Those Wascally Wabbits

Gather ‘round, kids – it’s time for another installment of Master…I’m sorry, a slip of the tongue, there…I meant to say ‘Disaster Gardener.’

The struggling specimen pictured here is none other than Aquilegia, more commonly referred to as a Columbine. I know many have pointed out that my past failures could be blamed in part on trying to grow the wrong types of plants – dragging my moist Midwestern expectations (and vegetation) to a semi-arid climate. But this is the Colorado STATE FLOWER, it should be noted. Until now I have avoided the roving bands of horticultural zealots who would have me disemboweled with a rusty garden spade, but it’s only a matter of time.

The Better Homes and Gardens website says Columbines are an easy-to-grow perennial (they should really leave the joke-writing to the professionals). This one went in the ground a month ago, which is how long it has taken for all the blooms to fall off, save for one left to taunt me. I have better odds of hitting the Mega Millions than this poor bastard has of surviving the summer. As a friend of mine noted, somewhere in a plant post office is my picture hanging on the wall.

But this one I can’t take credit for. This is what the rabbits have done to my Asiatic lily, despite my best efforts to keep them at bay. This thing has been guarded like Fort Knox, with fencing and cages and the urine of seventeen different predators and all form of security short of proximity alarms and motion detectors.

Toby, my dog, is the first line of defense. Perhaps the most docile animal on the planet, his one pleasure is giving chase if he spots a rabbit as he’s being let out to handle his business. These encounters are short-lived affairs, due mainly to the fact that Toby can’t keep his mouth shut, thereby telegraphing his intentions with a strangled bark as he shoots from the patio door. Then hare and hound tear ass across the lawn in classic Looney Tunes fashion, just long enough for the furry trespasser to squirt through the fence into one of the neighbors’ yards, leaving Toby basking in the glow of self-congratulatory triumph.

For the record, he’s never caught one, and I surmise they just like to make him think he’s earning his paycheck. I also believe they are wise to his morning and evening routines and plan their real work accordingly. Which means they basically have all night to feast on their choice of vegetation.

Some mornings I find my hand-crafted chicken wire cage tipped aside, perhaps by a gust of wind but more likely a burly if dim-witted raccoon enlisted by the rabbits to do their dirty work, and the targeted greenery chewed to the ground. The lilies are a favorite, though they also decimated a barberry last year, chosen specifically for its thorny (and, I assumed, invincible) nature. But, like the dog, that proved not to be a deterrent.

So why expend all this time and energy to keep the rabbits away from my plants? I’m sorry, but when it comes to murdering the foliage around here, that’s my job.

The Best-Laid Plans

This is what greets my neighbors on their morning walks and the Amazon delivery guy as he trots to the door on a daily basis. No, it’s not a shallow grave – for the record, my wife is fine (as evidenced by the visitations of the aforementioned Amazon delivery guy), and I haven’t put an end to the family dog a la Kristi Noem.

Actually, there was a leak in the basement a few weeks ago. The main water line coming up out of the concrete floor was spraying its payload all over the furnace. I’m no plumber, but this seemed like a bad thing.

“Is it kind of a bluish pipe?” the friendly woman on the phone asked when I described the situation in my storeroom.

“Yes,” I answered hesitantly, not liking the fact that this stranger already seemed to know something sinister about my house.

Someone would be out as soon as they could. I covered the hemorrhage with a heavy glass bowl to divert the water away from the furnace and into a nearby floor drain while I awaited the actual plumber.

“Yep, that’s poly-B, alright,” he confirmed as the two of us squatted over the few inches of pipe jutting from the floor. Short for polybutylene. In the mid-seventies they anointed it ‘the water pipe of the future.’ It was suppose to revolutionize the plumbing industry. Inexpensive and indestructible (or so they thought), it was used in new construction until the mid-nineties. Until they realized it wasn’t quite the miracle pipe they took it to be. Once they discovered that fluoride (used in 73 percent of community water supplies in this country) degrades it.

