Author: Suzanne Olsen Page 23 of 45

What Is a Guy’s Guy?

On June 7, 2010

I’m still in central Oregon without wi-fi, and continuing with my observation of men.

People say my husband is a “guy’s guy.” What does this mean? I have this vague idea that it’s someone who acts like a stereotypical guy and likes to hang around with other people of the same ilk.

If you try to define ilk, you’ll lose track of this topic, and even though more than anything I want to know exactly what “ilk” means, I have no connection to Google, the source of answers to all my brilliant questions. So I will not stray from the subject, but just this once.

If you want to define how a guy acts, I suppose the list of characteristics would be someone who scratches his privates and spits (as in a baseball player), farts and belches and is comfortable walking around in his underwear (as in Will Farrell), and someone who likes to drink beer and see something naked (as in Jeff Foxworthy – he does this really funny comedy routine about what a guy is thinking. He says, “Ladies, if you want to know what a guy is thinking, it’s simple. All we think about is two things, and nothing else. These are the two things: I’d like a beer and I’d like to see something necked”).

Guy’s guys verge on being uncouth, but they’ve been taught socially acceptable norms. They know how they’re supposed to behave; they aren’t totally white-trash clueless. They just choose to default to the lowest common denominator of behavior, allowing their bodily functions to be the boss of them, and finding great amusement in others who do the same. There is also a laziness in their actions – they will choose to do the easiest thing. Not in all situations – they can be very hard working, but in social interactions they’ll do what’s easier. For instance, it’s easier to look at someone and find a flaw rather than finding something to compliment. They’ll say, “You’ve put on a little weight,” rather than, “That dress is pretty.”

These are stereotypes, yes, but they fit the vast majority of people I’d call guy’s guys. They’re perfectly happy sitting and watching TV, commenting on the stupidity of the plot/actress/Democrat/female politician/woman driver/feminine hygiene product commercial and so on without actually conversing. They like hanging out with other guys and watching TV while doing all those same things. Other comments are generally “what an idiot” or “man, that thing is HUGE” or “look at the tits on her” or something along those lines.

Phil, our host over here in central Oregon where, again today, the sun is shining, does not seem to me like a guy’s guy. I can hear him again in there right now trying to make conversation. There have been long stretches of quiet, but when there are words being said, he’s the one who’s starting them. He’s the kind of guy who takes pictures of his daughters and puts them together in a slide show for their birthdays. He will sit and talk to you about any subject and not act like he’s just putting his time in until he can politely say, “I have to go mow the lawn now.” My husband does this all the time when women are around. Sometimes he’ll mow grass that he just mowed to get out of a conversation with a woman.

In looking at this whole guy’s guy thing under a microscope, I see lots of interesting things – some of which look like cooties. There appear to me to be 3 different kinds of guys. Your guy’s guy as described above (perfect example is Al Bundy in “Married with Children”), and, at the other end of the spectrum, there’s the girly guy, who is gay and is a girl in a man’s body and loves doing things girls love to do, like chitchat, shop, gossip, decorate, flirt, exclaim “OH MY GOD!” every few minutes, and so forth. And then there are men like Phil – cultured, polite, sensitive, romantic, couth, but who also like beer and have, perhaps on rare occasions, passed gas, but only on accident and never in front of guests (I hope).

My question is, what do you call these guys – the not gay guys and not guy’s guys. Let’s all ponder this for a day or two. If you have ideas, please send them in along with your surplus money.

What Guys Talk About

By Suzanne Olsen

On June 7, 2010

In Relationships

I am over in central Oregon right now without wi-fi. If you are reading this it means I found some somewhere, but if this is not on the post day, then it means I found some but not until I got back home.

Finding wi-fi is not always easy. At my own house I’ve looked under the sofa and behind the dresser and couldn’t find it. I’m not even sure what it means. I think the “wi” stands for wireless. So does the the “fi” stand for fireless? These questions weigh heavily on my heart right now.

