Dining Out

         The following is one of those reflective posts that I write and keep here for only a day at the most before relegating it to obscurity in my 'humor and short story' link:

         Maybe the best thing about going out to eat is observing the fellow diners and praying for them. I guess the same thing goes for automobile trips. It's been many years since I had to hitchhike or take public transportation because we or I did not have an automobile but not long enough to forget the difficulties involved in trying to get somewhere without one. Thus I see someone, anyone, walking along the side of the road and offer up a prayer.
         Back to the restaurant, it has always amazed me how there are over 300 million people in America yet aside from twins, no two look exactly alike. I mean... how many different shapes can you have for a nose or a chin and how many different settings can there be for eyes? How wonderful was God's plan and design!
        Take tonight for instance.....and two different tables at the Middle Eastern restaurant that we ate at. At one was a mother and father, presumably, and their son. The father was quiet while the mother did most of the talking, and the son, of about thirteen or fourteen, was demonstrative with his hands, often adjusting his ball cap and occasionally pulling out an electronic tablet of some kind to play with, with his face about a foot from the screen. It was a pleasant scene but my thoughts always wonder if their home life is a pleasant as it looked. Maybe the father grudgingly took them out to dinner. Maybe the mother nagged him into it.
        One certainly could not tell in a restaurant of our home life when I was eight or nine years old. My father was a wonderful man but his life with us was shared with the local bar. Now it was a wonderful bar, I remember it well. The owners were elderly and everyone laughed while I played the bowling game while eating potato chips and drinking Cokes. When we went out as a family I'm sure it looked much like that family tonight but when at home there was often tension. I thoroughly felt blessed in praying for that family tonight.
       The other table in question was a man and what looked to be his two teenage daughters. They smiled and talked a lot more. Where was the mother? Perhaps there wasn't one or maybe she had a lot of holiday cleaning to do and told the family to help her out and go out for supper. I didn't feel as compelled to pray for them as the first table but I did.
       What else are we here for other than to pray for others in this world? I'm sure that's way too exclusive but at such times it feels to be the case. Of particular concern are those folks who might dress as if they don't have much money, or maybe their car looks to be well past its time, or maybe their expressions are just sad or forlorn? I want to tell them to take heart, that this world is passing, that true joy and even happiness is in Jesus Christ, that money means little to nothing in comparison, that Jesus said that with God it can be done but that...."...it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God." But how to tell them this...how even to help them?
       What is a man's life on average. The statistics may show it to be higher but I always refer to it as seventy years.....seventy short...yet in looking back on them....seemingly long and almost endless years. So many questions to be answered. So many wonderful answers ahead when we meet our Savior! And so many wonderful faces to look at at that banquet!

Fun With Special Dog

            Someone could make a comedy film out of some of the situations that I get myself into.  I think that Steve Martin would be perfect to play me. I get this unfortunate trait from my mother of whom the 50s television show I Love Lucy must have been based on. She once super-glued her lips together and another time she attached her fingernail to the wall while hanging a picture, and those are just two instances. As for me I'll give just two examples also. At a very formal benefit event I bought a string of tickets to put in the containers of prizes that I would like to win. It took me forever to just pick one. Time was running out and the announcer said that all tickets had to be placed. I hurried back to a "Beer Basket" with all kinds of beer and snacks and threw my tickets in, only I put them in the wrong container....women's lingerie....and I won..."and the winner of the women's lingerie is....Special Dog!! On another occasion my wife and I were at a very nice wedding reception. As we waited to be served, a friend and I stepped outside, he to smoke a cigar and me my pipe, but we didn't want to be out there when the food came so I peeked through a clear line in a frosted window to see if there was food on the table. No tables....only a women combing her hair at a sink!
            Tonight was another "Fun With Special Dog" evening as I attempted to put a clearer picture of myself on the website in place of the beach picture that is there now. This ought to be easy....just follow directions. Not so! I saved the new picture to my blog and then went to the site on my iPhone to see if it was OK. Specialdogg came up with my face filling the entire screen. Surely anyone visiting would think that this blog was run by an egomaniac! You had to scroll down quite a ways just to get to the title! I hurried back to remove the picture but could not find out how! I literally prayed..."Lord help me get this picture off!" So... to any visitors in that fifteen minute time period... I hope that you had a good laugh because I certainly did.....after the beach photo came back that is.

