Santa Claus vs. The Tooth Fairy

Daniel came home from school the other day with one of his baby teeth in a bloody plastic bag.

“I lost it during reading,” he said.  “I was playing with it with my tongue when it fell out.”

“Well, be sure to leave it under your pillow tonight,” I said.  “Then the Tooth Fairy will come.”

He smiled.  “Maybe I’ll get a DVD burner!”

“Daniel, don’t you think that’s a bit much from the Tooth Fairy?”  I said, “Maybe you should ask Santa for a DVD burner instead.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” he said.  “Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, I mean.”  I had an anxious moment, but he continued.

“I get a lot of stuff at Christmas,” he said, “but all I have to do to get it is be good.”

“Well, it’s good for you when a baby tooth falls out,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief.  “But being good helps everyone out.  It’s a matter of the number of people that it affects.  That’s why you get more at Christmas.”

“But this happened in class,” said Daniel.  “I have twenty eight kids in my class, plus the teacher.”

“Yes, but –“

“And I was good when my tooth came out.  I followed the rules,” said Daniel.  “I was bleeding, but I raised my hand to go to the bathroom and I didn’t run in the hallway either.”

“This isn’t Scrabble,” I said.  “If you’re good and you lose a tooth, it’s not the moral equivalent of a double word score.”

“I had to bleed real blood for the Tooth Fairy,” he said.  “That just isn’t fair.”

I thought a moment.  This conversation was getting into some deep philosophical territory.

“Well, all the holiday people – Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy – they all draw from the same Daniel fund,” I said.  “If you get something nice now under your pillow, that means you may only get a dollar in your stocking on Christmas Day.”

“That’s okay,” said Daniel.  “That way I don’t have to be as good at Christmas.”

“No,” I said quickly.  “You still need to be good or the whole fund goes down.”

Daniel frowned.  “You mean I have to be good for the Tooth Fairy, but it doesn’t count for anything except at Christmas?”

“Sorry,” I said.  “Those are the rules.”

Daniel sighed.  “I need a better dental plan.”

Free Range Tree

Daniel and I made the trek to Rockford, in search of trees.  We have a tree in our yard, but since it isn’t quite as tall as our bushes, it doesn’t count.  We stopped at Ack Ack Nursery to see what they had for sale that met all of our arboreal criteria.  The tree had to be taller than we were.  It had to be big enough to support the weight of the occasional bird.  Most importantly, we needed a tree that couldn’t escape.

I’m a fan of free range.  I like when chickens and cows get to run around before I eat them.  I wish we had free range ground squirrels.  However, I want my bushes and trees to stay in the yard.  Meka and I bought a blackberry bush a few years ago and planted it in the back corner next to the fence.  It never grew well there.  It was on top of the swale between the yards; water wouldn’t stay there long.  The fence kept it in permanent shade, but didn’t seem to stop the wind very much.  When the bush wasn’t being blown over or dehydrated, rabbits would come to feed.

“We should put some rabbit fencing up,” said Meka on more than one occasion.  We never did though.  The rabbits ate the berries, the leaves and eventually reduced the entire bush down to a single woody stick poking out of the grass.  I thought that was the end of that.

A few months later, I noticed a weed growing up next to the cable junction box on the other side of the fence.  The ground is muddy and the gap is too narrow for me to mow there.  The weed grew taller and taller.  One day I noticed it was covered in flowers.  Soon after that, it was covered in blackberries.   I stood in the corner in the mud, promising this time things would be different.  However, the blackberry bush has made no sign of moving back.  I think it’s moved on and it was time for us to do the same.

I took Daniel with me to the nursery.  We picked out a locust tree from the “scratch and dent” aisle.  Daniel gave it a hug when I bought it.  The tree will be delivered by flat bed truck.  There will be no harrowing journey sticking out of the trunk like a rectal thermometer.  The tree will be planted by professionals and Daniel promised it will be watered faithfully.  I think it will like living with us in our yard.

But to be on the safe side, we’re getting the fence fixed before the tree shows up.

White Shirt Blues

Daniel and I were twenty miles into our mission to visit my sister Amy when it dawned on me I was wearing a white shirt.  I don’t know why I bother owning white shirts; they don’t stay white very long.  It may be food, it may be drink, but something will end up staining the shirt.  And once that happens, I get a small pity sound from Meka and yet another shirt I can wear when I do work around the house.  I decided I would make my stand.  It was going to be a full day in Chicago, but I promised myself I would end the day with a white (and only white) shirt.