Here in central Oregon it is sunny, as opposed to western Oregon where the rain drove ANOTHER slug into my house. I put the “another” in all caps to show that it wasn’t the first, and so you could hear the exasperation in my voice. But the weather is not the subject we will be looking at this morning. We’re going to talk about guy’s guys.

We’re staying at a friend’s house, it’s 7:30 a.m. and I’m in the bedroom blogging while my husband and our host are in the living room. I can hear them talking, and they’ve so far touched on the stock market and sports. These are what I’d call typical “guy” subjects.

My husband doesn’t go in for a lot of idle chatter. He uses words functionally. He says things like, “I’m hungry,”or “you’ve told me this before.” The rest of the time, he’s either quietly observing the world or asleep with the remote control clutched in his hand. Our host, however, is a salesperson and used to talking a lot. He’s chatty.

What’s interesting is that women always wonder what men talk about. At least I do. I’m always saying to my husband, “Are you this quiet around your guy friends? When you’re golfing with them for 4 hours, do you just walk along side by side without talking?”

He answers, “We talk when there’s something we need to talk about.”

Right now these guys don’t know I’m awake listening to everything they’re saying. I’ve noticed that Phil has initiated the conversation in every case. He says, “How about those Ducks?” or “Can you believe the stock market?” My husband responds with the obvious comment, like “yeah, can you believe it?” then Phil responds back and they have this little back and forth until that subject is exhausted about 45 seconds later.

So ladies, if you want to know what guys talk about, I can vouch for these two. They aren’t talking about anything worth listening to.

Since I’m having a little vacation, I think that’s enough blogging for one day, but tomorrow I think I’ll blog a little more about men.

PS: I did not find wi-fi, though I looked in every nook and cranny. I’m back home now. Sorry for the lapse in posting.

Ways to Get Rid of Your Surplus Money

By Suzanne Olsen

On June 4, 2010

In News

This morning I went to hang one of my photographs at Starbucks and heard a snippet of an interview on NPR. It was about a lady who started sending requests in the 1980’s to people asking for donations to help bring down America’s debt. She and a bunch of other people sent hand-addressed letters to thousands of people.

What a crazy idea! Asking people who already pay taxes to contribute more money to the gov’ment (that’s how I learned to say it in the south, just like I learned to call the police “the law.” Just thought you’d want to know).

The even crazier thing is that people responded by sending money. These people got thousands of people to send thousands of dollars to help reduce the national debt. After they’d counted it all, they took a month-long trip to Hawaii and spent most of their days being pampered with massages and foot rubs by cabana boys. Ahhhh, doesn’t that sound good?

Of course I’m kidding. That’s how the story would have ended today, because we Americans (pronounce the “mer” in this word like the “mer” in “mermaids” if you want to sound Southern – or should I say like an East Tennessee hick?).

Hand up in the back? You want to know the difference? Let me explain. A “hick” is someone who ain’t got no edgy-cation and thinks possum is the other what meat (insert “white” for “what” if you don’t understand. I think you got that edgy-cation was education. No? Well, it was). So you got your “southern” accent, and then you got your “southern hick” accent.

The difference between the two is in the way the words are pronounced. So a southerner might say the word “education” like this: “ed-u-ki-tion,” so the “southern” part of the word is changing the “ka” sound to a “ki” sound. I changed the “c” to a “k” for 2 reasons. (1), I didn’t want to confuse you by making you think the “ci” was pronounced like “sigh,” and (2) I’m going for a Guinness Book of World Records on how many of these (“) things I can put into the body of one blog.

Where was I? Oh yeah, hick. The difference between a “general” southern accent and a “hick” accent is where the emphasis is on the word and the way it’s pronounced with a wad of Skoal in your mouth.

