Category: My Life

Shirtless in the Metromess

Shirtless in the Metromess

It’s been hot here in my little corner of the DFW Metromess. By hot, I mean both actual and “feels like” temperatures are in the triple digits. Add to that a lingering drought and one can see why I took the liberty of shedding my shirt when I decided to pose with the sunflowers in my back yard to make a profile picture for my social media addictions.

My posting of the photo on Facebook led to a number of reactions ranging from “Thumbs-up” to “Wow” to the floating, laughing head. There were comments a plenty, too, from the expected “Oh, my eyes!” to several from friends who complimented me on being brave enough to post my semi-nude body.

Okay. Let’s get something straight. I am not a model by any stretch of the imagination. I’m just a typical guy approaching 70 (way too fast in my opinion) with a bit of a gut and a couple of scars here and there from where a surgeon or two went into my gut to better my health. Except for the occasional glitch here and there, my body has served me well for all these years – hopefully allowing me to die at the age of 102 from a gunshot wound from a jealous lover.

That’s the goal, anyway.

Part of my “body positivity” has to do with the quarrel I had with cancer last year.

I won.

At least that’s what the doctors have been telling me.

The quarrel has taught me that my body is pretty darn good at taking care of that part of me just under my hairline (and behind my glasses). So, I have been taking steps to better take care of my body and have developed a positive attitude about it. Sometimes it means exposing a little more of me than what many people would expect on a platform like Facebook.

And the reactions have been pretty much what I’ve expected.

Brave? Perhaps, but not really. I do have an advantage my female friends don’t have, which is to be able to display a shirtless photgraph of myself on a supposedly “family friendly” platform. Part of that has to do with comedian Terry Thomas’ monologue about the American preoccupation with “Bosums” in the movie It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Preoccupation, indeed!

I’m just proud of who I am and happy that I’m still able to walk upright with a minimum of fuss in the latter part of my sixties.

Be Seeing You!

Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden

Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden

The other day was writing, I heard an unfamiliar sound, as if something had hit the house. I really didn’t think about it until the kid from across the street was out on the front sidewalk looking a little confused. After a minute or so, I went out and asked him if he was looking for something.

“Yes. A golf ball,” he told me.

Well, we looked for his golf ball, finding it on a corner of the property. He took it back to his place and all was well.

If we didn’t find it, I was willing to give up one of the golf balls I have in my garage. I have a small collection of the things, gathered years ago when I was living with the first wife and the kids in Allen. The high school student living across the street from us would go into his back yard which overlooked a former cotton field and smack golf balls into the field as practice for his high school golf team. After he hit a bunch of balls, he would go out into the field to gather as many of the balls as he could find so he could hit them out again.

He didn’t find all of them. I would regularly go into the same field with my son and/or our dog at the time and gather what the person hitting the balls couldn’t find. I told my son (who was four at the time) that the golf balls grew there naturally, calling it the “Golf Ball Field.”

I took the notion that since I was collecting the neighbor’s left-over golf balls, I wouldn’t mind having a club and smacking a few of them out into the field myself. I requested a club for Christmas. The wife complied, bought a club and showed it to our son.

Fast forward a week or two. It’s a Saturday morning, less than a week before Christmas, and there was a man at our door asking if I would be interested in joining the local Country Club as a Christmas gift to myself. I politely declined, saying that I wasn’t interested in joining as I did not golf.

As I was explaining my position to the gentleman, my son was right behind me, tugging at my trousers: “But Dad… But Dad…”

Now, I didn’t tell him directly that I knew about the club his mother bought for me as a Christmas present, but he did get the idea that one should not spoil a Christmas surprise.

For a few years after that, we would occasionally go out to the “Golf Ball Field,” hit a few balls, and usually find more balls than we hit.

I still have the club and a few of the balls I’ve collected.

Funny thing is, I had a physical education requirement in college – so, I took golf lessons at the college golf course. We learned technique, smacked balls around for a bit, and had loads of fun. Since I was never well funded, most of my golfing experience after college was at one of several local putting greens. A couple of my college classmates are still regular golfers to this day. They love the game. Me, well, I would likely be the guy who would get frustrated at every turn, eventually tossing my bag and all the clubs in it in some water hazard (after mangling a club or two on the way there).

I still have my club. I use it every once in a while to fish out the dog Filbrix’s tennis balls out from under the furniture. As for the golf balls in my collection, the kid across the street is welcome to them if and when he discovers I have them.

