It’s always SOMETHING

Some days, I wonder why any of us bother to get up in the morning.

It’s not as though we don’t have enough to worry about, what with the economy in a shambles in just about every place that has an economy. And of course there’s politics, speaking of shambles, with a president on one side whose opinion polls put him somewhere in the neighborhood of a fart in church, and the opposition party offering up a field of candidates who come off as a bad hybrid of Keystone Cops and extras from Night of the Living Dead.

With all this in the air, I go online to read some nature news, thinking that will get me out of the mind-set that the world as we know it is coming to an end.

Big Mistake.

On one website, I learn that a piece of ice twice the size of Philadelphia is cracking off from the Antarctic ice shelf. The crack so far is about 20 miles long and up to 200 feet deep, and growing at a rate of nearly seven feet per day.

And it’s not even caused by “global warming.” I forget just now what the scientific term for the effect is, but it basically means “s**t happens.”

The whole thing is supposed to break off and start drifting around in the open sea later this year or early next year. Earth on the rocks, shaken, not stirred.

Nobody seems all that concerned. Maybe I shouldn’t be either. On the other hand, having a chunk of ice the size of a small South American nation bobbing around in the ocean just doesn’t sound like good news. Twice the size of Philly? At least it will be cleaner.

And then there’s the asteroid.

The news outlets describe it as an “aircraft carrier-sized asteroid, a little over four football fields in diameter.” It will pass by our little old home planet, closer to us than the moon.

And the moon is only about 250,000 miles away.

That sounds like a far piece, but in astronomic terms, that’s like having a bullet pass by your head close enough that you can hear it buzz.

It’s supposed to pass us by this coming Tuesday. Just so you know.

NASA, known for calling the catastrophic explosion of a Delta 2 rocket as “an anomaly,” has classified the asteroid as a “potentially hazardous object.”

There was a time when if NASA said it would be a near miss, I’d relax. But not too long ago, the space agency aimed a satellite at Mars and missed the whole freaking planet, so, yeah, I’m gonna chew my nails just a little bit.

If this asteroid hits, it won’t be the end of the world, but it will bust things up pretty well. It would make a 4,000 megaton blast, (nearly 20,000 times the force of the bomb that fried Nagasaki), a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. If it hits the ocean, it could cause a tsunami 70 feet high. The tsunamis that hit Japan earlier this year were no more than a third that high.

One of the wire service stories said “Encounters of objects this large this close to our planet won’t happen again until the year 2028…” That one will be a wee bit closer than this one. Wonderful.

I closed the laptop and turned on CNN, only to see some goon in a suit dodging questions on his candidacy. I flipped over to the USA Network to an NCIS re-run. Give me over-the-top violence and improbable stunts any day. It beats watching a planet on the rocks and under fire, and anyway, I’d rather see the bad guys get blown away than elected.

Some Random Thoughts at the launch of 2010, and a Thought on Health Care Coverage.

Happy New Year!

For those of us of a certain age, writing “2010” is a real adventure.

I write for a newspaper for most of my living, a trade that seems to be fairly precarious these days. I’ve stopped reading articles in the trade journals. They made me feel like a sword-swallower with hand tremors.

So. 2010 is the sort of date we all saw written in science fiction stories when we were kids. Years beginning with the digit 2 were the Years of The Future.

And here we are. Funny, it doesn’t look all that much the way the sci-fi writers thought it would.

I distinctly remember we were supposed to have colonies on the moon, and probably on Mars. Every home would have a car that would fly. People would wear form-fitting clothing that looked like it was made out of spandex.

Energy mostly came from safe nuclear fusion reactors.

Look around.

Obviously, we missed a step, here and there.

The closest thing we have to a space colony – outside of Congress — is the International Space Station. Think of an Airstream trailer with solar panels.

Our cars? Well, except for some hybrid vehicles, the basic technology of the automobile is the same as it was in Henry Ford’s day, with sexier bodywork. Today’s cars don’t go airborne unless something has gone terribly wrong.

Some people wear form-fitting spandex clothing. Few of them look good in it.

Our energy still comes from old-fashioned sources, hydro-electric, coal, and a few generation plants powered by nuclear fission. Fusion reactors cannot maintain a nuclear reaction and so will not melt-down, and produce little or no nuclear waste. No more TMI nonsense.

Naturally, nobody has been able to figure out how to make a fusion reactor yet that didn’t take more energy to run than it produced.