Let’s hold the questions until the end, because I’m trying to tell you about the lady on the radio. She claimed there are still people sending in donations. Last year they sent 1.3 billion dollars! (or something like that. I’d suggest you do your own fact checking because I can’t vouch for these numbers, this lady, or whether I dreamed all this. It was 5:30 in the morning and I had not yet had my coffee, for crying out loud. Be sure to let me know if I’ve misstated because I truly give a damn).

I can see that we’re running out of time. The point of bringing this up was to inform you that there are people out there with surplus money. It is up to each and every one of you to figure out how you can get your hands on it. When you come up with a way, please don’t hesitate to let me know. Hey, I just had a great idea! If you find that you have surplus money laying around just getting in everyone’s way, don’t keep tripping over it. Send it to me, preferably in a plain brown wrapper. 20’s are nice. It’s for a good cause. You’ll be glad you did.

Rain, Rain Go Away – and Take the Slugs with You

By Suzanne Olsen

On June 2, 2010

In Weather

It has been raining in the Northwest non-stop since October. We realize that it rains a lot here. We take pride in the rain. The University of Oregon athletic teams are called the “Ducks” because everybody around here has “web feet.” Pretty clever.

Every year at this time people in the Northwest start getting really, really sick of the rain. But this year, we got sick about a month and a half ago. It’s too much of a good thing. Even the slugs are sick of it.

If you don’t know what a slug is, it’s a snail without the shell. They are everywhere here because – take a wild guess – they like moisture. When I go out my front door to get the mail, I’ll pass a minimum of 5,000 slugs on the way to the mailbox and back. You have to dodge them because you DO NOT want to step on them because they’ll stick to your foot and leave a permanent slime trail that soap and water, harsh chemicals, or even sandpaper can’t get off. You have to shed that layer of skin before the slime goes away.

How do I know that even the slugs are sick of the rain? Because I have found two slugs in my house. TWO!!! IN MY HOUSE!!!!

These guys are desperate to get refuge. It’s like some mass migration to find a dry spot somewhere…ANYWHERE. I found one on the carpet in the dining room – hundreds of miles (in slug miles) from any entrance. I think he got there by jumping on a passing shoe as it walked by, hoping to get out of a puddle.

I had seen the other one when I went out to get the newspaper earlier in the day. It was on the sidewalk, coming right straight for the front door, traveling at the rate of approximately 2 inches per hour. I stepped around it, but wondered what it would do when it got to the door. There is a small crack under the door, but surely not big enough for a slug to slide through.

A few hours later I found that same slug IN MY ENTRYWAY. I knew it was the same one because they all have different coloration and markings – just like different breeds of dogs. You’ve probably heard of the “banana” slug – the big granddaddy of them all that can grow to be 3 feet long in the Northwest and has been blamed for the disappearance of small dogs or cats. Then there are the finger-length slugs that are about as long as your arm and have brown spots on a tan body.

The slug in my entryway was grayish tan with spots AND stripes, which is an unusual combination. That’s how I knew he was the same one I’d seen earlier heading for my door. He had two little eyes sticking up, checking everything out and wondering where I kept my goldfish. Luckily, I found him before he could wreak much havoc and I scooped him up into a napkin and marched his little slug bottom right back outside and dropped him into the grass. Actually I tried to drop him but he was clinging to that napkin like he’d been super-glued to it. He wanted to stay in the warm, dry house. I shook and shook but he just stared at me with these big, pleading tentacles. At one point I think I saw a tear. Finally I just put the napkin on the ground. The rain pounded it into the earth and the slug slithered off, shaking his fist at me. He was headed straight toward the door again.

If I wake up in the night and that thing has crawled in bed with me and is about to chomp down on my throat, I’m going to be really, really mad.

How a Morning at Starbucks Defined the Dictionary Part 2

By Suzanne Olsen

On June 1, 2010

In Home Life

(In our last episode we left Merriam returning from the bathroom with extraordinarily sweet smelling hands, while Webster was sitting at the table with a mouthful of spoon bread and a maddingly obsessive tickle in his throat.)

