Courage

When I swim in the ocean here in Southern California, I have to combat my Midwest tendencies to fear sharks in the water. Lots of people have this fear. It’s all Jaws-related. Even the Pacific’s gentle telepathic reassurances that she will protect me don’t totally erase my fear of sharks. But this swimming season, I have done pretty well, swimming out past where my feet can touch the bottom, trusting the mighty sea, and never being let down. Then I took my 5-year-old niece to the beach recently and while she was running from the tide on shore and screaming with glee, I waded out into the water. A young man with bronzed skin and a boogie board standing with his girlfriend stopped me. “Hey man, I wouldn’t go out there,” he said. “I’ve never said this to anyone before,” he continued, “but there’s a shark out there.”


“C’mon,” I said while my niece screamed and eluded another wave racing toward her.


“I’m from California,” he said, “I’m a beach bum. I’m always here. But I was out there just now and saw this huge shadow swim right next to me. For real..”


His girlfriend was really pretty..


“Will you protect me?” I telepathically asked the ocean.


“You will be protected,” she answered.


I shrugged to the young man, caught a look of shock in his girlfriend’s eyes and had one of my most pleasant swims. From the water I listened to my niece shriek with joy on shore and, after dunking my head underwater to see for massive, fast-moving shadows coming my way, heard the ocean laughing hysterically at me.

No Petruchio

I plain-old don’t like plays, and it has nothing to do with the plays themselves.


This odd aversion to live performances began after I purchased eight tickets to see the play Taming of the Shrew.


Mind you, I didn’t attend a single performance with seven other people. No, I bought eight tickets, two at a time, and saw the play only once.


The first gal I got the tickets for was studying paleontology at the time. I dated her for a week. For me, it was one of those sugar-sweet weeks like a tropical island fantasy. For her, it felt more like the Ice Age.


I bought the tickets for a Saturday afternoon show and waited inside the theatre lobby for her. And I waited—and waited..


She was an hour and a half late, and when she pulled up in front, she didn’t even bother getting out of her car to meet me inside.


“Am I late?” she said as I opened the car door and moved her groceries off the passenger’s seat so I could sit down.


“Nooooooo problem,” I said, bright-eyed and happy that she showed up at all. “I bought two tickets for next weekend. We can go then!”


But she didn’t want to go next weekend. She just wanted to be friends. So I was stuck with the next weekend’s tickets. I called a few female friends but none could go. I stopped calling around because, well, I had run out of female friends. So that’s two sets of tickets that I bought and pitched down the drain.


The third set of tickets I picked up with the idea that I’d surprise my next love interest on a first date. Over spaghetti and olive oil, I popped the question: Did she like plays?


“Definitely,” she said. “Just not Taming of the Shrew. I just saw it.”


So I took her to see the only movie that wasn’t sold out that Saturday night or featuring a plot line about college kids having way more sex than I was having. We ended up seeing Aladdin. Behind us sat a family with something like 19 kids. A little boy kept asking if we were “boy-fend en gir-fend.” My date stressed that we were only friends.


I should have simply gone to the play alone, and appreciated the fact that I was becoming fast friends with the ticket agent. But I bought another pair of tickets and invited yet another date. She accepted and we actually saw Taming of the Shrew. We both enjoyed it. But what she didn’t enjoy was when I announced over dinner that my lobster tail was, and I think the exact words were “an obvious scam” because it cost $25 and ya’ couldn’t even eat both sides.


When I dropped her off at her apartment, she was reaching for the passenger door handle before I even stopped my car.


“This isn’t even your block yet,” I said as she waved goodbye to me.


So I don’t like plays. There’s no point in seeing ‘em.

Getting life right for ten minutes, tops

Nothing puts things into perspective like a handicapped kid.

I would have guessed this boy was about 14. He wore a blue parka and was talking to his mother. Well, actually, he didn’t really talk as much as he groaned his words, the way deaf people do who try to speak. He held his arms close to his body with his elbows and wrists bent at acute angles, as if they were broken. With black-rimmed glasses, white tennis shoes and jeans from someplace like Sears or Montgomery Ward, he stood with his weight on one leg.

I was drinking a hot chocolate and stopped at a rain-splattered park bench and watched this mother and son. They were beautiful, facing each other under the battleship gray sky.

The boy mumbled loudly.

His mom nodded.

He mumbled some more.

His mom said something—I don’t know what—but whatever it was, it was said lovingly, protectively.

They both turned and walked by me.