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Jerry

Jerry

Wrapping up a few odds and ends on a Sunday afternoon and my thoughts turned to Jerry – a former co-worker of mine when I was selling stuff at one of the “Big Box” stores in my area.

While I was making lunch, I thought that the world could use a few more Jerrys.

Jerry sold grills and lawn equipment. He was good at it, too. He had oodles of advice, most of it I carry with me nearly ten years later. He was customer friendly… maybe a bit too friendly in a good way. He could have sold more mowers if it hadn’t been for the stories he told and the advice he’d give people.

He also tended not to suffer fools gladly. He was advising a customer one afternoon when someone else tried to butt-in to the conversation, demanding Jerry’s attention RIGHT NOW! Jerry told the customer that he would be with him in a minute and continued the conversation he had been having. The other customer pushed back a second, and then a third time. Finally, Jerry told the person trying to interrupt to “I’m with a customer, Buffalo Breath, I’ll help you when I’ve finished.”

The customer didn’t take to being called “Buffalo Breath” – He called Corporate to report him. Corporate called and talked with Jerry. “Is it true that you called a customer Buffalo Breath?” Jerry didn’t deny it. He told us that he was able to tell that he was on speaker phone when he heard the laughter of everyone listening in at corporate.

Now, that wasn’t the first time, nor was it the last time that corporate called to check up on Jerry. He had a disarming sense of humor which was appreciated by the people in North Carolina, but not necessarily by some of his customers here in Texas.

Of Jerry’s co-workers, I cannot say that there was anyone of them who didn’t like him. Even those of us on the other end of the political spectrum (I like to think that Jerry thought that Ronald Reagan was way too liberal for his tastes) respected Jerry. He was one of a kind.

Toward the end of my tenure at the store where we worked, Jerry was in the habit of inviting one or another of his co-workers to lunch at “On the Border.” He had a favorite table and a favorite server. I had the honor of having lunch with him a few days after I left the store. The man was generous to a fault.

A year, maybe two or three after my lunch with Jerry, I learned that he passed while having an operation for some minor little detail. Every one of his former co-workers felt the same way I did about his passing. It was one of those sad days when memories of someone who was truly one of the good guys.

We need more Jerrys in this world.

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Lidsville

Lidsville

I woke up this morning with a post from a friend in Ohio, featuring her latest child. The child is cute as a button (although not quite as cute as my stepdaughter’s slightly older child (sorry, but it’s all relative if you catch my meaning)). The text accompanying the photo had to do with the child having a big head – in the 98th percentile. I have suffered from having a physically big head – big enough so that I cannot wear one of those “One Size Fits All” baseball caps which almost everyone around me is able to wear.

This morning’s post from my friend in Ohio ties in with a couple of discussions both at home and on the internet about hats, and heads, and the place they hold in our hearts.

Not to say that I cannot wear hats. I have one hanging on the small rack by my front door. It’s one I got as a gift from my daughter a few years back when she worked at “The Mad Hatter,” a hat store in Savannah Georgia. It was the second hat I’ve gotten as a gift from the same store. A few years prior to the current hat, I was on a visit to Savannah with the first wife when we wandered into The Mad Hatter. She was aware of the size of my head – and took it upon herself to kid me about it almost incessantly. I told her when we walked into the shop that if she could find a hat which would fit me, I would wear it.

I walked out of the Mad Hatter wearing a Tilley Hat. My size.

The Tilley Hat is distinctive. Made in Canada, it’s probably the only hat I know of which comes with an owner’s manual. The hat itself is seriously overbuilt – the owner’s manual is seriously tongue-in-cheek. One of the instructions with the hat is if one encounters someone else wearing a Tilley Hat, they are to compliment the other person as being someone with good taste and distinction.

When I ran across a photo of a naturist wearing nothing but a Tilley Hat (and nothing else) over the weekend, I naturally complimented him on his good taste and distinction.

The other tie-in to hats came on discussions on Saturday and Sunday. A friend in Rhode Island was telling me about what her daughter did on Saturday mornings. Naturally, for a child that age, she loved watching what cartoons are still running on network television. On Sunday, my better half, for no discernable reason, started singing the theme song from H.R. Puffenstuff, Sid and Marty Croft’s ‘Live Action’ puppet show from the early to mid-seventies.

A bit of background – Back in the sixties, Saturday mornings were a cartoon ghetto, mostly geared as attention getters so Kellogg’s and General Mills could sell their sugary cereals. There was protest about the glut of cartoons, so networks wound up going to the Croft brothers and other producers to come up with whimsical live action shows to appeal to kids.

