The DAMM Truth

In Memory Of Oscar “Little Buddy” Damm

? — January 12, 2015

When people die, it’s hard. It’s upsetting and sparks anger, denial and deep sorrow. But it is a sadness and sorrow that typically, if death is in the natural variety, complete with some kind of closure. Goodbyes can be expressed and understood. Forgiveness can be asked for and granted, or even denied, and there is at least an understanding of how matters were left. Even sudden deaths can allow for inference of a goodbye that could bring peace to those left behind.

“That’s the way he would have wanted to go,” can be said because at some point during the deceased’s life, they actually said, “This is the way I would like to go.” And that brings with it a certain amount of comfort. It isn’t as easy with dogs, and Oscar, “Little Buddy,” Damm was a very good dog.

Oscar came to us through petfinder.com as a rescue. After proactively completing our dachshund rescue paperwork, we had a fast track to adoption of a dog. We simply had to find one that got along with Gracie, the other dachshund that lived in our home.

Oscar seemed to appear out of a fluffy pink bath towel being held by someone at a veterinary clinic. His neck was extended out and up toward the camera as if he wanted to reach his nose through the screen to greet me. His eyes were big, brown and bright, with a touch of desperation but a very eager sense of kindness. The look on his little wiener dog face just called to me. And it looked like he had gone through some rough times but he was determined to make the best of his vet office surroundings.

“I think I found him, honey,” I said as I hit the send button on an email to Wendy with the link.

“Oh, my gosh!” Wendy said out loud from her office twenty-five miles away. “Oh, he is very handsome.”

He was handsome. The notes said he had a bald patch on his back from stress, that he had been adopted and given up by two couples in only his first year of life, who didn’t understand what commitment to a dog means, and that he was unbelievably sweet. They undersold the sweet part.

That night, Wendy and I took Gracie to meet Oscar at his foster home, to make sure the dogs would get along. The foster mom was hosting several dogs of various shapes and sizes, but made sure Oscar could come out to meet us alone. The other dogs were intimidating to Oscar’s small frame, and he was just a little reluctant as he took the first steps out into the open of the foster family’s living room. He raised his head and looked right at Wendy across the room. He immediately began to run to her with purpose. Wendy braced for it by kneeling down with her arms open. He didn’t slow down as he approached, to sniff for danger or to show submission. He flat out leaped into the air, like a poorly catapulted russet potato directly into Wendy’s waiting embrace. I could see his little dachshund arms out as wide as they could go (not terribly wide), hugging my wife as he laid his comforted head on her shoulder. It was a beautiful moment and a memory I use to remind myself what love really is.

I immediately looked at the dog foster mom and said, “well, it looks like he’s coming home with us.” There really was never a question. It was March 20th, 2003.

Gracie, our picky little princess dachshund even liked him, and sat with him for the ride home. Home. He was home forever now. He knew it too. Although never having been to our house in Kent, he walked around the place like he had lived there for six months. He went outside to pee, came back in, and because it was nearing our bedtime, he walked directly over to our closed bedroom door and turned to look at us as if to say, “well, I don’t know about you people, but I have had a long day, what do you say we all go up and get in your bed?” And just like that, we let a dog we had only known for a couple hours, sleep deep down in the covers of our bed, where he always preferred.

We decided to keep his name the same. Although every second male wiener dog is named Oscar-get it? Wiener, Oscar, as in Oscar Meyer the makers of hot dogs that are often called wieners? Not funny. But since yelling that name had a better chance of keeping Oscar out of a busy street, we kept it.

The only time we were ever reminded that Oscar didn’t always live with us was when he heard a doorbell. We did not have one, so when a doorbell sound effect would go off on television, Oscar would begin to bark and race to the door, while Grace just thought he was nuts. That Pavlovian reaction always made me wonder which of the two previous houses had him jumping for the doorbell, and it was always a little sad. But if it bothered him, we sure couldn’t tell. But we sure did give him lots of attention when it happened, which of course only reinforced the behavior.

He was not as fast as Gracie, nor was he from a well bred line of papered dachshunds, and Gracie reminded Oscar of that constantly. Next to Gracie, Oscar didn’t quite seem as smart either. Oscar was always a bit slower, but to be fair, in contrast, I’m pretty sure Gracie reads at the third grade level. But what he lacked in speed of foot and brain, he over-compensated with cornering ability and absolute kindness.

Everyone loved Oscar immediately. He won your heart with his big eyes and ever-present smile, but would approach you humbly with his tail tucked between his legs. Everyone just had to hold him, and when they would pick him up, discover that the fur on his chest was as soft as the finest rabbit mixed with cashmere. When he was done on your lap, he would simply lick your hand lightly to let you know he was ready to go. Oscar could work a room like a veteran politician, and at the end of the party, everyone was voting for him.

Children especially loved Oscar and Oscar especially loved children. While Gracie would prefer little hands stay away from her, Oscar would endure grabbing and pulling with patience and affection. He also appreciated how easily they would give him food.

Oscar was a genius when it came to acquiring forbidden food. He could sniff out treats, or extra food you might have on a discarded plate, and if he could make it happen, he would have it. And he could almost always “make it happen.” On more than one occasion we caught Oscar on top of our dining room table.

Keep in mind that in his absolute prime, Oscar was only maybe six inches tall at the shoulder. And to get on the dining room table, he would need to execute an eighteen inch jump to get to the seat of a dining chair and then immediately jump another twelve inches to make the table. That’s three times his height for the first jump and then twice his height for the second. No human can do that, yet this fat little dog did it again and again. Maybe his little tail would helicopter him up there. I never saw it happen; I just found him in impossible places. I can’t help but imagining him in slow motion making these jumps with the sound effect from the Bionic Man. And that might not be the impressive part.

Once up there, this 11 pound dog would siphon up as much food as he could. While clearing the dinner table, we might come around the corner and see him daintily licking off the plates, but he would always position his body so he could see any impending threats to his gorging. As soon as he would detect one of us coming to take him off the table, he would increase his food intake ten fold. It was like he shifted from second through fifth gear in less than a second. I was always a little concerned when he did this, that he would accidentally swallow a serving spoon or gravy boat, but thankfully that never happened.

One time he managed to down an entire bowl of green beans and most of a cube of butter. That made for a long night. It was extremely gross but most impressive.

One afternoon, I came home from a trip to Safeway with several shopping bags full of groceries. Upon entering the house, I heard someone calling me down to the basement for assistance. I put the groceries down on the floor to hurry down the stairs. I was not downstairs more than a minute before heading back upstairs to begin putting the groceries away.

Halfway up, I got the feeling that something wasn’t right. Gracie stood at the top of the stairs looking at me as if to say, “I told him not to, but he wouldn’t listen,” and “I have been standing here the whole time.”

A can of soup rolled by the open basement door as my head became level with the hardwood floor. That was a bad sign. I knew Oscar had found the groceries and had began looting it like the first hour of a zombie apocalypse. I was only gone a minute, less than, in fact. How much could he have gotten into?

I arrived at the groceries and briefly felt relief when I didn’t see Oscar’s swirly-haired butt bobbing around halfway into a plastic bag. Only one bag looked like it had tipped over, which was also a good sign, but where was Oscar.

The air vent around the corner kicked on and blew a small, empty plastic bag across the floor in front of me and it landed at my feet. “Oh no.”

The bag, had until present, held exactly one pound of deli-cut turkey breast lunch meat.

Oscar stumbled around the corner, unable to manage the ten percent weight gain he took on in under a minute. He looked like a poorly made football. He looked bleary-eyed and stoned. He looked up at me as if to ask for a little assistance as he made his way, remarkably under his own power, to the backyard to try to undo some of the damage he had just done. When I picked him up, I realized that he didn’t just look like a poorly made football, but he felt as tight one as well.

Oscar had eaten all of it. It was one of the most impressive things I have ever experienced. Anyone that can eat ten percent of their body weight in under a minute would be granted miracle status from the Vatican. Oscar did it.

Oscar loved people and attention, but not always together. He wasn’t a glory hound. When we entered Oscar and Gracie into the wiener dog races one weekend in Oregon, he showed us that he wasn’t afraid to let the spotlight hit Gracie instead of himself.

Gracie had already handily won the first heat that she was in, but when it came time for Oscar to nose up at the starting line, he clearly wasn’t having it. Wendy held him at the start and I was calling him at the other end. When Wendy let go of him at the start, the other wiener dogs bolted out front, while Oscar tucked his tail and made a wide U-turn, back through the crowd and the hell away from the yelling people. We found him in the parking lot, still angry at us for signing him up for such a thing.

He wasn’t all smiles and sweetness though. Even the best of us can get frustrated at times. It took quite a bit to make Oscar mad, but when it happened, he was very clear when expressing his feelings.

I first noticed how Oscar would communicate frustration one morning when Puff, a one-eyed toy poodle, was staying with us. I had let Puff, Gracie, and Oscar out the kitchen door of our house to relieve themselves in the spacious back yard lawn area. As I like to have my privacy when performing bodily elimination, I like to grant such to others in the house as well, being human or not, so I turned my attention inside to the kitchen. After a few minutes, Puff punched through the doggie door and ran through the kitchen to the rest of the house. Gracie came through next and gave me the old stink-eye for some reason—I assume it was her distaste for the poodle.

When Oscar came through the door, he didn’t walk by me. He just stood in front of the door, not moving, staring at me. It was odd behavior so I instinctively approached him. Something was different about him. He was standing perfectly still, yet almost vibrating. He looked me in the eye as I got closer and I could see that he was absolutely pissed off. It also became clear that he was pissed on.

That was when I noticed for the first time, how Oscar would communicate how he was displeased. He made sure I was looking at him and then he would very sharply exhale through his nose and mouth. It wasn’t a sneeze. It wasn’t a spasm. It was just a raw expression of not knowing what to do with anger.

From his tail to his ear, and on a wiener dog that can be quite a distance, there was a line of poodle urine. Oscar just stood there wondering what I was going to do about the situation—no, demanding to know what I would do about the situation. He gave me another exasperated snort. Prince has explained to us what it sounds like when doves cry, well this is exactly what it sounds like when wiener dogs swear.

The only time I ever saw Oscar angrier was when he wanted his rawhide chew strip and it was out of his reach. It was jammed between two pieces of furniture and just out of range of his short snout.

What escalated the situation was the fact that he knew I had the ability to solve his problem easily, but I was ignoring him. Instead, I was preoccupied with this new baby that we had and couldn’t spare literally four seconds to use my opposable thumb to drag the rawhide just three inches closer. He must have been absolutely infuriated. In fact, he found a way to show me exactly how he felt.

As I knelt next to our bed, diapering or tickling our infant son, I felt something warm falling onto my bare foot. It was surprising because it felt a bit wet at the same time. My first thought was that Oscar might be peeing on me. But that was all wrong. What was hitting my foot, this had a little weight.

Sure enough, I look down to see Oscar hunched over my bare foot, laying an impressive poop right over the top of my upper-arch and toes with pinpoint accuracy. On his face, the definition of malice, no trace of shame. His eyes locked onto mine and they didn’t waiver. As he pushed, I could hear his little voice in my head, over my stupefied disgust, “Do I have your attention now?” And just before I lost my cool, as I was about to open my mouth to explain to a wiener dog that, “NO, WE DO NOT POOP ON PEOPLE’S FEET!” Before I could say that, in the zen moment when he knew he had captured my horrified attention, he gave me a very hard snort of air out of his mouth and nose. Check and mate.

