Category Archives: writer’s challenge

I Didn’t Do It!

But it is time to answer the posers put forth by the all seeing and all hearing Mama Kat in her weekly Writer’s Challenge! This week I decided to have a go at all of the questions, so …

1.) Why did you do it?

I did it because he looked so lonely and forlorn; a bit like a puppy dog trying to get his first pat on the head. He had moved into our suite of dorm rooms in my sophomore year of college. Kevin would have been labeled with Asperger’s syndrome in the label obsessed world of today. We just thought he was extremely inept in his people interface. I made sure not to ignore him through the year. When spring came around, I helped ensure that he rushed our fraternity and that he became a member. (It really would have helped our chess team if we had one since Kevin played at a Master level when you could convince him to play.)

Over the next year, Kevin’s people skills became more acceptable and slightly more polished. Especially when he relaxed and realized he was amidst friends. I graduated from college early and after graduation I didn’t think much about Kevin. In fact, I didn’t see or hear from him until my 25th college reunion. L and I and the Son were in the cafeteria on the last day of the reunion when a gentleman from another class who looked vaguely familiar insisted on introducing his wife and family and thanking me profusely for making a difference in his life. In the course of our conversation, the light gradually turned on and I figured out it was Kevin. He was then the head of engineering at a very large company and was very clearly happy with his life. His social skills were still rough, but he didn’t let that hold him back. And somehow he believed he owed it all to me and the fact that I didn’t just ignore him.

Thus, I learned the very important lesson that even seemingly insignificant acts can have a major impact on others. It’s something I try to keep in mind every day now.

2.) What is a common misconception about you?

That I am too brilliant to talk to. My friend T (from here) and I have played a lot of golf together over the years. Anytime I’d leave the table or group, T would tell me that others would then come over and quiz him on what we found to talk about; wasn’t he afraid of looking dumb, etc. T would tell them that I was no different to talk to than anyone else. Given that T suffers from severe dyslexia and barely survived high school because of it, he is regarded as the antithesis of an intellectual. So the fact that he and I are friends and spend time talking about every topic under the sun seemed hard for them to understand. But the fact that I have a friend like T is one of the keys to breaking that ice wall of fear that had surrounded my interactions with the others. And for that I am thankful.

3.) Describe a moment when you felt afraid.

I was once involved in a fatal traffic accident. I was driving a truck loaded with fuel down a rural highway when a pickup truck drove out of a field, past a stop sign, and right into me. When I saw that the other vehicle was not going to stop and it was too late to do anything to prevent the crash, I was afraid, very afraid.

I remember how time slowed to a crawl as my knees shoved through the metal dashboard. I remember how the band on my watch expanded and broke and the watch and my glasses flew together into the windshield and then on out of the truck in slow motion. I remember gripping the steering wheel so hard and pushing against it so hard that it literally turned into a pretzel in slow motion in front of my eyes. I remember the intense pain once everything stopped moving. I remember falling out of the cab because my knees hurt too bad to stand. I remember seeing the flames start licking out of the engine compartment of the other truck. I remember crawling back into the cab of my truck and getting the fire extinguisher, and crawling down the road to try to put the flames out. I remember the frustration when the fire extinguisher ran dry and the flames continued to grow. I remember the other driver being unresponsive and having to pull him out of the vehicle as the flames shot to 40 feet in the air around us. And I remember crawling and pulling both us a distance down the road, attempting first aid, and praying for someone, anyone, to come along and help. (This was in the days before cell phones.)

I’ll be forever grateful to the farmer in his field a few miles away who saw the plume of smoke and fire and called the police and ambulance and then came to see if he could help. I’ll be forever sad that the other driver didn’t make it. (He had evidently had a heart attack before the collision and may have been dead even as we collided.) I’ll also be forever grateful that I survived even though it was the end of my football playing days and I spent months using canes to get around. It could have been so much worse. And I’m grateful that now, after a great deal of time has passed, that I can approach a crossroads in a vehicle without dying a mini-death of fear that it will happen again.

4.) In what ways are you turning into your mother?

I think the easier question to answer is “In what ways am I not turning into my mother?’ Most of it is pretty simple: I don’t quilt, I don’t collect recipes, I don’t call myself up to fix my computer, and I don’t spend winter and early spring with the seed catalogs deciding what to grow this year. How’s that for a brief answer?

5.) Are you always right?