The best-laid plans…

“And this isn’t the city’s problem?”

“Fraid not. From the city connection to the house is your responsibility.” Of course.

And the news only got better. “There’s no fixing it – you just have to replace it.” Of course. And that would require a full shutoff and jackhammers and trenchers and boring machines and buckets filled with water standing at the ready in the bathrooms should anyone be unable to hold their water for the duration.

And the best part was, we had an out of town guest arriving THE NEXT DAY to spend a week with us. Of course. So all this talk of boring into the basement and manually filling toilet tanks to keep the loos flushing was threatening the structural integrity of my skull. Therefore a provisional plan was quickly formulated. Tony, the plumber, leapt into action, fashioning a temporary patch that, providing the crick didn’t rise in the interim, would get us through the week. The heavy equipment was scheduled to arrive the following Monday. Which would also give me time to either hit the lottery or take out a second mortgage by way of financing.

Besides the fact I still have running water in the house, now that the dust has settled that mound of dirt out front is all I have to show at this point. We’re waiting for it to settle. They said to give it a month or so. If it was closer to Halloween I’d put a tombstone next to it.

[On a side note – not to get too Stephen King-ish, but if I were to bury someone in a shallow grave, the front yard might be the perfect spot, as counter-intuitive as that may seem. Whereas common sense would dictate hiding it in some out of the way location, in the past two weeks not one of my neighbors (or the Amazon delivery guy) has stopped by to ask what’s going on, or sent the gendarmes to investigate. Just something to file away for future reference.]

As for the money, well, que sera, sera. Before eviscerating the budget on thirty feet of buried pipe, there was talk of traveling across the pond this summer to visit the UK and see if I could find any kin walking the streets of Glasgow. Instead, I’ll be watching soil compact.

The best laid plans…

Back In The Saddle…Perhaps

To write or not to write – with apologies to the Bard, that is the question that has vexed me for some time now. I have stepped away from my blog on several occasions, due to a lack of inspiration, a lack of interest, the demands of life and, if truth be told, frustration with the dwindling return on investment. And each time my intent was to let it fade quietly into obscurity.

But there is always something to get me riled up or leave me bemused, at which time I do the only thing I know that helps me deal with such moments. Put word to paper, or at least that white paper-like facsimile on my computer. Followed immediately by the realization that I have no venue on which to share said rant/observation/musing other than this humble blog. And so I come crawling back.

It’s just a question of how long before I’m feeling butt-hurt again when I don’t get the response I had hoped from my latest post (the definition of ‘insanity’ notwithstanding), and decide that my blogging days are over. Enough of this feces. I’m done pouring out my soul to craft insightful, humorous pieces, only to have them flatline again and again. Of course, I appreciate my core of loyal readers (all twelve of you), but while I can’t do the math off the top of my head, all I can tell you is, out of a possible eight billion sets of eyes, that’s a pretty slim percentage. Time to pull the plug. That’ll show all those bastards who won’t read my stuff.

I know there are those who say that blogging isn’t about the views, that the writing should be its own reward. I can appreciate the sentiment. But after a decade of this, it’s a bit disheartening to be losing readership. Because if no one reads your stuff, what’s the point? And, yes, I would like some cheese with my whine.

So maybe it was serendipity when I touched the former WordPress, now Jetpack app on my phone by mistake (or perhaps not?) the other day. Staring back at me was the usual gaggle of goose eggs that denoted my site’s various interactions for the day (not all that surprising considering I have only posted two stories in the last three months, after more than a year of inactivity).

Attempting to avoid all those depressing zeros, I clicked on the ‘Reader’ button to have a look around, see what those I had been following were up to after all this time. And there at the top of the list was a post from The Spectacled Bean, a piece about the author’s 20 year blog journey. She even posed a question about how one might go about bringing his/her blog to an end.