“I’m hungry,” said Daniel.  It had been almost half an hour since we ate.  There was a Burger King at the next exit.  We stopped and went inside.  There would be no drive thru eating while wearing a white shirt.  I ordered a Whopper with nothing on it.  Daniel got a burger and fries.

“What do you want to drink?” I asked.

“Fanta,” he replied.  I looked at the drink station.  They had Fanta, but only in grape.

Oh, boy…

I used to work in fast food, so I know how the drink stations work.  I pressed the Fanta button and stepped to the side so the first few purple drops of soda hit my arm instead of my shirt.  I could wash my arm.  I dropped the drinks off at the table and stopped Daniel from banging on the ketchup packets with his fists before disaster ensued.

It took us an hour and a half to get to Amy’s place.  We met her and took the bus to the lake.  We were packed in like – well – like people on a bus.  Sardines have it easy.  I was bumped and bruised and elbowed on occasion, but I managed to avoid any spills and any stroller children with candy.  The beach was nice.  We walked along the retaining walls across from Navy Pier.  Occasionally a wave would rush up and splash us with spray.  I thanked my lucky stars we weren’t being splashed by the Chicago River.

Daniel invented some games with a little rubber ball he found in the park.  I forget what they were called, but they all seemed to require fishing said ball out from under bushes and flower boxes.  Still, my shirt stayed clean through the afternoon.  Food in Chicago is expensive, but Subway had a deal on a couple of footlongs for just five dollars.  We ordered meatball marinara sandwiches.  I pulled one out of the bag and unwrapped it before remembering what color shirt I was wearing.

Daniel finished long before I did, even Amy sat and watched as I delicately nibbled at my sandwich to avoid any red spots on my shirt.  That had to be a first.  Dessert was chocolate chip cookies, fresh from the oven with the chocolate still gooey.  Again, not a single spot and I washed my hands like a surgeon afterwards to avoid any secondary staining.

All in all it was a good day.  Daniel and I had fun with Amy.  We had fun wandering around the city.  We stopped back at her apartment before heading home and I inspected my shirt in the bathroom mirror.  Nothing.  The shirt was still white except for a dark mosquito on my shoulder in mid-bite.  I slapped it and came away with a long streak of blood on my shirt.

 

 

All You Can Eat

Rockford has not one, but two all you can eat buffet restaurants and they are only about a block apart.  The competition is fierce.  Even in Belvidere, we get coupons from one restaurant or the other about every other week.  Despite the siren song of savings, I wasn’t really tempted to eat at an all you can eat buffet until Daniel started wearing a shoe size larger than mine.  I thought it might be a good idea to make a test run prior to his becoming a teenager.  It might allow us to stay financially solvent.

It was already dark when we pulled in the parking lot.  The car was bathed in red from the never ending stream of menu items on the restaurant sign.  It was a full house.  Everyone in line had the coupons too.  However, things moved quickly and Daniel and I found a seat near the door.

“Here’s the way it works,” I said.  “You can take whatever food you want, but you have to eat it.  I don’t want it to go to waste.”  Daniel nodded.  He took one of the big white plates and began scooping out mashed potatoes.

“You might want to look around a bit,” I said.

“I like mashed potatoes,” he said.

“I know, but you might like something else better,” I said.  “You might want to check out the other stations before you commit.”  Daniel put the spoon back in the tray reluctantly and walked around the other tables.  He stopped at the dessert station, but I didn’t even give him time to grin.

“But I like this better than mashed potatoes,” he said to no avail.  Mean Dad still shook his head no and made him turn back to the real food.

Besides the mashed potatoes, Daniel came back to the table with a slice of ham, what looked like sweet and sour chicken and a small hot dog.  He rolled the wiener around in the orange sauce and pronounced it delicious.

“I can make my own recipe with this,” he said.  “I’ll call it the hot, sweet and sour dog!”  I’m not sure what “old country” the buffet originated from, so I refrained from dismissing the idea completely out of hand.

Round two was salad: four pieces of iceberg lettuce and a tomato slice covered in enough bacon bits to reconstitute a pig.  And more mashed potatoes.  I have to admit that mixing the mashed potatoes with bacon bits looked pretty good to me.  I went back up and got a scoop myself.

