A few years ago, Son and I were standing in line to the Ferris wheel inside the Times Square Toys R Us, and just as we walked up to the gate, it was closed for the ride, so we had to stand there, and wait, and engage in some serious smalltalk with the ticket person.
“Hey, guys, where are you from?” asked the young lady.
I always feel lost when I’m traveling. Not because I don’t find my way around the city, because most of the times I do. But because I lose my pocket system.
Like many men, I don’t carry a bag with me. No messenger bag, not a back pack, and no man purse. Whatever I think I’m going to need, I carry with me in my pockets.
I keep losing things. I’ve always been one of those people that are always looking for their keys, their wallet, their pens, watches, or a magazine they just had in their hand but now seem to have misplaced somewhere.
As a kid, I had the home key in a hockey skate lace around my neck, and still managed to leave it at home often enough to become friends with the scary Mrs Hellgren who had the master key. Once I lost my wallet at my uncle’s place, must have dropped it on their yard somewhere, and the entire family with my cousins and aunts and uncles had to come out and look for it. After hours of search, we gave up, but the next morning, my aunt found it in a bush. How it had gotten there, I have no idea.
Our house has three floors, with the kitchen and the living room in the middle, all the bed rooms – and my little office – upstairs, and a playroom, and an entrance to the backyard in the basement. Each staircase has 15 steps, so it’s a 30-step run from the basement to my office, when, for example, the phone rings.
Sometimes, when I’m standing around in the kitchen, waiting for the espresso machine to heat up, I see a common magpie land in our front yard. It’ll hop there, glance around, strut around with a swagger, looking all classy in black-and-white, like it’s walking on a red carpet on its way to a gala dinner.
Although, there’s something a little sneaky about it, too. It hops, looks around, as if to see if anybody is watching its every move.
I used to be able to fit a hockey puck in my mouth. Sure, it took some pushing, and I had to pull my lips over with my hands, but at least on that one sunny, spring day, I could do it, and I have witnesses who can back me up.
Well, you may not think that’s anything special.
I’m on Twitter. I tweet a few times a day, posting links and very, very short stories. Most of the links take you to my stories, either here, or to some other site that has published my writing. The short, short stories are all mine, as are the fake news I sometimes post.
I created my first Twitter account on May 1, 2007, so I’ve been tweeting almost four years now. I got on Twitter, because at the time, I wrote about the Web and technology for Scanorama, and thought I’d have to know what was going on.
At 10:22 that night, I told the world … this:
just spilled a cup of coffee
I think my second one was along the same lines. What can I say, I spill a lot of coffee. A few tweets later, I started to look around, to see if I could find people to follow, but basically, I stopped tweeting for a few months. Nobody was following me, nobody was listening to me, so what was the point?
Unlike Groucho Marx, I’d be happy to get into a club that would have people like me as a member. As a kid, I started numerous clubs, and always designed membership cards for each of them: Tarzan club, Pecos Bill club, Tex Willer club, and Woody Woodpecker club. They were ultimate anti-Groucho Marx clubs, because most of them had just one member: me.
I didn’t care about not having any other members in my clubs, that wasn’t the point anyway. The point was the card, the official badge that I could flash whenever I felt like it. The cards had my name, my membership number – “1” – and the club logo on them, often “a stamp” of the main authority. Me.
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but haven’t got around to trying to make one. Anyhow, you know how certain songs always take you back to a certain place? Like, for me, Bruce Springsteen’s “Night” always takes me back to that one winter’s night when I was in high school, and Dad stopped at the traffic lights and then the drums kicked off “Night”. I know exactly where we were.
And “Heaven’s on fire” makes me think of Terry, and how he would rest his feet on our dog while watching music videos.
I was sitting, resting, at the gym at the Orillia Y when that summer’s big hit, “Brickyard Road” was playing and I remember hearing the lyrics clearly for the first time, and how sad I thought it was.
So, here’s my attempt to create my historical musical map. I’ll update it as new songs pop into mind.
See a larger map on Google.