Baggy Paragraphs

In the last week I’ve observed a pair of red-shouldered hawks engaged in mating activity. They were high in a pine tree across the back alley. If not for lots of squabbling and fussing and strange calls, I wouldn’t have noticed them, but this couple is quite vocal.

Today I caught them in flagrante delicto atop the power pole in the same alley.

I just happened to have my camera, grabbing these shots without paying attention to any of the exposure settings.

The timing was excellent in more than one way: just a couple of minutes afterward, the rain started falling. I don’t know where hawks wait out a thunderstorm, but it seems they ought to have a nest somewhere!

Still life photo of Pink Lady apples with Gerbera daisy by Baggy Paragraphs

Boy, I’m telling you, I just hate it when I:

1. Run out of staples in my Swingline stapler, which is as aggravating to me as a political reversal to the committed party member, or a home team’s loss to the ultrapartisan fan
2. Wake from a nap and see a ten-inch lizard on the floor, which awakens my primitive flight response, as though my inner eye were seeing a dinosaur
3. Forget whether I locked the car, which may or may not feature my iPhone standing as ripe as an artichoke in one of the center-console cupholders because, of course, I forgot it, too (the day when we wear our phones as part of our clothing will be a good thing for me and others, including those who drop theirs into the toilet and vaguely report, “It fell into water” — unless adding apparel before flushing is a routine thing)
4. Bite my cheek while too avidly chewing, or scald my lips and tongue with a hastily imbibed hot drink, leaving me with the vague hope that the tissues of the mouth indeed heal quickly because of superabundant vascular circulation
5. Leave my shopping list on the counter and my collection of cloth and polywollydoodle shopping bags in the car’s door pocket, while my main emphasis upon entering the market is to find the restroom
6. Am taking my daily walk, and the hard rubber ball or the baseball with which I play Mouth-of-Driveway (high toss with backspin; sharply angled carom from driveway’s sloping mouth received with the off hand without breaking stride) bounces awry and rolls with dismal, disheartening finality into the storm drain
7. Go outside for the newspaper that hasn’t been and won’t be delivered today
8. Break a drinking glass
9. Flip the light switch and hear the filament snap, making me want to curse Thomas Edison
10. Have to peel fruit labels

The 1954 Merkle Subatom MC² Sport was a side project of Captain Hyman Rickover’s when he was developing the nuclear navy and adapting that technology for civilian power production. It was named Merkle, for an old friend of the admiral’s back in Poland, as a way of deflecting attention; yet it was indeed Capt. Rickover who climbed behind the wheel when the Merkle competed in the Carrera Panamericana. As viewers of that race remember, the entry surged to an enormous lead by the middle stages, proving the efficacy of nuclear power in automobiles, but during a restroom break at a tiny pueblo in Zacatecas, Capt. Rickover decided to power down the reactor and learn the Spanish subjunctive mood from a woman he met near a bougainvillea hedge.

Series production of the Merkle was briefly considered, and the Packard Motor Car Company appeared interested in acquiring the model as the linchpin for a new division of high-performance automobiles. The plan snagged when Packard’s assistant chief engineer John DeLorean insisted the Merkle be equipped with the company’s Ultramatic transmission, which he had helped to develop; but Capt. Rickover’s minions, who were handling the Merkle deal, let it slip that they preferred General Motors’s Hydramatic tranny, and DeLorean stormed out of the meeting, going home to his mother, with whom he still lived.

Hyman G. Rickover

After this traumatic episode, the one and only Merkle fell into obscurity. Following his promotion to Vice Admiral, Rickover began to drive Cadillacs. The Merkle languished for many years at the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania. Later it was put back into driving condition for use as an airport shuttle at Los Alamos National Laboratory; then it served as a hogan near Round Rock, Arizona, with the built-in central heating being a prized feature.

