F2070-1 Stambaugh's

They came out of Stambaugh’s. He was pushing a panel cart and she was walking just behind him. He looked irritated. His brow was furrowed with a deep notch of anger, like a man who had been interrupted on a Saturday morning, when his wife thought it was better that they leave the house than to allow him to watch the New Yankee Workshop on TV. She had herded him into the Mercury earlier and directed him to the lumber yard, telling him each step along the way which way to go. He kept saying, “I know, I know,” with an ever-increasing ripple of disquiet marring the otherwise placid pond of his patience. Now they were approaching the same car with a single sheet of drywall on the panel cart. His eyebrows twitched nervously.

“Open the trunk,” he barked at her, with the same irascibility I had seen so often in my own father. She ran quickly and opened the trunk.

He lifted the sheet of drywall and brought it near the trunk. From where I stood, the sheet appeared to be too wide to fit into the trunk. He attempted to bring the sheet straight into the trunk. But it hit the side moldings of the trunk.

“Turn it on an angle,” she suggested. He stopped and looked at her, with the sheet of drywall drooping pathetically in his hands. He said nothing. He angled the sheet and took another stab at securing it in the trunk. But it didn’t fit that way either.

“Got any other bright ideas?”

“Maybe if you bent it slightly in the middle it would fit,” she said.

He dropped the sheet onto the lip of the trunk and glared at her, his hands on his hips. “What the hell good would it do to bend it in the middle?” he said, as he reached out and pressed on the drywall halfway down its long length.

“No, no, not there,” she said, “press on the short end here,” she said as she patted the sheet with her hand in the middle of the width.

He pressed there. But the sheet was still too wide by about one inch. He picked it up and angled it again, tilting the sheet to slope upwards to the left that time. The diagonal opening of the trunk was the same right-to-left, just as it was left-to-right, so the sheet didn’t fit no matter which way it was tilted. After he tried to stuff the sheet into the car that way, he realized just how muddled his thinking was that morning. When she began to gesture with her hands, he cut her off abruptly. “Don’t say another word!” he said, pointing at her. Again he rested the sheet on the trunk lip. He stood there with his arms folded across his chest, his eyebrows twitching rhythmically like the warning lights at a railroad crossing. He bit his lip.

Then suddenly his expression changed. A slight smile flashed across his face. He pulled the sheet down to the pavement, with one end resting on the bumper of the car and the other end on the ground, like an inclined ramp. He raised his foot and stomped on the middle of the sheet, breaking it in half. He picked up both pieces and inclined them on the bumper as before. He thrust his foot through those pieces, creating four pieces. He picked them up and threw them into the trunk: four ragged pieces of drywall, each about two feet by four feet. He slammed the trunk lid closed and turned toward his wife. “You wanted drywall,” he said, waving his hand toward the trunk, “well, there’s your drywall.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he said, “I hope you’re happy now.”

She stood there silently for several seconds, lost in a blank, helpless stare. Then she said, “I don’t think it’s much good like that.”

He walked to the door on the driver’s side and looked back across the roof of the car.

“Just get in the damned car,” he snarled.

F2095-1 Drinkin Injured

Speaking of busted up old guys, I went to my family doctor a few months ago. I had a right shoulder that was just killing me. I was putting up with that bum shoulder until one day, when I was crawling under the car to change oil, I discovered that the shoulder hurt so badly that I couldn’t pull the wrench to tighten up the drain plug on the crankcase. You can’t change your own oil, that’s bad. You wouldn’t have any excuse to go to AutoZone.

Well, the doctor looked at it and asked me how I had injured the shoulder. I didn’t think that I had done that. Over time the shoulder just seemed to be getting a little worse, until it got to the point that it hurt so much I couldn’t sleep very well. Maybe a little Arthur Ritus, I thought, but no injury. He told me, “You’ve got a ‘frozen shoulder.’” Something called “adhesive capsulitus.” Whew, that sounded pretty serious to me. Jeeze!

He sent me for x-rays, and then to a physical therapy place, where they would loosen up the shoulder. Yeah. If you call bending your arm the way it was never intended to be bent “loosening up the shoulder,” that’s just what they do. Da Missus said she knew a couple of women who noticed that they had real trouble doing their hair because they couldn’t raise their arms high enough. They went to physical therapy and got fixed up. But they said it hurt to beat the band. And I found out that they weren’t lying one bit.

Some of the therapists have MPT behind their names. I asked my therapist what that meant. He said it meant Masters of Physical Therapy. Shoot. I thought it meant Maximum Pain and Torture. The guy who runs the place, Big Ed, came by one day while I was on the table getting worked over. He asked me how I was doing. I said, “This guy’s killing me!” He smiled. “That’s good,” he said, “that’s real good.”