Special Dog's Typical Saturday

           My wife and I had a wonderful day this past Saturday. We went to an Italian Festival in a local community. They had about ten booths set up selling food such as gyros, wine and biscotti. An older couple led off the entertainment with Dean Martin music.....That's Amore....that type of stuff. The only problem was that it was raining and there was no cover except on the stage. We were the only two people at the festival but the show must go on so we bought a couple of gyros and two wines and sat behind the singers on the stage. A bit surreal...yes...but pretty wonderful too...our own private concert!  They would sing to no one with their backs to us and we would applaud...they would turn and say graze and we would return with prego. On the way home we stopped at two stores in the middle of nowhere that I always wanted to visit. The first was a western store that sold boots, cowboy hats, belts, saddles...anything a horse lover might want. The second store was a biker or leathers store. I had a good time in both and bought two du-rags and a ring that also opens beer bottles! As we drove off I said to my wife "You know these are two types of person that I would like to be...but neither of which I am."
          I'll leave this post up for only a day...probably less...and forever after deny its existence!

Carnival Royal

        


        Walking into the dark trailer from the bright sunlight temporarily blinded me. The man in the black sport jacket tightly hugging a turtle neck in 85 degree weather, who had his hand firmly clasped around my wrist, had no problem, for the dark sunglasses helped him make the transition easily. The character of Oddjob flashed through my mind as he fit the description complete with a bowler hat on top of his head.
         I was a little bit disoriented and tried to focus on where I was. There were small television monitors across the one wall and a man sitting in front of them who motioned for me to sit down on a wooden chair directly below the glare of a floor lamp with a flexible goose neck. At least it was cool in the trailer so I took a couple of deep breaths before complaining, "Whats all this about?" He ignored my question and said "Tell me, are you a very good gambler...or just a very lucky one. Or is it maybe something else?" "I hardly call it gambling" I said, and he responded "Well, I guess that I shouldn't either for you seem to win all the time, not much gambling in that." "So that's why you brought me here. I win a lot?" "That's right," he glanced over at my winnings which the apparent security detective laid on the table in front of me and continued. "Is it mathematical equations? Nah, it can't be that, or are you some sort of magician?" "Look" I said brusquely, getting increasingly angry, "My wife must be out there looking for me." I paused to catch my breath and continued, "I pulled five bucks out of my pocket and if I had lost that I would be home by now." "Five bucks? You expect me to believe that you raked in that haul from five bucks?" "Yeah! I'm not going to waste more than five bucks in a dump like this!"
         With this Oddjob pushed me back into my seat and his friend said "We take a lot of pride in our work. We run a first class operation. A lot of people have a good time, we make a small profit, that is until someone like you comes around." "I have to find my wife." I said. "She must be getting worried by now." My interrogator was heavy set and bald. He began scanning the monitors on the wall. "Look at these screens. do you see her anywhere?" I pulled up closer to the monitors. She wasn't by the merry-go-round, or the caterpillar....or the french fry stand. "There she is. Look...she's looking all around....by the cotton candy booth" Curly, for lack of a better name, looked at Oddjob and said "Go get her. Tell her that we just have few questions for her husband."