“Daniel, I’m sorry I ever doubted you,” I said.  “You really don’t like anything more than mashed potatoes, do you?”  Daniel’s third plate had a little bit of corn, a little bit of green beans, a lot of mashed potatoes and a taco.

“I’ve never had tacos with mashed potatoes before,” he said.

I’m forty two years old.  I’ve never had mashed potatoes with a taco before either.  Daniel reported the taco shell worked quite well as a scoop and the drippings from the taco meat made a “Mexican Gravy” that was incomparable.

“You should try it,” he said, getting up for more.  I remained where I was, listening to the menacing creak of my belt struggling to hold in the two plates of cafeteria food I had consumed.  The buffet closes at eight thirty and it was almost nine.  Daniel’s fourth and final plate was color coordinated.

“I got all white food,” he explained.  “It matches the plate, see?”  He had some grilled fish, cauliflower and a biscuit.

“No mashed potatoes?” I asked.

“They ran out,” Daniel replied.

ESPN covers the hot dog eating contest on Coney Island every Fourth of July.  If they wanted to see some real competition, they should really follow a bunch of teenagers as they make their way through the buffet like locusts.  It was an amazing sight.  We closed down the restaurant and headed home with one final stop… for dessert.

Off to See the Wizard

It was “Movie Night” the other night.  Movie Night doesn’t fall on a specific date.  It just happens to be an evening where we’ve done all the work we need to do and eaten dinner at a decent hour.  There’s enough time left before bedtime to view some of the thousands of gigabytes we’ve recorded on the DVR.  It was my turn to pick something to watch.  Daniel looked a bit wary.

“We’re going to watch some old movie, aren’t we?” he said.  I nodded.  So much of our culture depends on references to old music and movies and television shows.  I felt it was my parental duty to educate my child so he knew what his parents’ snarky comments meant.  Not to mention, we don’t get channels with newer movies; they cost too much.

“I thought we would watch The Wizard of Oz,” I said.

Daniel snorted.  “Isn’t that a kids’ movie?”

“Aren’t you a kid?” I asked.

He didn’t have a good counter to that.

I’m worried my window of opportunity is closing with Daniel.  He’s growing up.  I think he will be able to appreciate older movies, maybe understand them from an intellectual standpoint and how amazing they were back in their day, but he won’t be able to appreciate them at a visceral level any more.  They’ll be good movies, but not his movies.  I hoped for the best.  We popped some kettle corn and took a couple of boxes of Dots down from the corner cabinet.  We made ourselves comfy on the family room couch, sharing the green throw on our feet.  We turned out the lights and started The Wizard of Oz.

Daniel got right into it.  He didn’t beg me to use the commercial skip when Dorothy started to sing.  There was concern on his face when she was trapped outside during the tornado.   Daniel brushed it off when I mentioned it.

“I knew she wouldn’t be killed in a Rated-G movie,” he said.  “Lucky for her it’s not an R.”

I pointed out how the film went to color when Dorothy arrived in Oz.  It turned out Daniel hadn’t noticed.  He just thought it was “the color of Kansas” before that.  He liked the Scarecrow and the Tin Man right away.  He thought the Lion was a jerk at first, but he grew on Daniel as the movie went on.

I got the first question when the group tried to cross the poppy fields.  “Do poppies make you pass out like that?” he asked.

“I think it’s a metaphor,” I said.

Daniel nodded.  “I get it.  It’s supposed to be heroin, but they couldn’t show heroin back then in the movies.”

“That’s true,” I managed weakly.  “Definitely no heroin allowed in The Wizard of Oz.”

I have to admit, I still think the flying monkeys are seriously creepy.  I must have looked distressed near the end of the movie because Daniel patted my arm.

“Don’t worry, Dad, Dorothy’s not going to die,” he said.  “All she has to do is keep turning over the hourglass and she’ll be fine.”  I’ve probably seen The Wizard of Oz ten times since I was a kid and I never thought of that.  It made me feel better about the whole thing.

Daniel felt the ending was kind of weak.  He didn’t like the “… and it was just a dream” malarkey.  I explained they needed the movie to have a happy ending.

“She goes back to Kansas where the neighbor is going to kill her dog and the house got hit by a tornado?” he asked.  “Some happy ending!”

Childhood Conspiracy Theory

Daniel and I were sitting in a booth at the local Grill and Chill, finishing up the “grill” portion of our meals.  We were surrounded by vintage pictures of Dairy Queen days gone by.  Daniel eyed one hanging over our booth from the 1960’s.  It featured a band called The Zonks.