It was gross, but I immediately laughed. I realized how mad Oscar had to be to resort to that level of retaliation. He had actually used his “nuclear option.” It was the only time he ever expressed himself in that way, but obviously it was not forgotten.

When our son Zach was born, we wondered how the dynamic of the house would change. We didn’t exactly worry that the dogs wouldn’t take to Zachary right away, but you hear stories that dogs or cats become jealous of the loss of attention. It was very important to us that the dogs accepted Zach into our little pack. Otherwise, we knew we would have to make the hard choice. We would have to put Zach up for adoption, which we really didn’t want to do.

Luckily, when the hospital released Zach on his second day, we brought him home to two dogs who couldn’t wait to meet him. It might be a little strange for some people to present a plump newborn baby to their waiting carnivorous animals who have descended from wolves, but it was the right thing to do. They were both incredibly excited to meet Zachary and sniffed and licked him with delight.

“Gracie, we are about to score major floor scraps,” was probably what Oscar was thinking.

Oscar particularly took a shine to Zach. There is a special bond between child and dog that cannot be duplicated. Oscar and Zach started that bond early. Oscar loved Zach a little extra. Oscar would seek out Zach when Zach was a tiny baby to check on him or be near him. When we would let him, Oscar would curl up next to Zach as Zach napped away lazy afternoons back when we counted weeks and months for him instead of years.

When Zach started toddling around the house and dropping things from his high-chair. Oscar was often following behind, curious to see where Zach would go. Later, Oscar would wander into Zach’s room to make sure he was there at night or to make sure all the bedroom doors were open. Oscar is against the idea of closed doors inside a house.

Unfortunately, the sands of time run much faster for dogs than for people. They ran faster for Oscar than his little legs could keep up with. He wasn’t the healthiest dog. In fact, people always questioned his age and health even though he was very close in age to Gracie, who still gets around like a much younger dog.

He came to us with a large bald patch on the right side of his body. When we adopted him, the agency said that he had probably lost it due to stress and that the fur would probably grow back. The adoption wasn’t contingent on Oscar growing his fur back. We didn’t mind it. It certainly helped identifying him between the two smooth furred brown dachshunds that were all over our houses.

The patch never grew in, not even a little bit, and our vet had us run some dubious $200 tests to make sure it wasn’t serious. It wasn’t serious. As a matter of fact, when we moved and the new vet asked about his patch and we said we had it tested, they looked at me like I was incredibly stupid and said, “they ran tests on it? It’s pretty clear to me that it’s just a bald spot. I just wondered if it was getting bigger.”

The patch was shaped curiously like a map of Iraq if you held Oscar up correctly. This helped us explain where Wendy’s brother might be stationed while serving in the National Guard in that country. People would ask where Adam was in Iraq and if Oscar happened to be walking by, we would just reach down, orient the surprised but happy wiener dog to show the map and point to the part of his bald spot the represented where a certain Iraqi city might be; very handy.

Oscar always struggled with his weight, at first we just thought he was extremely motivated by food, which he was, but a few years ago we learned that he might have Cushings disease. Without going into the details, Cushings effects the pituitary gland, hormones and appetite. It’s not a cheap disease to have or fight, but if you have the manageable kind, it can be treated and add years to the lifespan.

After several very expensive tests and a specialist, it was determined that Oscar wouldn’t need surgery but would need to be on meds the rest of his life along with monitoring tests every few months. It was around the time Wendy was getting ready to move with Zach to Kansas and leave me back in Washington with the dogs to keep me company. I took Oscar to see the specialist a few times after Wendy had moved, and every time we would go to a vet appointment, Oscar got this sad, guilty feeling in his eyes. I never told him he wasn’t worth it. He was worth every dime, but I always got the feeling from him that he thought of himself as a burden. He wasn’t.

It turned out he also had a problem with his eye, that only dachshunds and like two other breeds tend to get. This required a canine optometrist. When I took him to that specialist, I fully expected to have Oscar walk out of the back wearing tiny horn-rimmed glasses, but no, just a bunch of eye drops to be administered with his morning pill and night pill.

By this point, he was racking up thousands of dollars in medical bills. I remember my mother, who loved Oscar as much as any of us, asked me about how much it was costing. I told her it was easily several thousand dollars by that point, with some expensive monthly maintenance medicine. Concerned, my mother asked if we had thought about some kind of limit we were thinking of putting on the dogs life.

“How much are you going to spend on him before you decide it’s too much,” my mother asked me.

I bristled, “you mean, what limit will we reach and decide he just has to die?”

“Well yeah,” she clarified, sensing I was about to answer offended, which was not Mom’s intent.

I guess it was the sense of impending mortality of losing Little Buddy that made me answer sharply, “that’s a good idea Mom. I never thought of putting some kind of limit on his life. When you get older, what kind of limit do you want us to put on YOUR head?”

Mom laughed, “well that’s a pretty good point.”

Cushings wasn’t all bad though. Oscar would happily vacuum up any popcorn or scraps of food that fell on the floor. If it was safe food and if he wasn’t already hovering under foot, I would just yell his name and he would run in to the kitchen like the fire brigade and get to work.

There was an unfortunate occurrence when he found a bag of candy bars at my parents house one time while we were out of town. When they found him, he had all but finished an entire bag of the “fun size” bars and his stomach was so full, it was putting pressure on his little, wiener dog lungs. His tongue was turning blue, when they got him to the emergency vet. I’m told he was more basketball than football that time, and when they finally got a hose down his throat, he deflated like a punctured balloon.

The last few years of Oscar’s life were very happy. We eventually moved the dogs to Kansas to be With Wendy and Zach full time. On the plane ride out, we were worried that Gracie would bark the whole time we were in the airplane cabin. The dogs stayed under the seats in little kennels, with the mesh doors facing us.

It wasn’t Gracie who gave us any trouble surprisingly. She was terrified and stayed quiet. But Oscar knew we had treats to keep them quiet. He took to barking soft once Wendy passed him a nugget of kibble through the wire. He would wait a little bit and then bark softly again. If Wendy ignored the first bark, he would wait a little longer and then bring the thunder. He would let out as loud of a bark as he could. He was rewarded instantly, simply because we couldn’t tell him “no” on the flight and he took advantage of that every day.

In Kansas, he met new people and smelled new scents. He became fascinated be the squirrels who lived in the big oak in our backyard. The squirrels loved to tease him by running to the base of the tree and pretending they didn’t know a dog lived in the house and was on the porch. When Oscar would see one, he would take off like a porky potato with tiny legs after it.

The squirrel would wait at the base of the tree until Oscar was six inches from catching him—still plenty far away from Oscar’s semi-dangerous jaws—and then the squirrel would casually shoot up the tree, leaving Oscar to his excitement of “almost” catching a squirrel.

He would turn and look at me with a big smile, “did you see that, Dad? I almost had him!”

I never had the heart to tell Oscar that the other two squirrels were always up in the tree, watching and laughing…or that the squirrels would usually circle Oscar once before going up the tree. Those squirrels were jerks.

When we moved back to Washington from Kansas, we almost lost Oscar. As the boxes were being packed and the house was being cleared of furniture, Oscar started to deteriorate. He was in an enormous amount of pain and wouldn’t move from his bed. When we picked him up to take him outside to relieve himself, he would yelp and howl with pain. He was wobbly, and couldn’t stand on his own. And Oscar, our forever hungry little dog, wouldn’t eat his dinner.

We would move him gently from room to room with us as we cleared and cleaned the rental house just before our road trip. It was December when we left Kansas with two cars loaded like the kinds of busses you see crossing the African deserts packed to double capacity. With the stress of the moving time-crunch over, with three days on the long road across the Midwest, we settled into our thinking chairs to really let Oscar’s condition sink in.

Bumps in the road or shifts in inertia could set off a string of distressed yelps that could not be cured with a gentle hand or medicine. He just laid there, uncomfortable and suffering.

On one evening in Wyoming, Oscar perked up a little. He ate some of his food. But I still had to hold him up as he pooped and peed outside the hotel at a toasty 16 degrees.

When we got to Washington and took him to a vet to get him fixed up, the vet knew right away what the problem was. It wasn’t his Cushings. It wasn’t his spine or his liver. His neck muscles were simply all knotted up in a big, painful ball of stress.

It turns out, watching us pack up our house was too much for him to handle. I imagine that Oscar was experiencing some old, unresolved feelings attached to the two times he was abandoned as a puppy.

It was just a simple muscle relaxer that made him better, but it was his heart that had been wounded. Oscar loved deeply, almost to a fault. He had created bonds with the first two families again that reached over ten years into his life with us. I imagine the boxes he saw us packing were similar to the ones being packed when the decision was made to give Oscar up. One Family breaking up and moving away and another family that moved into a place that didn’t allow pets.

The thought of losing us, or anyone was so terrible to that sweet little dog, that his little body started to turn on him. It reminded us all of just how full of love he was and how deeply cared about being a member of our family.

The next year was our bonus year with Oscar. We spent extra time with him, took him on hiking and biking adventures, and gave him lots of extra love.

He was completely deaf at this point, but he would still chase a ball and bring things for you to throw for him. He was slower, but always so happy to see you after a long day. He would run his portly little body over to any opened door to meet new friends from the neighborhood who got to know him and care for him.

We had been told long ago that ultimately it would be his liver that would fail and then he would quickly pass away. On the morning Oscar died, he was having trouble walking and making sense of where he was, he had been that way for the last 24 hours. So I set an appointment with the vet and took him in so they could fix him up.

But quickly, the doctors took him in to the examination room, letting me know that he would probably need x-rays and other expensive procedures, which I expected and was happy to pay. But then the doctor returned to the room and said she wanted to cancel the procedures. She said it looked to her as if his liver was failing and that he was very ready to pass.

I wasn’t prepared.

He’d been at death’s door many times, but this is the first time a vet had told me they would cancel x-rays. That machine just prints money for a vet. Veterinarians love to take x-rays. The idea that one would cancel them was ominous.

The doctor assured me with a finality that I knew to be serious. She asked if I could call anyone down to be with him. I couldn’t. Wendy didn’t have a car and Zach was at school across town.

“Can I take him with me?” I choked out of my constricted throat, “I have to get my family, they have to say goodbye too.”

“Absolutely,” the doctor said empathetically as she motioned an assistant to bring Oscar to me. “But you have to know that it is very possible that he will pass on the way.”
This hit me like a blow to the stomach. It was all happening so fast. I had planned on Oscar getting some tests done, tweaking his meds and bringing him home to sleep by the fire with Gracie. Now I was being told that today was going to be his last day.

They brought my Little Buddy into the room wrapped in a wooly brown blanket, very much like the fluffy pink towel I first saw him in that first adoption photo. His eyes were open but now I could see it. Now I could see him holding on.

Although the doctor said Oscar wasn’t in pain, she said that he wasn’t comfortable and would have a rough existence until he passed. The plan was to take him to see the family and we would bring Oscar back to euthanize him.

I asked if I could take him out the back door because I was a mess and the last thing a waiting room full of worried pet owners needs to see is a grown man weeping freely while cradling his motionless dog.