         He looked at me "OK now?" I settled down "Make it fast." He got up from the desk and walked over and picked up Snoopy. It was a good three feet tall, white and fluffy, with a perfect likeness of Charlie Brown's dog. I fidgeted, for the tips of his fingers had nicotine stains. "Please keep your hands of my Snoopy." He set it down and pointed to each one of the stuffed Snoopys "One, two, three, four, five...and six...six huggable, squeezable Snoopys...all won on a game that, mathematically speaking, shouldn't give a winner more than once every other day..." I was getting more irritated and stood up "Look...I tossed the ball and it rolled into the red cup..." He met me face to face "Six Snoopys on five bucks... three balls a buck, that's 16 balls." Oddjob, who had returned, interrupted, "15 balls boss." "Fifteen balls... do you think I was born yesterday?" I didn't back down and shouted myself, in spite of the aroma of sauerkraut...very bad sauerkraut, coming from his flaming nostrils. "Look, there's 576 cups on that board...thirty of them are yellow, 16 are blue and one, in the center, is red! I just happened to toss fifteen wiffle balls and six of them rolled into the red cup!" He backed away "And I suppose you think that a jury will believe that?" "A jury?" I gasped. "This is a travelling street fair...and I won six Snoopy dolls....are you crazy?" "Crazy? Each one of those Snoopy dolls are worth thirty bucks! You walk off with a hundred and fifty bucks of my merchandise and..." Oddjob interrupted "A hundred and eighty bucks boss" "I don't care, a hundred and fifty bucks, a hundred and eighty bucks. I want to know how you did it?" "I told you....I rolled the little white wiffle balls and..." He interrupted again and grabbed a cellphone from his shirt pocket...putting it right into my face "You want me to call homicide?" Oddjob looked at him "Homicide...boss?" "Homicide, Vice, Immigration...whatever. You come into my house and rattle off how may blue and yellow cups.... I don't even know those numbers! You cased this place and I want answers!"
         I grabbed the phone out of his hand "I'll call the police! You can't pull me in here and give me the fifth degree because I rolled six little white wiffle balls into a red cup!" "One red cup" he shouted "out of six hundred and fifty two cups." Oddjob corrected him "576 boss" "I don't care how many cups are out there. What did you do...guide that wiffle ball into the red cup with some kind of remote control or satellite?" He stopped abruptly and his eyes widened. "Do you have an iPhone? You do, you have an iPhone!" he demanded. "Its an app...isn't it? You guided those balls with an iPhone app!" "Yes I do have an iPhone. Oh Look! Here it is" I said as I took it off my belt. " Lets see.... nine...one...one..." He grabbed the phone out of my hand and began jabbing on the screen all over with his finger, hoping to stop the phone call. Oddjob took it and tapped once to end the call. 
         Curly ran his fingers over his scalp as if expecting to find hair and paced around for a minute or two. "Look. OK. You got me on this one. Tell you what...I'll give you three hundred smackers just to tell me how you did it." "I told you already. I just rolled the little wiffle..." He had had enough of my explanation and pushed me aside as he opened the door of the trailer. The bright sunlight invaded our space and I covered my eyes but not before I could see that he had no hair at all...absolutely none, and a very reddish complexion. "You can leave now...mister. But I'm warning you. By dawn I'll have your picture spread to every carnival...five counties wide... each direction! You stay away from Roll The Ball!"
         I didn't say anything. I just grabbed my Snoopys one by one and walked out. My wife threw her arms around me and helped me by carrying three Snoopys. As we were walking out of the street carnival, I turned and walked back over to the Roll A Ball. There were half a dozen kids and their parents standing by the rail, waiting to buy balls. I hoped Curly, or should I call him Goldfinger, was watching on his monitors. I started giving away the Snoopys to the kids. They were excited beyond belief and they and their families walked away, holding their prize for the night. I looked up and saw a camera pointing at me from a pole. I saluted into it and my wife and I walked off hand in hand.