“I wonder why all old pictures are in black and white,” he said.  I finished up my French fries.

“That was all they knew how to do a long time ago,” I said.  “They invented black and white film first and didn’t invent color film until much later.”  Daniel swallowed the last of his double cheeseburger, but seemed to have a hard time swallowing my explanation.

“That’s not right,” he said.  “That can’t be right.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.  Daniel paused for dramatic effect… and to test his Blizzard by turning it upside-down for a moment.

“Think about it,” he said.  “Color pictures must be easier to make because they just show the world like it is.  When you take a black and white picture, all the colors have to be changed.”

“Shades,” I corrected.  I couldn’t help myself.

“Shades?”

“Sorry,” I said.  “Black and white pictures have shades of gray, no colors.”  Daniel gave me a long look.

“Dad, are you obfuscating me?”

I almost choked on my malt.

He continued, “I can save color pictures on my computer and make them black and white after I take them.  My camera has a setting to make pictures look old fashioned, but it normally just takes color pictures.”

I asked, “Did you ever think maybe pictures were always in color, but the world was in black and white back in the old days?”

“Where did you hear that?” he asked.

“I read it somewhere,” I said.

“I think I read that too,” said Daniel.  I nodded.  We’re both fans of Calvin and Hobbes.  After a moment he shook his head.

“That’s not it,” he said.  “They still took pictures in black and white after color film was invented.  Why would they do that?”  I shrugged and sipped the last of my malt.

“Money,” I said.  “Color film cost more than black and white film when it first came out.”  Daniel almost leapt over the table.

“A-ha!” he exclaimed.  “That’s why they did it.  Money.  They wanted to save color film for later so they could make more money.”  Daniel sat back with the smug satisfaction of someone with all the bases covered.  I had to admit it made an odd sort of sense; it didn’t even occur to me ask who “they” were.

“Follow the money,” I said to myself.

“Where did you hear that?” Daniel asked.

“I read it somewhere,” I said.

“I think I read that too,” he answered.  I was surprised.  I didn’t think Woodward and Bernstein were required reading in the sixth grade.

“Congratulations.  You’ve uncovered your first conspiracy,” I said.  “So, what do you think?  Did man really land on the moon?”

“Sure,” said Daniel waving his hand dismissively.  “But don’t ask me why they only took black and white television pictures.  You don’t want to know.”

Dad Homework

I picked Daniel up Friday afternoon from cross country practice.  He plopped down in the passenger seat, bag in his lap, a smile threatening to take over his face.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.  Daniel grinned and shrugged.  I asked if he had a good day at school.  Another grin and shrug.  I asked if he wanted to stop at the corner gas station, get a bottle of orange Fanta before heading home.  Grin.  Shrug.  Finally I asked if he had any homework.  This was apparently the question he had been waiting for.

“No,” he said with a laugh,” but you do!”

One of his Language Arts teachers sent home a blue page addressed to parents.  “You know your children better than I do.  Please tell me in a million words or less about their passions and their strengths.  How do you think their story will be written in the future?”  Wow, I thought to myself, it’s been a long time since I had to write a theme for school.

“You really should sit down at the kitchen table and do this right away,” said Daniel.  “Otherwise you’ll be working on it at 3:00 in the morning before school on Monday.”  I took some comfort that – despite outward appearances – Daniel had actually been listening to me all these years about homework.  I sat down and thought for a few minutes while Daniel set up a game on the Wii.

“You don’t have to mention Oscer,” said Daniel suddenly from the family room.  Oscer is a stuffed blue dog.  He’s been Daniel’s sidekick since Kindergarten.  They used to go everywhere together.  Lately I’ve noticed Oscer is more of a recluse; he only plays with Daniel when they are alone together.

“Isn’t he your prized possession?” I asked innocently.

“Yes, but – you know – you don’t have to write about that,” said Daniel.  “And you don’t have to write about when I was a baby.”

“Aren’t you losing your game?” I asked.  Police had Daniel’s car surrounded.  He reset something and was off to the races again.  I put pen to paper.

“Daniel, how do you spell ‘goofy’?”

There was a screech of tires from the family room.

