The Time of My Life (17 page)

Sure, there may still be another freeze. We're not really safe until the middle of April. But I have my own ways of predicting the weather, and my instruments tell me we're through with winter. If that weren't so, I wouldn't have stepped out the back door last weekend and heard Mother Nature's unmistakable call. “Bring out the patio furniture!” she said.

I brought it out and arranged it and sat down with my book, and Pussycat strolled by and sniffed the air and rolled on the warm concrete, turning her furry, white belly to catch the sun's rays more directly, baring her throat to our main star like a wolf pledging his allegiance to the leader of the pack. A sure sign of spring.

And the gardening disease has attacked my lady. She plants and fertilizes as if possessed, laying plans for ivy and morning glories to spiral up from their clay pots and cover the high patio fence with green along the space that our late lamented tree used to shade. The yucca, dug laboriously from a Davis Mountain roadside in the heat of August, passed away during the winter. The prickly pear is unhappy, we think. It might still look fine in the cracks of the boulder on the slope of Sleeping Lion Mountain, where we found it, living on nothing. But it's too peaked to adorn a city patio. Maybe we overfed it with water or nitro gen or something. Used to the tortillas and beans of its native environment, maybe it foundered on the chateaubriand and champagne we served it. Or maybe it's just pining away, homesick.

On the other hand, the azalea seems to be a keeper. It was given to us almost a year ago in a wooden basket, planted in what appears to be plastic moss, where it still lives and thrives. If it blooms, maybe we'll put it on the front sidewalk, to notify passersby that there
is
azalea outside of Highland Park.

And Mockingbird has been going nuts. A troop of yellow-bellied pipsqueaks or some such inferior critter arrived a couple of weeks ago, apparently with dreams of settling in the neighborhood, and Mockingbird has dedicated himself to making them feel unwelcome. Whenever the poor things try to light and catch their breath, Mockingbird swoops upon them like Crazy Horse onto Custer, and making about as much noise. “If you're thinking of nesting in that carport, forget it!” he screams. “That's
my
carport, and
my
utility pole, and
my
fence, and
my
cat! And, by God, if those morning glories come up, they're mine, too!”

Sometimes I feel sorry for the pipsqueaks, but not for long. After all, if you're gearing up to sing opera, the last thing you need is a bunch of punk rock groupies trying to take over the front-row seats.

About the time I'm ready to go into the house and put on the
1812 Overture
or something else as loud and brassy, to let the pipsqueaks know that Mockingbird has allies, my lady turns the hose on the plants, and the aroma of water meeting the soil and the concrete and the wood of the fence gets me onto another track altogether.

I wonder if there's enough water in the Rio Grande for a raft trip through the canyons. I wonder how far my lady and I could get along I-20 West before some responsible soul would miss us and send the cops looking. I wonder how warm the Gulf is at South Padre, and if the Big Thicket is in bloom yet.

It would be fun to go find out those things, I guess. But where I am feels so good. Maybe I'll just get out the kite and go to the park. Or pretend I'm Pussycat and not move at all.

Yeah, it's spring, all right. Lordy.

March, 1980

Immortality Is a Lot of Trouble

N
EWSPAPER
WRITERS
rarely expect to write anything immortal. We know what happens to our stuff after it's dropped on your front lawn. One quick glance, and it goes to line the bottom of the birdcage or to wrap the garbage or to light the wood in the fireplace. When you're done painting the bedroom, it's used as a drop cloth. When you're checking the oil in your car, you wipe the dip stick with it. Your kids use it to make papier mache in Cub Scouts. On a cold day you stuff it under the door to keep out the wind.

This offends our sensitive souls, but there's nothing we can do about it. It's a fact of journalistic life that we have to accept if we're to avoid ulcers and nervous breakdowns and the heartbreak of psoriasis. We can't expect anyone to remember our works longer than a day or two. Sometimes we can't remember them longer than that ourselves.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I got a phone call from a guy in Milwaukee who wanted to talk about a story I wrote in Louisville in 1971. The story wasn't even one of my finer efforts. It was a simple little human-interest feature about my next-door neighbor, Mr. Chapman, who was a lively, interesting guy for his age. The story was published in the
Louisville Courier-Journal
on his ninetieth birthday. Mr. Chapman liked the story, and I did, too. But the world, we assumed, would little note nor long remember Mr. Chapman's deeds and my description of them.