A decade ago, the Merkle was sold at a well-known vintage and collector car auction in Scottsdale, Arizona, realizing a disappointing sale price of just $12,750. Quickly taken away on a flatbed, it was spotted in the parking lot of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas and subsequently reported in Beatty, Nevada, by an automotive spy photographer who spends her summers there in pursuit of future production models that are undergoing tests in Death Valley. Pictures of the Merkle were found to have been spirited away from archives such as the National Automotive History Collection in the Detroit Public Library, where a tall, bespectacled, white-bearded gentleman in a bespoke English suit, who signed the guest register as Lorem Ipsum, was the last to request the file. The only known surviving image of the Merkle, seen above, was recently acquired by a collector at a literature, toys, and memorabilia show for vintage Porsches and VWs in a hotel near LAX.

Going for a walk the other afternoon, I strolled past a home where the family recognizes me. They live right at the opening of Hidden Valley Drive. The little brown-haired girl, seven, and blond-domed boy, five, were playing in the yard. She was picking stems of Russian sage, while saying to him, “Oh, you have a boss? That’s so yesterday!”

Seeing me go by, she said, “What are you doing?”

I was carrying my baseball, which I bounce off of sloped driveway entrances, so I juggled it for them and said, “I’m taking my baseball for a walk.”

“Cool!”

“What are you doing?”

“Making a trap for Bigfoot.” She turned and pointed to the slope of the canyon, which is covered with live oaks.

“Really?” I said. “What are you going to do if you catch him?”

The little boy said, “Kill him.” This harsh declaration was a bit of a shock. “You would?”

“Kill him,” he continued, “and take him into the city to show that he’s real.”

So I guess the Russian sage must be considered an effective bait. A Bigfoot preservation campaign would begin with the eradication of Russian sage from all gardens. Meanwhile, I’ll let you know if they succeed. The little boy insisted I’d have to come to the exposition.

Related articles

• Bigfoot News February 13, 2012 (robertlindsay.wordpress.com)

December 27, 2011

Best of Big Red

6891 A St., #105

Lincoln, NE 68510

Greetings:

I would like to acknowledge receipt of a sweatshirt by second-day air, and it showed up at my door on Dec. 23, fulfilling the hope that after sending off a check on Sep. 23, I’d finally have the sweatshirt by Christmas.

Just to review: I ordered the Pelini Crewneck Sweatshirt (AS-10603) in Medium, but it was too big. So I returned it around the second week of October with a note saying that even after a washing, it didn’t fit. There followed no news whatsoever as to the status of my order (invoice number 3971, date Sept. 30, 2011). Around Halloween I called up and got a rather snooty woman who said that Normally if Someone Washes a Garment It Isn’t Returnable, But This One Looked Like New So It Still Could Fill an Order.

Please allow me to point out that the shipment had arrived at my door with a Returns and Exchanges notice, a copy of which I’m enclosing. On this notice, no mention is made about exceptions pertaining to the washing of garments. Besides which, one becomes used to dealing with Land’s End and other catalog companies, as well as direct retailers like Macy’s, who take back their merchandise and no questions asked.

So when I called up toward the end of November and got the same lickspittle on the line, she said, “Oh, you’re the one who washed his shirt?” OK, let me observe that the customer is not to fucking blame, and I think there’s probably some nepotism going on at your shitty little company Best of Big Red.

My hope for the New Year is that things get straightened out at Osborne Familyland in the event that I’d like to order more of the brilliantly designed merchandise that you monopolize.

And thanks for the sweatshirt that I didn’t order.

Best wishes,

Ronald Ahrens

Cc: Addidas Customer Service and my blog.

I’m merely posting the link to a short video showing Christmas decorations at my house in Monrovia.