One of those shows was “Lidsville” – a magical place where everyone other than the three main characters was a hat of some sort. And what a cast for the main characters. The chief protagonist was an overly curious teenager who was sucked into Lidsville, played by Butch Patrick. Yeah. THAT Butch Patrick, better known as “Eddie” from The Munsters! He was assisted by “Witchie-Poo,” played to perfection by Billie Burke. Ms. Burke also appeared in H.R. Puffenstuff. She did a good job as a witch. The chief antagonist was played by Charles Nelson Reilly. No, it should be that the chief antagonist was “Camped Up” by Charles Nelson Reilly (is there anyone from that era that didn’t catch on that CNR was Gay as a Maypole?).

I recall watching Lidsville and immensely enjoying the few episodes I managed to catch. Given the size of my head, Lidsville is, perhaps, the only other place where I could find a hat which fits me!

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Friends

Friends

I spend a fair amount of time on social media applications keeping up with and exploring friendships from around the country and a couple from other parts of the world. Recently I have been conversing with a woman living in one of the New England states who started to follow me out of the blue. What prompted me to follow her back had less to do with her appearance as it did with what she had previously posted.

About once a week, I get unsolicited requests from young women who appear to be just starting out. They usually have very few posts and in those posts, they are wearing very few clothes. The word provocative comes to mind. It’s as if they are inviting me to indulge in… shall we say, less than a “family” friendly behavior. This newest friend posted some really nice photos – post card quality – of places I have not been but would like to.

Nice woman, so far. Let’s see where this goes.

I wrote an Email using my Google Email account this afternoon. It drove the editorial feature batty. By the end of the process, the editor said that I had made several major mistakes. What the editor didn’t take into consideration is that I write a lot like I talk. Way to go, Google editor. I may just bypass Google the next time I do an Email. For the most part, I use Yahoo, sometimes the former Hotmail. Neither of them care much about how I post.

With the addition of the woman living in New England, I’m finding I have lots of friends I am in contact with all over the country. One of my friends, someone I knew from high school, pointed out that many of our friends are “Bookmark” friends. There are long periods when we have no contact, but when something comes up, we’re on the phone or on the internet jabbering away as if our last meeting was yesterday.

Sometimes those are the best friends to have.

Then, too, there are those friends you find by accident. While I was working with a couple a few years ago, the woman remarked that I have a radio voice. She asked if I had worked in radio locally. I told her that I worked mostly in southern Ohio, She almost immediately told me that she listened to me on a station I had worked for. Seems that her younger brother and I were running buddies back in the day. We get together on a semi-regular basis, although with COVID, we haven’t seen or heard from each other as often. I know that I will hear from her husband, though, almost as soon as I post this on the internet.

No matter how a friend comes into your life, a friend is nice to have around… and sometimes the least likely people are the best friends. What makes a friendship is having common interests and/or common goals. I’m finding that to be true, especially now that I’m in the final third of my life.

Here’s to more friends!

Be Seeing You!

Texas Sweet Taxes

Texas Sweet Taxes

Everyone in my corner of the DFW Metromess has their bowels in an uproar this week, with the arrival of the estimated property tax bill sent out by the local tax collector.

Happens every year. The estimated tax bill is sent out and everyone has their bowels in an uproar about it. For the next month or so, there will be a rush to the tax office to protest whatever value the tax people put on their property in hopes of reducing the bill when it comes due next January.

The better half and I are lucky on two fronts. For one, we are both over sixty-five and for us, one of the taxes is frozen. I believe it will be the school tax. For the other, we have what’s called a “Homestead Exemption,” which limits the increase of the taxable value of our house to 10%. Considering a Real Estate listing I saw for a house identical to ours in our subdivision, 10% is quite reasonable.

The listing I saw (and showed to the better half) priced that identical house at $400,000 – more than double what we paid for ours. Given the way home prices are soaring in this general area, it would not surprise me if the seller gets every penny he’s asking for.

What’s nuts is that we are getting people calling/texting/emailing us on a regular basis, offering to buy our house for way more than we paid. The latest offer was between $300 and $350k in cash. What’s even nuttier is that if we accepted that offer, we would have to scramble to find similar accommodations and deal with the higher prices I’d have to pay for something similar – not to mention having to go to the trouble of moving. Again. I mean, since moving to north Texas, I have moved five times. By myself. Even with what help I got; I’m not getting any younger.

Besides, I like where I am. We have what we need. We can accommodate guests. When we don’t have guests, we have enough room for more stuff than we need, along with a separate room I use as a study. The other half has a study, too – when she’s not sharing mine.