This fellow in Milwaukee did, though, and I was flattered. When somebody remembers a newspaper story you wrote nine years ago, you're getting pretty close to journalistic immortality.

Then the fellow told me he's a lawyer and that he wanted my testimony in a case he had filed on behalf of his client in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. He wanted to ask me more about Mr. Chapman and that story I had written about him, and would I require a subpoena?

I told him I sure would.

He said that was fine, and that I wouldn't have to go to Milwaukee to testify, that my deposition could be taken in Dallas, and that I would receive a subpoena by and by.

Why, I ventured to inquire, was the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin interested in Mr. Chapman, who has been dead for several years?

It had to do with salad dressing. Mr. Chapman in his younger years had been an inventor, and one of the things he invented was the machine that Kraft uses to make Miracle Whip Salad Dressing. I had mentioned that fact in my story, and that's what the lawyer wanted to ask me about. His client was Henri's Food Products, Inc., a Milwaukee company that also makes salad dressing and is suing Kraft. Mr. Chapman was an important part of their case, he said, and I would have to testify.

A week or so later I got a call from a Dallas lawyer who said he was representing the Milwaukee lawyer who was representing Henri's Food Products, Inc. My deposition would be taken in his office, this lawyer said, and would it be all right if the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas just mailed my subpoena instead of sending out a U.S. marshal to find me?

I said sure, and we agreed on a time for my appearance.

Last week I got another call from another lawyer. Actually a bunch of lawyers. These were Kraft's lawyers, and they were in Chicago, they said, speaking to me on a speaker-phone. They wanted to know why the other lawyers wanted to talk to me. I told them it had to do with a nice old gentleman I had known years ago who was still spry enough at age ninety to rake his own leaves and shovel his own snow and had once invented a machine to make Miracle Whip Salad Dressing. Beyond that, I hadn't the foggiest notion what the flap was all about. One of the lawyers mumbled something about trademarks and said he was flying to Dallas to talk to me, too.

Hmm, I thought. This is getting serious. So I rummaged through the musty remains of my journalistic past until I found a yellowing clipping of the Chapman saga. The story wasn't so bad, but I've done better. There were only two paragraphs about the Miracle Whip machine. I wished the lawyers had chosen to exhume a more ambitious work to display before the federal judiciary.

Well, Friday was the big day.

The first thing I had to do was go to the post office and get my subpoena. The United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas had sent it by certified mail, and I wasn't at home when the postman brought it. He had left a card saying that if I wanted my subpoena I would have to go get it myself. I felt like a real low-rent witness, having to do that.

Things were better at the lawyer's office, though. A court reporter was there. A Dallas lawyer was there. A Chicago lawyer was there. The voice of a Milwaukee lawyer was there, on the speaker-phone. For an hour he listened long-distance while I answered questions about myself and Mr. Chapman.

The lawyers told me what the lawsuit was about, too. Kraft's Miracle Whip Salad Dressing is a registered trademark, see, and Henri's Food Products makes another salad dressing called Yogo-Whip. Well, Kraft claims that the word
whip
belongs exclusively to Kraft when it refers to salad dressing. Henri's Food Products, on the other hand, says it doesn't and has filed a suit asking the federal court to declare that it's okay to keep calling its salad dressing Yogo-Whip.

I never figured out what Mr. Chapman and I had to do with it, though. The lawyers didn't even say they liked my story. By the time they let me go, my sense of immortality had wilted. I was whipped, in fact.

March, 1980

A Perfect Toy in an Imperfect World

T
HE ANCIENT
GREEKS
, being logical, decided a long time before Columbus that the earth is round. Their syllogism went like this:

The sphere is the perfect form.