So, we’ve still got poverty, as always, wars everywhere, as always, and a nation that seems to have no sense of adventure, certainly nothing like it had 40 years ago when humans left their first footprints – and their first junk – on the face of the moon.

This is not to say that I’m one of those old crabs who think nothing has turned out right.

Well, not much has turned out right, but I’m not all that crabby about it.

Today is my 25th anniversary as a newspaper reporter. That much time in these trenches teaches you that few things turn out as planned, usually cost more than they were supposed to, and are usually late to boot.

I come from an era of party lines and rotary-dial phones, black-and white TV, from a time when everything in the world was far away and a long distance call was a marvel, even if filled with hisses and odd acoustical events. And it seemed as though everybody read the newspaper.

Earlier this week, I watched a TV program on my iPod.

I regularly check the weather, read and send email, and take photos and video on my cell phone.

Sometimes I even talk on it.

Attending government meetings or court hearings, my colleagues and I often write stories and file them on-line…while the meeting or court business is still going on.

Every news story and most of the contacts I have made in the past quarter century exist as a pattern of electrons on my laptop or an external hard-drive. A few years back, I ditched four file cabinet drawers full of files, because almost everything that was in them is available on-line in less time than it would take me to walk over and find the file.

And, to be honest, I usually read my own paper online in the morning before I make the 50 mile trek to work where I can get my hands on a dead-tree version.

Yeah, the news industry is going through a lot of changes right now. I have no idea what will happen next. That’s scary, especially for those of us on the shady side of 60 with pesky things like mortgage payments to keep up with.

Even so, it’s also exciting. When the dust settles, there will still need to be people who can sort fact from conjecture and rhetoric and tell a good story.

I hope I’m still one of them, partly because I can’t afford to retire in this economy anyway, and because reporting has GOT to be more fun than shuffleboard.

I think of the opening of this new decade the way a novice skydiver looks at the open door of the airplane on his first jump.

Enough talk. Let’s get to it.

AND ANOTHER THING:

This is just something to think about.

On Christmas Day, independent singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt died in Athens, Ga.

He was 45.

He died from an overdose of muscle-relaxants.

Chesnutt was partially paralyzed from a car crash when he was 18.  He got around by wheelchair.

He was facing a lawsuit filed by the local regional hospital following surgeries that left him owing about $70,000.

Chesnutt, who was signed to a Canadian record label, often worked with musicians from there. In an earlier interview with the Athens Banner-Herald, Chesnutt said his band mates were stunned by his situation.

“…It’s something that blows their minds; there’s nowhere else in the world that I’d be facing the situation I’m in right now. They cannot understand what kind of society would inflict that on their population. It’s terrifying…I’ve been nearly suicidal over it,” he said.
In other news, CNN reported just last week that tests performed on conservative talk-show guru Rush Limbaugh after he was admitted to a hospital for chest pains found nothing wrong.

The network reported that Limbaugh praised the work of the medical staff.

“The treatment I received here was the best that the world has to offer….I don’t think there’s one thing wrong with the American health care system. It is working just fine.”

I would like to note two things.

1.    The health care debate has not been about the quality of health care available to Americans. If they can pay for it. It has been about who can pay for it. Meaning, who can get, afford, and keep health insurance.

2.    In the summer of 2008, Rush Limbaugh signed an eight-year deal to stick with his radio show. The deal is reportedly worth $400 million, with a $100 million signing bonus.

3.    Vic Chesnutt may have committed suicide because he was being sued for as much money as Limbaugh makes in about three hours.

Just something to think about.
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© 2010 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

Just Lucky

It is Thanksgiving. I know you knew that, but I had to start somewhere.

Visions of turkeys at my grandmother’s house get stronger as the smells from the kitchen grow stronger.

We sometimes had Thanksgiving at the homes of other relatives, but I only remember the ones at Nana’s. Heaping bowls of buttery mashed potatoes, tureens of gravy, piles of fresh rolls, casseroles of one kind or another involving green vegetables and thus suitable to be ignored by boys of a certain age.

In the center, of course, would loom the turkeys.

To a kid my age, they were always enormous, a wall of poultry, steaming, savory, the epitome of temptation.

OK, this was before puberty, and my range of temptations was still fairly narrow. But still. Oh. My. God.

I am feel more fondly now of toward some of the people at that table, looking back, than I did then. For one thing, most of them are dead, and it seems unkind to feel otherwise.