It was uncannily timely so I commented, there were a few queries about my absence, and then a handful of click-throughs from other readers. It felt a bit like old times, though not enough for me to open a blank document and start tapping out a new post.

But then came the clincher – I gained a new follower, the first in a very long time. Just one, but that was enough. Because every time it’s happened in the past, I felt obligated to soldier on, to not leave that person in the lurch by never posting anything again. As I do now. So I’ll give it a go one more time.

The thing is, I’ve always wanted to be a writer, ever since reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a teen. The creative process, in this case crafting a story in six hundred words, brings me joy. That only a dozen people read it, well, you can’t have everything, right? Besides, now it will be thirteen. Maybe that’s my lucky number.

The One About Raquel Welch and My Colon

I’m a child of the sixties and seventies – our legacy is dancing naked in the mud at Woodstock and protesting a war which made little sense and Hunter S. Thompson driving through the desert stoned out of his mind. Generations before and after have their collective touchstones as well – I offer mine merely for perspective. Because, looking back, there was never an inkling that someone would take a tour of my colon. Such a thing was completely unthinkable given the technology of the day. And, of course, the fact that we knew full well we were invincible. But times change.

My coffee this morning is black, per the instructions of those who will be along for this little sashay through my bowels. The laxatives and witches’ brew of polyethylene glycol, sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride and potassium chloride (with a splash of lemon), meant to speed the evacuation process, are on tap in an hour or so.

We’re looking for, or rather hoping not to find, the big C – cancer. A pernicious bastard, that one. If you’re not grappling with it personally, you surely know someone who is. My brother is currently going 15 rounds with multiple myeloma. My sister just finished treatment for a lump on a lymph node. My best friend had his prostate removed a few years ago when cancer was detected there. And on and on.

So having someone poke around in my nether regions is simply the price for living this long, and to get a jump on the son of a bitch should cancer be coming for me. Even so, there’s always a nagging concern with any type of invasive procedure, regardless of how “routine” I’m told it is. Hell, I remember Katie Couric getting a colonoscopy live on the Today Show at least twenty years ago. But, as irrational as it may be, I have an inherent unease about any foreign object gaining access to my plumbing.

With possibly one exception. I might have preferred something more along the lines of Fantastic Voyage, the sixties sci-fi gem wherein they shrink a group of scientists (including Raquel Welch, in some of her best work) and a submarine to microscopic proportions, then inject the whole kit and kaboodle into yet another scientist (who’s in a coma) so they can travel through his veins and other ductwork on their way to his brain in order to destroy an otherwise inoperable blood clot with their tiny laser guns.

By comparison, simply having a camera run up my exit ramp seems quite pedestrian. But while Raquel and her laser gun would come in handy should there be any rogue polyps lurking in my hepatic flexure, I have to imagine bowel detail for the micro-crew would be decidedly less glamorous than navigating the chambers of the heart and battling killer white blood cells. I mean, who gets the job of hosing off that submarine?

It’s that fight we all face, as our parts wear out or corrosion sets in and we realize there’s no warranty. And while Neil Young believes it’s better to burn out than it is to rust, that whole ‘Live fast, die young and leave a pretty corpse’ thing doesn’t really resonate with me. In fact, I imagine most of us are trying our best to prolong the experience.

I, for one, enjoy and appreciate the physical world, sublimely so. Regardless of what comes next, I will miss this place dearly. But I am not waiting on a heavenly afterlife, a home in the clouds that promises better things once I shed this mortal coil. No, this is the only go-round for me, and I’d like to make the most of it. Which means some preventative maintenance is to be expected.

Unfortunately, Raquel Welch is no longer available for microscopic exploratory medical work. So bring on that gallon jug of witches’ brew. When this is over, I plan to go dancing naked in the mud somewhere.

Postscript: Clean as a whistle. Life is good. Let’s dance.

