks was literally minutes away from the home of a good friend of mine with whom I was stationed in Montana when we were in the Air Force. Luck. I had forgotten to bring his phone number with me, but I was able to coordinate with Mrs. Farrago to look it up on my computer and get the number to me! Luck!
We finished shooting, and I went to my Air Force buddy’s house where I met his kids for the first time (his wife, whom I met a few years ago, was away working the night shift Suck.)). We talked for hours, reminiscing about our times in the Air Force and updating each other on our lives.
Tuesday morning, however, the magic was gone. I met the client in the hotel lobby for breakfast. The bacon on the buffet table looked as though it had come from those poor atomic bomb test pigs from the 1950s. Suck. The hotel had set the restaurant’s air conditioning temperature to “MEAT LOCKER,” and the main blower was aimed at our table. Suck. We had made our plans to leave the hotel by 8:30am, but at 8:20 we both received serious calls of nature, and we didn’t meet up again until 8:40. By the time we checked out and got the van packed, it was 8:50, and we had 30 miles of L.A. morning rush traffic between us and the airport. SUCK.
By 9:30 I was pretty certain I was going to miss the check-in cutoff for my 10:48am flight. We arrived at the Hertz Car Rental Return center and managed to arrive at the bus with our large cachet of luggage at the same time as 50 other passengers who had turned in their cars just ahead of us. Suck. Of course, at LAX, the United Airlines ticket counters are at the far end of the airport from the Hertz center, last in the long line of terminals (suck); and of course, there were five elderly passengers on our bus who were NOT flying United, plus one younger woman who had some sort of ailment or illness which caused her to walk doubled over and very slowly…also not flying United Airlines. Suck.
We finally arrived at the United terminal just in time for me to miss the 30-minute cutoff time by three minutes. Suck! I had to book a different flight. Where my original flight was a non-stop from L.A. to New Orleans, booked in all aisle seats, and scheduled to arrive at 4:30pm, my new itinerary was a flight connecting in Chicago (HELLO!), and arriving in New Orleans at 10:00pm, in window seats. Suck! The ticket agent told me the flight to Chicago was scheduled to leave at 12:50. I swear that’s what she said.
I went to the gate area and hunted until I found a seat near an electrical outlet so I could work on revising a script for one of my co-workers. Luck?
Okay, so the flight I missed was at 10:48, nearly 11:00. By the time I got to the gate area it was about 10:55. I finally sat down and spread out with my laptop to work at approximately 11:10. Boarding for a 12:50 flight would start around 12:20, so I had more than an hour to work and, around 12:10, shut down, walk 75 yards to the McDonald’s, grab a bag of heart disease and breeze onto the plane, right?
After about 20 minutes of work, at 11:28am, I heard an amplified voice say, “(mumble, mumble) to Chicago will begin boarding momentarily.” I pulled out my boarding passes and read, “…DEPARTS 12:00.” WHAT?! 12:50 my ASS!” Suck. I began to leisurely gather my things, as boarding was already starting, and I wasn’t going to make it to be the first on board. Then, suddenly, I heard over the P.A. system, “Passenger (Farrago) to the desk, please. Passenger (Farrago).” I’m certain it meant I was being awarded a free upgrade to First Class, for which I had idiotically neglected to request an upgrade! LUCK! My laptop was still out, my backpack had puked some stuff out, and I had cords to wrap. I couldn’t leave the stuff unattended or the police might come and confiscate or destroy it.
I finally got my crap together and I ran to the gate desk. I said to the agent there, “You called for (Farrago?”) And the guy just sorta smiled at me. I said, “I’m (Farrago). You called my name.”
He said, “I have all the passengers I need, thank you.”
I said, “You called my name. Why did you call my name?”
He gave me a slightly dismissing wave and said, “My apologies, sir. I have the passengers I need.” I felt like I had just been uninvited to the popular girl’s party. SUCK!
So I boarded the plane, sat in my window seat (suck) and fumed at the gate agent who wouldn’t tell me why he had called my name though I knew. I just knew.
Just as I had begun to calm myself down – saying to myself that it was really all my own fault; I should have planned on leaving earlier; I shouldn’t have wasted so much time getting ready; I should have gotten a colostomy bag installed; I should have paid closer attention to the information on my boarding pass – just as I had begun to get over it, Chris Farley incarnate sat down in the middle seat, beside me. Suck. And “beside” is a relative term. And by “relative term” I mean so much of his body was touching me (SUCK! SUCK! SUCK!) through most of the flight, he might as well have been a relative of mine.
So, you see, the fine line between luck and suck can be measured by as little as the time it takes to take a dump, or – in the case of the First Class seat that was not meant to be – the time it takes to read a freaking boarding pass.