“Never mind,” I said.  “I’ll just get the dictionary.  I make you look up words before asking for help.  I should do the same.”  Daniel was clearly focused on his video game, not at all watching me from the corner of his eye as I looked up various words – ‘diaper’ and ‘naked’ – and jotted them down on a sheet of notebook paper.  I was leafing through the pages, looking up ‘booger’, when Daniel finally snapped.

“What on Earth are you writing about me?!” he demanded.  I handed him my paper.

Daniel is a good kid.  He has many strengths.  However, he falls for Dad’s practical jokes all the time.

Daniel tried his best to scowl, but he kept smiling instead.  Finally he laughed.  It was the last laugh, by the way, as I didn’t finish the actual theme until 3:00 Monday morning before school.

White Castle Word Problem

We were all heading home from the western suburbs. It was after eight and while we were hungry, we weren’t really hungry. White Castle and their “fun sized” hamburgers seemed like the perfect choice. Unlike most fast food places, White Castle burgers aren’t wrapped in waxed paper, but are housed in small open-ended cardboard boxes. To cash in on the fortune cookie trend, White Castle prints pithy sayings on the bottoms of the boxes. Some have wise sayings, others have amusing riddles. Daniel grabbed the box out of my hand as I slid my third hamburger onto my five inch paper plate.

“If you stacked all the White Castle hamburgers sold, they would stretch to the moon and back with plenty left over for lunch,” he read aloud. “Is that true?” Meka shook her head. I wiped the corner of my mouth off with a napkin and pulled out a pen to do some quick calculations. A White Castle hamburger (typically known as a “slider”) is a square patty about two inches wide. It’s wider than it is tall, so that’s why I used that measurement.

“Fudging your data?” said Meka, our resident scientist. “Your results are going to be suspect at best –” I bought her silence with a pair of jalapeno cheeseburgers and got to work. With my standard slider measurement, there were 6 sliders to a foot and it would take 31,680 sliders to stretch a mile. While that’s a lot of burgers, I worked at Burger King when I was in high school. We would typically sell a thousand Whoppers a day; thirty thousand sliders didn’t seem like all that many in the grand scheme of things.

But the moon is pretty far away. Even at the so-called “supermoon” approach back in March, it was still 221,565 miles from Earth. I started writing across the narrow edge of the napkin, but had to switch to the other side and redo my math across the long edge instead; the numbers got big pretty quickly. I came up with 14,038,358,400 sliders required to reach the moon and back.

“You forgot the ones for lunch,” said Daniel.

Oops. I came up with 14,038,358,404 sliders.
Fourteen billion is a lot of sliders, but was it an impossible number? According to the vintage poster hanging above the booth, White Castle sold 50 million hamburgers in 1941. At that rate, White Castle wouldn’t reach the moon until the summer of 2061.

“You’re just assuming one long string of hamburgers,” said Meka. “For something that tall, you’d need more of a pyramid structure in order to get the necessary strength –” I slid my box of fries across the table and she withdrew her protest.

Back in the olden days, White Castle’s motto was “Buy ‘em by the Sack”. Nowadays, you can pick up hamburgers by the case or even the crate. It took White Castle forty years to sell their first billion hamburgers, but only seven years to sell their second billion. If their sales stayed at 1968 levels, White Castle burgers would have reached the moon by now, but would have barely begun the journey back.

I felt it was a reasonable assumption their business has continued to grow since the sixties. The two White Castles I visit most frequently were built since I was born. And you don’t have to go to White Castle to get sliders anymore. Frozen White Castle hamburgers are available in the freezer section at Wal Mart (and if you stacked all the Wal Marts from here to the moon… well, that’s another story). I figured their sales had to average 96% better year-over-year since 1968 in order to get the slider trail all the way back to terra firma. White Castle is a privately owned company. I couldn’t find any hard data on their website. However, they did mention building a plant in 1992 that could make 200,000 hamburgers a day. That would have added 51% to their annual burger production capabilities, or more than 43,000 slider miles since the day it opened.

While my final numbers were incomplete, I felt I could say with some confidence to Daniel that – yes, if you stacked all the White Castle hamburgers sold, it was possible they would reach the moon and back.

“Nope, you’re wrong,” said Daniel.

“I’m wrong?” I repeated. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a trick question,” said Daniel with a laugh. “If you stacked all the hamburgers sold, it wouldn’t be a tall pile at all. They’ve all been eaten!”

“He has a point, you know,” said Meka. I gave her the last half of my shake before she could say “I told you so” and threw out my napkin in the trash.

