Category: memory lane

Iguana Has Breakfast… with Cat?

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Sorry, I couldn’t resist posting this. The iguana in this video looks so much like my iguana did when he was young. You can tell this is a young iguana by his build, by the still barely visible baby-stripes on his dewlap, and by the fact that none of the soft spines on his back have been worn off yet.

You can also tell that this is a good iguana who’s been raised right. He has learned not to be afraid of the cat; in fact, they’re probably friends. The cat has been taught good manners, too. You can see he’s just dying to play with that long, green tail–but he restrains himself.

My mother, my wife, and my neighbor all got into preparing very nice salads for my iguana. It’s very gratifying to feed someone who’s always glad to get it. Nor will I ever forget my mother going around the multiflorabunda rose hedge with a jar to catch bugs for my small lizards. Ma, those were good days!

A Walk Around Town, and Tommy’s Pond

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I went for a long walk yesterday, most of it down the main street of my home town.

Over the past twenty or thirty years, my town has aspired to cultivate an air of hoity-toityness. We’re always having arts and crafts festivals, special events on Main Street, etc. This has resulted in higher and higher taxes; and each year, there are more and more businesses shutting down. So my walk took me past quite a few empty store-fronts. We have a whole office building that has yet to have a single tenant. The high taxes create a bad business environment.

One kind of business that we have more and more of, though, is “learning centers.” These are places where you can send your kids to learn the stuff they should have learned in school–reading, English, math, and how to prepare, at the last minute, for the SATs so they can go to collidge and learn about gender and oppression.

We have only four schools in our town, and yet the school budget is higher than all the rest of the municipal expenses put together. With all the money we spend on our schools, why do we need so many learning centers?

Another thing I noticed: there’s always a new “life teacher” hanging out his shingle. These businesses don’t last too long, but when one folds, there’s always another to take its place.

Remember when your family, and your church, taught you “life lessons”? Where has that gone? How good are these life teachers, and what exactly do they teach? And how did the human race get by without them for all those thousands of years? Are we any better, at all, for having them?

I went to the YMCA and had a nice long shower, then finally reached my goal: a little pond, Tommy’s Pond, where my father once taught me how to fish. I could easily throw a softball to someone standing on the opposite end of this pond, but in spite of its small size, the pond this day was full of sunfish, plus a few rather large turtles–including the biggest painted turtle I’ve ever seen.

The fish, the turtles, the snails, and the water weeds don’t need learning centers or life teachers. They are as God made them, and they work. I was glad to spend some time with them.

So much, so very much, has been lost, paved over, replaced by empty buildings and oversized houses whose inhabitants you never see. This one little pond remains.

May the Lord our God protect it.

To My Ma, on Mother’s Day

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You’re not here with us anymore, having moved to your mansion in our Father’s House; but there’s one thing I want to say to you that I never got around to saying while you were still present to hear it.

When I was a little boy, I was so proud of you for doing things that none of the other kids’ mothers, in our neighborhood, ever did–although they were as young as you were.

You rode a bike, helped teach me how to hit a softball, played chess and monopoly with kids and teenagers, played with us when we played volleyball on the street with Mrs. Thomas’ hedge for a net, and sometimes taught bunches of us kids how to play the games you played as a girl (“You may take three baby steps”–remember that one?). I could’ve burst my buttons, I thought it was so cool when you did all those things. I wish I’d thought to tell you so! But I’m afraid that was one of those things that children take for granted.

Nor do I forget how you watched U.N. meetings when they used to be on public TV, with me sitting with you on the sofa, and taught me all about the assorted world leaders and their countries, who they were and what they were trying to accomplish.

I think we both realized, after very many years, that if ever anybody was a chip off the old block, I was a chip off yours.

I would not be me if you had not been you.

P.S.–My wife wishes me to add that she and my mother were the best of friends: “And how many wives can say that about their mother-in-law?” It’s quite true, though. Nor will I ever forget my mother advising me, after she’d met Patty a few times, “Don’t you dare let that one get away!”

Memory Lane: My Turtles

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My wife and I love turtles, and this video of someone’s baby turtles brings back happy memories. I always fed my turtles by hand, which made them very tame.

When I was a boy I had a big tank for my turtles, all babies–a baby snapping turtle, a very personable diamondback terrapin, a painted turtle, and a little musk turtle the size of a nickel.

One summer night I didn’t bring the aquarium back indoors, and we had a heavy rain which caused the tank to overflow. Come morning, there were no turtles in it.

Would you believe it? One by one, they all came back–even the tiny musk turtle. The snapper went wandering around for two weeks, but in the end he came back, too.

And I must add a salute to our painted turtle, Clemmy, who enjoyed a long career of sharing our suppers with us and also lived in hope that Henry, our cat, would someday feed him. I am happy to say that Henry never did anything more than watch the turtle.

Memory Lane: Dead Man’s Cave

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Just say the name out loud: “Dead Man’s Cave.” If you’re twelve years old or so, there’s potent magic in that name.

I had heard of Dead Man’s Cave years and years before I ever saw it. Kids spoke of it in hushed whispers. Older kids had been there, and were kind of vague in their descriptions of its wonders. That only served to feed my imagination all the more. Was the cave a hideout for outlaws? Or a completely crazed murderer? I dared conjecture even farther: prehistoric animals. That’s what you’d find there, if you went in deep enough. A saber-toothed tiger, at least.