I was a mess, trying to get ahold of Wendy. I called my mother, who immediately understood but was very emotional too. She kept me from crashing the car as I drove to pick up my family with Oscar right next to me.

I talked to Oscar as I juggled communication with Wendy, letting her know how serious the situation was. I felt his heart beating faster through his oh-so-soft chest fur. His nose was dry. His breathing was labored.

Wendy came down from her office and picked up Oscar in his blanket and bed and held him close as she spoke loving words to him that he was too deaf to hear. We both cried and headed to Zach’s school to give him the opportunity to say goodbye to one of his first friends.

I kept it together when I opened his classroom door, knowing if I said anything, I would lose it. I simply caught his teacher’s attention and mouthed the words, “I need to take Zach.”

“Dad, what’s wrong?” he asked me in the hall as I gathered all his things.

“Buddy,” I began.

“Is Oscar dead?” Zach asked. He knew Oscar wasn’t well and that I was to take him to the vet that day. But I could honestly tell him that Oscar wasn’t dead.

“He’s in pretty bad shape, Zach,” I said, unable to hold back a stream of tears, “we have to say goodbye to him today.”

That’s what we did. On the way to the vet, we stroked him and loved him as much as we could.

The clinic was amazing. They gave us assurances that it was the end for Oscar and they gave us plenty of time with him. The doctor answered Zach’s questions so sweetly, I was thankful that she could say what I could not at the time.

She explained to us how our pets are more than just creatures that occupy space in your home. They are often more loyal than any human could be. Because of this, a dog like Oscar might fight on and live a miserable existence just because they want to please us. They won’t give up until we give them permission to go.

“It’s okay Oscar, you can go,” Zach told him gently as he cried some of his first grieving tears. I was proud of him. Wendy and I followed suit, with our words, yes, but also releasing him with our hearts so that he could feel free to pass.

Oscars eyes opened with a little more coherence, and like he had always done while sitting in our laps, he licked our hands gently, letting us know that he was ready to move on.

The doctor administered the drugs and the light in Oscar’s eyes dimmed into open nothingness.

…
We had Oscar cremated and he is back home with us. The last two weeks have had more tears than I can count. Reminders of Oscar are everywhere, his harness, sweater, leash, bowl and a stain here or there.

Gracie is getting along without Oscar, but I feel very guilty that she didn’t get to say goodbye. I don’t think she really understands what has happened. All she knows is that Oscar threw up on the carpet three times and I took him someplace he didn’t come back from. Although there hasn’t been an accident in the house since, I am hesitant to believe it’s because Gracie thinks we just got rid of Oscar because of one too many accidents.

There is a massive hole in our home, lives and hearts left by a tiny brown dog. It’s quieter in the house without his weird, deaf barking or his chronically uneven gate when walking or trotting down the hall. But nowhere is it quieter than in my head.

I always felt that I could “hear” Oscars thoughts. He had a voice and a simplicity all his own. I heard it when I was with him. It was a kind, naive voice, always a little dopey, almost always food centric, but it was in my head, as clear as a bell whenever I was with him.

Since he passed, I can’t hear his voice in my head, and that has made whatever else was going on in my head terribly lonely.

I would love to think that Oscar was greeted in heaven by my grandmother, who loved Oscar dearly and held him whenever she could. That makes me feel better.

But I really wish he was with all the amazing dogs that have touched our lives through the years and moved on: Lady, Sarah, Chopper 2, Puff, Scotty, Angel, Heather, Shaugnesy, PJ, Suzy, and maybe Ms. Wolverine. Ms. Wolverine was a fish, but I don’t know all the rules of pet heaven.

None of us that knew him will ever forget Oscar. But the best part of sharing his life was watching the lessons he showed us of kindness, simple pleasures, unconditional love, and dying and letting go.

Goodbye Little Buddy.

 

 

Many people are curious about the expectations and protocol regarding the hosting of social parties in the home now that marijuana is legal for personal use under certain states’ laws. Knowing how to approach this new substance and introduce it to your beer, wine and spirits selection can very well determine if your soirée is a raving success.

Because marijuana at parties is a relatively new idea—despite being popular for a limited time in the 1940s—many guests may be confused or hesitant to partake in the substance. It is crucial to the party’s success that your attendees feel relaxed and comfortable in this uncharted territory. The savvy host should become familiar with the varieties of plant offered, as well as the operation and utilization of the various paraphernalia.

One way to ensure an easy introduction to those guests unfamiliar with this exciting new culture is to keep the nomenclature simple. Marijuana should only be referred to as such or by its more scientific name, cannabis. However, take care not to confuse your guests by switching between the two socially acceptable terms. Never call marijuana by its nicknames, such as grass, pot, or weed.

Likewise, bong is the gauche term for the much more elegant water pipe. The use of too much slang may make some of your guests uncomfortable, leading them to collect their coats and head for the door prematurely.

Water pipes should be clean and free of smudges and fingerprints, as should any glass pipes or table lighters (disposable lighters are acceptable only if you are hosting an outdoor gathering). All paraphernalia should be free of defects and in good working order. Furthermore, a variety of smoking devices should be available so all of your guests can access the marijuana within a reasonable amount of time. They should never need to resort to fashioning their own pipes from aluminum cans or by hollowing out tree fruits of any kind.

A more formal gathering would favor pipes over marijuana cigarettes. For casual affairs, offer a selection of pre-rolled cigarettes fanned out elegantly, and assist your guests in choosing their preferred variety.

You may be tempted to allow your guests to roll their own cigarettes. Unless you are entertaining a small group or planning a marijuana-cigarette-rolling instructional evening, proper etiquette dictates that you simply supply pre-rolled cigarettes for your informal gathering. (That being said, learning to roll a marijuana cigarette properly can be a fun activity for couples bored of the usual bridge and mahjong.)

As always, one passes the pipe or marijuana cigarette in a counterclockwise direction.

Antique hookah pipes can add a stylish centerpiece to your marijuana party. Make sure each hose is cleared and clean before allowing your guests access. If you are planning a more intimate affair, your hookah may be the only equipment necessary. In either case, have plenty of marijuana on hand if your group has trouble addressing all the inhaling stations simultaneously. Although the hookah is a lovely piece for entertaining, it can be a less-economical use of your marijuana supply.

Knife hits should be discouraged.

As your guests become more familiar with the subtleties of the many types of marijuana, they will learn which plant strains they enjoy most. As the host, you are expected to help shepherd your guests through this enlightening experience. If you are a marijuana novice, it is advised that you hire an expert from a local dispensary to act as a guide. This person will explain the different types of marijuana you will be selecting for your guests. Ideally, the marijuana authority would also be a sommelier or beer cicerone and therefore able to suggest wine and/or beer pairings for the varieties of marijuana you are offering.

Your expert will advise you to purchase a variety of marijuana types to produce different desirable sensations for your guests. This person will also advise just how much of the substance should be used to avoid a bad experience. It would be very unfortunate to have a room full of people who do not know if time is standing still or whether your party will ever end.

Marijuana has been rumored to enhance the taste of food and increase the appetite. This makes your responsibilities as host even more important. It is highly recommended that you offer a wide variety of both sweet and savory foods. No matter what you serve, by the end of the evening your guests will be certain it is the finest food they have ever tasted.

A buffet-style presentation is the ideal food-service option for a marijuana party. This will give your guests easy access to all the choices, as well as the proportions they desire. It may also discourage your guests from ordering pizza to be delivered to your residence during the party.

Setting the appropriate ambiance is crucial for your marijuana party to be considered a success. Lighting should be low, but not dark. Candles may be used a safe distance from your guests, but not as the primary light source. Comfortable seating should be arranged to provide your guests an opportunity to speak to one another about minutiae of everyday life or just stare into space indefinitely.

Having a spare bedroom available for any guest who may need to lie down to ease off of a negative reaction is an excellent way to avoid any unpleasant yelling or crying.

Removing items from the area to be occupied by your guests may be necessary. This may include scary artwork or native peoples’ masks. Children’s toys that move or speak on their own must never be present. Also take care to remove any photographs of people or pets that may appear to be judging your guests or that might resemble ghosts.

Music can make or break a marijuana party. Avoid music that is too loud or aggressive. Songs with political messages should also be avoided, as this will undoubtedly lead to marathon conversations in which the same eight sentences are repeated over the course of several hours. Smooth jazz or long-play selections will make it extremely difficult for your guests to judge the passage of time. Stick to short, melodic pieces that do not rely heavily on a rhythm section and can be followed easily by an untrained ear.

The introduction of marijuana to your entertaining repertoire may take some getting used to. But if done right, it can make for a magical evening that your guests may never remember.

Sometimes I think I am so darn clever. When I say that, I mean that when I realize I have an idea that others are not hip to, I get that smug look on my face and that little glow of evil self-righteousness in my heart. On a few occasions I feel justified and adopt the practices of my ideas. Other times, when I am wrong, the fall from my high horse seems too far.

This is a story of a smug moment turned costly mistake.

As anyone can attest, I care not for my personal appearance. I wear clothes that make me look twenty years older and twenty pounds fatter. I don’t like buying expensive clothes and sporting a brand’s label for free. When it comes to clothes, I’m cheap. Shoes are not exempt from this philosophy either.

Why pay for an expensive pair of shoes at Macy’s or Nordstrom when I could get three pair for the same price at a bargain outlet or discount sporting goods store? Only a sucker would fork out that much cash for a brand name.

Oddly enough, this was one of those instances when I learned an expensive lesson about quality.

The more expensive shoe companies were charging more for their shoes because they included things like arch support, cushioning, safety testing, and other features that promoted comfort and foot mechanics.

The less expensive shoes were all about the outer appearance. They were shoes that a human foot could be placed inside and look like they offered some kind of rudimentary protection from the elements. They definitely looked like shoes. However, it would be like purchasing a cheap car, but instead of interior features like seats and safety belts, there would just be a couple upside-down buckets with a length of rope to lash yourself to the interior frame. But look at those racing stripes!

For years I would buy these junky shoes and put mile after mile on them while silently abusing the delicate muscle and tissue makeup of my feet.

I am not sure when it happened, but I know over a short period of time that it became difficult to walk on my feet after short periods of having my feet in a resting position. It got so that waking up and taking the first few steps out of bed sent shooting pains through my feet. It felt as if all the muscles in my heel and arch had grown together wrong and needed to be ripped apart each time.

Sometimes one foot would feel worse than the other and sometimes they would both hurt about the same. But it was becoming the status quo, as was my weird limping around the house during my foot adjusting time.

“Those cheap shoes you buy are ruining your feet,” my wife would say to me, “see a doctor and stop wearing cheap shoes.” Sometimes it is difficult for me to cut through the thick veils of her hints. Perhaps if she was more direct, I may have figured it out sooner.

I asked around my job to see if anyone knew a foot specialist but nobody did. A coworker did tell me about a friend that had a similar issue and that his chiropractor might be able to help me.

I had never been to a chiropractor before and had always been leery of the practice. The whole industry seems like it straddles the line between science and sorcery. Like, it’s covered on my medical insurance but the “doctor” went to a community college. I don’t know enough about it to be critical or positive, I can only tell you that I knew insurance companies paid them, so it had to have some kind of research to back it up.

My feet hurt and I didn’t want some podiatrist telling me I would need three surgeries per foot to “attempt” to correct my foot pain. Spending $25 on an office visit copayment sounded better than spending two years in post surgery ski-boots, so I was off to give pseudo-science a try.

