Halloween

First published October 28, 2005

I miss Halloween.

Ok, there is still the fun of handing out the goodies to the kids, of filling every square foot of the yard with inflatable witches and goblins, and of going to Halloween parties where we all seem to believe that our friends won’t recognize us in our Hugh Hefner and the Sexy Playmate costumes.

But it’s just not like the old days.

First, I should explain that I have very fond memories of Halloweens when I was a child. This was many years ago, back when you could ring a neighbor’s doorbell and yell, “Trick or treat!” without first having your buddies set up a diversion to draw fire, then lobbing a percussion grenade through a window.

Back then, my brother and I would each bring home bags jammed with enough candy to keep an average school bus-load of kids buzzed on a carbohydrate high for a month. Like two little refined-sugar misers, we’d sit on the floor and sort our booty into carefully segregated heaps ranging from the Snickers and Almond Joys in the “keep-your-grubby-little-meat-hooks-off” pile, to the “let-the-dog-have-it” stack made up of “candy corn,” baggies of stale popcorn, and those red-and-white round mint things like they have next to the register at the Chinese restaurant.

Then my dad would come by like a mafia don and collect his percentage. He was usually kind enough to bypass our top-echelon inventory and raid the mid-range stuff, concentrating his take somewhere around the level of Good ‘N Plenty, Heath Bars, and black licorice whips.

We didn’t mind; we figured that since he had paid for the costumes, he was entitled to a taste of the action.

Then I began to grow up, and by the time I was twenty, the old people in charge of handing out the goodies stopped buying the “tall kid in a Casper The Friendly Ghost Mask” routine. I realized then that I was going to be pretty much out of luck until I had a kid of my own to do the bag work.

True, I could always dip into the bags of candy I bought to give away, but that just didn’t encompass the same spirit of adventure. Or the variety – how many inch-long Baby Ruth bars can one guy eat?

Now considering how well my dad did shaking down my brother and me, I decided that once I got married I would simply father twelve to fifteen kids, who could then be strategically deployed in handout-rich neighborhoods, like miniature commandos in Dracula suits.

Ok, so I didn’t think to run the plan past my wife before we got married, just to make sure we were on the same page on that particular concept. As it turns out, we weren’t.

So instead of propagating our own little trick-or-treating platoon, we had one son. And while he was a valiant little vampire, even during his prime candy gathering years there was only so much loot even a highly motivated kid could bring into the organization on his own.

And now my son is grown and living away from home, presumably facing the same Halloween candy predicament as his old man. I guess we’ll both just have to wait until he gets married and has kids.

So what’s a grandpa’s cut amount to, anyway?

Copyright © 2005 Michael Ball

...Read more!

Dock Tales – The Fall

First published October 21, 2005

It’s October, so a lot of people around here have already taken their stuff out of the water and stored it away for the winter. These are the same people who didn’t put their stuff in until the weather was warm enough that there was at least a remote chance someone would want to use it.

Weird, huh?

My friend Tom and I have a slightly different philosophy. We like to think of ourselves as pioneers, braving the extremes at both ends of the season as our own modest way of pushing back the Boundaries of Human Endeavor.

Not procrastination – Boundaries of Human Endeavor. Honest.

As a side note, does it seem fair to you that our friends who live in Florida don’t have to take their docks in and out? This is because it doesn’t freeze in Florida. At any time of the year, all they have to do to enjoy their lakes is go out and shoo the alligators off the jet ski hoist.

Lucky devils.

Anyway, last spring when Tom and I put the dock in, we left a few small details that we knew were not quite perfect. There were a couple of cracked boards. A few of the poles were a little bent. The last fifty feet or so looked like we lined them up by tossing the poles and dock sections out of a helicopter.

“Relax,” we’d told each other, basking in the optimistic sunshine of the springtime afternoon, “we’ve got all summer to tidy it up.”

Well, sometime in June the cracked boards began to give way completely, so walking out to the boat became a little like playing a game of hopscotch in a minefield. In July the bent poles slipped, so from that point on you pretty much had to use climbing gear and safety ropes to traverse those spots. By about mid-August we’d come to think of the act of reeling down the zigzags toward the end of the dock as a sort of personal folk dance.

Around the beginning of September our rationalization had subtly shifted from “We’ve got all summer…” to “Well, the season’s almost over…”

And so, on a beautiful Saturday afternoon a few weekends ago we were standing on the dock, clinging to a pole to keep from sliding off, and Tom said, “You know, we really ought to think about taking the dock out.”

“Yes,” I replied, “we certainly should.”

“So, you want to go skiing?”

“Sure.”

As the autumn days rolled by we would spend more and more time each weekend carefully gauging the weather, monitoring the changing water temperature, calculating the lengths of the days, and discussing taking the dock out. Then we would decide to go and do something else.

And now we’ve started the job. So far we’ve spent one weekend dragging the hoists up on shore, then gesturing with our beer bottles at where we want to stack everything else. Next weekend the dock itself comes out.

You know, I think it’s that above-mentioned Boundaries-Of-Human-Endeavor thing that compels us, after waiting until the water is really, really cold, to tackle the job in leaky waders. These are the same waders, coincidentally, that we intended to replace after freezing in them last spring.

After all, we had all summer…

Copyright © 2005 Michael Ball

...Read more!

A Giant

First published October 14, 2005

I had a friend named Scott. He was a Giant.