As far as the house itself, well, it’s modest. Non-pretentious. The lot is a fair size, it presents somewhat well, and it fits in with the rest of the neighborhood. It is by no means a $400,000 house. Or even a $300,000 house. Even with the solar panels, it would be a stretch to say that the house is worth a quarter of a million dollars. To me, a quarter million is one hell of a lot of money. As a “Person of Lesser Means,” anything more than, say, $100,000 is a hell of a lot of money. So, where do I get off living in a house “worth” $400k?

Still trying to figure it out. In the meantime, I am happy, the better half is happy, and the dog Filbrix is happy with where we are. We can afford the payments and that’s all that counts for the time being.

Be Seeing You!

… and Chips

… and Chips

I had a memory bubble up in my head earlier today, one which would be a continuation of the previous blog, Fish.

The fish shown at the top of that blog (as well as the top of this continuation) were quite delicious “Beer Battered Cod” obtained in a recent trip to Costco. They were served with “Chips,” what the British call “French Fried Potatoes.” I consider myself as much a connoisseur of Fish and Chips as the people on the Aleutian Key were connoisseurs of catfish.

The memory released was one of a trip I made with my children to visit the first wife while she was working in London (England, not Kentucky, Ohio, or Ontario). On our first night there, we decided to go to a nearby fish and chips chop just down the street (or up the street) from the hotel.

The place was best described as a “Hole in the Wall.” It was small, crowded, and not at all like one would find at a restaurant here in the States. There were no pretenses. We sat down at a table with some of the locals and had a choice of what type of fish we could have with our home-made chips.

Our server was a small woman – at most, four-foot-five and maybe ninety pounds soaking wet – who took our order and our money, returning with what I recall was the best (or at least the most authentic) fish and chips I had ever had. Period. Bar none. I was also introduced to “Shandy” and recall seeing a British Television game show called “The Weakest Link.” (Has possibilities, I thought. Sure enough, the show was transplanted here to the U.S. within just a few months)

Up to that point, my favorite fish and chips came from a small chain called “Alfie’s.” One of the few Alfie’s was in Chillicothe Ohio – not too far from where my parents lived. One of the people working for that Alfie’s was a woman I knew from high school. I still keep up with her and occasionally bring up the fact that there’s still an Alfie’s in Lompoc California. The rest of the chain went by the wayside long before the start of the millennium.

Since the trip to London, the best fish and chips I’ve had in the Metromess was in a place named “The Londoner.” They seemed to understand how to properly do cod and chips – and when the local branch changed hands (It’s now named “The Celt”) the recipe transferred to the new owners.

Here in my little corner of the DFW Metromess, we have “Big Spray,” a brew pub with a decent cod and chips. The owner is an avid water skier and transplant from Indiana, hence the name. (I’d mention that he also offers Pork Tenderloin Sandwiches, but since this blog is about fish and chips, I won’t bother to mention it.)

And regarding Long John Silver’s, on occasion, usually when I’m on the road and there’s not a Whataburger nearby. For the record, there is, or at least was, a Long John Silver’s in London. Kentucky.

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(Products and/or services mentioned on this blog are not mentioned in exchange for goods, services, or hard, cold cash.)

Fish

Fish

When last we heard from this intrepid author wanna-be, a blog about micromanagement would be the topic of his next blog. Instead, a word (or several hundred) about fish.

A friend of mine mentioned going to a restaurant the other day and enjoying catfish – while her husband enjoyed cod. His remark about catfish (according to his wife) is that catfish tastes like mud.

I agree. With one exception. I’ll get to that momentarily.

My friend defended catfish by saying that catfish is best prepared by dipping it in buttermilk prior to breading and cooking it. That may be how that one exception was prepared. The only catfish I’ve ever really liked was at a small strip restaurant just around the corner from where I lived in Allen, run by the son of one of the Tuskegee Airmen. It was delicious.

Perhaps my aversion to catfish came about some forty years ago when I was working on an offshore oil rig. I was the northerner on a steel island inhabited mostly by southerners – some of them raised Catholic, meaning that the tradition was that they would eat fish on Fridays. Being southern, the preferred piscatorial delight was catfish. Deep fried catfish in a cornmeal batter. It was… okay, I recall, but there was a mud-flavored overtone which didn’t really appeal to me.

I ate it, in hopes that someday, something better would come along.

