Mark Myers's Blog, page 37

The DVR Effect on Husbands

I have always been told I was a selective listener. If I were called to stand trial for this deficiency, my mother would be the first witness called to the stand. Countless times my chin rested in her hand while she said those five words all boys hate: “Let me see your eyes!”

Teacher after teacher could give valid testimony against me. But the prosecution’s star witness would be the woman who’s suffered with my malady for the longest – my poor wife. When I zone out, she constantly gives me the look that lets me know she’s onto me. Rarely does she patronize me with the five-word command, but she has ways of making sure I’m listening. Some are gentle, some are not.

When we found out I had hearing loss in both ears, I immediately pegged it as the culprit. Truth be known, it’s not. If I were brutally honest, I would admit that I hear some things and choose to keep my head down. Unknowing, unhearing, un-responsible for whatever I’m being told.  I know, it’s not healthy and not good.  But don’t act all holier than thou, men. As if your sense of smell suddenly abandons you whenever you hand your baby back to your wife and didn’t happen to notice their full diaper.

So there has always been an irritation. The onset of the Digital Video Recorder has grown it to a plague. In my television viewing, no longer am I required to pay attention to anything. I can give the TV a cursory glance and if I want to go back, I can hit the magical button that pushes time backwards fifteen seconds to fill in the blanks. It is amazing! It is brilliant! It is revolutionary…but not for relationships. 

Because of the DVR, I don’t listen to anyone when they begin talking to me anymore. It’s not my fault, my brain has been conditioned that the first fifteen seconds of anything don’t matter because I have a magic button. “Honey, can you get the large pot from the cabinet, fill it with water, and put it on to boil,” becomes the simple phrase, “to boil,” which means absolutely nothing, thereby absolving me of any responsibility to help in the kitchen.

This is excellent news for me, but not for my wife. You see, she doesn’t have the receiver that takes the signal from the magic button – nor does she want one. She will repeat herself, but seems to be very annoyed when forced, at which point I naturally point to my ears and claim hearing loss. After twenty-one years, she knows that game well and wins it more often than not. Defeated, I put on water to boil and wish I could learn to pay attention.

Fortunately for our marriage, I don’t watch much TV. But when I do, I hold the magic button in my hand and am invigorated! And the cycle begins anew.

Don’t Poke a Sleeping Teen

Our eldest has been dealing with the big college decision along with a several disappointments during her senior year. I came home the other night and just felt the urge to pray with her. Being a teen, she spends most of her time in her ultra-neat and clean room, so I knocked and got a quiet reply.

When I opened the door, the light was off. She had obviously been sleeping, but she looked at me and talked quiet coherently. I sat on the edge of the bed and told her what I wanted. She agreed and laid back while I beseeched God for wisdom and direction for her. I am not a deep prayer and my words don’t string together poetically like some folks I’ve been around. I love hearing someone like that pray, though. You sometimes feel like you’ve been taken to the very throne room of God. I wish I could be that eloquent. Since I’m not, I pray like the simple child that I am.

It was a very sweet time. I couldn’t help reminisce about bygone days when I would sit on the edge of a smaller bed and say prayers over a  little bundle with curly hair, pacifier, and her Arthur jammies – sleeping in touchdown position. Precious. A little tear formed in the corner of my eye as I whispered, ‘Amen’ and kissed her on the forehead. Our times like this are running desperately short.

I wondered if she felt the same tug on her heart as she looked up at me innocently. I wondered right up until she grunted in a nasty voice, “You smell funny!” and nudged me off the bed with her leg.

I got up off the floor, realizing she’d been asleep the entire time and didn’t hear a word of my prayer.

But God heard.