It was the usual mix: Mom and Dad, my brother, my grandmother, resigned and unhappy, her own mother, sour, mean of eye and the reason for the dispirited expression in Nana’s face. Assorted other relatives filled the chairs. The older I get, the less distinct their faces become.

They were possessed of the usual hodge-podge of human frailties and strengths, drawn by accidents of birth and a circled date on the calendar to sit down at a feast of gratitude.

Thanksgiving is an ancient word, and an older concept, giving praise to whatever deity you worship for what you have been given. Not that we are required to worship a deity to be grateful. This has long troubled me as a practical atheist. I finally decided it was perfectly logical to feel gratitude for simply being lucky as hell, or at least luckier than you likely deserve.

In a little while I will close this laptop and join a dozen other people at a table groaning with two turkeys and all the accompanying glories of excess, as three dogs roam around the table like religious pilgrims, seeking epiphanies.

It does not take a flash of comprehension for me to know how very lucky I am. I have people who, mysteriously, both know and like me, despite my obvious failings. I have never known serious hunger, been homeless, or suffered many of the insults to self-respect that human culture can pile on. I am in frequent contact with truly amazing people.

Yes, I could win a big lottery. Against all common sense and my own advice, I sometimes buy a ticket, because, well, you never know. But I’m really fine without it. I’m lucky, and I know it, through no effort or grace of my own. How did it happen?

Beats the hell out of me.

Happy Thanksgiving.

==============================.

© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.

Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

Godzilla rediscovers Badminton

The Kid is 13. He is nearly as tall as I and skinny enough that I think he must have to run around in the shower to get wet.

I am, for reasons that are not clear, on the other side of a badminton net from him.

He is beating the crap out of me.

Correction, it’s not a net, but a clothesline, but that’s a quibble. Also, The Kid’s mom is playing beside me. She is a smart lady, and pretty much stays out of my way.

Oh, yeah, I’m a Badminton-playing devil. I am everywhere at once, racquet whistling through the air, my lithe form bounds like a gazelle from one end of the court to the other….

Well, that’s the fantasy. The closest I came to playing badminton like that was the last time I had played it, when I was about the age this kid is now, nearly four decades ago, when dinosaurs walked the Earth.

He’s Sue’s grandson, full of that goofy, manic energy that kids get when they are growing at the rate of about an inch an hour and they’re interested in everything but holding still.

I, on the other hand, am discovering why it is that all those people I see about my health — my trainer, assorted medical professionals and a chiropractor – tell me I need to get out and MOVE more.

Apparently, sometime over the past five or six years I turned to stone, as though I had caught a fleeting glimpse of Medusa as she drove past in her limo. I can move, sure, but it’s less a thing of nerve and sinew than it is a geological process, like watching a mountain erode.

The Kid slams the birdie my way. It comes in high, and then dives for the grass just barely on my side of the clothesline. I see that I am too far back. JUMP! My brain flashes to my body.

“Huh?” My body responds. “Me? NOW? All the way over THERE?”

The birdie lands ingloriously on the grass. I lumber over toward it, bend ever so slowly and pluck it out of the lawn. I am pretty sure I can hear a sound like rusty gate hinges. I turn and lurch toward my corner of the court. I have a clear image in my mind of Godzilla klutzing his way through Tokyo, racquet clenched firmly in his knobby hands.

We play a fast series of volleys, during which I hit the birdie about six times. Two of those hits were accidental. Godzilla flailing at the buzzing fighter planes. Oops, there goes the train station. Yikes! Sorry about that bridge.

During one graceless lunge, I turn my ankle. I am wheezing and wheeling like a drunken buffalo. The Kid finally calls the game by the simple expedience of jumping on the nearby trampoline. He starts bounding and flipping like a spider on a griddle, or a stretched out version of the Energizer Bunny having a seizure.

I see him trying to figure if he can leap from the trampoline to the rope swing hanging from the adjacent tree-house, but it’s too far. I hobble over, clear the rope, and hold it next to the trampoline. His eyes light up. He boings fiercely, then arcs through the air and grabs the knot I have tied halfway up the rope for a hand-hold, and swings out across the lawn, a scrawny Tarzan.

He runs back to the trampoline and shouts that he wants to do it again. I have a brief, mean thought that I could jerk the rope out of the way just as he goes for it, just to be mean.

I don’t, of course. We do the trampoline/rope thing about six times before he lands at a run and takes off for the farm pond, hitting the little aluminum rowboat in a flying leap. I groan and stagger over to stand on the dock and watch. He hooks a bungee cord to the dock and the rear of the boat and laughing, rows hard away from the dock, only to be pulled backwards to where he started.