Memories – The Case of Cichy’s Eyes

It was my first sleepover. I had just turned ten years old. My big birthday present was a digital watch that played “Dixie” (a la the General Lee in The Dukes of Hazzard). My friend Dave turned ten a week after I did. He happened to share his birthday with President Lincoln so we all had the day off from school, perfect for a sleepover. There were five of us: me, Dave (of course), my next door neighbor Tim, my friend Greg and our friend Mike Cichy from school. We met at Dave’s house after dinner. We ate a lot of potato chips, drank a lot of pop and watched television until we got tired. Cichy bailed first. He was an “early to bed, early to rise” kind of kid; I think he petered out around 9:30 or so. He got dibs on Dave’s bed. Dave was next. He slipped into a sleeping bag on the floor by the window in his room.

Greg was camped out by the closed door to the hallway. There was a hole in the wall shaped like the doorknob. Light poured in through a similar doorknob shaped hole from Dave’s brother’s room next door. Dave had two brothers: one older, one younger. They weren’t invited to the sleepover, but made their presence known by injecting things via the hole, most of them landing on Greg’s face. At one point, disgusted, Greg piled up all of our suitcases to block the hole. Bad idea. They poked a broomstick through the hole and knocked them all down on top of him. Tim and I helped extricate Greg from the pile. Tim grabbed the broomstick and pulled it in with us. There were a few cries of “no fair”, at least one “you suck” and the light faded from the other room.

The three of us sat together in the dark. None of us were sleepy. We decided to tell ghost stories. And not plain old generic ghost stories. We told ones from our family histories. I told about my great grandmother who could predict the future with a Ouija board. I think Tim told two, one from each side of his family. Greg told us a tale from one of the times he went visiting his relatives on Cape Cod back east. All these stories were real. All these stories were unnerving, even terrifying. In a very short time, we were all huddled together in the corner of the room, fearful for our very lives.

About that time Mike Cichy decided to roll over in his sleep. Greg swallowed and pointed towards something directly behind Tim and me. I felt my stomach drop down into my lap. Every hair on my arms stood straight up. Tim and I looked at each other and slowly turned around to see what had so freaked Greg out. Cichy was asleep and laying on his back, but his eyes were wide open. Apparently he was dreaming about his own brain because his eyes were rolled all the way back in his head, leaving only the dead white areas visible via the thin strip of light from the space between the curtains and the edge of the window.

“What do we do?” asked Tim. He was afraid Cichy was going to get up and start walking around at any minute. That was too horrible to contemplate.

We contemplated it anyway.

“Okay…” I whispered, drawing them into a huddle. “One of us has got to go over there and close Cichy’s eyes -”

“I’m not touching him!” yelled Tim. Greg shushed him. Cichy didn’t move. We waited slightly less than nine hundred years before breathing again.

“He might be contagious,” said Greg. “I remember hearing about this kid who touched a dead bird’s eye -”

“I heard that too,” said Tim. “I don’t want to get no Cichy Eye Disease.”

“There’s no such thing as Cichy Eye Disease,” I said.

“Then you close his eyes!” Crud. Caught in the web of my own reason.

I stood up slowly and pivoted around. The floorboards under the carpet made a low creak. Greg and Tim shushed me as if the shoddy Levitt construction was somehow my fault. I took a step; another creak, another flurry of shushing. Cichy must have been tired; he never stirred. With glacial speed, I moved across the room in the dark. I had plenty of time to think of the old horror movies I had seen staying up way too late at night. Cichy looked an awful lot like one of the pod people from the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He lay on his back, arms folded under the covers. I would not have been surprised if he suddenly loomed up straight like Nosferatu (I would have died, of course, but I wouldn’t have been surprised).

I swear each step I took sounded like a scream in my hyper attuned ears. The house was literally falling apart underneath us. I could hear my heart beating, pulsing behind my eardrums. I could hear the sharp intakes of breath from my companions across the room. Cichy was making this odd gurgling noise. It was either a sinus condition or a large parasitic worm was preparing to crawl up out of his throat and eat my face. I clenched and unclenched my hands again and again. I was almost to the bed, almost ready to lean over him and gently push his eyelids down, when I stepped on my watch. The electronic tones of “Dixie” filled the room. I jumped back about six feet. Tim and Greg leapt to their feet, screaming and we all crashed into one another and ended up in a heap. Amazingly we managed not to wake up the entire neighborhood. Cichy rolled over. We couldn’t see his eyes anymore, but it didn’t matter. We knew they were still open and somehow still watching us… and waiting. We sat guard on him until the gray light of dawn.