The King’s Castle

As a dad, it’s hard to know if the lessons you are trying to impart on your children are sinking in. At those teachable moments, when I have an opportunity to set an example, I always wonder if they are watching. Did they pay attention? Did that really sink in – not surface level but heart-deep?  Case in point, Mrs. P is out of town with the oldest two, which leaves me driving the 9.4 mind-numbing miles to school for a few days. Yesterday I had only the 13 year-old with me for a few miles. As we discussed the Friday schedule, it dawned on her that she would have a couple of hours at home alone. I let that sink in because only a few years ago, being alone in any room would have terrified her. But she has matured greatly of late, so I didn’t get a look of panic or any reaction at all – just that blank, teenage stare…until, a devious little smile rolled over her face as she declared, “I’m not going to wear pants.” 

Of all the things she could do alone, that’s what she chose!

I suppose only the pets will know if she follows through. As for me, I need a tissue

I have always said, “A man’s home is his castle and the king can do whatever he wants in his castle.” Mostly I say that to defend something stupid I’ve done at home, but at least one of them is paying attention! I couldn’t be prouder.

Happy Friday from Portsong!

The Colonel’s First Story, pt. 4

We have nearly come to the end of Colonel Birdwhistle’s first story from the book.  Click here to start at the beginning: Part 1 .

And now, I submit to you Part 4:

“An excellent question,” replied the Colonel.  “We used local ingenuity, my dear.  Local ingenuity.  You see, the people there have been trapping monkeys for hundreds of years.  The monkey is a clever animal, but he is more selfish than he is clever.  He can figure out how to get his hand on something to steal, but once he has it in that hand, he won’t ever let go until it is his.  So we tied several crates to the top of our cart, each with a freshly cut mango inside.  Then we made holes in them just large enough so that monkey hands would fit in but the mango wouldn’t come out.  On our trip, the monkeys descended on our cart and smelled the mangos.  They fought over which ones got to stick their little hands inside to grab those fresh mangos.  When we stopped the cart, the monkeys scattered — all except the ones with their hands stuck in the crate, too greedy to let go.  So, we would untie those crates with monkeys attached and give them to the locals to…to take away… and relocate.”

He held up a hand again and pointed at it adding, “So the very thing that they cause trouble with gets them into trouble, too.”

“Did you get rid of all the monkeys in Africa, sir?” asked a boy with bright red hair and a nose generously sprinkled with freckles.

“No, young fellow,” laughed the Colonel.  Then he pointed at the large tree behind him.

“You see this tree.  It has squirrels in it right?” he said to general agreement.  “If I were to take the squirrel family that lived there away, another family that lived say, over there in that smaller tree would look at it and say, ‘that’s a nice tree and there are no squirrels living in it.  I’ll bet it has lots of nuts.  We should go live there.’ And they would.  So you would never have an attractive tree like this with no squirrels, right?”

The audience bobbled their heads as if they understood.

“It is, unfortunately, the same with monkeys,” said the Colonel.  “We removed as many as we could, and by the time the next ship came in, there were at least as many monkeys there as there had been before.  And they were stealing from us again.  To them, our supplies were just like that nice big tree the squirrel family wanted.  So they came in droves with their cute little hands and chit-chit noises and robbed us blind.”

He finished his story by slapping his knees to add emphasis and the children laughed.  The mothers behind them clapped their approval, and the Colonel couldn’t suppress a “dreadful vermin,” muttered under his breath.

Conclusion coming soon

Vervet Monkey photo credit: Whit Welles

Save the Speakers!

My first car was a 1969 Orange Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.  It was wonderful!  Well, to a 16 year-old boy it was wonderful.  Truth is, the floorboard had so many holes rusted in it that I could see the road I was travelling on.  The heat was non-existent, the windows often came off track (and sometimes fell out), and I could hear a mocking laugh from the windshield wipers when I turned them on.  But I loved it.  I first saw it as I pedaled past a used car lot in my hometown in Kentucky.  Every town has that cheesy lot – with all the ropes of ugly plastic flags hanging from pole to pole and a small building housing a used-car salesman who looked and dresses exactly like Herb Tarlek from WKRP in Cincinnati.  When it came time to buy, my father took me to the lot to confront Herb with the admonition to let him do the talking.  Yeah, sure Dad, I’ll be quiet.  That guy saw me coming.  Maybe he’d seen me ride my back past him, lusting after the orange beauty.  Anyway, he wouldn’t budge off the asking price of $900, so my father staged the fake walk-out – a negotiating tactic he should have warned his naive son about.  Of course, being an idiot, my immediate response was to yell, “But I want that car!”  I don’t think I grabbed onto his leg and rode him while he stormed away, but I might as well have.  Guess what we paid for the car…$900.