The chiropractor’s office was very nice. It had the feel of a specialist’s or high-end dentist’s waiting room. There was a fish tank, a sassy receptionist that knew how to fling a clipboard and last month’s general interest magazines. It also had medical drawings of spinal columns and nerve charts on the wall along with a full sized spine model with removable vertebrae on a table.

All of this made me breathe easily, the environment was engineered to show me that this is a little more medically sound than I had originally judged. But then I thought, my son has a model helicopter but I wouldn’t pay him a couple hundred bucks to fly us around Maui. This is exactly the kind of setup I would do if I were going to start a bone cracking business.

The chiropractor’s patient rooms were nicer than I expected. It looked like every psychiatrist’s office that you have ever seen on TV. Leather books, a painting, nice chairs and a strange leather table with some shaped, foam cushions on it. Soft, pleasant music played out of a small bookshelf radio unit.

The chiropractor entered confidently and told me his name. For the purposes of this writing, we will call him Dr. Ford. He was tall and fit, with a very positive demeanor. He was very focused when I told him why I was there and specifically what could be done. I appreciated the time he took to ask me questions. He was a nice guy and I liked him.

He explained to me that what he thought might be the issue. It appeared that I wasn’t getting the arch support that my feet needed and my muscle tissue was compensating by blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah. He told me that I needed better arch supports in my shoes. Then he looked at my shoes. He said I needed to buy better shoes.

However, the experience didn’t stop there. He told me he had something he could do for my feet and that over time it would “help” to correct my painful issue, but it would take several visits. I was prepared for this and if there was just a fraction of relief he could give me, I would come back and let him do it again.

“But first,” Dr. Ford said, “Let’s have you stand up and get you adjusted. Take a deep breathe and let all the air out.”

I didn’t stop and think, I just stood up. As I took the deep breathe I could see him face off against me and kind of crouch slightly. I was halfway through my breathing out when he threw his arms out and around my body, pinning my arms to the side of me and sending a wave of panic through my core. This chiropractor had attacked me.

I started to struggle as he lifted me off the ground, pushing my remaining oxygen out of my mouth and dramatically increasing my sensation of helplessness. My machismo was damaged. I couldn’t believe how fast this weird fight had started and how quickly I was rendered defenseless. In the second-and-a-half after Dr.Ford had picked me up off the ground suddenly, I had played out the rest of the fight.

“Think dammit! Use your surroundings!” I thought frantically to myself. I felt pops in my back. “If I could just get my hands on that bookshelf radio, I could brain this crazy bastard. Can I get at his groin? That’s not fair fighting man, don’t kick a guy in the groin. WHAT’S FAIR? THIS GUY JUMPED YOU OUT OF NOWHERE IN HIS PLACE OF BUSINESS! THIS IS A FIGHT TO THE DEATH!”

“Take it easy,” Dr. Ford said sensing my discomfort, “it’s almost over.”

Too out of breath to say anything, my brain screamed “HE IS TRYING TO KILL ME! HE JUST SAID I’M ALMOST DEAD!”

“Just a little bit more,” Dr. Ford grunted as he reapplied his mammoth bear grip around my body with a slight bounce. I felt one big pop in my mid spine, and felt relief. “There.”

He put me down on my feet and I literally believed my legs wouldn’t hold me due to having this man breaking my back and severing my lower nervous system from my upper. But I stood firm and had some release of pain I forgot I had in my back.

“I, I wasn’t expecting that,” I stammered, “I’ve never had that really done before. I thought we were just doing foot stuff.” I was stupefied. I don’t care for people touching me but hugging the air out of me with no warning left me feeling violated.

“Oh!” Dr. Ford said with genuine alarm and sympathy on his face, “I hope I didn’t freak you out. That’s the first of a few general adjustments I would like to do before we work on the feet.”

Freaked out. Yep, definitely freaked out.

He had me do a few other positions on the table and with a cushion. It all seemed like a series of very professional, yet inappropriate hugs. I didn’t care for the experience but my body did feel much better. My psyche was a little traumatized but nothing like what was about to happen.

Dr. Ford told me to lay face down on the table with my face through a padded circle at the end. He had me remove my shoes and leave my socks on while he ducked into a different room down the hall.

He returned with a flat metal tool with rounded smooth, curved edges. The outer edge curved like a small banana and was of a shiny chrome. He held it under the table briefly for me to look at it.

Dr. Ford explained that he was going to use the tool to scrape the internal scar tissue free so my foot could heal itself properly with better arch support insoles that I was to buy immediately. As he explained, he secured my right foot bent at the knee up in the air like he was shoeing a horse.

I don’t think I giggled on his first pass over the bottom of my foot, but I think I jerked it hard at the sensation.

Dr. Ford kind of laughed. “Weren’t expecting that, were you.” He took a firmer grip.

I honestly tried to keep it professional as Dr. Ford dragged the tool over my throbbing heal. It was painful and extremely ticklish at the same time. I bit my lip and dug my freaky little carnival hands into the padded table as he worked. My eyes filled with tears as I stifled the uncontrollable urge to laugh.

Well, uncontrollable means just that, I couldn’t control it. I barked out a couple big belly laughs that deteriorated into spastic giggling topped with loud, LOUD thunderous chuckles.

Dr. Ford worked away for a minute, until he realized that not only could his entire practice hear me but possibly everyone being fitted for hearing aids two floors below us at the audiologist. “Are you going to be okay?” He asked, “Can I finish?” He was amused but confused at the same time.

I looked up and dried my tears, “yeah, it’s cool. I have my asthma inhaler.” I reached into my trouser pocket and retrieved my medicine for a quick puff. “Go for it.”

Dr. Ford laughed and shook his head. I put my face back down and he returned to torturing my foot in a way I hadn’t had done since my Uncle Dave used to tickle me when I was a kid.

I laughed and carried on like no adult man—none ever—should ever, ever carry on. I sounded like I was in absolute agony—kind of. I sounded like a hyena, gorilla and two parrots capable of mimicking human speech were locked in a small closet together.

Had I been a patient in a waiting room to see this professional, not only would I get up to leave, but I would search for a hidden camera TV crew and upon finding none, would phone the police.

I squealed and heaved huge gasps of air between fits of silly, goofy guffaws. It was a snowball of laughter and it grew to an unacceptable level.

For some reason, the chiropractor just powered through it.

I really tried not to laugh but the combination of the physical sensation along with the absurdity that a professional was doing it in his place of business was just too much to take.

Then he did the left foot.

I walked out of there feeling far more comfortable than any self-respecting man should after cackling madly for twenty minutes within earshot of three medical waiting rooms.

I’d like to say that I didn’t have to go back, but there were several weeks of this and it did indeed seem to help the healing process along. Each time I laughed the sounds of a sanitarium with a late shipment of medicine.

I paid a man, and I paid him very well, to tickle me, and that’s the Damm truth.

“You’re going to be alright,” said the voice above me.  I wasn’t so sure.  In my opinion, I was about a mile away from alright.

I was focusing on breathing.  Was it in through the nose and out through the mouth, or in through the mouth and out through the nose?  Either way seemed like a stupid idea. Screw it! I’m going to breathe in through my nose and mouth and out through my nose and mouth.  That made sense to me.  Get as much of the precious oxygen into my lungs as possible.

Flat on my back, sucking in gulps of air that felt as if they were just out of reach, I saw the dull haze of industrial fluorescent lights on the ceiling.  They pulsed along to the rhythm of my quick heartbeat amidst the tiny flashes of fireworks popping all around my field of vision.  The volcano in my stomach, threatening to erupt in vomit all over myself began to subside, but at that point, lying on my back on the gymnasium floor, I was preparing my soul for its trip into the unknown.

As the voice above me continued to talk me through this humiliating moment in my life, I saw quick flashes of everything that had brought me to this point.

Three weeks earlier, I was beginning to drift off to sleep when my wife, Wendy, put her phone down and quickly turned her body to face mine in the darkness.  “You’re going to die,” she said to me with a seriousness reserved only for the milliseconds before I fall asleep.  “You’re going to die, and leave Zach and me alone.”

“You won’t be alone,” I replied casually, “You’re attractive enough, you’ll have lots of options,” hoping this would be the end of it if she laughed, but I knew this wouldn’t be the case.  The words out of Wendy’s mouth were too clear and lucid for this to be the end of the conversation.

“I mean it Steve,” she pressed on, “You’ve gained too much weight again and you are going to die if you don’t do something about this.”

Wendy was absolutely correct.  In the last year, I had lost and then gained back about the equivalent of a cocker spaniel.  If I didn’t change something, I was heading into gaining as much as a corgi or English setter.  The good news, was that I had run out of excuses and now felt good enough to make the changes necessary to lose the spaniel and then maybe go so far as lose as much as a Scottish terrier or maybe even a blue healer.

Since we had moved to Olympia, Washington from Lawrence, Kansas, I had found it difficult to keep up with my very effective exercise routine I had stuck to out in the middle of the country.  My activity had fallen off when we got the word in mid-November that we would be leaving Kansas to move back to Washington.  Exercise time made way for packing up, cleaning, errands and trips to Goodwill with donations.

It was a stressful time too.  I was still fishing for a job either in Kansas or back in Seattle.  Kansas didn’t seem to want me because I would be heading back to Washington soon, and Seattle wasn’t interested because I was still out in Kansas.  My diet started slipping into the part of the food pyramid that actually lies outside of the diagram.  All my old favorites were welcoming me back.  Meat, candy, soda and carbohydrates all gathered around me with big hugs to get me through the mounting stress of moving.

“You look thirsty Steve-O!” said Soda, “have a drink of me and relax for a while.”

“Hey Steve, remember me?” asked Carbohydrates, “I’m at the donut shop within two blocks of your house.  You know, if you walk here and back you’ll probably be able to burn off more than a couple donuts.”  His logic seemed sound.

This slippage compounded with the wonders of multiple Thanksgiving dinners with night after night of leftovers, had made quickly made me too pudgy for my new medium sized clothes.  Holiday candy and cookies, moved me up yet another size in the week prior to Christmas, which was the week we piled into the cars and made the three day road trip back to Washington State.  There’s not a lot of kale in road food.

Before this turn of events, I had worked hard on my diet and exercise.  I was starting to look decent in a shirt and I was getting muscle tone that I hadn’t had before.  In the year prior, I had belonged to three different gymnasiums and got my value out of all three of them.  I woke up at 5:30 in the morning to swim laps at the Olympic sized indoor pool in Lawrence.  I was doing it, I really was.

But now months later full of sweet and savory foods and little to no exercise had turned me back into a portly pudge.

However, change is constant and before long, I had a great job, new hope and support to do whatever it takes to drop the weight again and start working my way back to those medium shirts.

The family joined a fantastic gymnasium in Olympia and we all started hitting it hard as a family.  I was getting back into an exercise groove and in only a couple of days, had put my bad food habit friends on a train out of town.  No more overwhelming cravings, and replaced them with the urge to go do a few miles at the gym.  I started swimming again and working on my weight training.  I checked out new workouts in Men’s Journal (not to be confused with Men’s Health, let’s not go crazy now).  I felt great again.

As part of the gym membership, we were each offered a free “fitness assessment” by one of the facility’s ultra-lean, super-duper positive physical trainers.