…Webster tried to grin. At this very second the tickle brought out the big guns.

It called on the mouth to send reinforcements in the form of saliva. The mouth was more than happy to assist, ordering the saliva to migrate slowly over the tickle like a glacier. Webster, feeling the trickle sliding over the tickle, was defeated by the onslaught and coughed with a mighty roar just as Merriam settled himself into the booth.

The spray from the cough hit Merriam like a shower without one of those flow restrictors on it that you find in old motels. It slammed his head back against the booth with such force that the woman on the other side thought it was an earthquake and ran screaming from into the street where she spotted another Starbucks and went inside to order a replacement latte.

Luckily no one was injured. Courteous Starbucks employees ran over with fresh white towels and wiped Merriam down. He sat wide-eyed, apparently in shock, as they buffed him up like he was at a car wash.

Webster took a long drink of scalding coffee, which laid the tickle to rest – until next time. “As I was saying, we will have the dictionary set up so that words like “winterize” will not have to be defined other than saying something like, ‘making ready for winter.’ If that’s not enough to satisfy them, they can go to the dictionary again and look up winter which we could define as “the season between autumn and spring comprising in the northern hemisphere usually the months of December, January, and February or as reckoned astronomically extending from the December solstice to the March equinox.”

Merriam came out of his trance, buffed up spiffy as a chrome bumper, and said, “Hot damn, word man, you’re brilliant!” He’d forgotten all about the saliva and pumpkin bread shower he’d just been subjected to. “Why, they won’t know what equinox means, and they’ll have to look that up, too.”

“Yes! Yes!” exclaimed Webster, “Now you understand! They’ll have their noses in our dictionary all day long. It will be like a wonderful scavenger hunt, with words as the only clues!”

“We must get on this right away, before someone steals our idea.” Merriam said. “There’s just one thing that I’m confused about.”

“What is it, man, speak up!” said Webster, anxious to get started.

“What does ‘wintercation’ mean?”

“Oh, I’m very excited about that word. Very excited. It’s one I heard in a commercial just yesterday. It combines two words – winter and vacation – into one. Don’t you see the possibilities? We can have these words listed individually, and then we can combine them and people will have to look up both root words!”

“Yes, yes, I see,” said Merriam. “We could combine any number of words and create new words. Let me see if I can come up with one….Here’s one: ‘frenemy.’”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a word I saw on a website – it means a friend who is, at the same time, an enemy,” Merriam said. “They also used the word ‘complisult’ which is giving an compliment which is also an insult.”

“Use it in a sentence,” Webster said.

“You have a nice face except for all the wrinkles,” Merriam said.

“Who-a,” Webster said. “Do you think it’s okay to just take any two words and smash them together like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?”

“Why not?” Merriam said gleefully. His happy disposition accounted for the ‘Merri’ part of his name.

“By George, you’re right! Why not? Especially since they’ll be paying us by the word!”

So blog readers, you now have the true** story of how to pad out a blog when you’ve run out of ideas. You’ll notice that I turned the word “spunky” into a two-day blog, and for that I give myself credit.

For those of you curious as to the definition of spunky, I will again consult Merriam and Webster, who are hunched over a drawing table playing a game of tic-tac-toe. They say that spunk is “a woody tinder…any of various fungi used to make tinder.” They also said I could look up the words: mettle, pluck, spirit, and liveliness, but I’m okay with that first definition.

As to the original topic of this blog, I noticed that I am more like my mother than I previously thought, and the flaw that I have imitated (unbeknownst to me) was the flaw of being too lenient and trusting. One of my adolescents got into some mischief, and even though adolescents will be adolescents, as they say, it might not have happened if I’d been more suspicious and ruled with an iron fist.

So it is with a mouthful of pumpkin bread (it’s really is good) that I apologize to those people whom I said were lazy. Even us woody tinders fall into the bad habits of our parents, which is not to say we will give up the struggle. We just have to ground ourselves, much like the way I’ve grounded my child for the aforementioned shenanigans, and hope we all learn something from it. **And FYI, none of this is true except, or including, the grounding.