It lasted 9 months.  $100 per month, which was a lot of money to a kid in the mid-80’s.  I had just picked up my friend Will on a Friday night when it breathed its last.  Like its inconspicuous color, it died in grand style.  The engine threw a rod and caught on fire.  My response to the flames was to yell, “Save the speakers!!!!”  I had just bought them for a considerable sum and installed them myself.  So with the back of the car on fire and a crowd gathering, two 16 year-old morons dove into the miniscule back seat to rescue the speakers.  I honestly don’t know if we saved them, but I do remember trading the piece of junk in on a white Oldsmobile that my classmates dubbed “The Egg.”  Quite a step down from my orange glory.

I tell that story for one reason – my laptop died a few weeks ago and I wanted to offer a piece of advice to would-be writers like myself.  My advice is to buy several external hard drives and flash drives and save everything often OUTSIDE of your laptop. If you are savvier than me, use a cloud.  Save often.  Daily.  You never know when something you love is going to die.

I got everything off of it except for a couple of my most recent edits and ideas.  Of course, the lost files were literary genius, I’m sure – the most witty and superb crafting of verbiage ever formed in the English language.  Whatever they were, they were destined to be my breakthrough pieces.  And now they are lost.

I’m very happy with my shiny, new, green laptop, named Shrek by my kids.  A far better name than my second automobile.

Save, Save, Save…  Don’t trust one drive, save and oversave.  Save early and often.

Oh, and don’t go back into a burning car for speakers.  That’s a bad plan.

He’s A Pirate

I’m not very successful at Twitter. I tweet under my character, Virgil Creech and mostly get ignored. But recently, one of Virgil’s best tweets was, “Boys will be boys, unless they can be pirates. Then, they’re always pirates.” It got a lot of likes and some retweets. It is fun to assume the personality of a raucous twelve year-old boy who doesn’t quite understand stuff going on around him. I might be 46, but I often don’t get stuff, either. Like on on this foggy morning.

I struggled on my run this morning. If you run, you understand that there are times when your body and mind don’t work together and it is tough to get going. Usually, it works itself out after a few miles. Not always. Today, I was struggling. Until my song came on. I have a song that pushes me to a sprint when it comes on the iPod. (It makes for a good Fartlek – which IS actually a word. Look it up, it is Swedish for speed play and always fun to add into conversations.) Ironically, my power song is, “He’s a Pirate!”

It is  one minute and thirty three seconds of fast-paced music. Better yet, the boy in me can pretend I am a pirate fighting alongside Jack Sparrow and Will Turner. I don’t always brandish my sword and scream as a run along the beaches with my mates. Not always. But, like I said, today was a tough run.

So to the two women who came around the blind corner today when I was racing to battle, I am deeply sorry I scared you. I was not after your booty as you might have feared, I was only charging to fight Davy Jones.

After all, I’m a pirate.

The Colonel’s First Story, pt. 3

I have been  serializing Colonel Birdwhistle’s first story from the book.  Click here to start at the beginning: Part 1 .

 

And now, I submit to you Part 3:

He sat for several minutes facing skyward with a peculiar look on his face.  Having lived alongside noise all his military life, he had developed the ability to drown out distractions around him by simply shutting his eyes and focusing on his thoughts.  It was a rare gift really.  He entered this trance while considering what to say next and was half hoping that Leon would wander off.  Finally, an acceptable topic came to mind, and he blurted out the word, “Monkeys!”