Up, Up and Away – Finally

Daniel and I had the week off.  It was spring break for him, a “stay-cation” for me.  We went to one of our favorite haunts the first evening we had off, the Chinese restaurant at the edge of Belvidere.  I asked him what he wanted to do.  He came up with the following:

1)     Eat at the Sonic Drive-In.

2)     Take the Metra train to Chicago.

3)     Launch the rocket that was out in the garage.

I built model rockets when I was Daniel’s age.  I even launched a few (rocket motors being more expensive than the rockets that surrounded them).  I had a Mosquito, a Wizard and a Star Streaker to name a few.  However, the one I wanted more than anything else was the Astrocam.  It had an Instamatic camera built into the nosecone and could be set to take a picture while the rocket was in the air.  My friend Greg had one.  I remember he had a couple of dim prints looking down at the farm field we used as a launch site.

Years later, I was on my lunch break at work.  I had to stop in Wal Mart for something and noticed a complete Astrocam rocket kit by the check out lines.  I don’t make many impulse buys, but my co-worker noticed the nosecone sticking out of the plastic bag as I put it in the trunk.

“What are you going to do with that?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “Maybe I’ll save it for my kids.”

So, here we were, thirteen years later.  I blew the dust off the box and was happy to see it was in perfect condition.  I had never even taken the plastic wrap off.  We set up the launch pad, put batteries in the launch controller and put an engine in the Astrocam.  There’s a big field not too far from where we live.  We drove out there and planned to set it off.

Unfortunately, thirteen years in the garage had taken its toll on the glue holding the rocket together.  The launch lug – the piece that holds the rocket on the launch pad – fell off as we tried to set it up.  Later, we noticed the engine mount was loose.  If we had launched, the engine would have flown off without the Astrocam.  We took it home and put it back in the garage.  Daniel was disappointed, but we took a trip to the hobby store in Rockford (after lunch at Sonic) and bought some new model rockets.  By the fall, we were launching rockets every other day.  By the winter, we started building rockets from kits.  In February, I finally felt we might be able to repair the Astrocam.  It took us the better part of a day to finish up, but we were ready to go in March.

Things have changed since we first planned to launch Astrocam.  Daniel and I have more than a hundred launches under our collective belts.  Our launch controller doesn’t rely on feeble AA batteries.  We have one that plugs directly into a car battery.  We don’t have misfires anymore.  Multiple cameras cover the launch pad, including a high-speed camcorder aimed at the engine to catch the first flames at ignition.  Daniel and I both were able to follow the rocket in flight.  Once it landed safely, we stayed in contact via a pair of walkie-talkies.  The flight itself was a complete success except for one thing.  The Astrocam didn’t take any pictures in the air as they stopped making 110 film back in 2003.

Memories – Radio Shack Customers

The first job I got out of college was the position of “Assistant Manager” at Radio Shack.  It sounds more glamorous than it actually was.  Managers had no actual power at the store level, assistant managers even less.  My boss was not a morning person and he wasn’t too wild about working weekends.  That meant I got to open the store most weekdays and close it down on Sundays.  My Radio Shack was an actual store and – unlike a lot of stand-alone stores – we had a location on the corner of a strip mall that hadn’t been abandoned and left for dead.

Weekday mornings were generally a slow time at Radio Shack.  I used to watch The Price Is Right on the eleven Realistic brand televisions lining the far wall.  If anyone was going to come in, it would be a know-it-all.  We had two types of customers at Radio Shack: the know-it-all customers and the know-nothing customers.  The know-it-all guys would show up right after the doors opened and make a bee-line to the parts.  Radio Shack featured a couple of aisles of discrete components: transistors, resistors, diodes and so on.  It didn’t matter; it was never enough.

After an hour of muttered grumbling, they’d stalk to the counter with an armload of electronic whatnot and rant how I had half a dozen PNP transistors in stock, but how could I be so incredibly dense as not to have matching NPN transistors?  What on Earth was I thinking?  I’d promise the very next time I traipsed back to the stock room to whip up a steaming batch of transistors, I’d be sure to make a couple of NPN’s… just for them.  Then I’d ring up their 450 parts… which totaled about eleven dollars.