This was one automated phone call I received not with annoyance but a thrill. The stumbling computer-generated words relayed welcome news: tomorrow between 12.30 p.m. and 2.30 p.m. my new refrigerator would be delivered to my home in “Monrovia, Caw.” Such poetry! Not just a new refrigerator: a real refrigerator! Because of uncertainty as to my future, not knowing whether I’d stay long in this small house I’m renting, I had endured the last five months since May, when I moved in, with a 2.8-cubic-foot mini-fridge. This is like having R2-D2 as your best friend. It’s a dorm-room fridge, good for keeping the beer and liverwurst and mustard. I do a modest amount of cooking and had increasingly struggled to make do with this compact fridge. The tiny freezer compartment wouldn’t preserve leftover mac and cheese; it’s so disappointing to open up your presumed dinner and find mold. And the cooler needed to be reorganized with every new Rubbermaid storage container. I spent a lot of time squatting before the little pint-sized thing, always forgetting the door lacked a self-closing tendency and instead, being stupidly pendulous, would swing all the way open and smack into the nearby jelly cupboard.

Afterwards, hoisting myself once again to a standing position, hoping I never needed to look for something to eat while I happened to be suffering from patellar tendonitis or a pulled hamstring or sciatica, I’d tell myself this was a good way to get in my deep knee bends. Calisthenics and capers! Why, yes, indeed, I was getting along just fine chasing the head of lettuce that rolled out with every opened door, dementedly meandering across the kitchen. Finally I stopped buying Iceberg lettuce. Romaine doesn’t meander. But it’s too tall; it had to be angled beneath the middle shelf, which was the first of two wire racks that got dislodged from their tracks with the slightest bump. Boston lettuce is short enough to fit in the lower tier but doesn’t make high-volume, high-satisfaction salad. Outta lettuce? Yet another trip to the market is required. Oh, and time to buy more orange juice and milk: the shallow door pocket encouraged the pairing of rapidly depleted pints.

Have you tried living without ice cubes? Do you realize what a luxury it is to have ice on hand? Not even automatic icemaker ice, just manual ice for drinks, for the Champagne bucket, for rubbing on burned fingers, for putting in a plastic bag and applying to a sprained shoulder like when I went down on my mountain bike in August. Even the dog enjoys playing with the occasional ice cube. And how about a lighted refrigerator compartment? Five months with the mini-fridge led me to conclude that it’s a phenomenal step forward for civilization to have a real door handle instead of a grip-it-and-rip-it indentation on the side of the door. Same for having a self-defrosting freezer instead of needing to unplug and empty out every six or eight weeks in order to extricate the one thing that will in fact stay frozen in this minuscule freezer compartment amid the dense buildup of frost: a pound of peas.

Meat? I had to throw out a rib-eye steak.

A real refrigerator allows me to buy gallon-size containers, to buy two bags of frozen lima beans when they’re on sale, to throw a whole turkey behind either of the doors. A mini-keg of beer, a pitcher of lemonade, a large bottle of water, a layer cake sprouting candles, a ham, a gaggle of rhubarb, a haggle of leeks, a pride of Swiss chard, a flagon of vodka (I don’t drink vodka), oodles of noodles: everything will fit! And the sculpted commodious door pockets with soft and grabby nonskid plastic and gently curving bumpers to protect against the out-of-control caroming brisket, the enclosed butter tray with clear cover, the cheese-and-meat drawer and the crispers with adjustable ventilation—all in this basic Frigidaire that I selected at Best Buy—combined to suggest most seductively the squalid excess of which I would soon be partaking.

Romero and another dude showed up early, at twelve o’clock noon, to deliver the fridge, doing a bit of setup right there in the street before harnessing themselves to the appliance and waddling along, climbing the stairs, passing through the gate and along the sidewalk in front of my neighbor’s cottage. (There are four structures on this half-acre lot.) The first attempt to enter my own house was repelled by the screen door’s strike plate, which Romero removed with my screwdriver. And when he popped out the pins from the main door’s hinges, I got my tub of grease and coated them because they had been squeaking.