Remember What Memorial Day Is About

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 31, 2010

In Holidays

I got an email from a friend this morning that reminded me what today was all about. I am copying some of it here. I don’t know the copywrite laws on duplicating emails but I hope I’m not breaking them. When you are thinking about your appliance sales and barbecues today, please take a moment to reflect on why the word “Memorial” comes from the word “memory,” and remember the brave men and women who gave their lives so that I could write this blog and you could read it.

It is
the VETERAN,
not the reporter,
who has given us freedom of the press.

It is
the VETERAN,
not the poet,
who has given us freedom of speech.

It is
the VETERAN,
not the campus organizer,
who has given us freedom to assemble.

It is
the VETERAN,
not the lawyer,
who has given us the right to a fair trial.

It is
the VETERAN,
not the politician,
Who has given us the right to vote.

It is the
VETERAN who
salutes the Flag.

How a Morning at Starbucks Defined the Dictionary*

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 31, 2010

In Words

My last blog was about people turning out like their parents and how you had to struggle all through life if you didn’t want to adopt their bad habits. I implied that I had risen above all my parents’ bad habits by being spunky.

However, I had something happen yesterday that caused me to look up the word spunky. Merriam-Webster online said it meant, “full of spunk.” I don’t know about you, but if I’m looking up a word, it’s usually because I don’t know what it means. Having the word’s meaning explained to me by the word itself is going to leave me scratching my head and other parts if no one is looking.

But this is what dictionaries do, and for good reason. A dictionary in the library that tried to contain a complete definition of all words and their derivatives (called “inflected forms” because they often carry communicable diseases) would have to be hauled around on a forklift. Even the ones that don’t have all the words in them are so big they can’t be picked up except by Sumo wrestlers, and have to reside on their own lazy Susan, a device that allows the curious to spin the book around really fast so the dictionary flies off and knocks out the kid sitting at the first table on the right. And, FYI, that device was NOT named after me because my name is SuzANNE, not Susan, even though many, many people here in the Northwest think I’m saying ‘Susan’ because they don’t understand my Southern accent and just nod politely and say “uh-huh” when I talk, lest I repeat myself.

When Merriam and Webster got together to come up with their dictionary, Webster knew what had to be done. He said to Merriam, “Look, there are a million ways you can use every word. Take the very simple word ‘winter.’ Other words you can make with it are winterize, wintered, wintering, wintercation – the list is endless. So here’s what let’s do. We’ll define ‘winter’ and then make everyone refer back to that word when they look up all these other words.”

“I don’t get it,” Merriam said.

“It’s simple,” Webster grinned, sipping a cup of coffee and taking a bite of the pumpkin bread, the house specialty at this Starbucks. “Chew fake do nerd…”

“I hate it when you talk with your mouth full,” Merriam said. “Finish chewing. I’ll wait.”

Webster took another huge bite of banana bread because he secretly loved tormenting Merriam. Merriam knew this, so he got up and said, “I’m going to the bathroom.”

Webster didn’t chew the whole time he was gone; just sat there like a chipmunk with both cheeks puffed out, filled to capacity with date-nut bread.

Merriam knew what Webster was up to, so he took extra time in the bathroom. This was easy because they had one of those cool soap dispensers that turn the pink gooey liquid in the clear glass pump into a nice round ball of puffy white foam that smelled like roses, daisies, and hollyhocks. He washed his hands several times, looking at himself in the mirror and smiling a rakish grin, knowing that the cinnamon roll was still in Webster’s mouth and he would start choking on it if enough time passed.