It wasn’t until I was 14 years old that I actually laid eyes on Dead Man’s Cave. And went inside. Yes, my friends and I went in!

Well, why not? I mean, it wasn’t exactly Carlsbad Caverns, was it? All thoughts of Tom Sawyer trying to elude Injun Joe among the stalactites and stalagmites evaporated from my mind.

Dead Man’s Cave turned out to be an unused, brick-lined culvert that ran under a railroad embankment. The other end was blocked by rubble, so it wasn’t very deep. Its archaeology featured beer bottles, soda cans, cigarette butts, and not very original graffiti. No sign of a dead man anywhere.

But I dare say one is all the better for having had a Dead Man’s Cave in one’s life–especially if you spend some time looking for it and never quite find it.

Because, in all fairness, how could it have ever lived up to your imagination?

Cozy Time with Your Rat

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Got to talking about my pet rats–what sweet girls they were! Every bit as affectionate as the rat in this video. They never did anything bad at all except to fight with each other as soon as we turned the lights out. Then I’d turn the light back on and they would pretend nothing had happened.

You’d hardly believe how smart rats are, how fast they can learn all sorts of things. Ditto mice. If they lived ten years or more, they’d run rings around us.

Come to think of it, though, that wouldn’t be so hard to do, these days.

Memory Lane: Hangman’s Tree

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Follow me down Memory Lane, where they can’t find us.

I’m going to take you into Edgar Woods, the forest that grew right next to our neighborhood, right up against the playground. Woods and playground have been torn down, paved over, and made to be as if they never existed but in dreams. But in my memory they’re safe; the orcs can’t touch them there.

We turn off the main path to a crystal spring that bubbles up from clayey soil–cold water that everyone around here drinks, and I never heard of anyone getting sick from it. We are not very far into the woods; faintly, you  can still hear the clink of horseshoes from the playground.

The spring feeds a little brook, and we’ll follow it along its left bank, deeper into the woods. On the right bank the ground is wet and swampy, with lots of skunk cabbage. There are frogs in the water. Here we have another path which will take us to a blue house that stands all alone in the woods, but we’re not going there today.

By and by the brook peters out, but the path continues. Now we can’t hear anything but birds and squirrels. It would seem strange, today, to be at any place where you can’t hear cars and trucks. But not here, not now.

Unexpectedly, the path breaks into a clearing. And there stands Hangman’s Tree, probably the biggest, tallest tree in the county. The other trees, and the underbrush, keep a respectful distance from it. It’s big and black and very, very high. Kid legend has it that this used to be the hanging tree for several towns.

If you can climb any distance up this tree, the view will take your breath away. If the air were clear enough, you might see your way to Spain. Micro-trucks on the highway, micro-boats on the river, the mirror-sheen on the water where the river widens into the bay–it’s easy to lose track of the time when you’re way up there.

Leading out of the clearing, through a stand of sticker-bushes–the whole woods is full of wild blackberries, all you can eat for free–is Soldier’s Path, a mysterious cinder path that will eventually lead you to a sweet little village which has been torn down and paved over for another highway. Other paths will take you out to a bamboo field that marks the boundary of Edgar Woods.

Come up with me, up into Hangman’s Tree, and together we can look for Portugal. Don’t worry about falling. It’s my memory landscape and I will undertake to keep you safe.

I think I want to stay up here for a while.

An Amazing Historical Surprise

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Betcha didn’t know the youngest son of Benito Mussolini–yes, that Mussolini!–had a long and successful career as an internationally-recognized jazz pianist and jazz trio leader. And here’s a bit of his music to prove it.

One critic joshed that Romano Mussolini, as musician, “made the refrains run on time.”

One of the dictator’s granddaughters is a big wheel in Italian politics and has served in the European Parliament.

I find this kind of hard to take in. How about you?

Remember This?

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Leroy Anderson had this hit tune in 1951, The Syncopated Clock.

I remember it as the theme music of The Early Show, back in television’s infancy. It was also the theme of The Late Show, but I wasn’t allowed to stay up anywhere near that late.

I was whistling this tune at the Y when a man stopped me in the hall. “I’m going nuts,” he said, “trying to remember what that’s called!” When I told him, he was delighted. “Of course, that’s it–The Early Show! I knew I’d heard it before, long ago.”

Long ago indeed.

By Request, ‘I Know Whom I Have Believed’

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Okay, Linda, here’s the hymn you asked for–I Know Whom I Have Believed, sung by Marshall Hall. Complete with saxophone solo.

Somehow this made me remember the most embarrassing moment in my whole life, which occurred during a service at our Dutch Reformed Church.

I can’t remember exactly why,  but something  convinced me that this particular service was intended to be in dramatic contrast to our usually staid and orderly procedure–that today we were supposed to have the congregation get enthusiastically involved in the business. So the minister read a verse, and I stood up and shouted “Hallelujah!”

Alone.

And every single eye in the congregation zeroed in on me–which is practically the last thing on earth that any 17-year-old ever wants to happen.

I hope I don’t dream about it tonight.