The Colonel opened his eyes and looked down to find that his audience had grown.  Instead of one plump boy seated in front of him, there were now a dozen children of all shapes and sizes waiting patiently for him to continue.  Behind them all stood their mothers as interested as their tots, and Mrs. Dobrey was smiling and nodding to him.

“I like monkeys,” said a pig-tailed little girl up front with her hand on his knee.

Surrounded and outnumbered, he continued, “Young lady, you might not like monkeys if there were hundreds of them and they were everywhere.  What was your name?”

“My name is Sally,” said the little girl with a smile.

“Well Sally, do you like rats?” asked the Colonel.

“Ewwww.  No.  They’re gross.”

“To some degree, in Africa, monkeys are just like rats.  Only they are more intelligent and can get into more trouble because they have these,” he held up one hand and pointed to it with the other.  “There is almost nothing that a group of cute little monkeys can’t steal.  And you know what they want most of all?”

The children said nothing but sat, eyes wide open, waiting for an answer.

“Food.  Just the same as what you and I want,” continued the old man, warming to his story.  “One of the things I had to do was to make sure that all of our men had enough food, right.  Because they couldn’t do anything if they were hungry all the time.  So we had these great big ships that came into port full of food and other supplies, and we would have to unload it and put it on carts that would carry everything to the forward post.  But the monkeys made it terribly hard to get this done because they were everywhere.  There were hundreds of them.  So we decided one time to trap the monkeys and um…” he paused looking slowly around at the innocent faces.  “Um, relocate them to a different area.  Yes, that’s it.”

“If they’re smart, how could you trap them?” asked one of the children.

Part 4 coming soon…

 

The broken cat

We forgot the cat again. We didn’t forget to feed her or change her litterbox. No, we forgot to take her to the vet to get her fixed, again. The phone call from my lovely wife went something like this:

LW: Did you make an appointment for the cat?

Me: I knew I forgot something! Did you make one?

LW: No, and she’s doing it again.

Me: What? That’s impossible! She just went through this.

LW holds the phone out so I can listen to the cat moaning her bewitching taunt to any would-be boy cats in a ten mile radius. We talked about it and agreed that it had to happen. With the busyness of life, we just never got around to it. To quote a favorite phrase in our home, we got stuck in the “tyranny of the urgent.” So she hit a cycle for the second time, reminding us of her needs.  Often…and loudly.

We have two old labs, one we call Toby Flenderson. If you watched The Office, you know Toby is short on personality and so is our dog. She never does much – just lays around and looks at you. She will momentarily spring to life to smell the butt or crotch of a visitor just to embarrass us. But it isn’t long before she lays back down, and looks at you. Well, the cat in heat has decided that Toby must be the one who can satisfy her urges. I don’t know why, perhaps it is because the dog is more dormant than the other one. Regardless of the fact that the dog is spade…and female, the cat has perfected a dance of love designed to woo her.  She flops around in front of the poor pooch all day long trying to seduce her. Worse yet, at night, she calls out to her, waking us up with her songs of love.

She got so desperate yesterday, I think she downloaded some Barry White on iTunes and bought Toby a shot of tequila.

While most in the house laugh about this, the entire thing has been fermenting in my youngest daughter’s mind. She hasn’t had “the talk” yet. So she doesn’t know why Kitty is doing a low crawl of love across the floor. Oh, the questions! What does ‘in heat’ mean? What is fixed? Is she broken? Why is her bottom in the air? Why does she keep nuzzling Toby?

Since we’re cat newbies, the oldest has been doing research on the topic. Turns out, this might last a while as they can go into heat over and over and over until…well, you get the picture even if our youngest doesn’t.

Guess who’s going to the vet soon?