The Second Time Around

(Image credit: CBS)

Amazon recently began streaming Northern Exposure, the quirky ‘dramedy’ about a Jewish doctor from New York City who, thanks to contractual obligations, is forced to spend time working in a small town in Alaska. This came as great news, for it was a favorite of mine.

As one might assume, cultural clashes provided impetus for much of the story lines. ‘Action-packed’ are words that would never be used in a program synopsis, which may have been the initial draw for me, having reached my fill of cop shoot-outs and emergency room traumas. Instead, this was a beacon of counter-programming in the vast wasteland – witty dialogue, off-beat character studies, finding the humor in human nature.

It first aired in the early nineties, a time when we were living in Denver, briefly. Our great relocation from the Midwest wasn’t going according to plan, as I couldn’t find work (without any business or social contacts in town), and the show provided a feeling of home in this strange place as well as respite from the stress of job-hunting. But CBS pulled the plug after a six-year run and it hasn’t been seen since. The word is they’ve been quibbling over music licensing all this time – a possibility, considering one of the regulars was a philosophical DJ with an eclectic taste in music who kept the townsfolk entertained by spinning a wide-ranging playlist on the local radio station.

And firing up the debut installment brought back all the feels as soon as the familiar strains of the opening theme song, not heard for thirty years, began to play. I haven’t had a reason to spend much time in front of a television of late, but suddenly found myself settling in for some serious binge-watching.

So why is it I’m only half a dozen episodes in and can’t for the life of me recall what it was I liked about this show? The characters come across as two-dimensional and downright boring, the acting rarely rises above the level of a high school production, and the story lines are uninteresting, even trite. What happened in the last three decades?

This isn’t the first time I’ve been disappointed the second time around. I read On The Road as a teen and, in the moment, found it to be revelatory scripture, a diatribe that inspired me to eschew higher education and take to the lonesome two-lane myself with Kerouac’s words as a battle cry – The best teacher is experience and not through someone’s distorted point of view. As it turns out, a college degree can come in handy at many a job interview (see Denver, above), but that is for another discussion. More to the point, when I revisited his tome in adulthood, it proved to be a joyless slog and I put it down, for good, after only a few chapters.

I came to realize there were any number of more engaging (and certainly more coherent) travel tales to consider. Of course, Homer set the bar for the genre with The Odyssey, but more recent examples include William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways and my personal favorite, John Steinbeck’s introspective Travels With Charley. I guess the simple lesson here is that, with apologies to the Beat Generation, people change. For better or worse, I became a grownup. And like little Jackie Paper leaving painted wings and giant’s rings behind, I was done with Kerouac’s pretentious, benzedrine-fueled ramblings.

But what of all my former friends back in Cicely, Alaska’s most popular one-moose town? Had I outgrown them, too? It looks that way. I wanted to believe that what I was seeing now was just a case of freshman season uncertainty, that period where a new show struggles to find its identity (and its audience), before the writers and actors get comfortable with the characters. So I skipped ahead into season two, but found myself muttering the same thing. “This was a whole lot better the first time around.”

So au revoir, Northern Exposure…we’ll always have Denver.

Hair for the Holidays

It occurs to me that I am not a hat person. I tried for a time, back in my ‘John Denver’ days, tugging a rough-hewn leather cowboy hat over my long (and typically greasy) locks in the hopes of being mistaken for a musician. It was a short-lived period and one that never achieved the desired results.

I will pull on a baseball cap when I go fishing, but there are quite literally two hats I chose from on those occasions. Even when I go hiking, many times my expensive ‘outdoors’ hat (the one with mesh cooling vents and a removable Lawrence of Arabia neck shroud) gets left behind in the car. Foolish, perhaps, should the weather take a turn, but I would rather feel the wind in my hair than cover my noggin.

Not to brag, but I do have a pretty good mane, especially considering my age (you’ve heard of Methuselah, oldest man in the Bible? I’m his dad). Other things may be sagging, swelling or outright falling off, but the hairline is hanging in there. Yes, my vanity might be showing, but why not flaunt what you got.