They asked us if we would be interested in doing the assessment together as a family.

“Yes, sure!” said my wife as she turned her head to look at me.

At the exact same time, I gave my answer, perhaps a little too loudly, “absolutely not!”

Wendy loves to exercise together as a family.  She loves it. Of course she does, she’s in excellent shape and has been her entire life.  Wendy was healthier than me while eight months pregnant and on bed-rest than I have been since I was the age of never.  I have never been healthier than my wife.  If Wendy were to die, and be in the ground with me crying over her grave, she would still be medically in better shape than I would be.

Five or six weeks before joining the gym, I had decided to go for a jog on one of the only Saturdays that had no rain in Olympia.  Wendy immediately thought it would be a great idea for her to come along with Zach riding his bike behind and our eleven-year-old wiener dog Gracie running alongside us on a leash.

I will run next to Wendy on a treadmill.  I’m fine with that, because we can stick together and still run at our own pace.  Running with her in the real world is a nightmare for me.  I can’t keep up even to the end of our driveway, which at our current home is almost 25 feet.  It’s embarrassing, I am humiliated and it makes me not want to run at all.  It’s not about outrunning my wife.  It isn’t about being a man.  It is about taking a solo experience that is always positive because I feel like I’m getting some great exercise, and measuring my output next to the impossible standard that is my wife.

“No, I think I would rather go alone,” I stated to Wendy in a tone that should have reminded her that we never run together because I hate it.

“It’ll be fine,” Wendy said as she put on her shoes and motioned Zach to go get his bike.

“Uh, I really would prefer to run by myself.  I don’t want to hold either of you up,” which is true.

“It’ll be okay, Zach will be on a bike,” she said, as if that was what I meant.

“No, I really don’t want to go with you guys.  I want to do this alone,” I wondered if she could detect the panic in my voice.

“We’ll go slow,” she said with finality.

“Great! Let’s go!” I said with sarcastic enthusiasm.  I steeled myself for a humiliating experience.  Sometimes everyone needs a refresher course on why we shouldn’t run together.

We took off from the house as a group, Zach leading the way on his bicycle.  “Zach, remember, we are going slow,” Wendy explained.

We started at about twice my normal jogging speed.  I immediately started doing the math in my head.  If we maintained this pace all the way to the end of the block, I was concerned that I may not be able to breathe.  At the end of the street, my math checked out.  Wendy looked at me and smiled.  She wasn’t breaking a sweat.  Clearly, she was enjoying herself.  I returned her smile with the widest, open teethed grin I could manage, to mask my frustration and also to try to pull in some extra oxygen.  We weren’t slowing down.

About three-hundred yards later, I started to lag behind.  Zach, who was ahead of us on his bike, stopped to look back at us. Wendy had turned around and was running backward just ahead of me to ask me if I was alright.  She does this quite a bit when we run together.  She’s bounding circles around me like a Jack Russell terrier, giving me what she believes are words of encouragement; all the while, I appear to be zombie-lurching down the sidewalk as if I was chasing a mirage up a sand dune in the Sahara desert.  We caught up to Zach, who again began to pedal out in front of us.

My son may hold the belief that the only thing that keeps his two-wheeled bike balanced while he rides is a steady stream of words coming out of his mouth.  Perhaps he fears that if he stops talking, the bike would simply fall over and dump him in the street.  I hold this belief because since the first pump of his pedal, he had not stopped talking in a stream of conscious manner about any and all things that popped into his head.  He had statements, then unrelated questions that made way for songs, observations about cartoons he liked and testimonials of which superhero has the most power.

By the half mile mark, at a pace double my usual, the only words echoing through my head are too inappropriate to print here.  They were inventive combinations yes, but extremely inappropriate.  They were the opposite answers to the one’s I was nodding to her in response to questions she was asking about me being okay.  Sweat is in my eyes, and I swear, the wiener dog looked up at me condescendingly.

It was about that time I heard my son ask me a question that I couldn’t hear over my desperate breathing.  It was something innocent and sweet I presume, possible about wanting to spend time with me later, or if he might be able to grow up to be as strong as me someday.  I will never know what he asked me.  I was seriously concentrating on moving my sluggish body forward at a pace that wouldn’t make my wife call an ambulance.  As soon as his distracting question was finished, I answered in a way I’m ashamed of today.

“Zach, YOU GOTTA SHUT UP!” I burst out, immediately regretting my decision.

Wendy and Zach stopped.  Even the wiener dog glared up at me, somehow sensing what a horrible jerk I was.  Wendy, who despite running next to a seething cauldron of asthmatic anger, had been having a good time up until I barked those words.  The mood had changed instantly, and rightly so.  I deserved the scorn and then some.

Even though I panted several heartfelt apologies, they weren’t enough to dry all the tears my son was trying to keep from leaking out of his eyes.  He probably forgives me, but I sure don’t forgive myself.

I felt like that little family run was even a little worse than I thought it would be.  We haven’t done one since.

That brings us back to the fitness assessment at the new gym.  Wendy only asked one more time to do the fitness test together, and then she got the message that I would prefer to be physically humiliated in a one-on-one scenario with the trainer.

I only had to reschedule the assessment once, and I knew I had to get it done, so after two weeks of me going to the gym nearly every day, it was time to face the music.  I felt confident that my work in the gym had moved the needle on my health at least a little.  I felt stronger.  Still, I was nervous about meeting with the trainer.

The tests, weren’t exactly feats of strength.  We didn’t go out in the nearby woods and have me lift tree logs, or pull a small airplane down a runway with my teeth.  I probably could have done those.  Instead, Danny the trainer measured how long I could sit against a wall, how many pushups I could do and my heart rate after walking up stairs to a metronome.  He took my actual measurements with a tape and then came the body fat measurement.

This is the test that I just plain disagree with.  It wasn’t done with calipers and math, like they used to do it.  Instead, Danny pulled out a device and pushed some buttons on it.  It may or may not have sounded like a Simon game.  I may have heard those noises in my head because of how skeptical I was of this next test.

“What the hell is that Danny, an E-meter?” I asked.

“What’s an E-meter?”

“From Scientology, it measures your energy and tells you how much money you need to pay the church to get better.”

“No, this measures body fat by sending an electric current through one hand and into your other, while measuring how much time it takes to get there.  Then it calculates how much body fat you have.”

“Yep, that’s pretty much like an E-meter.”

“It just measures your fat.”

When it gave me the number I definitely thought it was an E-meter.  Danny just said, “Well, it’s a baseline.  We’ll get to where you want it to be.”

That was a pretty bold statement.  I liked this kid, but I didn’t want to be the guy who took his innocence away.

We ran through my other numbers:

Wall sit: Weak

Pulse after stairs: Too high

Push-ups: Borderline acceptable (I’ll take it!)

Flexibility: Poor

Body fat: Too much

I scheduled my first training appointment along with some rather ambitious goals right then and there.  I continued to hit the gym in the morning and evening when I could.

The night before my first training session I was excited and nervous.  I didn’t want Danny to yell at me as motivation.  I didn’t want to hear the macho, “PUSH IT! COME ON!”  I wanted nothing of that.  I thought about talking to Danny first about how I could be psychologically reinforced.

Maybe I could take in a bag of peanut butter cups—the mini ones, I know why I’m at the gym—and have him give me one after a set of crunches, or between individual push-ups.  I thought that wouldn’t fly and he would probably throw them away, despite me explaining to him that dark chocolate has many health benefits.

I showed up ready to pump iron and work hard.  I’d been curling the twenty-pound dumbbells for quite a while.  Perhaps he would move me to the thirties?  Maybe it would be a leg day and he would have me try to best my 300 pound personal record from high school. No. Instead Danny had me do an exercise in the middle of the gym floor that essentially simulated me sitting down in a chair and then standing back up again—easy enough.

Then Danny had me grab a mat from the wall and lay myself down on my back, lifting my head and extending my legs out together off the ground and flutter kick them.  I looked like I was doing a chorus girl dance routine by the edge of a swimming pool.  But at the twenty second mark, I wondered how much longer I would have to do them.

Then he had me use one leg at a time only and step up onto a box.  Were we not going to use any weights?  Was my health so bad that Danny felt he had to start me out on basic getting-around-the-house kind of exercises?  Sit in chair, kick my tight pants on and walk upstairs, seemed to be what I was learning to do.  It resembled more of a physical therapy session.  I wondered if he would have me pretend to open and shut a kitchen cabinet.

“Okay Steve, Open that cupboard and reach for the can, reach for the can and close the cupboard.  Five more.”

He had me do push-ups on a ball, which seemed legit.  Then we started the whole thing over.  The weird thing was that I was pretty winded and a little tired.

“Are you tired?” asked Danny.

“No,” I mouthed, “let’s go.”

“Maybe we should get you some water.”

“Okay,” and I went and downed a cup of water, then got back at it.

It happened after the second set of steps.  I was catching my breath and an urgency awakened in my stomach, the kind that makes you look for exits and bucket shaped containers.  Danny was in the middle of saying God-knows-what to me, but I couldn’t hear him over the bass drum thumping in my head.

I panicked a little trying to stay in control.  “I think I may vomit,” I said quickly and a little too loud.

Danny stopped whatever he was saying and gingerly took my elbow to help me to the floor.  “Take it easy and just lay down here on the mat.” Danny said, in a voice too calm for a guy about to get puked on, “Take a deep breath and let’s get those legs elevated.”

My face felt hot and I didn’t know what was going on around me.  Danny had moved the stepping box closer to my legs and then lifted my calves up onto the platform.  He placed my nasty, sweaty towel under my neck and it felt a little like I was at a spa, but I knew this wasn’t good.  I suppressed a contraction in my gut that typically meant the coming of a Technicolor yawn.  I willed it to stay down.

“You’re going to be alright,” said the voice, Danny’s voice.

The gym I was in is one of four exercise rooms that this facility has.  It’s the room closest to the front desk and on the way to the pool.  As you pass by it, you’re compelled to look inside and see how busy the place is and whether this will be the room you exercise in.  It’s the room that is directly across from the childcare facility.  It receives maximum traffic.  I was sure I was getting more than my share of odd looks.  I waited to hear if a young child would honestly ask their mother as they walked by, “Mommy, is that ugly pregnant lady about to have a baby at the gym?”  To which the mother would reply honestly, “I don’t know honey.”

I felt deflated.  Sitting in a chair, moving my legs back and forth and walking upstairs had defeated me.  I imagined at my next session Danny would hand me a Nerf ball about the size of a peach and say, “All right Steve, give me three good squeezes!”

“Does this happen often?” I asked Danny as I sat up.

“It happened to another guy I worked with.”

“Another guy” meant this only happened one other time.  I let Danny continue the story.

“He didn’t have anything for breakfast and his blood-sugar got too low and he puked,” Danny explained, foreshadowing his next question, “did you eat breakfast?”

“Yes I did,” I said.

“What did you have?”

“I had a handful of nuts.”  It didn’t sound stupid until after I said it.  Before I said it, it seemed perfectly reasonable that a handful of nuts would classify as a hearty and healthy meal.  However, a handful of nuts, does not a breakfast make.

“A handful of nuts?”

“Yes, a big handful of nuts,”

“Why did you only eat nuts for breakfast?”