Of course!. I have on the wall of my office a sign/plaque from L that reads:

Daniel’s Rules
Rule No. 1
Daniel is always right.
Rule No. 2
If Daniel is wrong, see Rule No. 1.

I Used To Think …

I used to think ….

that growing older was mostly experiencing things in the same way as when I was younger, but just choosing a different balance of things to experience. That meant it wasn’t necessary to savor the complete sensory fullness of each and every moment because it could and would happen again in the future. Now in late middle age, I have come to realize that growing older involves so much more than simple choice of what to experience in what proportion. It involves a complete change in how our senses react and are interpreted internally. And that has immense consequences for the whole idea of the repeatability of experience.

It seems that our very senses change in the way they respond to the world around us as we age. Some sights are not as vivid as they once were whereas others trigger new and powerful emotions by association with the past. Sounds have new and different timbres as the frequency response of our ears changes; music we once thought could not be improved upon now sounds so-so; music that we once deemed merely good now sounds great. The sensitivity of touch changes so that textures take on whole new meanings. A baby’s skin still feels soft, but in a different way than it did in our youth. And the callouses that time and use have created on our fingers means that smooth is a different experience now than it was in younger days. In some ways aging leads to a mutability of experience much akin to the LSD trips popular in our youth.

So now I think that growing older consists of experiencing the world in new and different ways, even if it is the same objective experience from my younger years. And that has consequences in how I view and interact with the world and my possible experiences of it, both in the future and now in the present. It makes me realize there will never be another moment just like the current one in my experience. That in turn means that the current moment is important to savor in all it’s fullness. There will never be another one just like it in my life because even if the same conditions were to recur, my sensory intrepretation of the experience will be at a minimum slightly different. That also implies one should not let life get in the way of fully experiencing all that happens. Now matter how dark or dim the present and future may seem, each experience should be enjoyed fully in the now; there will never be another like it.

That is what I used to think and what I now think. What do you think?

This is a response to Mama Kat’s writers challenge for this week. Click on over and join in.

The Death of Innocence

I remember the day I lost the last vestiges of my childhood innocence about the world. I was sad and angry and confused and … It was all due to a sequence of events that will remain in my memory as long as I live.

My grandpa and grandma served as hosts to a farmer from Africa one summer while I was in  junior high school. “Kip” was here to learn about our agricultural methods and then bring the best applicable methods back home. Over the course of his stay, Kip talked about his country and his life, usually over Sunday meals with the extended family. Kip was one of those happy optimistic people that always had a smile to brighten your day. He always made your day better for having smiled and said hello.

Kip had learned English in a colonial school while growing up and so spoke with a very refined British accent. The accent was coupled with occasional charming lapses into his native tongue when he couldn’t find the equivalent word in English. (His native langue sounded to my untutored ears a lot like a woodchuck running amok in a snare drum shop.) All this was absolutely captivating to the teenage me who had never been more than 150 miles from our location in the mid-western US. 

Kip was shy at first, but he was a born story teller once you got him going. Kip told stories of his farm, of his wife, of his dreams and his hopes for his children. He told of his tribal mythology and of the natural wonders of his country. He talked of how he missed his wife and family dearly, but felt he needed to learn different farming methods if they were to have a better life. His fellow villagers could only afford to send one person on the program and Kip was it. He would share his new knowledge with his neighbors when he got home as part of the trade for their support. Kip and the other farmers from around his country came here and learned, supported in part under a department of agriculture program for developing nations. Keep in mind this was before cell phones and the breakup of the AT&T monopoly, so there was no way for Kip and the others to phone home. An international call like that would have cost more than Kip’s annual income. So we became the family he couldn’t talk to.

Kip felt like a part of the extended family for that summer stay. I hated to see him get ready to go. I knew I would miss the tales of far away Africa, the stiff British accent, and the beaming smile that Kip always seemed to wear. But it was time for him to return home to his real family and life. We made sure to exchange postal addresses and he invited us to come and stay with him if we were ever to journey to his country. That Sunday he met up with several of his countrymen and headed to Denver to begin the journey home. The whole group gathered in New York City and then boarded a plane for home.

During the time of their flight home, fate altered their lives forever. A coup occurred in their country, changing the accepted ideology of the leadership. When the airplane Kip and his fellow farmers were on landed, they were ordered off the plane, marched to the edge of the tarmac, accused of being “tainted” by their exposure to capitalism, and executed. Of course we didn’t learn all of this immediately. It took a certain amount of time for what had really happened to leak out of the country. Eventually there were news photos of the executions, many by being hacked to death with a machete, smuggled out of the country. Definitely not pretty. There is nothing quite like the experience of looking at newspaper photos of an atrocity like that, hoping against hope that Kip wasn’t one of the victims, and yet expecting to see him in every new picture.