Why was this boy born this way and not me?

Suddenly, things I took for granted in life glittered with value and roared into my thoughts like surf. I forgot about those monthly bills I can barely keep up with and remembered that I haven’t called my sisters in a while. I forgot about the dog food I had to buy on my way home that night and remembered that I hadn’t told someone how wonderful she is.

Life is never so pure and simple as it is after encountering someone who, by chance, inherited a mutated gene. The boy in the parka must have drawn the short straw when they were handing out DNA sequences.

The boy in the parka will never have the chance to talk back to a teacher and whimper in detention, score 12 points in a row in a basketball game, work a summer job climbing ladders, buy his first car and accuse his mechanic of ripping him off.

If he could step out of his handicapped body and brain for just a moment, what would he tell us normal folks about how we should live our lives in the brief time we have left?

I drank down my hot chocolate and resumed my walk back to work. By the time I got there, the rain was falling and I was wet. I had my phone out to call someone and tell her how wonderful she is. But I had to get to work, and figured I’d call later, which I didn’t do.

So quickly I had forgotten about the boy in the parka, and I guess life wasn’t so clear anymore.

True Love . . . or something like it

This story is about finding meaning, and maybe even love.

My friend Jerry was driving his paneled minivan to a local pub when his cell phone rang. He studied the caller ID before answering.

“Heeeey,” he said into the phone. “We’re on our way. We’ll be right there. We’re like, two minutes away.”

Actually, Jerry was more like ten minutes away, and he kept talking into the cell phone and driving.

Jerry went to college and got a communications degree, and at the time, was dating a gal studying to be a pediatrician. Then Jerry dropped out of law school after two months and not too long after that, the gal studying to be a pediatrician dropped him.

“Just wasn’t for me, being a lawyer,” Jerry explained at the time.

Since dropping out of law school, Jerry has kicked around some, working different jobs—nothing he especially liked and nothing he figured on doing for very long. But he has been working those in-between jobs for almost eight years now: video store clerk, temp worker, sales, temp worker again.

Lately, he was thinking about getting his teaching certificate and said he’ll make a decision about that this summer. He believed strongly that there was something out there in this world he was born to do, and he hoped to figure it out sooner rather than later.

At the time Jerry was working at a downtown Chicago insurance firm, emailing contracts and claim forms out to clients. And he filed the manila folders that other workers who wear suits piled on his desk.

When things were slow at the insurance firm, Jerry often surfed the Web, looking at different job listings online. And he compiled his league’s fantasy baseball statistics. He sent out updates every week, but he was in last place, so he was on his way to losing interest and stopping the compilation of stats near the All-Star Break, like he did last year.

He was a temp worker for almost a year at that insurance company.

While he was a temp, Jerry had turned down plenty of opportunities to get on permanent at the insurance company because, well, he knew that if he did that, he might have ended up at that insurance company for good.

And Jerry didn’t want to end up there.

“It might be different if I was married and had kids,” Jerry said.

No sir, Jerry doesn’t have any kids. No yet. But he did have Ansel Adams posters and every CD John Melloncamp ever put out, including the ones when his name was John Cougar Melloncamp.

Since college, Jerry had dated a handful of women. They all made more money than him, and those relationships never lasted long.

“It’s just a fact,” Jerry said, “that when you’re not totally happy about where you’re at professionally, it affects you personally, I think.”

So Jerry clicked off his cell phone and pulled in the pub’s parking lot, and she was waiting for him at the front door. They high-fived.

Inside, they took their coats off, and she ordered a draft of light beer and he ordered a vodka cranberry.

She was tall, taller than Jerry, and wearing a black tank top with a thicket of roses tattooed along the small of her back. Jerry was wearing a light blue plaid shirt with a white undershirt.

When they talked, she twirled her long, brown hair around her pointer finger, and he nodded a lot and raised his eyebrows when she spoke.

A couple of times, they tried to include Jerry’s friend in the conversation, But it was hopeless.

Jerry’s friend asked her what she did for a living.

“Nothing really,” she said, and smiled.

“I’m just ‘temping’ downtown. That’s how I met Jerry. I work in the same building he does.”

True friend as valuable as money

Friends.

Sometimes they’re infuriating, sometimes they’re never on time, and sometimes they won’t even lend you money.. But true friends are always around, no matter where they are. When you need them, you can find them.

Friends—the kind that listen instead of waiting to speak—those kind of friends, they’re life’s mile markers.