In that spirit, I’ve decided to try and grow it out one more time after watching a few episodes of The Kominsky Method. I’m thinking I could give the Michael Douglas/Sam Elliot look a go, though I am also keenly aware that you’re only a couple of Hot Buttered Rums away from the Nick Nolte ‘sleeping on the park bench’ coif (see above).

I am at the point right now where I either need to get a haircut or commit to the shag. Previous attempts have been thwarted by an obsessive need to keep my advancing locks from touching my ears. This may be an ‘old guy’ thing, as it was never a concern when I wore my hair down to my shoulders.

But these days I seem to be much more sensitive to it, and find myself pushing my hair back constantly. So, short of being put into a medically-induced coma until I look like a hoary Fabio, this may give me cause to resurrect the mullet – providing length while still keeping the ears out of the fray.

These latest thoughts about “letting my freak flag fly” – as Crosby, Stills and Nash crooned in Almost Cut My Hair – had their seeds in the pandemic, when the simple act of getting a haircut could mean taking your life in your hands. So trips to the salon were delayed as long as possible, and while that made for many a Doc Brown moment (when you see yourself in the mirror and spontaneously exclaim, “Great Scott!”), it also had me reminiscing about the good ol’ days of tangled tresses and pony tails.

There was high school, of course, because it was the seventies and long hair was mandatory. The eighties didn’t put much of a crimp in my style, either, thanks to the afore-mentioned mullet. Then it came time to toe the line and sport grownup hair, though I did manage to gain back some length in the months after we moved to Colorado, while I waited for employers to beat a path to my door.

There’s a bit more gray these days (and by ‘a bit’ I mean a shitload), but society gives me a pass and calls it ‘distinguished.’ Then again, ‘distinguished’ isn’t necessarily a look you want to sport for a job interview. Which may be a big part of why it’s been such a challenge for me to find gainful employment following our relocation.

But hell, St. Nick himself is rocking a righteous white mop in all his promotional materials and at his many mall appearances. I guess if that shaggy old hipster can find a gig, then there’s hope for me.

A Forgotten Souvenir

I’ve had a tune rolling around in my head for days. Not something that I might have heard on the radio recently or was suggested by the Spotify algorithms – no, this is a song from the depths of my gray matter, from when records were the size of dinner plates.

Here is a poem that my lady sent down, some morning while I was away, Wrote on the back of a leaf that she found, somewhere around Monterey…

Old Dan Fogelberg, the title track from his second album, Souvenirs, released the year I graduated from high school. Shortly after we hominids stumbled from Olduvai Gorge. I was introduced to it by a friend, another euphonium player in band class, who previewed it for me excitedly one evening at his house. And at seventeen, it became one of my favorites. While far from such seminal works as, say, Dark Side of the Moon or Sgt. Pepper, its folksy, acoustic vibe (even a bit smarmy at times, in retrospect) appealed to the wannabe troubadour in me.

Part of the Plan hit the charts, and put Fogelberg on the map. The rest of the record was generally ignored by commercial radio, but I was enthralled and played it until I wore out the grooves. John Denver had already inspired me to pick up a guitar, and now I attempted to add a few of these songs to my meager repertoire. Three simple chords – C, F and G – and I was strumming backup rhythm on There’s a Place in the World For a Gambler.

Though he gained a reputation for sentimental ballads, this early album (produced by his friend Joe Walsh) had a more upbeat feel, embodied by the near-rock number, As the Raven Flies. But when it came to jamming with the lead guitar part on said tune (some of which was laid down by Walsh himself), it was obvious I was hopelessly outmatched, as the exercise typically degenerated into a furious stream of jumbled, discordant notes. And on many of the remaining songs I warbled tentative harmonies in my strangled, nasal Midwestern baritone.

