The Garden Center

"I bought a new snow shovel today," I told Toby (6). "It's my Christmas present to myself."

Did you buy it at Menards, he asked suspciously.

Yes, I did.

Does it have a yellow handle?

Yes it does.

It's in the garage, he said.

Yes, it is. I put it there.

Did you buy it at the garden center at Menards?

No, I bought it inside, where they are displaying the snow shovels.

Did you look at the shovels in the garden center?

Sigh. No, I did not. The garden center is unheated and this is Minnesota and it was cold.

You should have looked in the garden center, when I looked there last summer they had a bunch of nice shovels.

I opened my mouth to ask what six year old kid remembers the quality of shovels from six months ago, but I just closed my face instead.

Never Closer To Death

The doctor stuck his hand at me, and said, "Congratulations. This is amazing. How did you do it?". I shook his hand and looked momentarily at his wide smile and the clear sincerity in his face, he really wanted to know how I did it and wasn't just being supportive. I knew then that I had never been closer to death in my entire life. How I did what? As men age, their physician will be constantly feeding them numbers gleaned from blood and urine tests, index numbers based on your weight and height and explaining how these numbers impact your mortality. My Dr has been on my ass for the last two years to lower all the usual numbers and to get and keep moving. I did all that, but honestly didn't move too far off the infamous 'Dean & Evan' diet. He gave me the usual regimen of tests yesterday. When he returned to the room he was smiling broadly and clearly happy with the results. BP: 110/68; LDL: 57; blood sugar, medium normal. When your mom walks into your room...

Child Not Childs

It might surprise blog readers to learn that I have long been a fan of Julia Child. I have never made a meal from one of her recipes but I have read seemingly all of her biographies and some of her published letters. I have always found her remarkable journey from working in the OSS during WWII to assembling the nearly insurmountable volume of recipes for her book to pan-flipping her way into the American culture such a great story. I also liked the way that she almost completely disregarded the celebrity aspect of her life, always answering questions about herself, her recipes or work in a matter of fact fashion. I saw some late in life "living history" program not long ago with J Child and the interviewer asked her, as an introduction, to talk about her early life. She gave a momentary rolled eye expression and said, simply, "I am Julia Child" and inferred, let's get on with this, sonny. So I saw the movie (this is four films I have seen in their entirety in t...

By A Blue River

I've been down to see my dad's grave only a few times since he died now more than 40 years ago. His final resting spot is something like 4-5 hours from my house in an almost forgotten village where the streets have no names. Each time I've visited the place in the last 25 years--twice--odd events struck. The first time, in the early 1990s, I hadn't been by to see it in since I was 10-12 years old and swung by on a lark, somehow found the town on a map and parked my bike on one of the few paved streets in that little blue river town. I walked around remembering houses and buildings from one of my visits from my childhood. My dad had grown up in this town, and had graduated from high school there, when they still had a high school. His family settled in there as well, his brother, and assorted cousins and stuff. I'd been there for a wedding and a funeral when I was a kid, won my first fist fight (I'd lost a ton of them previously, of course) in an alley in that...

Hailwood1965

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