“Nuts are the new thing.  Every health magazine and dietary doctor is saying we should be eating more nuts, because they are so good for you,” I started to get a little frustrated, “So this morning, instead of eating a bunch of carbs and fatty-cheesy, burrito-ish breakfast, I thought I was being healthy by having a small portion of nuts.”

“You need to eat more.”

“It’s that kind of thinking that got me in this mess in the first place.”

“Eat a good breakfast every day,” Danny said.  Sesame Street has a book that I read to Zach when he was three about the subject.  Now I know that nuts alone, don’t cut it.  You need something in your gut.

“Fine,” I said, “I’ll eat more than nuts. I feel like I’m ready to get back at it.” I wasn’t, but I was paying Danny something like $1.32 per minute, and vomit or not, I had already wasted $3.96 on this sad display of fitness failure.

“And don’t kick yourself about this.  It’s only your first workout.” Danny tried to comfort my bruised ego by reminding me I had never worked with a trainer before.  I took it a different way.

I took it to mean that he believed I had never worked hard or truly exercised before.  To me, it sounded as if he had classified everything I had done in the three gyms in the last year was just touring the facilities.  I was offended, and had I not been tired from all the exercise, I would have told him just how good I was at exercising, but instead I just looked at him as I mopped sweat off of my face and nodded a little…but not a lot.

We did finish the circuit and ended with a specific type of rowing on a weight machine.  This is to give the ego a feeling that something was accomplished other than simply bending my body at the knees and back several times and kicking my little legs out in front of me while laying down.

He gave me an exercise journal that we wrote down everything that we did and he showed me how to log more to show him my progress.  I thanked Danny for his time and told him I would see him next week.  He asked if I was sure.  I was, but come on man!

My plan was to go and do 50 more minutes of cardio after my workout, but instead I decided to collect my things from my locker and try to drive myself home.

I knew what was coming.  I was going to be very sore the next day.  But it was more than that.  When I woke up the next morning, it felt like my legs were duct taped straight.  My legs felt like they had undergone extensive, root-canal dental work done.  My legs felt like artists were blowing glass in my thighs.  My calves felt like five dwarves had surrounded each one with sledge hammers and they were all rhythmically bashing away at them.  My abs felt like the spirits of two dead boxers were punching me in the belly.  They felt like I had spent an afternoon standing three feet away from a baseball pitching machine set to “medium.” On top of that, it felt like a wiener dog was jumping on my stomach wanting to be let out to go to do its business. That last one turned out to be true.

I managed to make it through the day, knowing that in the morning, I would get up at 5:15 to head to the gym and try to recreate what Danny and I had done two days before.  I let Wendy know how sore I was all day, looking for a little compassion.

“Oh honey,” she said as she kissed me goodnight, “tomorrow is going to feel worse,” and that’s the Damm truth.

This School Tarnishes The Name of Thomas

By: The Ghost of Thomas Jefferson

Since my transcendence from the physical plane, I have enjoyed virtual omnipresence of both time and space. There has been much to celebrate, and much to mourn, much to cherish and much to rebuke. The name of your structure, Thomas Jefferson High School, is one such item for the rebuking.

Your so-called institution of learning has been using my name to identify itself as a place of educational enlightenment. My memory is neither honored, nor even ironically humored by this injustice. I require you cease this personal assault on taste and reason post haste.

I begin my discontent with the individuals you have occupying this building. Your “teachers” are nothing more than a collection of numb-headed mynah birds, living wine to mouth until they will someday forget to breathe.

Only Ms. Paulson, justifiably driven to develop science and mathematics in female students, and Mr. Wilson’s free-thinking ingenuity in his current world problems courses are worthy to present any knowledge to the lard-soaked minds of the studentry. The rest, seem satisfied to wait out the calendar until the irrelevant harvest season requires the closure of the school, so they may fritter away their summer months on meaningless skullduggery.

The casual disregard for the French language and it’s abhorrent instruction is a particularly disappointing offense to my legacy. Had I encountered French teacher, Mr. Torrance, speaking to me in a Parisian market during my appointment as Minister to France, I would have immediately inspected his scalp for evidence of deep, traumatic scarring.

What has discontented the hearts of these once passionate educators? Surely the teachers of this school would give all they had to any student that displayed even a passing interest in the truth of knowledge or art.

Tragically it seems any gratification delayed beyond the pressing of a button for this generation appears to be a hopeless cause. Seeing the state of youth today, any scientist might hypothesize that each member of the student body is dimwitted to the extent that their parents may have been first related as brother and sister.

Regardless of intelligence or motivation of either faculty or student, the simple question my spirit form ponders constantly whilst hovering above the campus is: “Do I wish my memory to be represented by this place?”

The answer consistently manifests itself in virtually every endeavor this school attempts. From the utterly abysmal test scores to the track team’s inability to qualify for district level competition, this school seems to be the measuring instrument for which to judge only failure. Had the football coach of this school been placed in command to hold even the smallest parcel of ground during the American Revolution, not only would we have lost that territory, but I fear his own troops would have shot him in the back during his premature retreat.

And what has become of the arts? Are we training our young minds to enter a world without the skills to craft beautiful sound, color or expression of the human condition?

The music program has devolved into attempting to sing along to YouTube videos, with nary a woodwind nor stringed instrument to be seen. Mrs. Katzenbach’s uninspired production of Our Town succeeded singularly in the third act’s graveyard scene where the student’s natural, nebulous emoting only accidentally accomplished the proper atmospheric stage direction.

If only my grievance with the building title concluded with my disdain of the people the building serves, we might be able to salvage the situation by simply flogging the staff and sterilizing every single student. As it stands, my insistent protest far outreaches the unevolved mouth-breathers that inhabit the school.

This collection of building materials crudely thrown together not only insults my former person, but also anyone whom has ever drafted a building schematic. As I’m sure you do not know, I designed my own home of Monticello as an amalgam of French and Italian designs complete with my own innovative touches. This building you have so casually hung my name upon has all of the insightfulness and character of an abandoned stable.

The architecture pains my spectral vision in a way I believed only possible whilst living. Any fool with a protractor and slide rule could prove that the west mezzanine is, at peak capacity, but one more over-ripened sloth of a student away from total collapse into the ugliest atrium this ghost has ever seen, alive or dead. The structure has all the integrity of one Benedict Arnold.

I care not whether you find the above reasons worthy of removing my name from this institution. I require that the action be taken, if for the simple fact that this building stands for none of the values I coveted during my time on Earth.

Might I suggest a name more worthy of the direction and merit I have observed in the classrooms and hallways? A far more accurate moniker befitting your unsound halls of benightedness would be John Adams High School.

Regrettably,

The Posthumas Ghost of President Thomas Jefferson

(To be read by any person in attendance of the funeral chosen at random via lottery number included inconspicuously on the program.)

(State your name and relation to Steve Damm.)

(Murmur the first line into the microphone and then read aloud with purpose.) Isn’t it just like Steve to choose someone like this?

Before I read this, I think you all might as well know that for six years after 2004, Steve Damm and I were lovers.

(Look up to see who laughs.  They’re laughing at you, not me.  I’m dead.)

Not true.  I assure you that we never made love.

Thank you all for coming!  Steve would have only been slightly disappointed at the turnout.  Is Chris here?  Not you, the other Chris.  Yep, I thought so, too “busy.”

We all knew this day would come.  Some of you have been praying for this day for a long time.  You know who you are, and now Steve knows too.  Keep that in mind.

Many of you came today to find out certain truths that Steve had been indicating for years and years he was keeping secret until they were revealed at his funeral…this funeral.  For instance, raise your hands if you are here to find out the true identity of a parent.  Thank you, now will all those seeking the final clue to finding the vault of uncut South African blood diamonds raise your hands.  Wow, there are a lot of you.  How about those of you looking to for the lost Dead Sea scroll that Steve claimed to have hidden near or under Safeco Field?

Well, you should know that the doors have been barred from the outside and nobody is leaving this service until Steve has been honored properly.  Also Steve wanted to make sure most of the seats were filled at his funeral, so for years he has been baiting people with these lies to ensure a good attendance.  Unfortunately none of your questions will be answered today, but feel free to stick around for the reception food.  It’s catered by Applebee’s.

Now let’s get down to business shall we?

Steve spent a fair amount of time trying to make people laugh.  He loved making people happy.  But for every up there is a down, every Yin, a Yang, and Steve Damm was no different.  Steve was incredibly funny to be certain, so as the balance of life goes, Steve had a dark side that he was ashamed to admit to anyone.

Oh, don’t worry, there aren’t any mass graves out there that Steve is responsible for.  But he did inflict pain and suffering on the world.  Primarily Steve did this through his passion for music.  When he wasn’t ruining someone’s groove on the dance floor with one of his tediously long and unimpressive drum solos, he was promoting terrible music.  How terrible?  Steve Damm was the mastermind behind Hanson, the Jonas Brothers and Justin Bieber.  Using the internet and several key identities in social media, Steve Damm found these groups and nurtured their terrible sound to the masses by marketing through mainstream media manipulation and inflated Scantron numbers.   Yes, Steve Damm did that.

Think about it.  Steve had to find the perfect balance of what could be sold to the public and pushed over airwaves and through data wires, without being so ridiculously bad, that nobody would buy it.  Something that would explode out of the gate, but with every play heard, wounds you just a little until finally the songs make you nauseous.  Incredibly difficult to organize with little permanent damage, yet widespread enough in suffering to balance out the amazing joy Steve brought to the world.

He apologizes, but remember how funny he was.

Steve was very insecure about his physical appearance.  Many of you may not know this, but Steve’s muscular design and metabolism was near “perfect.”  This deeply troubled Steve from just after college until the time of his death.  Many of you will find it hard to believe that Steve’s true outward appearance resembled a well honed middle-weight boxer.  He looked like a carved, lean statue; rippled with muscles over muscles and unblemished skin.  He struggled with body image most of his life, not believing it was fair to the rest of the world to look upon him and doubt their own, sad forms.

To make everyone else feel better and to “blend in,” Steve took to wearing incredibly lifelike fat suits of varying sizes.  They were of the highest quality, so well made and realistic that his wife Wendy didn’t even know.  Hard as it was to keep this secret from everyone, he suffered the baggy clothes over his rock hard body and porcelain hewn abdominal muscles in a conflicted silence.

You could have gazed upon his perfect body at a public viewing of him—had he not arranged for a strange cult-like organization to collect and cremate his body immediately upon his death.  I believe I was the only person to have seen it, and I assure you, it… He, was an amazing specimen.  (Really sell it.  It’s my dying wish, so do it.)

I will now read personal messages to specific people in attendance.  You know who you are.

Mom:  I don’t know why you outlived me, but I’m guessing it was an aggressive illness, or unattended spider bite.  Anyway, I love you.  Take care of Dad.

Dad:  I love you, but I never understood your fascination with Chick-O-Stix.  Take care of Mom.

Somer:  Now you have to clean out the Dad’s garage when he dies all by yourself.  Not so cool to be the executor of their estate NOW, is it?  Love you.

Wendy:  I bet you look really hot in that dress, or whatever you chose to wear.  No, you look really nice.  Great choice of boots too.  There’s a last letter for you in a safety deposit box at a bank in town, but I can’t remember the bank, box number or where I left the key.  It might not even be in this town.  I’m sorry, I’ll let you know if I remember.  I loved you and you’ll find love again…but I forbid it.