Later, when I started my illustrious broadcasting career, my first job was disc jockey at a small station in Howell, Michigan, not far from Detroit. Back then it was a quiet farm town, the seat of Livingston County and a notoriously conservative enclave. A place where they loved their country music, and where a Grand Wizard of the KKK was rumored to live. As a DJ, one of my duties was to meet the national news feed at four minutes before every hour as a lead-in to the local newscast I had to read at the top of the hour.

I usually tried to back-time a song with a cold ending so that the last note was dying just as the ABC news anchor chimed in. And many times, the two and a half minute Changing Horses was the perfect length to fill that window. It brought me no small joy to think that I was elevating the lyrical discourse in what tiny bit of the world was reached by those five-thousand watts – giving these window-licking hillbillies a taste of quality music for a change.

Eventually he was supplanted, as he got a little too ‘soft’ for me as his popularity grew, and other artists came along – R.E.M., Counting Crows, the Indigo Girls, the Tragically Hip, Wailin’ Jennys, the Dave Matthews Band, Dawes.

So just how this particular song now came to haunt me is a mystery. It bubbled to my consciousness despite me having not revisited the album in at least 30 years. Maybe I caught a snippet of another tune that reminded me of this one. Or maybe I heard a reference to Monterey in the news that triggered a dusty, long-idled turntable in my head. Whatever the case, I was compelled to go digging through a bag of old CDs in the back of the guest room closet until, like a pothead in search of that last roach, I put my hands on it, gave a brief exclamation (“Yes!”), and held it aloft triumphantly.

I fumbled with the CD tray on my laptop for an inordinate amount of time, finally getting it to glide open after uttering the correct combination of magical curse words. With Dan’s ghost staring back at me from the jacket cover, hair flowing to his chest and bird feather in hand, his music spilled into the room. Though the computer speaker lacked the wherewithal to give the album proper respect, it didn’t matter – the songs rolled on, one after another, and every word came to my lips without hesitation.

My favorite, Illinois, is about another Midwestern boy (Fogleberg was raised in Peoria), now a California transplant, who longs for his home back east. I sang so loud that my wife yelled up from the TV room for me to tone it down so she wouldn’t miss any of the profundities being caterwauled on Real Housewives of (Take Your Pick).

I remembered that he had died some time ago, silenced by prostate cancer in 2007 at the age of 56. His was one of those passings that stuck with me for a while. Like John Lennon, Robin Williams and Joan Didion, among others – people I admired for various reasons, and realized once they died that I would never get the chance to meet them, regardless of how improbable such a possibility might ever have been.

But, thankfully, they all left a piece of themselves behind. Fogelberg’s music still resonates with me, perhaps even more so now with the memories in tow, and Souvenirs is back on the playlist.

Baby, It’s Cold Inside

Even Captain Planet can’t win them all.

The nineties environmental superhero who fell victim to adolescent indifference and, subsequently, chronic lackluster viewership, still lives on in spirit. While the ratings-obsessed media overlords may have long ago dropped the curtain on his herculean efforts to save our azure orb from the ravages of its human inhabitants, at least one aging hippie has picked up the mantle of Ted Turner’s mullet-sporting green guardian of the globe.

Yes, I’m that guy. The one who pulls shampoo bottles out of the bathroom trash while giving my wife the ‘seriously?’ face, or lecturing my son about how removing that cardboard pizza box from the refuse stream will make a better world for him to inherit. And, surprisingly, neither has killed me in my sleep just yet.

These days it doesn’t take much to make me happy. Case in point, Maud’s – a coffee distributor that appears to have finally heard my lamentations (curses, more accurately, sent with gusto into the cosmic void every morning as I stand over the sink, k-cup in hand). You see, I’ve been recycling those little cups for some time now because, well, 13-billion (with a ‘b’) finding their way into the landfills every year is enough.

And it’s messy business, peeling that foil cover off to get the grounds out. Until now. All it took was adding a tiny pull-tab to render the job effortless (but begs the question, why did that take so long?). And if one goes so far as to compost the spent and soggy payload, then that cup of joe can go down nearly guilt-free.

