Memories by HenryM

IT WAS A WEEK AGO (A WEEK AGO!) that I saw Halloween decorations out. Big, lighted orange things on a home’s front lawn, announcing to all and sundry that they needed to get a life. To go to the trouble of putting out Halloween decorations six weeks before the day in question is more than I can handle. It’s a ridiculous holiday to begin with, when people send their children out to go door- ...

LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO NOT EAT DONUTS (in Old English: doughnuts). Yet I resist, I resist with all my might. It’s not fair that such pleasure should be so bad for you. Driving home from the gym, where I turn left to get home, if I just went a half mile further up the highway, there is a wonderful donut/ice cream shop there. I have been in there two or three times, days when my defenses were de ...

WE DECIDED TO EAT OUT the other night and we went to a little Italian restaurant we’d only just discovered. The place opened at 4 PM and we arrived about ten minutes early. There was a little porch area in the front and, as we hurried through the rain from our car, there were about a half dozen people already waiting for it to open. A couple about 35 to 40 years of age was sitting on a be ...

MY POSTING HAS BEEN OFF due to brief illness and two days hospitalized for dehydration, but I’m home and fine now. I got the usual blast of bureaucratic absurdities while in the hospital, many of them hilarious. My arrival in ER, after the usual wait, began with an EKG. Not only did it show my heart was fine, but the operator said “That’s the prettiest picture I’ve seen in quite a whil ...

To be without guts (present company accepted) doesn’t mean one lacks balls. I happen to have balls in spades: super jumbo cotton balls. They are a staple of my changing routine which I perform every fourth day, first thing in the morning, usually about 3:30 AM or so, as I am an early riser. The cotton balls have to be both SUPER JUMBO, which means they are larger than the run-of-the-mill, ev ...

My first UC hospitalization was in upstate New York in a hospital that must have been a relic from the 19th Century, grim as it was. They installed me in what was called a semi-private room, a euphemism if ever there was one. A room is either private, or it’s not. A never-ending string of other patients funneled through the room during my one and one-half months there. I remember only one: a ...

From the fourth grade on, I worked. Job upon job, plus school which, as we know, if done right, is work too. I didn’t stop until I was seventy-five and, even then, it was with mixed emotions. Of course, as the great Lily Tomlin once said, the problem with the rat race is that, even if you win, you’re still a rat. So I came to regard retirement as time to hang it up, box it up, and give it ...

SOMETIMES MY PIEBALD DACHSHUND HUXLEY thought he was a pit bull. As low to the ground that he was, you’d think he’d get a terrible crick in his neck from looking up all the time. But he was a tough little doggie and, as dachshunds tend to be, very protective. He kept a wide berth from our cats, just to be on the safe side. Dachshunds are smart little buggers too. One day a neighbor of ...

APPROACHING OUR 55TH ANNIVERSAY, my wife and I marvel at the permanence of our relationship. We have passed beyond love into something indefinable, a kind of unification of spirit. We were married in 1968, a traumatic time in the USA, punctuated by assassinations and upheaval and an unpopular war. Thinking about it makes me aware of my own insignificance. My ileostomy is how I avoided Viet ...

WE’VE ALL HAD PHOTOS TAKEN OF US that we thought were terrible. Do I look like that? But the worst, the photo you don’t ever want to sit for, is the infamous mugshot. Whenever someone gets arrested, having fingerprints taken and a mugshot are normal elements of the processing into the system called booking. Many well-known people have been through this unenviable procedure over the yea ...

IT’S A SEVEN HOUR DRIVE FROM Miami, Florida to Tallahassee, Florida. It is a long peninsular state and, these days, the available highways are high-speed, divided, long distance bores with minimum reasons to slow down except for rest stops or gas stations. Of all the states that I have traveled through, Florida may be the most boring, as its highest point is only a couple of hundred feet a ...

MY HANDWRITING SUCKS. Technically, I would say that it is a combination of cursive and printing that, by the time I had left school and the necessity to take classroom notes, had deteriorated into a sort of semi-legible chicken scrawl that even I can’t always read. In school, I concocted a number of abbreviations to enable me to take rapid notes, and I continue to use them today. For exam ...

FOR WEEKS, I’VE BEEN HEARING BANGING and tinkering noises coming from my neighbor’s garage. Then, just the other day, we were both out getting our mail at the same time so I asked him about it. “I’ve built a time machine,” he told me. “I know that sounds crazy,” he continued, “but I’ve tried it and it works.” I feigned interest. “I can tell from your expression that ...

SUNDAY I GO TO CHURCH, and church is outside in the dark early morning, under the stars, inhaling the fresh air, and watching the possum make it across the road because, on Sunday, traffic is substantially reduced. Outside, with large oak trees reaching toward the sky instead of man-made spires, my step is inspired by the spiritual richness of nature. I may not be able to see the owl in the ...

DOWNSTATE, THE HURRICANE battered, flooded, wreaked havoc, and I feel bad for those folks. But it missed me, and I can wander outside in the bracing fall weather without worrying about getting struck by a flying palm frond or a floating car. In fact, the weather around me is perfect, cool mornings to walk in, pleasant partly sunny days to putter about in the yard, pruning, fertilizing, admir ...