Worst of all, however, is that this leg of the trip deposited me in New Orleans. S U C K ! I guess I should have seen it all coming.
I flew to Phoenix from Chicago on May 30. Uneventful flight, no drama. I have a good friend in Phoenix, and I was fortunate enough to get two evenings free, spending one at dinner with him, and the other at his home dining with his him, his wife, and their two painfully adorable kids. Luck.
On June 3 I flew to Los Angeles – again no drama – and met at LAX bag claim my client’s producer/director with whom I was to shoot a video piece. From there we rented a minivan and drove leisurely to our hotel in the Thousand Oaks area, in the northwest reaches of the megalopolis that is the City of Angels. Fortune smiled upon me that day as the subject of the video had informed us that he had a wedding to attend Saturday, so the original plans to shoot on that day were off. We had the afternoon and evening free! Luck. The producer/director and I have become friends over the past year, so, with a free evening we planned to get a bite to eat and then see about catching “The DaVinci Code” at a local theater.
If you've never been to Los Angeles, suffice it to say that it is a veritable source overload for anything you might be looking for. We asked the hotel front desk clerk if there were any decent restaurants close to the hotel, and she handed us a three-page list, stapled at a corner, of restaurants that were within a 2-mile radius! We were both in the mood for steak, so we wound up at a Stuart Anderson’s Black Angus restaurant. When we arrived there it was approximately 6:15pm, and I fully expected to have to wait in line, but when we walked in, the hostess – who looked all of 12 years old – walked us straight to a table. Luck. We ordered, got our food – cooked, if not to perfection, at least to order (Luck) – and we left. We used the Hertz Neverlost GPS system in the minivan to find us the nearest movie theater, where we walked in to the ticket lobby at 7:34pm. “The DaVinci Code” was listed to start at 7:30. Both my client and I have read the book, so I wasn’t too worried if we missed the first few minutes. There was a line, so we probably didn’t get into the auditorium until nearly 7:45pm.
We sat down, saw two trailers, a short film titled, “Buy Your Popcorn, Sit Down, Turn Off Your Cell Phones and Shut Up," and our movie started! Luck!
The next day it only got better. The subject of our video is quite well to do. He has an incredible house made into a beautiful home by his professional interior decorator wife. Generous to a fault – after we finished taping for the day, during which he fed us lunch – he insisted that we stay for dinner and a sit-down in the hot tub with cigars and wine. Luck. (Yes, this IS California. No, we were NOT naked Luck. …well, I was (SUCK!))
On Monday we had more shooting to do at the man’s office, and then at his home again. I had discovered that this man’s home in Thousand Oaks was literally minutes away from the home of a good friend of mine with whom I was stationed in Montana when we were in the Air Force. Luck. I had forgotten to bring his phone number with me, but I was able to coordinate with Mrs. Farrago to look it up on my computer and get the number to me! Luck!
We finished shooting, and I went to my Air Force buddy’s house where I met his kids for the first time (his wife, whom I met a few years ago, was away working the night shift Suck.)). We talked for hours, reminiscing about our times in the Air Force and updating each other on our lives.
Tuesday morning, however, the magic was gone. I met the client in the hotel lobby for breakfast. The bacon on the buffet table looked as though it had come from those poor atomic bomb test pigs from the 1950s. Suck. The hotel had set the restaurant’s air conditioning temperature to “MEAT LOCKER,” and the main blower was aimed at our table. Suck. We had made our plans to leave the hotel by 8:30am, but at 8:20 we both received serious calls of nature, and we didn’t meet up again until 8:40. By the time we checked out and got the van packed, it was 8:50, and we had 30 miles of L.A. morning rush traffic between us and the airport. SUCK.
By 9:30 I was pretty certain I was going to miss the check-in cutoff for my 10:48am flight. We arrived at the Hertz Car Rental Return center and managed to arrive at the bus with our large cachet of luggage at the same time as 50 other passengers who had turned in their cars just ahead of us. Suck. Of course, at LAX, the United Airlines ticket counters are at the far end of the airport from the Hertz center, last in the long line of terminals (suck); and of course, there were five elderly passengers on our bus who were NOT flying United, plus one younger woman who had some sort of ailment or illness which caused her to walk doubled over and very slowly…also not flying United Airlines. Suck.
We finally arrived at the United terminal just in time for me to miss the 30-minute cutoff time by three minutes. Suck! I had to book a different flight. Where my original flight was a non-stop from L.A. to New Orleans, booked in all aisle seats, and scheduled to arrive at 4:30pm, my new itinerary was a flight connecting in Chicago (HELLO!), and arriving in New Orleans at 10:00pm, in window seats. Suck! The ticket agent told me the flight to Chicago was scheduled to leave at 12:50. I swear that’s what she said.