Back at the table, Webster felt a tickle in his throat but hoped that if he just relaxed and stayed calm he could weather it out, although he knew Merriam would wash his hands over and over because he was a clean freak. The tickle got more persistent, and sent a message to Webster’s brain that said, “Scratch me.” Webster ignored them both. The tickle decided to bump it up a notch, and sent a message to Webster’s brain that came through as a shout. Webster tensed up, ready for battle. The tickle was not backing down. It knew it would win over time, as long as Webster didn’t pour scalding black coffee all over it, in which case it generally retreated. But today it was digging in. Today it said, “Bring on the coffee. Bring on the ice water. You can’t expect to hold food in your mouth and not swallow and get away with it, sucka. Not on my watch!”

Mirriam, squirting another fun ball of foam, heard a knock on the bathroom door. “Crap,” he said. He dried his hands slowly under the electric hand dryer, not rubbing them together so it took longer. He started the dryer again. The noise of the dryer drowned out the insistent pounding on the door, no doubt by someone full of Starbucks coffee and in desperate need to get in there.

Finally the dryer stopped and Merriam opened the door. A lady with her legs crossed nearly knocked him over as she rushed past. “Humph,” Merriam said to let her know how rude she was.

Webster, seeing Merriam approaching, pleaded with his throat, “Please just hold on for another couple of seconds.” The tickle was not having any part of it. It started agitating so that Webster felt like his larynx and windpipe were being assaulted by an octopus waving feathers.

Merriam, sliding into the booth, said to Webster, “I see by your cheeks that you are still eating.”

Webster tried to grin. At this very second the tickle brought out the big guns.

TO BE CONTINUED

*As with all historical fiction, the people may be real, but the places and incidents are made up or else the story would be boring. Not that I’m making any of this up, but I want to cover myself just in case. If the law comes after me, don’t tell them I’m hiding under the dictionary.

Little Clones

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 30, 2010

In Home Life

Have you ever noticed how some people are carbon copies of their parents? I’m not talking about looks, but the way they act. I have a theory about this.

If you are an observant person, and I know that you are, then you can look at what your parents are doing and make judgment calls. I noted, for instance, that my mom spent a lot of time sitting around without really having too much ambition. I also noticed that, when I got older, I wanted to sit around. I loved many, many things about my mother, but sitting around wasn’t getting me anywhere, so I decided to lay around instead, which I considered a change for the better.

Same with my dad. He was old school with the attitude, “Do it because I said so.” Normal kids don’t want to do things they’re ordered to do because it’s usually something unsavory like cleaning your room or kissing your Aunt Jane. If the person would explain why, like: “Clean your room so that the Boogie Man won’t want to move in under your bed because he only hangs out in dirty rooms,” then I’d be in there swooshing through the sticky jawbreakers on the dresser and crusty socks splayed all over like some kind of wild thing until my room was completely sanitized. But it’s no fun being on the receiving end of an authoritarian who won’t bother explaining, so even though it was tiresome, I tried to always explain things to my kids.

“Mom, why do I have to brush my teeth?”

“Because I said, err, because if you don’t spiders will crawl in your mouth at night because they love foul smells.”

The reason I thought about this is that someone I’ve known for years is turning out just like her father. He was always overweight and in his last years he didn’t have the energy to get out of a chair. She’s getting to be the same way. She says she’s “depressed,” but I think she’s just following the family tradition.

My theory is that all people are programmed as infants to be like their parents. The spunky ones take everything in, imitate the good things and fight the bad. The reason it takes a spunky person to do this is because climbing out of the mold takes a lot of energy. You keep sliding back down into that earlier learned behavior.

For example, my mom was an accomplished overeater, and so was her mom before her. I would watch the two of them shoveling food like they were trying to fill up a deep well, and decided that I did not want to be that way. I have their same appetite and I love eating almost better than anything in the world, besides writing this blog for you, my loyal readers, but I refuse to eat so much I get big.