Place is like that. One day this gimpy starica comes limping into the room, and her therapist has her get up on the table. He told her to lie on her back, with her knees bent and with her feet scrunched up next to her butt. Then he told her to arch her back and raise her pelvis up into the air. I was absolutely amazed when the gal did just that. You gotta remember that she was about 450 years old. The girl knew Columbus personally. But she moved like a kid. Then the therapist told her to “do that 200 times.” The old gal just about had a bowel movement right there on the table. “Two hundred times?” she said. “Are you serious?” The therapist gave her that Marlboro-Man-in-the-Saloon-Look: Late afternoon sun glinting in the windows, burnishing the lower half of his jaw. Takes a long drag on his stogie. Slowly blows the smoke down at the floor. Flicks the stogie into the spittoon. Pushes his hat back slightly. Looks her right in the eye and says, “Damn right, ma’am!” Old gal asked for some toilet paper.

After a couple of weeks of that physical therapy, the shoulder started moving better. It was like pitching in the Major Leagues, though. If I had a day of rest, I could start. But on the day they wrenched on my arm, I was pretty useless. Some days it was tough to get the sljivovica to my lips. But I tried. That old Wisconsin experience kept coming through: we know how to drink injured.

Vasilji

C3001-57 Thanksgiving: Macedonian Eyes

I am thankful that she stood and talked long enough for me to study the marvelous way that You had tinged her mahogany eyes with an emerald hint of green, and how You had placed a mere wisp of white on each temple next to those dark chocolate eyes, against the mysterious background of her black Macedonian hair.

Dali ima novoj beli svet,

Poubavo devojce od makedonce?

Nema nema neke se rodi.

Poubavo devojce od makedonce!

F2075 Brains

Every now and then, when you get to be my age, you’ll have one of those senior moments. You’ll take your cocker spaniel out for a walk and the little kids will run down the porch steps and cross the yard to come over to pet your dog. The dog seems to attract little kids and women - especially women. In fact, the dog is a “babe magnet,” as they say.

One day a youngster from down at the end of the block came toward the dog and told me that the dog was “a real nice dog.” I had suspected that for some time. So it was reassuring to hear that - even if that opinion came from a youngster. After he petted the dog for a while, he asked me what the dog’s name was. I just stood there.

You see, I was having one of my “Senior Moments,” and the dog’s name had suddenly drifted off into one of those cracks in time. I knew what the dog’s name was just as well as I knew my own name. But for the life of me, I couldn’t recall it just then.

The boy petted the dog again and looked up at me. “What did you say the dog’s name was?” he said. All I could remember was the word, Brains. It was one of my nicknames for the dog, a name that seemed quite appropriate to me after the dog had made a mess on the floor - again - and I had said, “Boy, this dog’s a real Einstein! We should call her ‘Brains.’” And after I had said that, the word Brains had fastened itself onto my own brain to such an extent that often I couldn’t remember her real name anymore.

The little boy looked at me, waiting for an answer. And I looked at the little boy, waiting for my brain to start working again. We stood there for quite a while, looking at each other. He, expecting me to shift into drive and go. And me, turning the key and trying to get the engine started. But nothing happened.

The youngster reached out and grabbed my trouser leg and gave it a short tug. “What’s your doggy’s name, Mister?” He seemed more insistent that time. I just stood there, frozen in that muddy crosscurrent of time, and only the word Brains came to my mind. After I had despaired and given up any hope of recalling the correct name, I told him the dog’s name was Brains. He stood there with the word on his lips, his mouth twisted into a grimace, as if one of those dog doo-doos in the yard had suddenly found its way into his mouth. “Brains?” he said. “Your dog’s name is Brains?”

“Yeah.” I told him. “The dog’s name is Brains.”

The dog and I continued down the street. The boy stood on the sidewalk and watched us. He didn’t run away, or return to his front porch. He just stood and watched, with the two of us on the end of the leash of his vision. The dog and I turned at the corner and I kept turning one word over after another, looking for the one with the dog’s real name on it. And do you think I could remember that name? Ha! Not a chance.

When we got home, I asked my wife what the dog’s name was. She sat there and looked at me as if I had totally lost my mind. “What?”

I said, “Tell me what this dog’s name is,” pointing to the dog.

“Have you lost your mind?”

“Hey, just tell me what the dog’s name is!”

“It’s Zoey,” she said. “What is wrong with you?”

“Zoey! Yeah, that’s it,” I said, beaming. “I couldn’t remember the dog’s name when a little boy down at the end of the street asked me a little while ago. Yeah, Zoey! That’s it.”

She sat there and shook her head from side to side. “I don’t believe you.”

The next day when Zoey and I went for our walk, the little boy was there on his porch again, this time with his mother. He pointed at the dog and said, “Mommy, that doggy’s name is Brains.”

She looked at Zoey. Her lips pursed into a bud. And slowly, ever so slowly that bud blossomed forth into a word. “Brains?” she asked.

I looked at the kid. “Well, at least he remembered the dog’s name,” I thought to myself.