Dave:  Watch out for my family for me.  Not just on Facebook, I left you seventy-five dollars in the will to take Zach fishing a couple of times.  Don’t tell him about the stuff we used to do with fireworks.

Bill:  Thanks for coming from Alaska.  It means a lot.  By now you know the subpoena was a fake.

Lars:  I have a few un-cashed checks from selling our Ground Flower CD’s in college, you’ll probably want to cash those.

Nabil:  It would be great if you could teach Zach how to play guitar.  Also, I because you scared the crap out of me on our trip to Montana, I have decided to haunt you on one random evening when you least expect it.  Be thankful you’re not…

Colby:  Because you’re going to be haunted the rest of your life.  You scared me so badly on our canoeing trip that you’re going to be seeing things you can’t explain until you die.  But I promise many of them will be funny.

Justin:  Thanks for being such a great friend and spectacular person.  Stay the hell away from my wife.

Chris:  Who am I kidding?  You’re not here.

Todd:  You were totally right man.

Roger:  You sir, are a dick.  You’ve always been a dick.  Everyone here knows you’re a dick.  You’re a horrible person who deserves an unhappy life and I’m very pleased to have wasted several hours of your time with my funeral.

Bette:  We knew that society would never truly let us be together, no matter how much we loved each other.  I want you to understand that during those nine days in 1995 that you were the wind beneath MY wings.

Zach:  Son.  I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you all those times you needed me.  Please understand that I will always be in your heart, though in a poetic way.  Never literally try to look inside your heart for me.  You’ll die.  Please find knowledge and beauty in inside the books I have left to you.  Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers are full of great trivia and information.  I would still prefer you not touch my comic books though, because I’m unconvinced you have learned to wash your hands properly.  I love you.

Please don’t un-friend Steve on Facebook.  He promises to be popping up now and then with an interesting video or article.  He might even private message you from the beyond.  Seriously, don’t.

Steve loved trivia and Japanese poetry.  He left you to ponder this:

Three lines of poem

Five-seven-five syllables

Is not true Haiku

Enjoy the scavenger hunt of “items of personal significance to Steve.”  He says it’s a doozy.

Steve hopes you enjoyed his life as much as he did.  He never took life too seriously and I think all of you have pieced that together from your time with him.  Also, the fact that he chose to hold his funeral at a roller skate arena is a bit of a hint.  Slushies are on the house for the next fifteen minutes, followed by a procession snowball skate, starting with his widow Wendy, picking up new skaters with every lap.  The song will be Funkytown, by Lipps Inc..  Please, do not “shoot the duck.”

Lastly, Steve wishes to let you know that since his death, his ghost has seen all of you naked—some of you a few times.  He thanks you for coming.

It’s that season again where we spend a bunch of money to get dressed up in costume and eat candy.  I love this time of year.  The colors change, the grass pollen is gone and the sun is down early so I don’t feel guilty about nodding off at 7pm.  The best part though is the fun my family has when we dress up in our costumes.  We’re “that family” that likes to overdo it.

But let us not forget the reason for the season: Candy Corn.  No, that isn’t it, though I do enjoy a handful now and then.  It’s a time for us all to celebrate the great Satan, or Lucifer to his friends.  No, that isn’t it either.  It originated as a Christian feasting holiday based on Celtic Harvest festivals from when Pagans and Christians joined forces to crush an alien invasion in the middle-ages that has been widely forgotten and/or covered up by the illuminati.  That’s as close to a history lesson you’re going to get out of me, if you want to know the real story, go to a library.  I’m not here to teach everyone the histories of every day of the year, sheesh!

This year, Halloween falls on October 31^st which happens to be a Thursday, meaning there will be fewer drunk-driving fatalities.  That’s good, but it also means Friday at school is going to be pretty tough for students and teachers alike.  So I have elected to do my part and make sure my Halloween stories aren’t scary in the slightest, ensuring a good night sleep for all who only use my blog as Halloween entertainment, which would be both odd and sad.

I am about to tell you some ghost stories.  REAL events that have happened to me, personally that have led me to believe ghosts were involved.  These very well could be my weak grasp of reality mixed with a child-like understanding of logical reasoning mixed with an over-active imagination and lower-than-average intelligence.  I will allow you to be the judges of whether or not I have encountered an actual spirit from beyond, or created a psychological construct to avoid blame, shame or ownership of my mental deficiencies.

My wife, Wendy, and I purchased a cute little farmhouse from the original owning family about twelve years ago.  We’ve since sold it, but we lived there for eleven years.  It was built in 1931 by a man for a woman that he wanted to marry.  Upon seeing the house completed, the woman told him that the house was too small, so he added a large room at the front and that seemed to satisfy her so they got married and lived there for years, tending the farmland and fruit trees around them.

They died.  People do that after a certain number of years go by, and left the home to their niece, who moved in and started a family.  But after a while, they received an offer they couldn’t refuse from a developer that wanted the surrounding land to build houses and they made the decision to sell their home to us and the land to a builder.  We got to know the family a little bit and they were excited for us to move in, even surprising us by arranging some furniture for us that we had left after our honeymoon.  They were nice folks.

The first sign of supernatural activity occurred when Wendy and I were unpacking the kitchen.  There was a special drawer next to our stove that rolled out on rails and had a cutting board built into the top which also rolled out.  It was unique to that side of the room.  No other drawer was fashioned like it near there.  It’s where I decided to put the cutlery and I arranged our new knives neatly in the drawer.  After that, I turned around and helped my wife unload another box.

Only minutes later I needed one of the knives for something.  I went to the drawer to retrieve one, but when I slid the drawer out, it was empty.  I figured Wendy had switched them to another drawer as when I organize our home, I am incapable of doing anything correctly.  So I asked my new bride where she moved the knives to.

Wendy looked at me strangely and pointed to the empty drawer I had just shut.  I opened it again to indicate they weren’t there.  Then we both searched all four of the drawers in that area, even rolling out the cutting board a couple of times.  The knives weren’t there.  So we figured we were just disoriented in the new kitchen with the move and looked in other drawers but the knives were gone, and it was my fault.

Needing to move on with our unpacking, I put some other dishes away and then found a box of other kitchen utensils that I figured I would put in the same row of drawers  that I had wanted to put the knives.  After filling that drawer, Wendy asked if I had come across the knives yet, but since we had completed a thoroughly redundant search of every drawer there, I figured I would be dramatic and slide the top drawer out again to reveal its empty nature.  To my horror, the knives slid out with it.

“How did you do that?” Wendy asked, unimpressed with what she thought was a practical joke.

“I didn’t.”  I said, “they literally just re-appeared, seconds after I had this drawer open before.”

“So what?” asked Wendy, “I just looked in that drawer too and there’s no way that those knives got in there without you putting them there.”

I was flabbergasted, we both were.  There was no physical way for those knives to have moved without one of us doing so and neither of us were unattended long enough to create such an illusion.  We simply opened an empty drawer, closed it for a few seconds and then opened it again and there was a drawer full of knives that could not have slid on their own to a place that was out of sight.  The drawer was full of cutlery.

Later that week when I was downstairs attempting to reconnect the washing machine to new pipes my father had installed in a different area of the basement, I had run into a jam.  The older hoses wouldn’t tighten correctly to the nozzles of the water pipes and when I would turn the water on, it would spray all over from the hose.  I needed a tool that I didn’t have, which were vice-grip pliers.  That was one of the only things I didn’t have and I needed it them very much at that moment in time.

Resolving to have to wait until morning to go pick up a pair from the hardware store, and putting off a load of laundry that needed doing, I looked up into the bare bones of the unfinished basement walls.  Propped up against a framing stud, in a one foot square area between foundation and basement ceiling was precisely the tool I needed.  It was old, well used, but still in excellent shape.  Etched into one of the metal handles was the name “Kyle.”

Strange things like that happened around the house from time to time.  They weren’t bad, in fact, I’m convinced that I have been helped by the spirit on several occasions and at least once it may have saved my life.

One evening, months later, I was again working on our washing machine in the basement.  This time I was replacing a pump that had stopped working, so I needed to get underneath the heavy machine and reach up into its mechanical guts to remove the bad and install the good.  It’s not as easy as it sounds and ultimately I was not successful.  In order to get to where I needed to go, I had to first pull the machine away from the wall far enough for me to tip the machine back and lean it against said wall.

After I get the hefty white box balance against the wall, I begin digging in with a screw driver.  I had to alternate between a Philips head and a small crescent wrench to get the piece out (I can hear some repairman reading this right now and remarking over his shoulder, “No wonder his machine didn’t work, he was pulling out the regulator and not the pump.”).  It was frustrating work and the first time I set the screwdriver down on the cement floor of my basement, it started to roll away from me, so I set up two blocks of wood on either side for me to put the screwdriver between while I had my head completely under the edge of the washer in a corner just large enough for my skull.

The blocks worked as planned keeping the screwdriver from rolling away (I thought about patenting the idea briefly).  However, on the fourth or fifth switch, I reached for the screwdriver and it wasn’t between the blocks where my sensitive and detail-oriented hands had last put it.  I peeked out the v-shaped gap between the floor and the metal edge of the washing machine and saw that the screwdriver had neither rolled off where it had before, away from my left arm nor had it been magnetically attracted to my love-handles.  This meant I actually had to shimmy out from under the washing machine to see where it went.

After dragging my head and neck out from under the machine, I looked around for the screwdriver I had been using.  It was still lined up parallel to my body and between the blocks of wood, but was down by my ankle instead of my waist where the blocks were.  I could not and would not have reached that far to place the screwdriver there and it was resting where it could not have rolled.  It would have had to have been drug the additional two feet to be where it was.  I had to sit all the way up to reach for it.

No sooner had I sat up to retrieve the tool than the washing machine came crashing down to the floor behind me, with enough force to sever a human head at the neck… Precisely how I had been situated not five seconds before hand.  The sharp metal edge of the machine would have sliced right through my neck, jugular, spine and Adam’s Apple, killing me for sure.  Even if my hands and arms were in the way, the least possible injury would have been fatal.

I was shocked, but aware that something strange had happened that made sure my head wouldn’t be under the machine at that time.  I thought hard about where I had placed the screwdriver.  I even tried to roll it a few different ways to attempt to make the screwdriver arc down toward my ankle.  I couldn’t make it happen.  That screwdriver was moved and I think it was to make sure my head wasn’t in the way when my incredibly unsafe working condition failed.

(The repairman from before is shaking his head, saying, “Well of course your machine stopped working.  You can’t just slam a machine down on concrete like that.”)

A few weeks later we ran into the former owner at the grocery store and got to chatting about the house.  Eventually Wendy and I were brave enough to ask the woman if anything strange ever happened to her there.  She piped up immediately with a smile.

“Ohhhh yes, but it was always positive stuff.  Why?  What happened?”

We explained some of the things and when I mentioned the part about the pliers and the name on them, the former owner smiled and said that they belonged to her uncle.  She explained that when you sell a house, you don’t really want to mention any freaky occurrences to perspective buyers because they’ll think you’re nuts.  But she went on to tell us several fun tales about encounters she had in the house.  All fun or funny tricks, but she was really impressed with the story I told her about my near death experience.

“Kyle must like you guys,” she said with a smile.  “We just enjoyed the experiences when they happened and I think you will too.”