Other friends come and go, like the friend at work or the one at the bar or the lunch friend.

But true friends…

True friends tell you when you’re wrong.

They’ll say when you’re pig-headed. They’ll stop you when you’re being defensive. They’ll sympathize when you’re sad. And they’ll definitely tell you when your shirt just doesn’t go with your pants. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. And I think eventually, a true friend will come around and tell you those things. Someone who’s not a true friend will never say them or ever lend you money.

True friends don’t play shrink and ask you, “How does that make you feel?” They know how you fell because they actively listen and can figure it out.

They don’t play it cool.. Ultimately, no one in this world is especially cool, and with true friends you can comfortably be uncool.

True friends tell you when you’re working too hard. They’ll tell you when you’re not sleeping enough. They’ll tell you that your laugh is annoying and you’re just being lazy.

They tell you when you don’t have any control over a situation, when you’re being strong, when you have to be stronger, and when you can’t borrow anymore money.

True friends have the confidence to laugh at you, without paying lip service and insist they’re laughing with you.

I suppose time is a valuable element when it comes to making friends. The longer you spend with someone, the stronger the bond.

Sometimes, though, true friendship is forged over a short period of time through the fire of a difficult experience, like men who go to war together or police officers’ partners.

I had a teacher in high school who would tell us that if we made just one true friend—just one—then we’ve come out on top in life.

“True friends,” he would say waving his finger in the air like a wand. “Truly true friends are more rare that you people think.”

We’d listen and sneak glances at each other and roll our eyes. Back in school, each of us had so many “friends” we thought that anyone who valued having just one friend was a major loser.

But as they years have passed, the lunch friends have fallen away and the work friends have been left behind—and the bar friend isn’t at that bar anymore, just like you aren’t at that bar anymore.

I suppose that’s how life is.

I bring this whole friends discussion up because I went to a carnival recently. You know the scene: carnival rides, geeks at the microphone, sticky cotton candy fingers and the smell of popcorn and pizza everywhere. For me, the best thing about the carnival was watching all the young kids hanging with their friends, running around and playing games.. Most were in large groups although some were with a single pal.

I myself was with a single friend, and then I met another one later.

It was about then that I realized I’m becoming what I used to think was a “major loser.”

The “friend” count may be lower for me than it was, but I suppose the “true friend” count is more clear for me now that I’m older. And that’s a good thing—because to play all those games at the carnival that I played, my friend had to lend me a lot of money.

The Romantic

A romantic evening for a guy means faking it. Honest.

If a guy is totally honest about a fun time, he’d invite a girl to play Nintendo into the wee hours of the morning surrounded by Chee-tos and Ding Dong wrappers. Or he’d think convenience and drive her to Home Depot on an errand for some plumber’s putty. They could talk on the way, of course.

My buddy Kevin “The Big Ragu” once leveled with a girl just five minutes after meeting her.

“You wanna go cruisin’?” he asked her, leaning against a wall with one hand, the other knuckle-deep in the back pocket of his skin-tight black jeans.

“You know, up and down Harlem,” he wooed.

Needless to say, Ragu rode his Schwinn home alone that night.

You see? That’s what we got for being honest. So we sell out, for the girl’s sake.

We take off our “ET” T-shirts for a night and ask her to do something she would like, such as a candlelit dinner followed by a three-hankie movie.

Ragu says he never brings flowers to a girl on a first date and no one ever should. I know what he means. Once, my date’s entire extended family squeezed into the foyer with disposable cameras for the flower hand-off. That was all I needed to nix that $7.99 embarrassment in perpetuity.

Another Ragu rule is always position your date in line with the restaurant TV (and always take her to a restaurant with a TV). By re-focusing you eyes, your attention can go from the Sox game to her face almost instantly.

“Listening,” Ragu said with air-quotes, “is all about reacting to different tones in her voice.”

Like Ragu says, when speaking to a girl, a fella should emphasize the positive. Put a little spin on inescapable facts, such as I’ve only been living with my mom for four and a half years. Or I easily make over $12,000 a year.

It’s no surprise then that the movie is the relief period of the date for the guy; he doesn’t have to keep up his end of the conversation anymore. He just hopes she’s sharing the arm rest with him when the credits roll.

When Ragu drops her off at the end of the evening (if he has borrowed his father’s car), he throws the car in park immediately and unsnaps his seatbelt confidently. If she bolts, she bolts. If the car is still idling ten minutes later and the passenger door hasn’t opened yet, there’s your romance right there.