         There is only a grain of truth in this story. I did go to our local street carnival and bought a peanut covered caramel apple and spent a little bit of time at the Roll A Ball. Watching the kids faces is the real joy, especially since it seems that it was not that long ago that our son was rolling the ball. Today he's a lawyer who could have been called if this scenario had taken place. I did count the colored cups and spent some time trying to figure out just how to land that wiffle ball in the center cup.

A Day At The Olive Garden

          The following post was written five years ago:

A Day At The Olive Garden

         How do you handle an inebriated octogenarian at the Olive Garden on a Saturday afternoon? My wife and I took my mother, who is 84 years old, out for lunch this past Saturday. We were going to make an afternoon out of it so they both ordered fancy wine drinks. I've told you about my mother before. In her younger days she bore a striking resemblance in both looks and personality to Lucy Ricardo. She was also very artistic, once coming in second place in a nationwide Alcoa contest for designing an insulated blanket for automobile engines, and she was an accomplished painter in oils. I walked into the apartment one day as a child to see her sawing our couch in two. Remarkably, she sewed the ragged ends together to make very nice chairs for both sides of an end table. She once super glued her lips together and another time nailed her fingernail to the wall while hanging a picture. You do have to know how to interpret her train of thought though. For instance, she gave me a shirt that day and said she had ordered it from B. B. King; which I believe can be correctly interpreted as L. L. Bean.
         Somewhere under 100 lbs. and with a half a glass of 50% wine & 50% ginger ale in her, she was having a real good time. Her main worry in life for that few hours anyway was having her dentures fall into the chicken scampi. My wife was having a good time also but as for me...well let me put it this way. At one time, I would have liked to have been an actor but didn't have the courage to even try out for a school play. I did take an acting course at Pitt and my assignment was snippets from the character Paul Bratter in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park. If you are not familiar with the play or film, Jane Fonda plays a young newlywed who craves excitement in everything, but her lawyer husband Paul is ultra reserved. The character's personality fit me to a tee. At the Olive Garden, I reacted as Paul Bratter did as Jane and Charles Boyer were popping their knichi to the center of their tongue to get the full benefit of the entire palate rather than nibbling it like a civilized person. My son's Father's Day gift was a framed picture of him and me, chosen because it is the only known picture of me in existence where my teeth are showing in a smile.
         After a very enjoyable lunch, we stopped at my second home, Barnes & Noble. My mother was not going home without Glenn Beck's new book Common Sense which we found, though she was a little disappointed that it did not have any pictures as she talks incessantly about how cute he is (He looks like a blond Larry Mondello to me.) The fun wasn't over as she kept announcing to everyone how good she was feeling.
         There was though, a touch of embarrassment. I am constantly grieved at the lack of decorum in public places and here she yelled across the aisle to me the title of a book she held up for me to see...Hey Special Dog...Bull...#&%. I do believe that a stronger drink...on occasion...is good for you. I'll occasionally forsake Diet Coke for regular Coke. It was a nice day and I thank God for times like that. My mother only spilled her wine once, we didn't get thrown out of Barnes & Noble for profanity and I even got a new shirt out of the deal

Hey Baby!

   
I submit to you this photo for evidence. I will keep this post up for only 24 hours and it and the photo will self-destruct. Afterwards I will disavow any knowledge of the episode!!!
 


         Things are not always as they seem. Take last night for instance. I went to a home furnishings store to buy a new alarm clock. As I was walking to the rear of the store where I knew the alarm clocks are I had to pass a section that sold dog toys. There were squeak toys, fetch toys and chew toys in bins. My dog doesn't fetch. He thinks he's my caddy. If I throw the toy and don't immediately go and get it he will walk over and point at it. So the choice was between chew and squeak. I picked up a bright green snake with black stripes. It has ( I have the cadaver in my hand right now) five sections of which the three middle ones have a squeaker inside. The other two sections are the head and the tail. Now I just gently picked it up and could hear laughter, noises and strange comments coming from somewhere. I looked around and then put the snake back and the noises returned from a little bit off to my left. Being the extremely intelligent and analytical person that I am it only took me about five squeak episode to figure out what was happening. One bin had little round balls and the very slightest movement made them give off various sounds. I thought it would be fun so I picked out a bright color and headed to the alarm clocks but there was one minor problem....the toy would not emit sounds when it was moving but when it stopped and was moved again...it started....Hey Baby!, Where Am I? or an occasional burp. I don't think that it was really a burp but I kept telling myself that it was. I got to the alarm clocks and set the ball down and began picking the various clocks up and setting them down. Each time I did there was a Hey Baby!  or a Where Am I?  or worse. One lady passed on the other side of the table with the alarm clocks. I held my breath and didn't move so as not to set off the ball on the shelf. She Picked up a clock and set it back down....Hey Baby!
        Well, I did what any idiot would do. I picked up the ball, held it high with a stupid look on my face, and shook it causing it to...burp...thereby letting the woman know that it was a ball talking to her. There was no way to get this toy to the check-out counter without getting in trouble so I left it there, picked out an alarm clock and on the way up front I picked up the bright green snake with black stripes chew toy.
         After I got home and set up the alarm clock I called the dog and threw the snake on the floor in front of him. He kept attacking the head while I tried to give instructions to bite the body and not the head. I did everything but put my own teeth around the snake's body and cause it to squeak. Now if it was a squeaking clown he might have been able to make it squeak but he doesn't like snakes...or skunks. He killed a skunk just last week. Write this down...it works...put one quart of hydrogen peroxide in a pan...mix in one-quarter cup of baking soda and a tablespoon of liquid soap. Anyway, I gave him the snake one more time and he destroyed the head. I'm sitting here writing this with the squeak toy on the chair's arm rest while my dog looks at me as if to ask..."What are you doing with that dead snake?"