If I were a lazy person, I would just give in to it. In fact, it wouldn’t occur to me to fight it. I wouldn’t even know there was a battle. I’d be glued to some trashy shows on TV and never notice anything except that the bag of pork rinds was almost empty and who could I get to bring me another one. That’s as far as my powers of observation would extend.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being like your parents. My mother was the best momma in the world. I do many things just like her on purpose. She had this fantastic laugh that I try to imitate. Hers was deep and throaty, like a hyena with a bullfrog’s voice. My dad had many good points too. I’m just saying that it wouldn’t hurt you to take a look at what your parents were like and see if the things you’re doing now are imitating their bad points. If that’s the case, then get off your lazy kiester and get your own pork rinds, and bring me a bag, too.

Growing Up Happy

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 29, 2010

In Home Life

I’m more in the mood to walk down memory lane than to do comedy, so if you feel like a little trip to the past, come join me. When I was a kid, we had the advantage of living in a working class neighborhood, which meant that no one really had much money. I don’t ever remember being jealous of anyone as a kid. When someone got something new, we didn’t want one ourselves, we all just sponged off of them.

Lisa Cain had an outside, under-the-carport ping pong table so there were always five to ten kids (or more) playing ping pong. The Armbrusters had a croquet set, so we’d all migrate en masse to their big back yard whenever that was set up. At our house we had a pole vault and high jump pit, and a homemade ping pong table out in the back yard, so we always had kids hanging around.

If someone was home, we went to their house and started playing with whatever they had to offer in their yard. Sometimes the kids didn’t even come out. The whole neighborhood belonged to us, and we played outside every day the weather allowed. Since this was Tennessee, most days were outdoor days, even during the school year – until it got dark.

In the summer, we played under the streetlight at the intersection of two streets. One street butted into the other – it wasn’t a thru street so you had to either turn right or left. If you went right, it was a dead end, so no one really drove on our two streets except the people living there, which made the intersection perfect for playing softball in the summer. A manhole cover served as home plate. 1^st and 3^rd were storm drains, and 2^nd base was the intersection of two cracks in the concrete. The only down side to this was when the ball rolled into the 3^rd base storm drain. A strong, older kid would have to remove the grate and a little kid would jump in and retrieve the ball. They were only about 3 feet deep and never had any water in them, so it was never anything more than an inconvenience. I got to be the little kid who jumped in and grabbed the ball sometimes, which made me a 5 second hero. Then Phippy Sams pulled me out like I was no heavier than a doll, which was as fun as a carnival ride.

A couple of summers Sandra Mead got together the older kids and put on a variety show. She and the other stars draped blankets over clotheslines to make a long curtain. All the parents attended and we were treated to corny skits and off-key singing that delighted us because most of us had never seen “live” entertainment.

I had one best friend in the neighborhood, Christine, and I spent most of my time with her, but we spent most of our time hanging out with all the other kids. The Gallagher’s yard had a chin-up bar in back that we’d have contests to see who could do the most pull-ups. The Gallagher’s kids were already grown and gone but Mr. Gallagher, who we called Poppy, liked to taunt us to do more by saying, “pull, pull, pull, you can do it!” My older brother could do a bunch of them, and when we’d all finished Poppy would grab the bar and the muscles in his lean, tanned arms would flex into hard balls as we counted off his pull-ups. He’d do about 50, maybe more, and the girls would get bored and drift away. Poppy and his wife lived on the corner by 3^rd base, so everyone hung out in their front yard when we weren’t chin upping in the back. We did handstands and cartwheels for hours, and sometimes brought a blanket to lie on and have a picnic.

My family was the poorest on the street, I suppose, but that made us creative. My brother made the pole vault pit by digging holes in the ground and putting in 4 x 4’s with nails hammered into them at one-inch intervals to hold the crossbar. He worked delivering newspapers on a bicycle to buy the fiberglass pole, and boys from miles around came to use it. They didn’t go much higher than 9 or 10 feet because the poles didn’t bend in those days. They’d land in a pile of sawdust. Girls came, too, but we high jumped.

