Regular Life

It wasn’t as rough as I expected. I don’t think anybody bled a single drop, and only a few times did anyone slam to the floor.

I attended a roller derby for the first time on Saturday night, and it happened to be championship night for the Dallas Derby Devils league. In this league the rink is flat, which was much different from the sloped tracks I had seen in movies.

I found out about it through a co-worker who is an amateur filmmaker. When he isn’t shooting weddings or documentaries or women on skates hip-checking one another, he helps run the website BigBadSportsDaddy.com. He’s the one whose movie set I visited to do still shots for the media release.

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My wife went through a large stack of papers and projects our son brought home at the end of first grade and found these poems he wrote.

Heart
Pump Pump Pump
Mimry (memory?) in my heart
Love love love
I love my heart

Mrs. Kenely (his 1st grade teacher)
I like her
I like her a lot
Oe (oh) yes I do
Mrs. Kenely
I rember (remember) her evry (every) day
Now I am at home
I miss you
bye Mrs. Kenely bye

Noah (his best buddy)
nice, playful
Laughing, bouncing, sleeping
He is my buddy
Friend

Butterflise (Butterflies)
Btterflise here Butterflise there
Butterflise on my bushis (bushes)
Sucing (sucking) necter (nectar) in the flowers

This was once the largest chest of drawers in the world. Built in 1920, it stands 38 feet tall in High Point, North Carolina. Now the tallest stands at another end of town, at 80 feet. As of this writing, I haven’t seen that one yet.

I walked up to him, a complete stranger, in the parking lot as he pulled out his knife. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

I realized about halfway into my drive to the airport that I hadn’t packed any dress socks. I arrived late enough that I just wanted to grab a quick bite to eat and then settle into my hotel room.

On the walk to the hotel’s front desk the next morning, my feet felt cool and free inside my stiff dress shoes. It was quite liberating. The cuffs of my pants bunched down over my shoes just enough to conceal my socklessness. I had a secret.

Sitting in the car, however, I could plainly see my bare ankles.

At the store to buy socks, I parked next to a man standing next to a pickup truck. He sported a salt-and-pepper ponytail and wore wrap-around sunglasses that hid the direction of his gaze. I ignored him and wondered how closely he watched while I secured my laptop bag in the trunk and went in the store.

Back out in the parking lot, socks in hand, I saw the man in the same spot. I sat in the driver’s seat, door still ajar, and quickly realized that because TSA doesn’t let passengers travel with handy things like keychain pocket knives, I had nothing to cut the confounding plastic filament that bound the socks together. It was so tight I couldn’t get my teeth around it to bite it off. Man living in the South, standing beside a pickup truck parked at Wal-Mart? Yep, it’s a guarantee.

I looked over at the man standing next to the truck. I stood. “Excuse me. You wouldn’t happen to have a pocketknife, would you?”

“You know what? I do,” he said.

He reached down below his waist, an area that the side of the truck concealed from my view, and then pulled up a blade about four inches long. It was slightly curved and part of it was serrated.

I approached the stranger wielding a knife and held out the socks. “See? I don’t really have anything to cut this.”

He reached out with the knife. “Here, why don’t you hold it,” I said. “I don’t want you to worry about cutting me.”

His calloused, sun-baked hands pulled the “T” at one end of the plastic filament to make room for the blade. “Well, I’m just worried I’m gonna cut your socks.”

A moment later he was successful, but that’s not really the point of this story.

While I was putting on my socks and shoes, driver door now wide open, the man struck up a conversation. It turns out he was born and raised in the area, but his son went to college at a small, distinguished, private university about 30 miles from where I grew up (and about 800 miles from that parking lot), and the same son went on to a Kentucky seminary that one of my best friends attended, in a tiny town I visited more than once. I didn’t ask how he started in a predominantly Church of Christ four-year college and ended up in a mostly Methodist seminary.

I tied my laces and looked at my watch. “Well, I better get going. Thanks again. Good talking to you,” I said.

“You, too. Have a safe trip.”

Thanks to his sunglasses, I never looked him in the eyes, but I think they would have been kind.

The alligator’s nostrils and eyes poked up through the water’s surface as the beast lay in wait for its next meal. Just 20 feet from us, it was as still as the glassy water.

“I’m going to get a picture just to show J there are alligators here,” J said.

“Sure. Me, too,” I said and lifted my camera to my face.

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“I don’t like going to the beach,” my son said.

Start the sound clip below and then click the thumbnail image to get an idea just how much he ended up hating it (earbuds will immerse you, but speakers will work):

I didn’t specify when he said it, because he told me that more than once during the first several days of our Sanibel Island vacation.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, son,” I said. “I would like for you to go with me in the morning. It’s my last day here, and on Saturday mornings you and I always have our father-son time.”

“Okay,” he said.