“This is fun!” he shouts.

“It’s good practice!” I shout back.

He doesn’t get it. He will.
==============================.
© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

Killing two birds with one stone: 25 Things About Me, (with apologies to Facebook, where all this nonsense started.)

(OK, I wasn’t going to do this thing because I’m oddly shy about doing stuff like this. Helluva position for somebody who compulsively writes expository column, but there it is.)

1. I was born in Sharon, Pa., right on the Ohio line and about 60 miles north of Pittsburgh. When I lived there, as a little boy, it was the capital of The American Dream, a steel town when steel was king. The factory where my dad was an engineer employed 17,000 people. At 4:30, when he got off work, it was like watching a kicked anthill, thousands of people, mostly men, boiling out of the office and plant doors, clogging the streets of the city with cars. Today, Sharon is mostly known for its chicken wings (The Quaker Steak and Lube) and for a vocal group hall of fame.

2. My first job was as an underage laborer for a franchise of Greyhound Moving & Storage. I was 17 with pipestem arms. It was summertime in a Georgia town full of three-story Victorian houses. I got fired after a 200-pound freezer with 100 pounds of meat in it fell on me. I wasn’t hurt, but the owner was afraid I’d sue. The experience almost cured me of the desire to work. My next two jobs were as a donut glazer (and delivery driver) at a bakery, and then as an apprentice mortician and ambulance attendant. I got fired from the donut job because I drove the delivery van, respectfully, down the ranks of sailors at a naval facility during the playing of reveille. The visiting admiral was really pissed off. Before I became I reporter, I had worked at 42 different places, doing some colorful things, from picking up road kill to running a garbage company to running the switchboard at a hospital and driving concrete mixers.

3. I got most of my real education on my own, through reading and living and talking to people smarter than I am, whose numbers are legion. I graduated with a B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, for what it’s worth. I’m not one of those people who still gets giddy and acts stupid when the football team from the college he left decades ago plays a game. I spent little time on campus outside of classes because I was working, sometimes as many as three jobs at a time while taking 15 hours of courses. So, no, I didn’t enjoy campus life, though I enjoyed some of the classes. I made the dean’s list twice. The first time, I didn’t know what that meant and thought I was in trouble. I’m still not sure how I pulled that off. All told, I was a mediocre scholar, only exerting myself in courses that interested me.

4. I love books and reading, and I’m always battling my TV addiction to have time to indulge myself. I don’t retain what I read as well as I used to. I find that as I get more and more years as a professional writer behind me, the less patient I am with bad writing in books. Bad writing gets between me and the topic or plot. It’s like reading through a chain-link fence. I joined the Goodreads website and have found some really good books by doing that, and have had some good discussions about books. It’s sort of a virtual book-discussion group for people who don’t feel like going out.

5. Sue and I have an embarrassment of cats. They are “owned,” insofar as one can actually “own” a cat, in three layers. We have one cat, Kitten Kaboodle, who lives in the main part of the house and sleeps on my left arm when I’m working on my laptop. That is, when she’s not attacking my feet. In the big room off the deck are seven, Mr. Bit, fat Scooter (aka Rotunda), one-eyed Winkie, Daphne, Chloe, and Sootfoot. Sprite, the seventh, is actually one of the feral outside cats who slipped in one day and hides out in my office. We have  been unable to catch her and put her back outside. Outside it’s more complicated, with a loose affiliation of felines  we feed, though some of them wander up and down the creek bank, mooching off other families. This morning the count was 13.

6. I am an unapologetic atheist, but I have a spiritual nature. This is not as confusing as you might think. At one point in a piece I’ve been working on for more than a year, I remark that “God gave us minds so that we might figure out that he doesn’t exist.”  At the same time, I admire people who have strong faith, because I’ve seen people like that get through some terrible things without being broken. But I think that strength came from within them.

7. At the present, I am just six weeks from my 60th birthday. I am annoyed with myself that I’ve started referring to myself as a geezer. I have even started giving young people advice. Just shoot me. Please. Seriously, other than a few squeaky joints and stuff, I don’t FEEL old. Mostly.

