When I Was A Kid
Guns & Love
It’s a way of looking at love and how love is expressed that I never considered.
The radio commercial featured a woman, talking to men. “Hey guys, I know you forgot to buy a Valentine’s Day gift again.”
Pause to consider the stereotype presented.
“But don’t worry. February is the month of love. So all month, you can come to the gun store and buy a gift for the loved one in your life.”
Now my stereotype is showing. When I think of Valentine’s Day gifts, guns don’t leap to mind. Candy, especially chocolates, a night out, jewelry, diamonds, flowers, lingerie…these are the stereotypes of the V.D. (sorry) gifts that come to my mind.
I suppose it’s valid for some cultures to say I love you with a gun. I imagine, outside of my sphere, there’s a whole world of gun-giving as gifts for special occasions. Keeping with paper, first year wedding anniversaries are probably celebrated with gun-range targets. In the fifth year, a nice, compact .22 pistol is given. For the ten year anniversary, give her a 30/30 hunting rifle.
The restaurant moments write themselves. He’s down on one knee, handing her a Sig. Her eyes shine with tears as she gasps and whispers, “It’s beautiful.” Around her, other patrons are gushing with appreciation. Applause breaks out as she accepts the gun and hugs her man. One woman hisses at her husband, “Why don’t you ever buy me a gun?”
I wonder if Hallmark has a range of gun cards for holidays?
Wrong
Do you ever catch yourself doing something that prompts you to ask yourself, “What is wrong with you?”
Yeah, it happened to me yesterday. I was in Costco, and as I walked along, I started singing Christmas carols to myself. That’s right, Christmas carols, on February 8.
I hope it’s not some harbinger of Christmas starting in February. I mean, what the hell?
Cat Commercial
I have to say, I’m a little irritated with a lot of the cat videos on the web. Many of them remind me of those commercials that imply, “If you eat this food, wear these clothes, or drink this beverage, you’ll be young, beautiful, and carefree, and have a wonderful, fun life.”
Doesn’t happen in my life, no matter what I eat, drink, or wear.
The cat videos often show a cat taken in as a stray or a kitten, and how the other cats and household pets adopt the new one, and they all start hanging out together, having fun, snuggling and napping together.
Yeah. Doesn’t happen in my house.
I feel like a U.N. Peace-Keeping Force in my house. I’m constantly manning observation points, watching their movements, and issuing warnings. “You. Tucker. Yes, you. I see you. No, it’s too late for you to try to get small or become invisible.”
Because that’s what cats believe. Cats believe, “If I don’t move, he won’t know I’m here.” Or, “If I get small and move real slow, he won’t be able to see what I’m doing.” These cats don’t think I’m very bright.
But like a life-guard at the pool, I persist. “You’re in the no-floof zone. Get back, please. Get back. Get back now. This is your last warning.”
You ever notice how they seem to realize you’re talking to them. But they’ll stall, putting on an act to buy time so they can come up with an excuse for what they’re doing.
“No, no, you misunderstood,” they finally say with their whiskers and other non-verbal communications. “I wasn’t sneaking up on that other cat with the intention of biting their ear off. I was just coming her to sit down in this spot to wash my face.”
Then that’s what they do. They sit down and wash their face, saying, “That’s all. There wasn’t enough light back there, where I had been napping. I wasn’t going to stalk and attack that other cat. I’m completely innocent.
“Trust me.”
Then they give me a look, to assess, is he buying this. Which is essentially a cat con commercial. So what the cats are really asking themselves as they watch me is, “Is this commercial working?”
Retrofloof
Retrofloof (catfinition) – a time-traveling cat who insists on living in the past.
In use:
Lady, the little gray tabby with a tawny belly, was a retrofloof, disappearing as suddenly as she’d arrived, with as little explanation to it.
He didn’t worry; another retrofloof would soon show up. Other people thought retrofloofs were strays, but he knew that cats liked time-traveling, and preferred (from his experience and perspective, at least) to go into the past to relive their past lives.
How did he know the cats traveled into the past? They’d informed him that it was what they did. Not all who disappeared were retrofloofs, of course; some were alterfloofs, choosing to live in alternative dimensions. But Lady, she had told him, was a retrofloof.
The Memory
Billy got hit by a truck, he says.
He thinks, a truck hit Billy, but he doesn’t say anything. The other is still speaking in slow, backwoods twangs and drawls.