But it seems there is always a yang to counter the yin.

With winter in the wings (and nights already getting nippy), Cappy is trying his best to curb household energy usage in an attempt to rein in a burgeoning heating bill. The cost to keep my abode cozy has risen more than forty percent in the last year. It’s not that I’m using more natural gas – in fact, I’ve reduced my consumption, but the cost of the product has, like nearly everything else, gone stratospheric.

Inflation? Corporate greed? Take your pick. But as much as I dislike playing the ‘old guy’ card, I’m on a fixed income now, requiring nickles to be squeezed even harder that usual. So using less energy has a twofold effect – conserving dwindling natural resources while also conserving dwindling financial resources.

Step one, then, is to crank the thermostat down in the hopes that I can lull the furnace into a false sense of complacency. At the moment I’ve settled on 68 degrees.

It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything is fine.

Okay, that mind over matter crap isn’t working. Neither is Life Below Seventy. I know there are some who brag about living in an icebox all winter, who claim they turn their heat down to 62 or the like, but Captain Planet can’t hang. It turns out cold is my kryptonite.

For me, dropping under my comfort threshold, even by just two degrees, is a back breaker. I find myself leaning over the toaster while my morning English muffins brown, or clutching my coffee cup in a two-handed death grip, even swaddled as I am in wool and flannel from head to foot. I might acclimate by the new year, but until then it’s all I can do to try and milk the last BTU from every alternate heat source in the house, like Bob Cratchit cradling that lone candle in Scrooge’s office.

Discretion being the better part of valor, I’ve decided to make a tactical retreat, back to a balmy seventy degrees. I’d like to still have all my toes come April. Besides, saving the planet goes a whole lot easier if you’re not a popsicle.

Dance of the Sugar Plums

Disclaimer: In keeping with the general decline in societal norms (a recent story on my newsfeed proclaimed, “Woman Accidentally Walks Into Husband’s Fart”), I’ve decided to delve into the dark side of pet ownership. For those who may find talk of animal excrement offensive, I will be referring to said subject matter as ‘sugar plums.’ If this is still not enough to placate the squeamish or puritanical, then I suggest you stop reading before, like me, you step in something you weren’t expecting.

For many, it is their favorite time of year. The air is crisp, the trees go full Norman Rockwell in spectacular color displays, the sky a cerulean pearl. Winter is, of course, lurking just off stage, waiting to make its entrance and bring everyone back to reality, but for a few weeks the world is all fleece pullovers, pumpkin spice and falling leaves.

Aye, there’s the rub – those falling leaves. They can drift lazily to the ground or blow in horizontally on gale-force winds, but either way they make my life hell. Not because I’m particularly bothered by raking them up. At least not here in Colorado. Back in Michigan, in our heavily-wooded neighborhood, they would pile up in knee-high drifts that had to be pushed onto a tarp before being dragged up the steep hill behind our house. It was a multi-day affair that tested my stamina and prompted me to keep my cardiologist on speed-dial just in case.

Here, things are much less strenuous. A couple of easy hours raking and it’s over. And there’s even curbside pickup. With one caveat – the company handling our yard waste is adamant about no biohazard (a.k.a. sugar plums) finding its way into the bin with the grass clippings, sticks and leaves. Something about the earth spinning off its axis as a result…

So this, then, is the dilemma. The backyard is my dog’s safe zone – it’s the only place he feels comfortable enough to go about his business. Toby is a rescue, and we’ve come to realize that he’s agoraphobic. When you take him for a walk he spends the entire time looking back over his shoulder as if to say, “Hey, I think you left the coffee maker on – we should really go back and check.”

Nor does he take these opportunities to make his mark in the world, apparently being a huge proponent of the ‘leave no trace’ movement. In the five years we’ve had him, he hasn’t once left a sugar plum behind on a walk. Not one. He saves them all for my backyard. And while his favorite drop zone seems to be directly in front of the shed doors, that is by no means the only one.