Sunday afternoons were the peak time for the know-nothing customers.  I could tell them the instant they opened the door.  We had a security sensor that would chime like a doorbell when someone walked in the store.  The know-nothing customers froze at the sound.  And since the sensor was still making contact, the ringing would go on and on and on until I walked over and helped the customer all the way inside.

“I don’t know if you can help me,” they’d start.  The answer was probably not, but perhaps I could sell them something.  Invariably they had a “thing” at home and they needed it to connect to “this other thing”.  I’d take them by the hand and lead them around the store, pointing at various things and asking if – by chance – our things looked like their things.  Sometimes we’d luck out and find out that one of their things was actually an answering machine or a VCR.  Other times they weren’t so sure; the color was wrong, it was a different shape, they couldn’t decide it the thing was a cell phone or a clock radio (they were alike in so many ways).  Then I would usually sell them a splitter of some kind – phone, cable; it didn’t matter.  Nine times out of ten, whatever they bought was never going to leave the bag it was sold in.

We did have a third type of person.  They were usually friendly and knowledgeable and eager to make some big ticket purchase.  Maybe it was one of the Sensation! brand computers we featured at the front of the store.  Sometimes they were in the market for a stereo or maybe a television.  I always tried my best to be friendly though they weren’t really customers.  After half an hour of bold talk, usually their wives would peek their heads in and ask them to come out to the car; they were done shopping at the supermarket.

Daniel Discovers the Moon

I could hear the theatrical sigh all the way upstairs in my office.  A moment later, Daniel knocked on my door.  I was surprised.  I wouldn’t have believed a knock could actually sound exasperated.

I was wrong.

“You won’t believe what we have to do for school,” he said.  “We have to look at the moon.”  He looked at me for reaction and seemed to be annoyed I wasn’t sharing his sense of outrage.  We have looked at the moon through our small telescope.  We’ve watched documentaries on television about the Apollo missions.  I thought it would be right up his alley.

“But we can’t use a telescope,” he said.  “We can’t look it up on the Internet or anything.  We’re supposed to just look.”  I got another sigh that belied the weight of the world on his fifth grade shoulders.  “How can I find out anything about the moon just by looking at it with my eyes?”

It occurred to me this was a case of too much information.  We’ve trained telescopes on the moon for four hundred years.  We’ve sent spacecraft past it.  A dozen men have walked on it.  When you can go to a museum and inspect a piece of the moon up close, what can you discover with a standard set of eyeballs from a quarter million miles away?

“Why don’t we try to forget everything we know about the moon and see what we can figure out for ourselves?” I said.  “I bet we can figure out ten things about the moon on our own.”

So far, we’ve determined the moon rises later every night as it goes from a crescent to a full moon.  It moves quite a lot compared to the stars.  The moon seems to move about ten moon-diameters east every day.  The stars have moved slightly in the past couple of weeks, but nowhere near as fast as the moon.  We figured that meant the stars were farther away than the moon.  We also figured out the clouds are closer than the moon.  A number of nights, clouds prevented us from seeing the moon.  However, we’ve never seen any clouds covered up by the moon.

“It’s funny we were able to think of something when we didn’t see it,” said Daniel.

We also figured out the moon always faces the same way towards us.  It was possible the moon was rotating once a day and we just happened to be catching it at the same time every night.  However, last Saturday we switched to Daylight Savings Time, so while we were still looking at the moon at 8:30 on Sunday night, it was like we were looking at it at 7:30 Saturday night.  And it looked the same every time.

Since the spots on the moon always looked the same to us, we determined they weren’t clouds.  Clouds on Earth move and change shape.  And since there are no clouds on the moon, there probably wasn’t any rain or snow either.  That meant the spots probably weren’t lakes or oceans.  Daniel thought they might be “bumps”.  He noticed the edge of the moon – where sunlight meets darkness – didn’t seem to be completely straight.  I couldn’t tell for sure, but gave Daniel the benefit of the doubt since his eyes are thirty years younger than mine.

I’m not sure if all this adds up to ten things about the moon or not.  We’ve only been at it for a couple of weeks.  In any case, none of our discoveries are – pardon the phrase – Earth shattering.  But it made us think about the people who looked and sat and thought about the moon when they didn’t have all the modern conveniences we have now.  And considering how much we could figure out just by looking at the moon for a few extra minutes every night, it makes me wonder how much more we might be able to see around us if only we look a little harder than normal.