Hurt By Church

I had an unusual conversation Friday night.  A friend of mine (I’ll call him Redleg) and I were together with a man who was hurt by the church – and he’s not going back.  He was very open about it and I found the dialogue very interesting.  It sounded like he was very active in a large church at some point, but now he isn’t.  In fact, his theology has totally changed to a “many roads lead to God” type of belief system, and he admittedly doesn’t care about eternity.  At some point, he let it slip that it all hinged on how the church reacted to his divorce.  A linchpin.  He got hurt and that was it.

Nothing was solved.  We listened and tried to encourage him before our time together was over.  I’ve heard about people such as this, and quite frankly, I’ve been disillusioned by church over the past couple of years also.  In fact, my family is winding down a year long search for a new place of worship.  So I could totally sympathize with his resentment toward how he was treated.  But whatever happened caused him to abandon his faith and that makes me sad.

The thing I’m still wondering about  happened after he had left though.  Redleg and I honed in on two totally different aspects of the man’s dilemma.  I lamented how the church reacted while Redleg felt as though the man was running from truth.  I know the Bible is firmly against divorce, as am I.  I further know that we need to speak truth and be a light to those around us.  But I couldn’t help think that if the confrontation had been handled in love, this man might not be floundering in his faith.

Somehow, truth and love have to coexist.  Is the modern church doomed if they can’t?  Redleg is a “truther”, and I’m a “lover” – and we are still friends.  We admittedly don’t know the entire circumstance that brought this man to where his is, but isn’t it odd how two believers went totally different directions in response to it?

(photo credit: Nicholas A. Tonelli)

 

 

The Colonel’s First Story, pt. 2

Over the next few weeks, I am serializing Colonel Birdwhistle’s first story.  Click here to start at the beginning: Part 1 .

And now, I submit to you Part 2:

 

Mrs. Dobrey returned in a moment followed by a boy exactly the opposite of her slight build.  Every aspect of him was round, from his trunk to his cherry cheeks.  Rolls of fat calves punched out of short pants that were too tight for him.  His arms stuck out of his shirt sleeves like dough squeezing out of a tube.  A look at the lad, who appeared miserably confined in clothing far too small, elicited a feeling of pity.  Looking from mother to son, the Colonel found it hard to believe they were cut from the same cloth.  They just didn’t belong together.  Yet here they stood, silently looking at the Colonel and expecting something from him.

“Well…hello,” he paused trying to remember the boy’s name, but he could not.

“I’m Leon,” said the boy.

“Yes, yes.  Good day, Leon,” said the Colonel.  “A fine young lad.  I am Colonel Clarence Birdwhistle.  I had the pleasure of meeting your mother and she said you might have some interest in me.”

The boy strained his neck to look up at his mother, who smiled back down at her angel and nudged him to redirect his attention.  Leon took the correction and once again stood quietly staring at the Colonel, who had no idea how to entertain the child.  He cleared his throat, rubbed his mustache and even pretended to be occupied with caring for Oscar, who didn’t help in the ruse at all.  He had taken to dozing on the sun-warmed pavement and growled at the interruption from a good nap.  Still the boy stood and said nothing.  Finally the mother broke the silence.

“Couldn’t you tell him a story from one of your adventures in Africa?” she suggested.

“I supposed I could,” replied the Colonel, uncomfortably shifting in his chair.  He cleared his throat once more and searched his memory for something to say.  The boy teetered forward and back and came to rest in a seated position with his legs crossed in a most awkward fashion.

“Well, Leon.  I can think of something that might interest a boy like you,” began the Colonel.  “Do you know what the word cannibal means?  It’s a beastly thing, Leon.  Practiced only among the low, uncivilized people of the world…”  Hearing a loud cough intended to interrupt, he looked up and saw Mrs. Dobrey standing behind the boy flailing her hands in a violent manner and mouthing the word, “NO!”

Taking the obvious cue, he changed direction.  “…But that is a tale for another day, my boy.  Let me see…. I recall an event when the local witch doctor put a spell on us…”  He stopped short as he spied the disapproving mother shaking her head once again.  He fell silent as he tried to find an appropriate memory to relay.

 

Part 3 coming soon…