Boy, do I remember that day. We were standing on one side of the road, by the school entrance. Billy was on the other side. He saw us and got this big grin. One of them big-ass coal trucks was hauling ass toward us, but Billy started running across the road. It was all so fast, I didn’t even have time to shout or think. The truck driver slammed on his brakes. The tires locked up in screaming smoke, and the brakes were grinding and squealing in what seemed like forever. I swear to God, I saw Billy turn and look at the truck at the last second, like he’d just realized it was there. Then the truck took Billy down the road.
His shoe flew off. I saw it fly away, like a damn bird. It landed off the side of the road. Then the truck was stopped, and it was all quiet for, I don’t know, it seemed like forever, but it wasn’t. Then someone shouted, Billy, and we all started running for the truck.
His blue eyes get still and wide, staring far off across time and space. Man, I remember that day like it was yesterday, he says.
Steps
He’s thinking about the day. He needs to dress, which means walking to the bedroom, fifty-eight steps. He’ll walk around downtown. It’s eight hundred steps from the plaza to the library.
Do you want to see a movie? she asks.
I don’t know, he answers. What’s playing?
She reads him a list with the playing times.
I don’t know, he says. Let me think about it.
Instead, he thinks walking to the movies, thirty-two hundred steps. He thinks about getting a drink of water in the kitchen, twenty-one steps.
Something is wrong, he thinks, getting up. Something has gone awry. Counting steps, he goes into the other room. He was supposed to do something there, but it fades away under the count. He walks around the room for a quarter mile, four hundred and fifty steps, and then returns to the other room.
A Time Pause
Walking around Ashland, especially in the commercial area downtown along Main Street and the Plaza, I encounter buildings constructed between one hundred and one hundred ten years ago. Their construction date is easily known because the year is on the building, which I like. But seeing such a proliferation of construction, I wonder what the town was then like, and the people’s vision of the future, and then consider what this town might look like one hundred years from now.
Her Memory
She’d found herself forgetting everything. It was, she explained to friends and families (who didn’t seem interested), like a wall or chasm existed between the answer and the question. She knew the answer was on the other side, but she couldn’t reach it.
This infuriated her. She’d been a five-time champion on Jeopardy! Ask her anything about culture, politics, arts and literature, physics and chemistry, or geography and history, and she could give you a quick, correct answer. Or could. Now it was changing.
She would not accept this. She adapted, because that was her nature, first keeping copious notes on calendars and notebooks about everything that happened. Nothing was too mundane. Updating her calendars and notebooks took from fifteen minutes to an hour every day, and was done as part of her ritual of preparing to retire for the night. Memories of more personal matters were augmented via recordings. The first recordings were done with a small Sony tape recorder. She switched to digital as the technology matured and became cheaper and more reliable. Eventually, she started making digital video recordings and storing them on the cloud. Then she could see and hear herself, reassuring herself of who she was and who she’d been.
By then, she’d retired. By then, her hair was wispy and white, and she wore wigs, out of vanity. By then, she’d buried her third husband and second child, and her parents and siblings. By then, she’d gone through cancer in her cervix and successful treatment, and had a hip replaced after a fall, and was treated for glaucoma, and celebrated her ninetieth birthday. By then, many friends had died or moved away, or were in hospice, or couldn’t remember her. By then, new technology emerged for an augmented digital memory, something like Keanu Reeves’ character had in Johnny Mnemonic. She’d enjoyed the book (by William Gibson) (because she loved science fiction and fantasy), but didn’t like the movie. But then, she’d never been a huge Keanu Reeves fan, outside of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, although he wasn’t bad in the first Matrix film.
Technology improved. She gave her memory a name, George, after her first husband. George would chat with her about what she needed to know and do, and what had happened, who said what when.
A new product, “Your Best Friend,” emerged. Using smart technology embedded in phones, computers, cars, houses, and businesses, her memory could have a holographic presence and a voice outside her head, almost everywhere, almost all the time.
She loved this aspect. She named her new memory Jean, after a friend she’d lost in her past. She and Jean had shared many good times together, and she thought it would be better to have a dead girlfriend as a faux companion rather than a dead husband.
She and Jean went everywhere together. It was initially a little strange to others and she was self-conscious about it, because it was all new, and others didn’t have virtual holographic friends. Others thought it odd, or that she was weird, or demented, you know, delusional. She was on the cutting edge. If her husband(s) could see her now. Hah!
Technology improved and became cheaper and more prevalent. Soon, many people had such companions, nannies, guards, and mentors. Eventually, she forgot that this was her memory.
Her memory had become her best friend, which, if she thought about it, was how it should be.
Michael Seidel, writer 