8. While we’re on aging, I was a bookworm with arms like soda straws when I was in my teens, but a summer throwing beer kegs around at a beverage distributor turned that around. Most of the jobs I had until I became a journalist involved moving heavy things from point A to point B. The result of that was that I was in pretty good shape. The result of that, in addition to a couple of motorcycle accidents, falling off a moving train, and this or that, here and there, is my back in X-rays looks like a ruined amusement park. A quarter century sitting in front of computers has done nothing for my boyish figure. I work out at a gym twice a week, job permitting, but I still manage to look more like Junior Samples from the old TV show Hee-Haw than Brad Pitt. This impression is not lessened by the fact that my outfit of choice on weekends involves bib overalls, which I consider the most comfortable item of clothing ever invented.

9. I like to cook, but not if it involves reading a recipe or too many steps or pots. My favorite thing to prepare is a dish I made up years ago that involves chicken, lots of spices and veggies and pita bread or burrito shells. One pot, lots of flavor. I’m not terribly conservative in what I’ll eat, but if given my “druthers,” I’ll take a good hamburger every time. And forget sushi. Where I come from, it’s called “bait.”

10. Fortunately, Sue is an excellent cook and learned a lot of her culinary sorcery during seven years living in Paris. I never know what to expect for supper, and I say that with the most admiration possible.

11. Speaking of food, in 1995 we bought a garden with a house attached. I had never before owned a piece of real estate. I stood in the garden one day with a rock in my hand, realizing that the rock was something like 3 billion years old, give or take, but the law said I owned it. I still find the concept absurd, but it did mean that I could actually have a garden. Gardening is not as successful for me now as it was in the years when I worked out of my home office, before I had a two-hour daily commute. I confess to being a so-so gardener. I don’t deal with the heat as well as I once did. But the garden is a frequent source of columns and constant trigger for things to think about. That means, admittedly, that I spend a lot of my gardening time leaning on some implement and staring into space as the weeds grow merrily along. I try to convince my neighbor Dan that this really IS work for a writer. Dan has another word for it.

12. I grew up in the Deep South, but have no love for heat and humidity. Every year we travel to the coast of Maine for two weeks of reading and relaxing in a little wooden cottage not much bigger than our living room. We go in late September or early October. The local libraries and good restaurants are still open, and we can walk on the shore without stepping over greased tourists.

13. A friend who tagged me with her own “25 things about me” list wrote that she enjoys listening to music but is “often stumped as to who or what that was.” That confession fills me with relief. I’ve always been that way. I listen to a lot of classical music, especially on my iPod at work to drown out the hubbub of the newsroom. I think there are maybe two or three pieces I can recognize. But I’ve never thought of enjoying great music as a trivia game. It’s the music that’s important. If somebody asks me what’s playing, I’m likely to respond “Oh, that’s Dusseldorf’s Carbuncle in nothing flat.”

14. I also like many other kinds of music; though country and western is often funny when it’s not supposed to be, and rap I view as more of a symptom than an art form. And no, that’s not meant as a racist remark. Ugly is ugly. Heavy metal would be impressive if they never showed us photographs of the actual bands. Most of them seem to be skinny chinless white doofi with bad attitudes and worse skin. Drop a Southern boy raised on biscuits and fried chicken into the middle of the group and watch some ass-kicking.

15. For some reason, I can’t understand the words in a lot of music, especially rock n’ roll. Thank God for the Internet. If I want to know what the singers are saying, I can look up the lyrics. I usually avoid doing that because all too often I discover that the lyrics are totally inane or lacking sense. Sense is not always necessary (I mean, it’s rock n’ roll, after all,) but you have to draw the line somewhere.

16. On the other hand, I have a bunch of what they call “world music” on my iPod. None of the songs are in English. In fact, some of the languages I can’t name at all. You’d be surprised how very little it matters. One of the weirdest things I ever heard was somebody rapping in Italian.

17. I have a son. He doesn’t know I exist. The circumstances of his birth would have been scandalous in another time. Today nobody cares, but I’m not proud. The situation included too much rum and not enough judgment. He is 31 and lives in a nice house in a Southern state. As far as I know, he believes that the man who raised him is his father. I would love to know him, but I don’t believe I have the right to land in the middle of his life and tell him he is somebody else.

18. I have lived in a number of fairly exotic places, and all of them were east of the Mississippi. A place doesn’t have to be far away to be strange. I live now just outside of Gettysburg, a place I have often described as “Norman Rockwell on LSD.” I grew up in Athens, Ga., famous as both the home of the University of Georgia and for being to New Wave music what Detroit was to soul music. I worked blue collar jobs for the first 35 years of my life, so I knew Athens the way most of my University friends did not. I lived for a time in public housing, where it was not uncommon to be awakened in the middle of the night by gunfire. I stood at the door of my second-story apartment and watched two men slice one another up with knives.  I also lived in the Mississippi Delta, in the middle of Blues Country. I think of myself as a Southerner in many ways, and my accent comes back when I tell certain stories, when I’ve been drinking, or when I want somebody I’m interviewing to think I’m stupid. Yankees usually think Southerners are dimwits. It’s a mistake.