Any other season, this is not a problem. Have shovel, will scoop. But come fall, when nature’s colorful collage carpets the yard, there is no safe passage. The sugar plums lie in wait, hidden from view beneath the autumnal bounty. It feels like every foray into the backyard during October should be accompanied by the theme music from Jaws.

To simply rake everything up into a pile is out of the question. Even taking into account Toby’s known haunts, the odds of dredging up rogue sugar plums in such an indiscriminate operation are astronomical. And to try and sift them out as you transfer the leaves to the bin is not only foolhardy and unsanitary, but nigh on impossible. Gravity helps the process a bit, as the heavier objects tend to make their way to the bottom of the pile, but unless one were to go leaf by leaf, stragglers and cling-ons will invariably slip past.

And so I bob and weave my way through the season’s waning splendor, cavorting with my leaf blower as I high-step over land mines both new and old, like Fred Astaire doing the mambo with that coat rack. Except the consequences of a misstep are slightly more dire in my case. Sure, I could get a cat and be done with it, but then what would the neighbors have to look forward to.

Lee Ann Womack had a big hit a while back with I Hope You Dance. Thanks to my dog Toby, her wish is fulfilled.

The Ghost of Christmas Presents

Christmas is all about the joy that comes from giving, but what happens when there’s nothing left to give? I mean, my lovely wife and I have reached a point in our lives and relationship where we pretty much have all the things we could ever need or want. During the rest of the year there is very little discussion about purchases – if one of us decides we should have something, we just get it. Larger purchases (anything over a few hundred bucks) will be mentioned, usually to avoid statement shock when the credit card bill rolls in, but we really don’t monitor the other’s spending habits.

Of course, it’s December when those chickens come home to roost. So for the last few years we’ve toyed with the idea of simply not buying gifts for one another, a concept only recently approved for other members of the (extended) family. Trying to curb the parade of baubles and trinkets that will be tucked into a dark corner, never to see the light of day again, or simply donated to a favorite charity after the dust of the holidays has settled.

At first blush, it seems like a win-win – not only relieving the receiver of all that guilt about returning the tube socks so lovingly picked out for them, but also giving the gifter one less thing to stress over as the big day approaches and the desperation factor increases exponentially (hence the tube socks).

As with anything, there are exceptions to the rule. Obviously our kids (and now grandkids), because there are still things they require. But this means they then feel obligated to reciprocate – the unwritten Christmas quid pro quo that ensnares us all.

However, just like with my birthday, the things that really matter to me any more are probably a little tough to wrap – things like world peace and clean energy. So I always opt for gift cards to a favorite restaurant, or a donation in my name to Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature or some other equally worthy cause. Still, this doesn’t always guarantee that a rogue pair of tube socks won’t turn up. To my youngest…it truly is the thought that counts, and I feel your pain.

But where my spouse is concerned, there is no easy out. In the past, we have looked each other in the eye and pinky-swore that this would be the year when we go gift-free, with the understanding that we don’t love any less, we just want to stop the madness. And should the economy slip into a death spiral because two fewer purchases were made this holiday season, well, my bad.

All our pact provides, though, is a sad commentary on trust. You end up buying something as ‘backup’ just in case she breaks down and tries to sneak her own something under the tree with your name on it. Which happens every year. It might be endearing if the exchange left us with a ‘Gift of the Magi’ sort of ending – me selling my newly-acquired kayak to buy her the complete set of Downton Abbey DVDs while she hocks the Blu-Ray player to get me a paddle for my kayak – but the days of being so broke as to pawn off our possessions to pay for presents are long gone.

So I’ll be prowling the shops right up until Christmas Eve, looking for another ‘something’ to avoid that fate worse than death – being the one who receives but has nothing to give. All the while railing against a society that no longer abides by the sanctity of the pinky-swear.