“Whatever you do, DON’T GET OUT OF THE CAR!” she said … through clinched teeth. Lives seemed to depend on it. I felt the weight of the words, and thought carefully about what I should say next. I’m a mature, thoughtful, relatively intelligent parent who thinks deeply about things. “Say WHAT?!?” I exclaimed. “This is America! You can’t tell me what to do. I have rights, you know? I’ll get out of the car and roll around on the hood like a bad 1980s music video if I want! Don’t think I won’t, either.” Yep, pretty much nailed it. Mature, thoughtful dad – 1. Kid – O This was all over tennis practice pickup. I was being dispatched to collect my middle school daughter from the courts. Seemed simple enough. I had to be there by a certain time … SHARP! I felt kind of like an Uber driver and a stock car racer rolled into one. I thought about buying driving gloves. I felt cool! Then I got my real orders: DON’T GET OUT OF THE CAR! Stay out of sight at all times. If you are seen by anyone — even a Chinese spy satellite flying over — that’s IT for you. You’ll never be allowed out of the house again. You won’t be able to walk me down the aisle one day. I will sell all your financial passwords on the Dark Web. It’ll get real, dad! You got that?
The passport expedition
I’m exhausted, spent, tired out. I’m mentally drained. I have worked hard. I have labored. I have trained for weeks — studying, planning, prepping. I have given it my all. I need to rest. Why? I applied for a new passport. Three in fact, and it was no picnic. But I’m done. It is all in the government’s hands now. There was a time when these sorts of things were a piece of cake. Even fun. The hardest part was stapling the little square photo to the application. Get that right and you were home free. Get it wrong and you forever looked like you had a bullet hole in the center of your forehead. Today there are greater dangers and more security concerns. Passports are serious business, and they come with many hassles, steps, document needs and all manner of ways it can go wrong. Take the picture, for instance. There are endless instructions, the most important of which is to not smile. But if you don’t smile, you look serious and mean … kind of like a Russian spy. That’s what my 12-year-old daughter looks like. I’m afraid no country will let her in. “This is Maria Porasgova, the Dark Wolf of St. Petersburg!” some foreign customs agent will declare. “She can kill a man with the flick of her fingernail. ARREST HER!!!”
Making sense of a tax return questionnaire
I’ve spent several days gathering up W2 forms. Scanning in documents. Calculating expenses and donations and figuring out the square roof of 72. It’s tax season and I’m getting down to business. So, the other night I finally filled out the tax organizing questionnaire my family accountant sent me. I don’t know if these are changes to the tax code this year, but every question seems a little strange to me. Maybe I’m just paying better attention. But does anyone else get questions like these? Please answer the following questions with a Y or N: • If you sold stocks at a loss last year, did you cry because you were the only person in America to lose money in a bull market? • Have you or a family member found any loose change in your sofa cushions amounting to more than $13 million? • If you or a family member found loose change in your sofa cushions, have you deposited it in an offshore account? • Did you offload any junk vehicles, in particular a green 1978 Oldsmobile that had been parked in front of 273 Parkdale Road before it was stolen? • Have you imported any illegal trophy animals only to re-export them because you didn’t like the smell? • Did you lose a beloved pair of sunglasses this year causing you to experience emotional pain and mental anguish valued at more than $1,500? • Have you ever truly tried to walk in someone else’s shoes?
Mysteries of the Winter Olympics
I grew up in Tampa, Florida, where if the temperature dipped below 76 degrees, the entire city moved to an evacuation shelter in Miami. Anything performed on ice or snow — or more clothes than a loin cloth — was pretty foreign to me. We didn’t ski or ice skate or launch ourselves off ice ramps. If we could get an ice cube in our tea before it melted, that was a winter sport. It’s much the same today, which is maybe why the Winter Olympics is so fascinating to me. I find myself hooked, staring at the screen, marveling at these sports I’ve never tried, or didn’t even knew existed. There are so many mysteries. For instance: • In any sport I’ve ever watched — or for that matter, anything that has ever moved — I’ve rooted for a massive crash. Cars. Poker games. Anything involving pom-poms. But in winter sports, I sit in fetal position peeking through my arms screaming, “Please Lord, don’t let that guy wipeout!” Winter crashes are terrifying, horrid and cataclysmic. On slick ice with no friction to stop them, they could go on forever, jumping barricades and shooting through town like a cartoon catastrophe. I get spasms in parts of my body I didn’t even know existed and can’t look at ice cubes for weeks.
Family origins as a birthday present?
“Brian! You need to come over right now and get your birthday present! It says ‘time sensitive’ on it!” Oh no! Not like, “Oh no!” I’m not going to do it. More like, “Oh no! What could it be?” “Oh no! Why in the world is it ‘time sensitive’ that I have to get it right now?” or “Oh no! Is this going to kill me?” “Mom, my birthday isn’t for like 20 days. What is it?” I said into the phone. “I can’t tell you,” she answered. “You just have to come get it right now. What are you doing, anyway? Watching the ‘Puppy Bowl?’” It was Super Bowl Sunday. I think I WAS watching the Puppy Bowl. I didn’t have time for this. I told my daughter to get in the car. That I needed moral support … and a witness. Plus, someone to drive the car if I got injured. “I’m only 12,” she said. “I can’t drive!” “That’s of little consequence. Now, bring your bike helmet and the first aid kit we got for the hurricane.”