The earth is perfect.

Therefore, the earth is a sphere.

The problem with the syllogism, of course, is the second premise. Man has learned during the past few thousand years that the earth isn't quite perfect. Modern science teaches us that it isn't quite round, either. It's sort of egg-shaped.

But I'm willing to believe that if the world
were
perfect it would also be perfectly round, for I've learned that one thing in this imperfect world is both round and perfect. It happened in a hobby and toy shop, where my ten-year-old son insisted on beginning his spring vacation.

Ted is a true child of our technological, materialistic age. He likes toys that are also engines or computers, toys that have batteries and buttons to push, toys that do things by themselves after he pushes the buttons or pulls a lever or flips a switch, toys that are large and cost a lot of money. The fact that such toys quickly bore him doesn't deter him from desiring them—being obsessed with them, even—and it was his latest obsession that had brought us to the shop.

Life, Ted had concluded, wasn't worth living without a remote-control model airplane. He professed himself willing to forego weekly allowances and Christmas and birthday gifts in perpetuity for the sake of his dream.

But reality stunned the dreamer. The six-foot-wingspan beauties hanging by wires from the shop ceiling were priced not in ones and tens of dollars but in hundreds. It was just as well, I told him. The planes were much too large and sophisticated to be handled by a lad of his tender years and elementary knowledge of electronics, mechanics, and aeronautics, I said. He should scale down his ambitions to his own size and means, I said. In due course, I said, such a plane would become a realistic possibility, but not now. He must wait.

I hated saying these things. I had hated such reasoning when I was a child. Parental practicality lies upon the shoulders of children like lead and presses the joy out of dreams. Ted listened politely and quietly agreed. He had no other choice. But he continued to gaze and yearn, and I knew that if he had had a credit card he would have ignored my advice and mortgaged his future in an instant. He is, as I said, a child of our age.

Meanwhile, Ted's eight-year-old brother, Patrick, wandered quietly about the toy section of the store, expressing no desire for anything. When we were ready to leave, though, he showed me a red rubber ball and asked permission to buy it. It cost forty-nine cents, he said. It would leave him $1.51 of his allowance, he said, more than enough to last the rest of the week. I was happy to endorse such a modest desire.

Outside, Patrick bounced the red ball on the sidewalk and said, “A red rubber ball is the perfect toy.”

“Why is it perfect?” I asked.

“Because it never gets boring,” he said.

I spent the rest of the day watching and remembering.

A red rubber ball, I rediscovered, is a delight to the eye. Whether bouncing on a sidewalk or rolling under a hedge or just lying on the floor, its shape is so simple and pristine, its color so bright and cheerful, that you never get tired of looking at it.

A red rubber ball is a pleasure to the touch, too. It fits just right into the palm and, when squeezed, its resistance to the pressure of the fingers is just enough—not too little and not too much.

A red rubber ball can be carried comfortably in the pocket of a windbreaker and is always ready to play when a boy is. It doesn't have to be assembled. It requires no batteries, no wires, no fuel. It won't break.

A red rubber ball comes with no rules or instructions. It doesn't dictate how a boy must play. Alone, he may bounce the ball on the sidewalk or the fence or the wall or throw it into the air and catch it. With a brother, he plays “catch.” If a father joins them, he plays “keep-away,” a game so ancient that even fathers know it.

A red rubber ball can hit a big brother without making him cry or requiring a trip to the emergency room or rousing parental wrath against the thrower.

A red rubber ball costs forty-nine cents. If it gets lost, nobody yells. A red rubber ball doesn't stay lost long.

The perfect toy never gets boring.

The red rubber ball never gets boring.

The red rubber ball is the perfect toy.

The Greeks probably were looking at a red rubber ball when they were thinking about a perfect world.

March, 1980

Missing a Few Stops on Memory Lane

N
ONE OF MY
REGULAR
correspondents—the phone company, the gas company, the electric company, various insurance firms and credit card companies—indulges in nostalgia. Even at Christmas and Easter, the news they write me doesn't tug at the heartstrings.