He also made the ping pong table out of a 4 x 8 piece of plywood that he painted green and put on two sawhorses. It worked pretty well except there were a couple of knotholes that disrupted the ball and sent it in odd directions, but that just increased the challenge. If people wanted a real table, they could walk over to Lisa Cain’s. That’s where we held the ping pong tournaments.

Rocky and Stone Maddox (names we thought were silly but would fit right in today) had a big area to play basketball in their gravel driveway. Kids and younger fathers got up lively games there all the time. The Sams’ who lived a couple of doors down had a tetherball and we’d get tired of basketball and go over there. Sometimes there were upwards of 20 kids and adults hanging out at any given time.

Well now, we’ve come to the end of our journey and wasn’t that a fun little stroll into the past? I don’t know if anyone else had a magical neighborhood like we had with all the adults accommodating the kids in yards with no fences, and everyone with plenty of time on their hands. It wasn’t all perfect, and there was some crazy crap going on here and there, but we had everything we needed to enjoy our childhood. Did I mention the gigantic, outdoor pool about half a mile away, and the grocery store a block down the street with a glass candy case full of every sweet a kid could ever want? Oh, and I have to mention the carnival that came for two weeks every summer and was about a seven minute walk away. I never thought about it until just now, buy my childhood was at the vortex of the universe when it came to opportunities for a good time. There was a park about eight minutes away with tennis courts, and, best of all, we got to go anywhere we wanted without having to check in or even say where we were heading.

All things considered, it was a virtual. Wish you could have been there.

Suzanne’s Law

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 27, 2010

In Kids

Do you remember Murphy’s Law? It went something like, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. I have invented my own law, called Suzanne’s law. This is a law of the universe that says, anytime you want someone to do something, they will either: not do it, do it but not do it well, or do it but not when you want them to.

This law is proved by my daughter on a regular basis. Here’s an example. I asked her for weeks to get the oil changed in her car. When she finally did, she brought the receipt in the house to show me all the add-on things they talked her into adding on. After I looked it over and heard her explanations (this was her very first oil change), I said, “Put that oil receipt in you glove box to show you’ve been maintaining the car.”

“I will mom.”

“Today?”

“Yes, I just don’t want to walk out there right now.”

If you apply Suzanne’s Law, you know that the oil receipt is still laying in the bonus room floor days later, and will continue to stay there unless ants carry it off or I plant myself in the middle of the room with my hands on my hips, tapping my toe, and watch her pick it up and take it out to her car, at which time she’ll come back into the house scowling and go straight to her room, slamming the bedroom door to let me know how unreasonable I’m being.

My dog has Suzanne’s Law down to a science. If she does something really cute, like cock her head to one side and look up with the whites of her little black eyes showing, and it’s the cutest thing you’ve ever seen in your life so you want to share it with someone, it’s guaranteed that she’ll cease doing it the second the other person looks at her, no matter how fast they turn their head.

Another version of this same thing is when she sits or rolls over on demand all day long, but if someone says, “Does your dog do tricks?” and you say, “Yes, watch this,” and then say, “Roll over,” she will just look at your like she’s deaf and not even acknowledge that you are speaking to her. If you say it again and again, she waits patiently, looking at you and maybe cocking her head as if to say, “What up, dog?”

Now that I’ve discovered this new law, which is akin to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in its scope and application, I see it happening all the time. We had a leak in our roof and the roofing contractor was supposed to call this morning by 7:30 to say when he was coming. I called him at 8:00. He said he was coming at 9:30. I called him at 9:45. He got there eventually, but not when he was supposed to – again proving Suzanne’s Law.

Curiously, now that I’ve coined this law, I feel more forgiving toward my daughter. She’s only following a pre-ordained, scientific model of teenage behavior patterns that are consistent with 99.9% of the teenage population.

I feel so much better. I’m going to get a lot of use out of that law until she goes to college. Feel free to use it as well. It may save you from pulling all your hair out.