When we finally learned for sure what had happened to Kip, I struggled to understand how any group of ‘human’ beings could do that to another person. How could anyone let ideology control them to the point that they could murder a person like Kip. It was this cold-blooded killing of an innocent man, a man with dreams so like my own, that killed my childhood innocence. If the universe would let  a person as nice as Kip be killed over something as unimportant as ideology, it clearly wasn’t a nice place. It wasn’t the innocent place that I had basked in as I grew up, safe with my family. Never again would I have that trust and faith in the fundamental goodness of the universe.

This has been a response to Mama Kat’s writer’s challenge. Go visit her for the prompts and links to the other writers.

The L in Limerick

Once more into the breach dear friends! It’s time once more for Mama Kat’s writing challenge.

The Prompts:

1.) Write a limerick.

2.) Normal is…

3.) Describe a memorable camping experience.

4.) What’s the best thing that has happened this week?

5.) Did you have a childhood hideout? Where? Describe it.

6.) Words that hurt me.

So there is little choice for a dirty old man like me but to supply these limericks three!

Limerick 1

Danny the spammer sat on his fanny

Spending his money paying Manny

   But plan out a scam

   You know that he can

Leading to nothing but net tyranny

Limerick 2

There was an old man with a flute

Who played a really mean jazz lute

  When both came together

  He was light as a feather

But all of the time he had a hoot

Limerick 3

Lovely Linda played often with her cam

Leading her to attempt a dark scam

  But then the exposure

  Led to her closure

Putting a definite end to her sham

Off to get ready for the morrow. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t. (Unless you send photos!) 

The Best Laid Plans …

In retrospect, I wouldn’t say it was my best idea. It certainly seemed to be a winner at the time. What else could we do with 400 feet of surgical rubber and a carton of eggs? There are, after all, only so many ways to make those two supplies truly entertaining.

It was a lazy Friday afternoon in the middle of the term. A friend who was off from school for the term and working in a hospital supply warehouse had sent a us a care package. Classes were over for the day and the gathering ennui of what to do for Friday afternoon fun was affecting us all. When we opened the care package and found a reel of surgical rubber – you know, the kind that is real stretchy – we all got ideas and that devilish glow in the eyes that precedes any questionable plan. It took but a moments consideration to see that we had adequate rubber to string between the trees in the front yard of the house. The really fortuitous part was that the aim was perfect for the Beta house across the street.

Now you need a piece of background. The Beta guys were our natural enemies just due to proximity. Our fraternity was co-ed and had gone the independent route long ago, which really rubbed the Beta guys the wrong way. It was not uncommon that pranks and tricks were exchanged on a daily basis. The last had involved some rather aromatic jars placed in our house. So we were primed for revenge.

Nancy and Cyndi came up with the half carton of boiled eggs and we were set. With a little ingenuity, we created a pouch for our modified slingshot. We could get more than 200 feet of pull, requiring two of us to hold the egg pouch back against the eager pull of the rubber strands. Nelson and Andy served as our gunnery officers to ensure good aim. The first shot went astray, missing the university presidents house by mere inches. Andy was immediately replaced by Thomas and adjustments made. The second shot spatted rather dramatically on the brick of the Beta house. With just a little more correction of our aim, we were ready for the fateful third shot. It was a direct hit on the window at one end of the Beta house.

Just so you understand, a boiled egg at that velocity punches an oval hole in the glass without breaking the pane. But, the egg then immediately disintegrates, spraying egg bits in a cloud throughout the room. Leaving few symptoms of what really happened until the egg starts rotting in a few days. It was like watching an anthill explode as the people came streaming out of the house and looked around confusedly to see what had made the bang. They never even thought to wonder what we were doing with the reel of rubber tubing behind our backs across the street. It took them almost a day to finally spot the oval hole in the window. Come spring, both houses would be hoisting water balloons at each other via surgical rubber slingshots. After the painful effort that the Beta guys went through to get rid of the rotting egg odor, a non-aggression pact of sorts had been forged: No More Eggs.

And that is how I attempted to make the world a better place. By egg bombing the Betas in an exploit that joined the lore of both houses and led to the first non-aggression pact.

This is my response to Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge. Head on over and read the challenge and visit the linky sites.