Has my vocabulary started going gray?
I don’t know why I said it. Where it came from. What possessed me to utter such a strange and utterly absurd greeting to a co-worker. “How you doing, sport?” I said. Sport?!? Who says “sport?” I wondered. I wasn’t the only one. Amused faces popped out of holes everywhere to ponder the same thing. “Did you just say ‘sport?’” they asked. “Seriously?” HAHAHAHA! Yes, I’m afraid I did. And it wasn’t the only one that day. In class later that morning I was talking to my college students about something and then blurted out for some unexplained reason, “Well, damnation!” The class burst into laughter. “Damnation?!?” they howled. “Is that like ‘tarnation?’ ‘Well, fiddlesticks, pa. You best take junior down to the well and fetch a pale for the vittles. Grab the pig while you’re down there.” HAHAHAHA!
Ideas for Amazon’s grocery store of tomorrow
Amazon opened something truly revolutionary the other day: A grocery store in Seattle without a single checkout line. Lined with cameras and sensors, you walk into the Amazon Go store, scan an app, pickup what you want and leave. No lines. No loud calls over an intercom for Herb to do a price check on aisle 8 for your corn remover. No trying to pretend that the tabloid story about Prince Harry being a space alien doesn’t actually interest you. Personally, I love the idea of a store like this. I hate checkout lines. But this only solves a couple of my biggest annoyances. So, in hopes that a bright Amazon engineer might read this, here are a couple of things that should also be incorporated into a high-tech grocery store of tomorrow: • We need sliding floors. Let me explain: This would come in handy in situations where someone has decided to park their cart right in the middle of the aisle so they can read the ingredients on a box of crackers. First off, who reads ingredients on a box of crackers!?! Any way you look at it, they’re bad for you! But to the point, I’m so polite that I hate asking someone to move. So, I stand there for 20 minutes while saying in the softest voice, “Uh, excuse me … Um, pardon me, but I can’t get through …” Sliding floors, though, could use sensors to spot this and gently “slide” that person out of […]
A Florida yard braces for more leaf-burning cold
I have a Florida yard. A Florida yard is loaded with nice, flowery plants that don’t need a lick of water, attract butterflies and hummingbirds and bees, and look pretty much bountiful all year-round. EXCEPT … if the temperature dips below 86 degrees. At which point the entire yard packs up and moves to Miami on a Greyhound bus. Or worse, shrivels up and dies, leaving behind a brown, crunchy wasteland. The surface of Mars is not so desolate, barren or sad. My dune daisies are wrecked. The porter’s weed looks like it has been stricken by a case of vegetative mange. And the bougainvillea — so happy to impale me with its saber-tooth thorns just a couple of weeks ago — has dropped every leaf it could find, ordered more on Amazon, and then dropped them, too. The aesthetic of my yard right now? Dead sticks in creepy forest. I tried to save them all. Or as best as I could considering we had several nights of sub-freezing weather, and I can’t really get too motivated with anything involving the word “sub.”
New Year’s resolutions worth resolving
I don’t know what to make of our new year’s resolutions. My wife had resolved to be less judgmental. Then she declared that if I were any kind of a good person, I would pledge to be less critical. “Less critical!” I erupted. “That is by far one of the silliest things I’ve ever heard you say.” And whammo! Just like that we had blown up two perfectly good resolutions … in the span of the first couple minutes of 2018. #quickestresolutionfails We’ll probably keep trying, though. We’re not the kind of people who take failure well. We don’t give up. That’s for stupid weak people who have … DANGIT! There I go again. OK, seriously, I’m really trying. There are other ones I want to work on in the new year, too. Like learning whether there is any correlation between the amount of cake I’ve been eating and the fact that I’ve slipped a notch on my belt. Or how when it comes to running consistently, I’ve not only fallen off the wagon, but the wagon turned around, ran me over twice and then gave me a slice of cake. At this rate, I’ll be down another belt notch by June!
Cold, Florida weather and the soothsaying acorns
Cold. So cold. Teeth chattering. Bones aching. Lips chapping. Dog not going outside unless I stand with the door open while screaming, “Be gone with you, wretched cur!!!” (My neighbors always pass by at the same, exact moment and report me to Animal Control.) It’s not my fault: It’s winter, and my dog would prefer I put out a stack of newspapers and let her do her business inside. It’s cold out there, and she has no interest in braving it. I don’t either. What is this chilly stuff? Is this not Florida, a state so immune to freezing weather that the snow shovel is listed as an endangered species? The other day I had to go do the unthinkable: root around in my closet in search of — GASP! — a sweater. I didn’t even know I had one. It was moth-eaten and covered in dust — a relic from 1996 when I bought it as a joke, or to use as a rag while changing my car’s oil. But after the cold snap this week, we Floridians could use a few sweaters. And some mittens and scarves and ear muffs … and about 17 batts of insulation to wrap around us with duct tape. It is cold, and we don’t know how to hack it! I watched bleary-eyed at the weather map as a mass of light snow moved across north Florida toward Jacksonville. Ouch! Not a sight you see every day.