18. I met Sue on Memorial Day in 1985. I was covering a hot-air balloon race for The Gettysburg Times. From a balloon, no less. We landed in her back yard. We didn’t really get to know one another until years later, but that’s when we met. You can’t make this stuff up.

19. I couldn’t say which season is my favorite. It’s not summer, though there is a lot to like about summer. It’s the other three I can’t make up my mind about. The colors of winter are my favorites. Winter is really the most colorful season, though the colors are all muted and subtle. Maybe that’s what I like about them. Autumn foliage is gorgeous, of course, if bordering on cheesy, and breathtaking. But my favorite thing about autumn is that sense of the world rushing to get everything put away before winter strikes. Leaves off the trees: check. Acorns hidden by squirrels: check. Spring, is maybe the most magical, when everything comes back from the dead, and no matter how many springs I see, each one really is brand-new.

20. Almost every word I write nowadays is on a computer, either on the desktop at work or, more likely, on my own laptop. I have said many times that if reporters still had to use typewriters, I’d still be driving a truck. I make too many mistakes to be a great typist, though I can go pretty fast when inspired. Truth be told, I really like to write, by hand, in a journal. My preference for a writing instrument is a fountain or cartridge pen. I can’t say why, but my penmanship is better with that kind of pen, and for some odd reason, I feel smarter when I use one. Reading back over my journal entries, I can tell you that there is no empirical evidence to support that feeling. Oh, well.

21. I love where I live. We bought the cottage in ’95, when it was almost 75 years old. I don’t know exactly who built it, but the people who have worked on it assure me that the builder was no carpenter. The house sits along Marsh Creek above a dam, so the water is about 100 feet across at this point. The creek has carp the size of torpedoes, all sorts of waterfowl, including blue herons and night herons, the occasional osprey, and every so often, a bald eagle or two. There is also a snapping turtle the size of a TV tray. I think about it when I’m in the creek. Actually I try NOT to think about it when I’m in the creek.

22. We had the house remodeled five years ago. We went a little overboard, but this was The Dream House. Whole weekends can go by and we will scarcely leave the property. Some days it really is hard to peel myself away from here to go sit in a big gray box and write stories. Coming home feels like solid ground under my feet after a long swim.

23. I work for the third largest newspaper in Pennsylvania. Most days I love the job, which is about as good a thing you can say about any job. Some days I’m better at it than others. Some days, I think I should have stuck with driving trucks. Some days, I think my boss does, too.

24. This year I’m celebrating my birthday at the Greenmount Community Fire Co. No. 23. The fire hall is about a quarter mile from my house. No, the fire company is not throwing a party for me; they’re having one of their fund-raising feeds, featuring roast beef and stuff. The tickets are 20 bucks and along with the meal you get a chance to win a gun. I think it’s a high-powered rifle. I was touched to discover that 20 of my friends have asked me to reserve tickets for them. I prefer to think it’s not because they hope to win the gun.

25. I had a pep talk with one of my young colleagues the other day. She’s one of those more recent hires, all of whom are younger than some of my ties. I told her I wished I was 30 again, and not just for the obvious “wait! I was having a good time” reasons. Newspapers are going through a lot of crap lately, and none of them is going to come out of this uproar unscathed. The next five years are going to be ugly. On the upside, I believe that there will always be a need for people who do what we do. All this talk about relying on “citizen journalists” is fine, but the bottom line is that reporters, most of us, anyway, really do have a code of ethics and rules for how we do things, and nobody is harder on us when we slip up than we are ourselves. Once everything settles down and news-reporting catches up to news-gathering, things are going to be interesting and exciting and we can all stop eating so many antidepressants. I really believe that.
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© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

The Fabulous Flying Armoire

(First published July 12, 1995, re-issued because of a discussion at a Christmas party last night. I’ve made a few tweaks, but left the original time references.)

It was a thing of beauty, all right. A genuine do-it-yourself reproduction of an old-fashioned armoire.

“Armoire” is a French word that roughly translates to “a large piece of furniture used as a closet back in the days when they built houses without them.”

More or less.