On top of that, he had another incentive.

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Four metal fence posts — the kind farmers and ranchers use to put up barbed wire fences — formed four corners of a square around a low mound of loose sand. A woman wrapped bright yellow tape around the posts to cordon off the area. She wore khaki shorts and a dark green shirt, topped off with a blue denim ball cap. Another woman, dressed similarly, walked to a small white pickup truck and climbed in through the open driver’s door.

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He stands on the balls of his feet between the poolside ladder’s safety rails, heels hanging over the water, facing me. The artificially turquoise waves dance below, waiting eagerly to envelop him.

He covers his mouth and nose with one hand and falls backward without bending. His back smacks the water loudly, muffled slightly by his swim shirt, and as he sinks the water quickly sloshes back in to complete his temporary translucent burial.

I review my results on my camera’s LCD.

His head breaks the surface and he rubs his fingertips over his eyes to clear them. “Did you get that one, Dad?” he asks through a wide smile.

“It was pretty good, but can you go again?” I say.

“Yep!”

Rarely when you miss capturing a moment do you get to try again. That moment at a wedding when the groom kisses the bride — sure, you can do a set-up shot, but it just isn’t the same. Same goes for that hug between a diploma-wielding graduate and a teary-eyed, seldom seen relative.

You miss those moments and, well, they’re just gone.

When taking action shots of a seven-year-old jumping into a swimming pool? Opportunities abound. My wife certainly took advantage while I threw the boy up in the air.

My son loves the water and all the wet fun it brings. He wears a swimming shirt that I’m certain must deaden the impact, because he has virtually painlessly performed several huge belly flops and more than one Nestea plunge. If it hurts, then he hides it very well.

Ah, those lazy, crazy days of summer.

“In the morning, take a piece of Scotch tape and place it directly over the anus. Then peel it up and stick another piece of tape over that one. Take that to your pediatrician’s office when you take your son in.”

Those were the words of the after-hours nurse we called when our son could not sleep due to severe itching. I allayed my son’s fears by demonstrating on my own arm that yanking Scotch tape off doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as pulling off a Band-Aid. Then I dutifully did what the nurse directed and sealed the sample in a zippered sandwich bag.

I felt a bit like MacGuyver. Or maybe George Clooney’s character on “ER.” He was in Peds, after all, and was known to improvise with what he had on hand.

We told the doctor that we had collected and brought in a sample, per the nurse’s orders, and he said, “Yeah, that doesn’t really do anything. There are lots of things like that going around the Internet.”

After we left, bewildered at our boy’s second positive test for strep at the opposite end from where most people get it, I thought maybe the doctor hadn’t understood. We had gleaned that advice from the after-hours nurse we reached through his clinic’s main number. We didn’t subject our son to the first cockamamie medical advice we found on an online forum. In fact, we didn’t research it at all until after talking to the nurse, because she had been our source of terms to search.

Surely their paid professional nurses don’t dispense advice based on their own half-baked Web research. If so, then someone needs to know it and put a stop to it. Here I go, dialing the clinic’s number.

What’s the weirdest medical advice you’ve received from someone who ostensibly could be trusted to dispense it?

The young woman in “Sweeper’s Peepers” was an amalgam.

Yes, on my last work trip I saw someone with very dark hair and blue eyes; there was a Subway employee sweeping the floor while I ate; and there was a woman who somewhat comically heard me wrong when I mentioned her eyes.

Rather than write separately about all three, I decided to combine them into one person. I hear “real” writers do this all the time, which is one way they are able to put the disclaimer in their books saying, “characters depicted in this work of fiction… not real people… blah blah blah.”

On the plane ride into the customer site (or the nearest airport, anyway), I saw a little girl, maybe about four or five years old, sitting directly across the aisle from me. A scruffy man I guessed to be her grandfather sat next to her. Her hair was very dark — almost black, yet she had pale skin along with bright blue eyes that nearly glowed.

At the Subway, which was the only fast food establishment in the customer’s town or within 15 miles of it, I saw a young, hefty woman sweeping the floor, and except for the parts about her eyes and my getting between her and the Thank You trash can, that scene went down exactly as I described it.

On my way back home, at the airport security point where someone checks the travelers’ ID and boarding pass before letting them go through the scanners, an older woman checked my driver’s license and used her neon yellow highlight pen to make an approving mark on my boarding pass. I noticed her eyes were a shade of green I rarely see, and, hoping that the fact I most likely never would see her again decreased her suspicion that I was flirting with her (I was not), I commented that they were nice. Our dialog played out as I depicted it in “Sweeper’s Peepers.”

So, while the scene itself (except for my stopping Sweeper and talking directly to her) was completely real, the character was a combination of three different people — all complete strangers — whom I saw during the trip. I guess I wrote it as practice just to see how it felt.