He was one of the largest men I’ve ever known, with a body that could fill up a room or block out the sun. He once played Harry Potter’s Giant, Hagrid, to my Professor Dumbledore, standing a good-natured, grumbling guard over stacks of new Harry Potter books, while wide-eyed young fans trembled in his shadow then asked kind old Dumbledore to sign autographs.

But his size wasn’t what made him a Giant.

As you might expect of any good Giant, Scott wore a fierce, bristly beard that covered most of his face. The look could be so intimidating that you might not notice the eyes that twinkled through his wire-rimmed glasses. I believe that he could actually make his beard flare on command, especially when he saw something that displeased him.

But that big fierce beard wasn’t what made him a Giant.

He was a self-appointed peace maker. He could clear up just about any problem simply by striding into the middle of it. If he ever spotted someone who might be taking advantage of a weaker person, for any reason, he became an avenging Giant, and that would pretty much be the end of any advantage-taking.

But his ability to dominate a situation wasn’t what made him a Giant.

What made Scott a Giant was just Scott. He was a private sort of Giant, so like many of his friends I was only privileged to see and share tiny bits of his life. He was a warrior in Vietnam. Then he was a police officer. Then he was a Giant working in a book store. And through all these incarnations, he was a husband and a father and a friend.

Like a Giant should be, he was proud, but his pride was rarely self-directed. He wasn’t prone to talking all that much, and then rarely about himself without a lot of prodding. But he never got tired of telling his friends about the two people who occupied the center of his universe, his wife and his son. He was never happier than when he was delivering a detailed dribble-and-shot account of one of young Scottie’s basketball games.

It’s a personal source of pride to me that he loved my columns. Whenever he read a goofy one, his laughter would rumble like far-off thunder. Whenever he read one that tugged at his heart, he would come and find me, with tears streaming down his Giant face and disappearing into that fierce beard, and he’d say, “Ok, you got me!”

On those occasions it always surprised me that he was willing to let the world see a weeping Giant.

When I started writing this I had just been told that the decision had been made to take Scott off life support. I knew that it was his decision, and the right one, and I knew the probable outcome. But, like the dreamer that I am, I was hoping for some kind of miracle.

And when the word came that Scott had left this world, I felt sad, and diminished, and more than a little bit angry. I felt like I’d been cheated of my miracle, because I would never see my friend the Giant again.

But I was wrong. As I sit here and let my mind carry me back to the rumbling laughter and those tear-streaked cheeks, I realize that I got that miracle all right, and I’ll bet everybody else who knew him can say the same. You see, we all experienced an amazing thing.

A Giant passed our way.

Copyright © 2005 Michael Ball

...Read more!

Caramel Apples, Yellowjackets, And Other Signs That Summer’s Over

First published October 7, 2005

October in Michigan is a magical thing. The leaves are beginning to change, the nights are cooler, and the kids are back in school.

From the football stadium, the festive sounds of the marching band, the referee’s whistle, the tearing ligaments, and the snapping bones fill the crisp autumn air.

We’ve all been spoiled by a long wonderful summer of warm-weather activities, when we could go out to the lake or the golf course or the chain gang on just about any afternoon and enjoy soaking up enough ultraviolet radiation to toast a bagel.

But now the boats are snuggled away in their shrink wrap and your nine iron is resting peacefully on the bottom of that pond near the green on number twelve. It’s time to switch over to Fall Fun.

One thing I always like to do is visit the neighborhood Cider Mill And Yellowjacket Wasp Preserve. This is a place where you can enjoy cinnamon donuts, caramel apples, fresh apple cider, and stinging insects motivated enough to swipe a Coney dog right off your paper plate.

I once knew a guy who became a legend by surviving three trips to the Cider Mill trash barrel in one afternoon! Unfortunately, on the fourth trip he had a couple of French fries stuck to the seat of his jeans – he disappeared into the cloud of wasps and was never seen again.

In the meantime, the hunters are all getting warmed up for deer season, blowing practice holes in Stop signs throughout the Midwest. As Opening Day draws nearer their workouts will get more intense, until they’re blasting Yield signs and, eventually, the smaller and more elusive Speed Limit signs.

The deer are out in the woods doing wind sprints and other cardio, obviously working on building endurance and foot speed.

As I’m sure you know, the bow hunters always get the first crack at the deer. My friend Clyde “Drinks Much Budweiser” Thumpwell claims to be part Native American, and prefers hunting with a bow. He says, “It gives the deer a sporting chance.”

When Clyde hunts he hides in a blind halfway up a tree wearing head-to-foot camouflage. He douses himself with doe urine to mask his scent. He uses a compound bow, equipped with a GPS-enabled laser targeting system, that is capable of pounding an arrow through the door of a Volkswagen. He fires scientifically designed arrows with the stopping power of a Patriot missile.

The only way the deer are going to get any chance with Clyde, sporting or otherwise, is if he Drinks a little too Much Budweiser and falls out of the tree.

Of course, you should never forget the lesser-known Autumn activities that are available to us. These include:

Half-heartedly Congratulating People Whose Favorite Baseball Teams Made The Playoffs (a tradition in the Detroit area for many years);

Jumping Into The Leaf Pile When The Neighbors Aren’t Looking (only really fun if you avoid building the leaf pile on top of the lawn mower); and

Reminding Yourself That You Only Have To Cut The Grass A Few More Times (if you could only find that darned lawn mower…).

So be creative. However you choose to occupy these golden days of Fall, just remember that the glories of Winter are just around the corner.

Aaaaaaaaarrrgggghhhhhh!

Copyright © 2005 Michael Ball

...Read more!