Anyway, I bought a matched pair of the things seven or eight months ago at a specialty shop near Harrisburg. Better than six feet tall and built of lustrous North Carolina white pine, they were to fill an important function at the new house, which has closets designed for use by hobbits.

The Fabulous Flying Armoire

We wrestled the things downstairs without too much trouble. My friend Mike noted on the way down that he’d seen the box the armoire had come in, and that it weighed 80-some pounds. It didn’t seem the time to mention that each armoire had come in two boxes, each of which weighed 80-some pounds. Timing, as they say, is everything.

Anyway, the two armoires were strapped down into my friend Alan’s pickup truck and, after a few hundred more items were packed into it and the rented U-Strain, off we went to the new house.

Naturally, being in the truck ahead of Alan’s, I missed the best part.

In some varieties of the Christian religion, it is believed that in the final days, all the Saved will ascend directly to Heaven, thereby avoiding the unpleasantness of dying and all.

Possibly the tree from which one of the armoires had been made had grown near a small church in which one of these intense and often noisy sects had practiced. Maybe it was haunted.

Whatever the explanation, somewhere just to the south of where General Pickett’s lot skewered themselves on the bayonet of History, my armoire began to twitch and tug at its moorings, designed to keep it from moving from side-to-side and front-to- back.

Alan, driving along placidly at about 40, had no idea of the wooden epiphany that was occurring in the back of his Ford.

The green truck chugged southward toward Marsh Creek. The white armoire tugged ever more furiously at the bonds that held it to the surly bungees of Earth.

In the car behind, Mike, Maria and Brian were yelling and gesturing wildly, probably at Alan, possibly to the armoire itself, attempting to establish communications with an alien species.

The truck shuddered. The armoire shrugged the bungees aside, free at last.

Gleaming in the sun under a perfect sky, it ascended toward Heaven.

A little.

They tell me it seemed to hang there, in that peaceful way things do during disasters, then began a sort of stiff curtsy toward the green berm rushing by beneath it.

The spell was broken, along with everything else, when the armoire met the roadway. For a split second, everything seemed fine. Then, splendid smooth pine shivered, the sunlight dancing off it in a thousand directions, and suddenly the armoire was a galaxy of oddly shaped boards, hodge-podged over the southbound lane of the Emmitsburg Road.

My friends collected the debris and brought it here to the new house, and told the rest of us what had happened. They sometimes took turns, sometimes talked all at once. There was a lot of arm-waving.

The pieces of the armoire lie on the back porch now, the light of the white pine dimmer, like a fire almost extinguished.

I had a friend once, a short order cook by trade. He tried to describe to me his conversion to one of those charismatic religions, and how he had felt afterward, both elevated by the experience, and shattered by it.

The armoire reminds me a little of him. I believe there is nothing for me to do but to attempt to put it back together again. I am one of those who believe that with faith and enough Elmer’s, nearly anything can be made whole.

Besides, how could I not? This is the armoire that defied gravity, that rose white as a fish into the sunlight, if only for a moment. I shall glue it together, a sort of utilitarian relic, to stand in an honored place among my other furniture, scarred and holy.

FOOTNOTE: Some time later, I think it was that winter, I actually assembled a couple of sawhorses, an assortment of clamps, and the dependable Elmer’s Carpenter’s Glue, and got to work. It took a week or more, maybe two. Some of the pieces were no more than a few inches long. For years, the reassembled armoire’s right-hand door had a panel on the inside that bore the tire-marks from Brian’s little blue Hyundai. I swore we’d never paint over that…but we did. I wish we hadn’t.

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© 2008 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
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Crossing Paths

It was Saturday. Like most folks who commute to a job some distance away, it was a chance to putter around with all sorts of things I can’t get to during the week, like gardening, cleaning out the shed in the back of the garage, which I call “The Barn,” because it’s easier than saying “the shed in the back of the garage,” working in the workshop, stuff like that.

One of the errands this weekend was to load up a bunch of recyclable stuff into the truck and take it all over to the recycling center, operated by the local church-run rescue mission for homeless men.

I wore my usual weekend work duds; torn camouflage jersey, stocking cap, not-very-clean denim bib overalls that still smelled smoky from an earlier barn-cleaning/trash burning operation, and worn-out work boots.

As usual, there were several mission residents helping folks sort and toss their recyclables. Typically, their appearance runs a gamut of sorts, but most look like they got a boot caught in Life’s stirrup and got dragged a ways.

A couple of the guys were helping a fellow in a burgundy SUV unload some bags of this and that.