I went to the gate area and hunted until I found a seat near an electrical outlet so I could work on revising a script for one of my co-workers. Luck?
Okay, so the flight I missed was at 10:48, nearly 11:00. By the time I got to the gate area it was about 10:55. I finally sat down and spread out with my laptop to work at approximately 11:10. Boarding for a 12:50 flight would start around 12:20, so I had more than an hour to work and, around 12:10, shut down, walk 75 yards to the McDonald’s, grab a bag of heart disease and breeze onto the plane, right?
After about 20 minutes of work, at 11:28am, I heard an amplified voice say, “(mumble, mumble) to Chicago will begin boarding momentarily.” I pulled out my boarding passes and read, “…DEPARTS 12:00.” WHAT?! 12:50 my ASS!” Suck. I began to leisurely gather my things, as boarding was already starting, and I wasn’t going to make it to be the first on board. Then, suddenly, I heard over the P.A. system, “Passenger (Farrago) to the desk, please. Passenger (Farrago).” I’m certain it meant I was being awarded a free upgrade to First Class, for which I had idiotically neglected to request an upgrade! LUCK! My laptop was still out, my backpack had puked some stuff out, and I had cords to wrap. I couldn’t leave the stuff unattended or the police might come and confiscate or destroy it.
I finally got my crap together and I ran to the gate desk. I said to the agent there, “You called for (Farrago?”) And the guy just sorta smiled at me. I said, “I’m (Farrago). You called my name.”
He said, “I have all the passengers I need, thank you.”
I said, “You called my name. Why did you call my name?”
He gave me a slightly dismissing wave and said, “My apologies, sir. I have the passengers I need.” I felt like I had just been uninvited to the popular girl’s party. SUCK!
So I boarded the plane, sat in my window seat (suck) and fumed at the gate agent who wouldn’t tell me why he had called my name though I knew. I just knew.
Just as I had begun to calm myself down – saying to myself that it was really all my own fault; I should have planned on leaving earlier; I shouldn’t have wasted so much time getting ready; I should have gotten a colostomy bag installed; I should have paid closer attention to the information on my boarding pass – just as I had begun to get over it, Chris Farley incarnate sat down in the middle seat, beside me. Suck. And “beside” is a relative term. And by “relative term” I mean so much of his body was touching me (SUCK! SUCK! SUCK!) through most of the flight, he might as well have been a relative of mine.
So, you see, the fine line between luck and suck can be measured by as little as the time it takes to take a dump, or – in the case of the First Class seat that was not meant to be – the time it takes to read a freaking boarding pass.
Worst of all, however, is that this leg of the trip deposited me in New Orleans. S U C K ! I guess I should have seen it all coming.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
In Case Anyone Is Interested
After posting my most recent story, I thought people might be interested in some other light reading (the title is a link)....
There really is/was a legend of alpha five Launch Facility, at least the way I heard it when I was a young airman at Malmstrom. I was actually assigned to the 342nd Missile Security Squadron which, apparently, has since been deactivated. The "swap" idea is mine, a figment of my imagination. Never happened as far as I'm aware. Also as far as I'm aware, there was never any kind of "incident" there, certainly not like such depicted in my fiction. The legend included a tale about a camper team that one evening heard and felt something hit the side of their camper, and when they got our and looked, there was a tomahawk lodged in the camper section above the cab of the pickup truck. I wanted to include that in the story originally, but when I got to that point, it just seemed too contrived...like it isn't already!!
There did occur something I never knew about - until a few nights ago - that happened nearly 20 years before I got there, which made for some very interesting reading for me.
Whatever. I hope you read the story. If you read it, I hope you liked it. If you didn't like it, I hope you'll tell me why.
dassall
There really is/was a legend of alpha five Launch Facility, at least the way I heard it when I was a young airman at Malmstrom. I was actually assigned to the 342nd Missile Security Squadron which, apparently, has since been deactivated. The "swap" idea is mine, a figment of my imagination. Never happened as far as I'm aware. Also as far as I'm aware, there was never any kind of "incident" there, certainly not like such depicted in my fiction. The legend included a tale about a camper team that one evening heard and felt something hit the side of their camper, and when they got our and looked, there was a tomahawk lodged in the camper section above the cab of the pickup truck. I wanted to include that in the story originally, but when I got to that point, it just seemed too contrived...like it isn't already!!
There did occur something I never knew about - until a few nights ago - that happened nearly 20 years before I got there, which made for some very interesting reading for me.
Whatever. I hope you read the story. If you read it, I hope you liked it. If you didn't like it, I hope you'll tell me why.
dassall
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