Here’s why I hate customer satisfaction surveys. When the fridge was put in position and plugged in, Romero handed me a card with an Internet address, saying, “If you can give a ten on each category, it would be great.” The new-car salesman who sold me the 2000 Honda Odyssey that I still drive said the same when he handed me a similar card. Wait, you’re asking for a perfect score? I just shitcan surveys like these. Here’s hoping my selfishness (often commented upon by friends and relatives) doesn’t keep Romero’s kids from attending the University of Nebraska of their dreams. Besides, there are a couple of scratches in my $500 box of steel’s thin coating of white paint, and in all honesty I’d have to mention them.

Soon after the delivery team left, I headed down to Target for ice cube trays and a bin, and to Home Depot for disk magnets to take advantage of the unlimited display space. The magnets allowed me to put up some leftover campaign buttons from 2008. So the Frigidaire has solved more than one storage woe.

Yesterday I set the mini-fridge out on the front porch for pickup by Vietnam Veterans of America. My last sight was of its ugly little compressor in the back. I imagine the mini-fridge’s future in a room on Skid Row, where it is stocked intermittently with malt liquor (sorry, no forty zips) and old unwrapped slices of pizza. Meanwhile, as the VVA driver loaded it onto his truck, teetering a bit during the clean and jerk, an imbalance in my life was corrected.

The woman taking her California driver’s examination was much older than the rest us in the Pasadena D.M.V. office. I first noticed her while standing on the left in a narrow corridor. This was the line to enter the examination room. The people on the right had already passed the thirty-six-question exam, entering no more than five incorrect answers, and they waited to be issued a temporary license at Window Two. With her husband pushing against her shoulders, they plowed right up the middle between the two lines. Did the elderly have special privileges? They disappeared in the mass of humanity, and I thought no more about them until I lined up again, this time at the proctor’s window with my completed exam. The room featured carrels around the perimeter walls and four school desks in the center. The old woman’s white head, tipped my way, was bobbing over the exam sheet as she worked at the front desk on my right.

After my exam was scored, I lined up for my temporary license. I was behind the woman’s husband, who was my same height, five feet eight inches, and stood perfectly erect in a blue shirt and tan slacks. Before long she came out of the exam room, saw him holding her place, and in a voice dripping with jubilation, said, “I passed!”  She made her way to him for a kiss. “I only missed two!” She wedged in front of him now and faced forward. “What’s this line for?”

“Temporary,” he said.

The jubilation resurfaced in her voice. “I’m ready for a martini!”

•  •  •

She was just five feet tall and more wizened than I’d first noticed. Seeing me leaning around her husband to look at her exam sheet, she said, “I’ve been driving for seventy-eight years!”

Seventy-eight years? That would’ve made her—no, it seemed impossible. “You started when you were—?”

“Seventy-two,” her husband quietly corrected without turning around.

“I’m ninety—he’s ninety-two.” She had bloodshot eyes behind her glasses, but her hair and lipstick were perfect and she was impeccably dressed for the summer day.

“I studied for two weeks,” she said, laughing now and stepping past her husband to thump my breast with her right index finger. “Some of these questions were tricky.”

She showed me one she’d missed. It asked about the penalty if you fail to pull over for a cop. She’d marked the box for Answer A, which said it was a $1,000 fine. Answer B was correct: up to a year in jail.

I told her I’d have guessed the same.

Then she stepped back into line and showed her official photo to her husband, who snickered like a mule that snorted pepper flakes.

“I felt like I should smile,” she said.

“You don’t have to,” he replied.

I reentered the conversation, asking if she was going to get herself a sports car.

“He had a sports car when I met him,” she said. “It was black.”

Picturing him in a Stutz Bearcat, her with a raccoon coat, I was surprised when he said it was a Porsche. As before, when she said she’d been driving seventy-eight years, my brain bogged down with the arithmetic. But maybe they’d met in the early or mid-1950s, when Porsches first hit the streets. Pasadena always was a good town for cars. The couple could’ve been in their thirties.

And then, before stepping up to the window to receive her temporary, she addressed her husband over her shoulder, saying, “I’m going to need a nap.”