I got everything, glass, plastic, cardboard, clothing, out of the truck and into the bins by myself.

As I was walking back toward the truck, the driver of the SUV gave me what I thought was a very brotherly look and said, with warmth, “Thank you.” Then he got into his SUV and trundled off.

I stood there, puzzled. Why in the world was he thanking ME?

 Then, I looked down at my comfortable and very functional wardrobe, and it hit me. He thought I was one of the residents.

We got a pretty good laugh out of that, for awhile.

Then I got to thinking of all the paths I took that led me to where I am now, and all the paths those other guys took that led them to where they are now. I thought about how often those paths crossed and tangled, and how I ended up on a lucky path a time or two, sometimes more out of luck than by intent.

 I also remembered stealing food, many years ago, so my wife could eat.

Long ago, a friend and teacher said there were no such things as luck or accidents. But she was an academic and always had been, and I suspect had not mis-stepped often in her life. I think those who believe they know where the road they’re on leads are fooling themselves, or praying out loud, or whistling their way past the graveyard.

So far, we don’t have GPS units for fate.

Probably in about a month, I’ll be back with another load for the Mission. I’ll haul the bags to the bins, and thank the guys who offer to help. And maybe actually help unload somebody else.

After all, one never knows where the path will lead someday, and it might be there.

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© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

Do guardian angels qualify for hazardous duty pay?

Several people have requested that I run this column from August of 2004. As it happened, Just a few days ago I was flying down I-81 in my pickup truck when I ran over some sort of debris, slicing a big gash in one of my tires. The tractor trailer behind me was close enough I could count the bugs in its radiator. I managed to get to the shoulder without getting flattened. I took a deep breath and looked over to my guardian angel. She was hodling her head in her hands and groaning. “Not again!” She said.

So, here’s the re-run. “Dillsburg” is a town in southcentral Pennsylvania that I once covered for the newspaper I work for:

 

I had a close call coming out of an alley in Dillsburg the other day. My fault. Just wasn’t paying attention and almost got myself whacked. Of course, if the other guy hadn’t pretended to be Dale Earnhardt….but that’s not the point.

As it was, I had to give another thumbs up to my guardian angel. And I made a mental note to be more careful: The old girl’s not as nimble as she used to be. You’ll know her if you see her: lots of band aids, a patch over one eye, a permanent case of the tremors, and a habit of jumping at loud noises. She can sometimes be heard to mumble to colleagues: “I never knew just how long eternity could be.”’

I really am a timid sort.

Looking back, though, I am amazed at the things I’ve tried. Even so, my tendencies have leaned more toward Casper Milquetoast than Mighty Mouse. “Who’s he tryins’ to k-k-kid?’ my guardian angel asks, stoically trying not to scratch at her hives. “The guy has no sense.’

Well, she may be right. I never really claimed to be brave, simply incautious; it started when I was a kid.

I loved to climb up to the tops of trees during bad weather. I would get as high as I could, so when the winds kicked up, I could ride the storm. I never got killed. Not even once. The angel, however, got a real workout. I can hear her now, mumbling something that sounded like “born-again kamikaze,’and chewing on her halo. Understand that I was young, and like everyone young, figured I was going to live forever.

It was the same when I got my motorcycle. It was no Harley or Boss Hoss, but a mid-size Japanese bike the color of a bluebottle fly. It made a noise like a bee who’d been drinking Red Bull. I loved it. It was snappy, nimble as a bicycle, and it would go over 100 miles per hour. It’s a good thing guardian angels can’t die, because that motorcycle would have killed mine, otherwise. I always put my brains in my back pocket when I rode. I did every damn-fool thing on that Suzuki except get killed.

Probably would have done that, too, if I hadn’t woke one day on one side of a bridge with the car I had hit on the other side. I still don’t know how I got away from that one, though I think the nervous lady in the wings and robe had some­ thing to do with it. Well, whatever happened, I seem to have grown out of all that daredevil stuff. I drive a minivan, and brag about how good it is on gas, rather than how fast it goes. I think that’s the better way to be.

Usually.

During one of our recent heavy storms, I caught myself looking wistfully at one of the tall trees in my yard. A climbable tall tree. I thought, briefly, about climbing it, riding the storm for old times’ sake.

“Right,” I seemed to hear a celestial, if harried, voice say. “But you do this one with­ out me.”

I stayed on the ground, but I wasn’t happy about it. One thing I can’t stand is a quitter.

© 2006 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.