That’s the way it goes with ghost stories, when they happen to other people, they are completely batty, but when something happens to you, well, then its real and everyone should believe your story.  Even if you have had a spooky experience like that and believe with all your heart that you had an encounter with a spirit or ghost or whatever, you’ll think anyone else is barking mad for telling an identical story.

From that time on, our ghost had a name and I would address it as such on occasion.  “Kyle, thanks for fixing that light,”  I would say, or “Hey Kyle we have company coming in five minutes, could you please help me unclog this toilet?”  Kyle would always oblige.  He was great. He would help us find stuff (seemingly), remind us of things (probably not), and fill our cupboards with food (this never happened).

Kyle only really scared me one time.  Again, I was in the basement—I spent a lot of time there—but this time I was on the treadmill, really giving it a go.  I had worked hard and this was one of the first times I had actually worked out to a point where calories were actually burned.  As I stepped off the treadmill, I felt Wendy’s hand and fingers press firmly into the small of my back, the way she does when she’s telling me she’s proud of me or wants something that she knows I won’t be happy about.  Out of breath, I turned to smile at her.  She wasn’t there.  Nobody was there and the feeling of the hand patting me on the back vanished.

I screamed in a manner and pitch that one would think improbable for my age and gender.  Wendy, who was the only other person in the house was located upstairs in the kitchen and heard my shriek.  Undoubtedly she was wondering why there was a strange girl in the basement and also how and why I was about to kill them.  She came running to the aid of who she would find out was just me in my most frightened state.  Kyle must have seen how upset I was because he never congratulated me on a workout again.

I could go on and on about these strange occurrences, but lest I divulge too much and you really think I’m coo-coo, I should probably cease this senseless typing and let you all prepare yourselves for a fun Halloween.

There’s an awful lot of fun out there for Halloween.  Enjoy your evening, and remember: the likelihood of you getting poisoned while trick or treating is about ten times less likely than you winning the Powerball, so you should trick-or-treat and meet your neighbors.  It’s a good way to socialize and that’s the Damm truth.

This is not a story.  This is the typing of a crazy person.

Most people write blogs about what goes on in their lives and the entries are usually short and to the point.  Mine drag on for thousands of words, sometimes there are two and three parts to them.  Often mine are self serving.  I love to write them, I do.  I enjoy throwing them together, remembering all the details of something that may have happened long ago or imagining silly stuff to make you wonder what is wrong with me.

Many of you that have been reading my junk since the beginning of this blog have perhaps seen my attempts to make my writing better, maybe not.  Maybe it’s just as crappy as before and I just make different mistakes, I don’t know, but the point is that I am working on all this stuff.  I’ve been digging in, reading and trying to fix style and grammar problems that have plagued me since the beginning.  Many of you have been kind enough to point them out to me, and to shield my ego a bit, I changed the tag line of my blog to something about how these are just first drafts.

Things have slowed down around the blog a little; not so much because I don’t have the material, but because I’m working on getting published other places, submitting more spit polished stuff to reputable institutions and publications.  Most of them require that the items I submit be unseen by others, meaning not published on my blog.  So I have been sitting on several pieces that I would normally have put up in thedammtruth.com.

I have submitted a couple things, and will be submitting more soon.  That’s exciting…to me.  I did just get one very small piece accepted to McSweeneys.net.  I suggest you take a gander at that site.  My thing won’t publish for a couple weeks, but I’m excited.

The blog is now the place where I’m posting first drafts of things I will be preparing for a book.  These pieces are just drafts.  Everything you have written will be added to, cut, fixed and shined up nice, worthy of wasting a tree on.  Not all of it will make the grade of course.

I also want to talk a bit more about the stuff I’m typing for you.  I try to keep it clean.  I do have an occasional swear word now and then but it isn’t anywhere near how many I use in my everyday language.  I edit much of that out, because I don’t know if it’s really necessary to use it to be funny.  But it isn’t real.  Taking out some of the language makes the writing a bit less honest and that leads to you not trusting my work.  I do hope you can forgive me for that kind of self-censorship.

Most of the stuff that I write here could be classified as essay or memoir, but I’m working on some fiction ideas too.  I have another site called: The Damm Lies that I’m readying…if I can ever figure out how to get the blog onto my hosting server and URL pointed to it.  Any volunteers?

Thanks for your patience, and if any of you have anything in particular you would like me to take a crack at, let me know.

Here are some ideas I’ve been kicking around:

BJ and the Bear: The Musical!  (not kidding, I have sunk some work into this)

Why I Don’t Drink

My Eulogy

Tooth Fairy Rules

The Longhorn Tavern

The Organization of the Squirrels in Kansas

Other Stuff

Nothing Political

Movie Reviews Delivered Via Puppet

Terrible Guided Meditation

Bands Vs. DJs

The ASB Election

I have to go to the bathroom (not an idea, I just have to go to the bathroom)

Bad Songs

Bad Songs By Me

Ron Damm vs. the Washington State Lottery

Inspirational self help books

I told you this wasn’t worth your time.  (That wasn’t in the list, this is the end)

 

I am certain that when my father was born, the doctor was surprised that the slippery little infant he was holding, still attached to my grandmother by umbilical cord, was smiling at him and capable of speech.

“Well hi,” said a squeaky voice coming from the yet unnamed little Ronny Damm.  Then he flashed his eyes and a tiny, toothless smile.

I doubt that my father cried when he was born, but I’m sure that when he left, all the nurses were his friends and he had tee times set with all the doctors twenty-five years in the future.

That was seventy years ago tomorrow.  That means tomorrow is my father’s seventieth birthday.  Seventy years of smiles and greetings of welcome.  Seventy years of quiet, reasoned thinking.  Seventy years of a strange sense of humor.  Seventy years of support.

One day about fifteen years ago, my father came to visit me when I was just out of college and working at a music store.  As my shift ended, my father and I walked together through the large parking lot in the early-evening sun.  That’s when the sun makes us all feel a little taller when we look at our silhouettes racing us across the ground.  But that day I noticed something very strange, something impossible.  My father was casting two shadows, one right behind the other.  It’s not really possible to cast double shadows with a single bright light source.  It puzzled me and I told dad to stop.  We stopped.

“Wow, Dad, you have two shadows!” I exclaimed as I pointed to the ground for him to see.

The shadow behind the first one appeared to be pointing too.

“No, that’s your shadow, dumbass,” was not what came out of my father’s mouth.  It was certainly appropriate, but my father has a gift of holding his tongue, choosing his words carefully and then seizing the moment to activate my brain and possibly teach me something.

“Are you sure?” he asked, sparing my shame, but acknowledging my statement with stifled enjoyment.

The thing is, we were both right.  Dad hadn’t cast two shadows, but two shadows of my dad had been cast.  One was of the man, who through the simple act of living his life and leading his son by example had crafted a similar walk, build and manner of carrying himself that was realized in me.

Some people say with uncomfortable realization “Oh my God, I’ve become my father.”  Then they ponder the idea and eat an entire “family sized” bag of Wavy Lays potato chips.  Some people are very disappointed.  I wasn’t.

I was shocked.  I thought it was funny, peculiar and I was very surprised, but I wasn’t disappointed.  Deep down, what I was feeling was that I was going to be okay.  If so much of my father rubbed off on me that I cast the same Damm shadow, some of his better inner qualities were probably present too.

Sure, he passed on some heart disease and some sloppy laundry habits, but the good far outweighs the bad.  That ability to shut up and choose words carefully comes in awfully handy when in heated arguments.  It has proved useful especially when I am using his rock-solid philosophies of doing the right thing even if it is hard.

My parents taught me the importance of friendship and the care and maintenance of a relationship, any relationship.  When I was four, my father took me to the local restaurant in Kittitas, the B&B.  It wasn’t a bed and breakfast, maybe it was—maybe it was a terrible bed and breakfast.  No, it was a restaurant.  Dad took me there for a Pepsi some days.  (I know, four-year-old, Pepsi, diabetes, shut up, it’s a lovely memory.)

It was immediately after we had moved to Kittitas from some forty miles away.  Sure it was nice to be on an outing with Dad, but the main reason we were there was that Dad was there to meet the people.  He was new in town and wanted to participate.  Participation meant making friends and making friends starts with introducing yourself and building trust.  It was as important to him as it was to pay the mortgage or change the oil in the car.  Building a network of friendship to my parents, both my mom and my dad, was as important as a balanced diet, maybe more.

Seventy years of friendships.  My parents have lived in Kittitas now for more than 35 years and have an amazing amount of friendships that extend outside of the Kittitas Valley and beyond.  Dad made his with handshakes and smiles, real ones, the kind you don’t get from salesmen or politicians.  This is the quality that I am most thankful to have had passed to me.

Ron Damm is cunning, almost to the point of a grifter.  He excels at what some would call the “low-brow sports.”  I remember one night, I was playing at a bar in Ellensburg and all my friends were there from college.  I was up on stage playing my drums and watching the crowd.  My dad came in and was recognized by a few of my pals and invited to join their game at the pool table.  I watched my father lose the first game, unable to hear what was going on at the table, but it played out like I was watching an old silent film.  My father gestured after defeat to play again, but I could see the question on his lips as if the decibels off the PA speakers were barely audible.  “Loser buys the next pitcher?”  They shook on it.

Dad ran the table.

But it has been like that with other contests too.  I remember playing in a home poker tournament with my father of some ten players including my wife and father.  I’m not sure how the first five players got knocked out, but my father’s disarming and unassuming charm had complete control over the final five players.  My father came in first, I came in second and my wife came in third.  I can assure you that I had NOTHING to do with how I finished.  That outcome was engineered by a man who probably cut his teeth on a deck of 52.

These two stories might offer circumstantial evidence against my father’s ability to run a hustle, but the next is a smoking gun.

When Wendy and I purchased our first home in Kent, my father brought over a house warming gift for our yard.  It was not one, but two sets of bocce balls.  It’s a lawn bowling game played professionally in Italy and as something to do with the hand not holding your domestic beer in the United States.

I told my dad that my lawn wasn’t big enough for two sets of balls and asked if he had made a mistake at the store or was just losing his mind.  He indicated that he was not losing his mind and that the sets were picked up as a bargain somewhere so he got them cheap.  Then the master tipped his hand.

“So what you do is, you use one set to practice up in your back yard and get really good,” Dad said, “then when you’re really good, you invite your buddies over to use the other, brand-new set.”

My mouth was agape at what my father was saying.  He was giving me the tools and the know-how, to hustle my unsuspecting friends with a backyard party game.  It was simple genius, slightly underhanded but shared with love.  Not cheating, it wasn’t ever about cheating as much as it was assumed misdirection.  It was also a peek behind the curtain into the mind of a man I had suspected for some time to be a master trickster.

I began to chuckle, “Dad, you are a dirty, rotten, bastard.”

Dad just smiled back, “well,” he said, “now you can be too.”

I’ll take it dad.  I’ll take all of it.  You’re a good man with a loving yet diseased heart who I am lucky to have learned to be a father from.  I’m proud of you as my dad and love watching you be a grandfather to my son.  I love you.

You don’t look seventy to me.  You look like the hard-working man who would walk out to the baseball diamond to watch me suck, or the guy who taught me to bait a hook without stabbing my finger.

But I’m going to take your word for it that you’re turning the big seven-oh.

Happy birthday dad!  I hope you make it to Christmas, and that’s the Damm truth.