The promise that something better would come along came around in the summer of ’82 when the rig I was on was towed from the Gulf of Mexico to a point in the Atlantic Ocean about a hundred miles off Martha’s Vinyard. It was reportedly a prime fishing area, home to a large variety of fish in large numbers – surely enough to supply a drilling rig with something other than southern catfish for a change. That promise was broken. The quartermaster ordered massive amounts of farm-bred catfish to be sent to Massachusetts for the consumption by the mostly southern crew for Friday dinners.

I did manage to treat myself at a decent restaurant in Boston before getting on an airplane to go back home to Houston.

Houston, and by extension, Galveston, was a great place to get decent fish other than catfish. I became particularly fond of Gaido’s in Galveston for the many ways they managed to prepare shrimp. Another favorite was just around the corner from my Aunt and Uncle’s home on the west side of Houston. It was there that I sampled and came to like escargot and Spanish paella.

After moving back to Ohio for a few years, the first wife and I became enamored of a couple of places to indulge in seafood – Mauger’s in Lancaster Ohio, and the Friday night seafood buffet at the Holiday Inn in Parkersburg West Virginia. On the first trip to the Holiday Inn, the first wife declared ahead of time that she would absolutely not eat snail. Period. End of discussion, until she had two or three pastries which she just loved. I told her the truth about the pastries when asked. Yes, they contained snail!

I have to go the next town over from my little corner of the DFW Metromess to get decent seafood (we have nearly two dozen places to purchase tacos here, making purchasing tacos from the outside somewhat illegal in my reckoning). Yes, catfish is still available, but never considered, at least by me, to be a viable alternative to almost any other seafood.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to prepare cod and chips for this afternoon’s lunch.

Be Seeing You!

The Naked Truth

The Naked Truth

If you are offended by nudity or the mention of nudity, you may as well turn around and wait for my next blog – probably having to do with micromanagement (or mismanagement – your choice).

I’ll wait…

We’re probably safe, now. Let me begin.

I got into a conversation on Facebook here in the past week having to do with planting cucumbers. According to someone’s book of lore, cucumbers are best planted in the early morning hours on the first of May by a naked boy. That’s just a couple of weeks away. Since the better half likes cucumbers and I’m usually up before the sun, I thought that I might just try planting cucumbers in the early morning hours of the first of May. Having the prescribed “equipment,” I qualify as a boy. Besides, I thought the first Saturday of May is usually designated as World Naked Gardening Day. Never mind. May first is on a Sunday. So why not? Unless one of my neighbors decides to stay out and watch me (which I really doubt as I don’t believe any of my neighbors read this blog), I might just go ahead and plant those cucumbers as prescribed.

The dog Filbrix will likely go out with me as she usually has business in the wee hours of the morning anyway. She watches me shower, so no big deal for her.

Well. The conversation on Facebook took the turn one would usually have when the conversation on Facebook turns toward being out of doors in one’s birthday suit. The story of when and how to plant cucumber seeds came from a woman of my acquaintance and the next thing I know the conversation became a bit risqué with what I would call “the usual comments” people have when nudity is mentioned. There are lots of grins and giggles, along with raised eyebrows and declarations that being outside in the nude is something which just isn’t done.

“If we were meant to run around without clothes, we’d have been born naked!”

Yeah. Right.

As I’ve aged, my attitude toward nudity has shifted. Maybe I should say that my attitude toward my own nudity has shifted. Part of that has to do with some of the scars I have accumulated over the years as a result of modifications made to keep me alive. Those scars aren’t necessarily pretty, but on the other hand, I’d much rather have them instead of having to go through the suffering I would have had had I not had them. Too, I’m a tad heavier than maybe I should be (Iost 35 pounds last year, but still, another 50 pounds over what I consider to be an ideal weight). I may not be an Adonis, but I am secure of who I am in my own skin.

While I’m secure in my body image, I am not going to demonstrate my security in public. Now, there are times when I step out of the shower, hang up my bath towel and not bother to dress for a few minutes – or even a few hours. I’ve been outside in the buff in a private setting, have been skinny dipping, and have even visited a naturist resort. Going outside in the early morning hours to plant cucumbers in my opwn back yard while wearing my birthday suit would be a lark.

Besides, the dog Filbrix would likely need to go out to relieve herself at that hour. It’s what she does.

Laugh if you will or consider making a snarky comment. It is considered to be socially acceptable to laugh or make snarky comments about a male thinking of going au Naturale. “No photos. Please!” is the usual line. Our “hangy down parts” are not considered to be photogenic anyway – unless of course, those parts are inordinately large.

Again, I’m no Adonis. I’ll settle for who I am and for planting cucumbers in the dark!

Be Seeing You!