Checkered Thoughts

Nothing says summer like a red and white checkered vinyl table cloth spread over a picnic table.

I saw such an All-American picnic table this past weekend and was immediately transported to a time when grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered at my parent's house for barbecues.  Real barbecues where my father worried over whether there was enough lighter fluid on the charcoal briquettes and a hot dog could go from appetizingly brown to crusty black in less than a minute.

It was usually I who was in charge of shuttling hot dogs and hamburger patties from the kitchen to the grill (a heady responsibility for a nine-year-old) where a team of men would monitor my father's cooking while discussing the latest baseball statistics.

In the kitchen, my mother, grandmother, and aunts worked to put the finishing touches on fruit, chicken, and potato salads - placing each in a colored bowl covered with plastic wrap.  That was in the days when it took three tries to tear off a length of plastic wrap without having the piece wrinkle into an unusable stuck-to-itself mess.

Entertainment came courtesy of transistor radios. Games of whiffle ball and badminton generally ran until the object being batted or swatted could no longer be seen in the dusk.

And at the end of it all.... there was no escaping a bath.

Weather Song

It is as sure a weather predictor as the evening news or the weather channel.

The day had broken sunny and warm, greeted by the sporadic chirps and whistles of sparrows, robins, and mocking birds. The medley spoke of blue skies and white puffy clouds.

By mid afternoon the bird song had quieted, my feathered friends sheltering from the high sun and resting in preparation for evening feeding.

But by four o-clock I knew the evening meal would be thwarted. Bird calls now came in sharp rapid-fire. Warnings shouted from tree to tree.

Louder and louder the birds sang out, competing with the steady wind that now turned tree leaves so that the under sides showed. The wind, seemingly encouraged by the shouting birds blew stronger yet. The birds responded with near panicked squawks. The noise became such that I was tempted to cover my ears.

And then - complete aviary silence as the first drops of rain splattered heavily on the patio.

Sandpipers and Sun Worshipers

Intermittent rain showers had beach goers racing between wide expanses of sand and the shelter of awnings and overhangs.

Whenever a band of showers ended, ever-optimistic sun worshipers would scurry back to the beach. Guided by their own shadows men and women of all ages would carefully orient their pastel beach towels and striped beach chairs to the angle of the sun. With a sigh of relief they would settle themselves comfortably and, convinced the day had cleared once and for all, begin to doze.

Alas, the much anticipated sun-induced naps were thwarted time and again by a chilly drizzle that somehow reached the beach before the clouds could block the sun.

With cries of dismay, the beach folk would scoop up towels and blankets and fold them into bundles on the run.  These people who had so thoughtfully spaced themselves apart on the beach would pack shoulder to shoulder beneath storefront awnings and hotel overhangs saying they had had enough.  Yet when the sun next broke through they would again scatter on the sand.

I couldn't help but compare the perpetual migration to sandpipers skittering along the water's edge, racing to and fro in response to the ocean's surge and retreat.

Measured Step

The house groaned and creaked with unexplained noises. Aaron did his best to ignore them. The house was nearly a hundred years old. The timbers were entitled to groan.

But then something completely different caught his ear. A rythmic sound - like someone with a peg leg walking through the kitchen. It made Aaron think of Captain Ahab walking the decks of the Pequod.

From the dining room he listened to the step and slide, step and slide, step and slide as something approached the archway between the dining room and kitchen.   His pulse pounded in his ears. His lungs worked  in short panicked breaths. His instincts demanded he run but he refused. To leave the house now would mean never returning.

The vibration of his cell phone in his pocket made him leap from his chair.

"I'm running late," Cindy said. "Did you let yourself in?"

Aaron nodded even though he knew Cindy couldn't see the motion. "Who else lives here?'

"No one," Cindy said. "I inherited the house from my grandfather. It's all paid for. I don't need a room mate. Why?"

"Anything special about your grandfather?" Aaron asked.

After a long pause Cindy answered, "No. He was a simple blue collar guy. Worked for the railroad. At least until an accident took his leg."

Looking for Home

He had to accept he would never find his way home again. It wasn't that he couldn't find the physical place. He had done that, driven through the old neighborhood, parked in front of his old house, even gotten out  of the car and walked into the backyard where the oak tree still stood.

But the memories that had been here were gone. He had packed them up and taken them with him.

When he got to the new place he had forgotten there was more to unpack than boxes. He had been so busy building a new life he had erased the old. By the time he saw the coldness in his new life it was too late. The old life was gone.

He had returned to this place where he had once lived in the hopes of finding meaning. The visit had stirred no emotion.  Had his childhood been so unremarkable - so easily lost?   He really couldn't remember

Pulling the Weight

The sound might have been the giant from Jack in the Beanstalk trying to get rid of his five o'clock shadow with a dull razor.

But when I cam around the corner of the building my guess proved wildly wrong - though what my eyes beheld was nearly as surprising as a razor-challenged giant.

Under the supervision of her personal cross-fit trainer, a forty-something woman was attempting to drag a metal plate laden with a massive hundred pound weight across the asphalt parking lot. The woman was connected to the metal plate by two heavy leather straps crossed over her shoulders. She was leaning forward like a draft horse trying to pull a plow through a rocky patch of earth.

All I could think of was...why?  Why would anyone willing struggle to drag one hundred plus pounds of metal across a parking lot?  Why would anyone pay money to do so? 

I tried to put myself in the woman's position, to understand wanting toned thighs and buns so bad that I would subject myself to the most absurd exercise routine. The closest I could come was picturing myself handing the leather straps to the trainer and telling him to pull the damn weight himself!

Goose Bumps and Sweatshirts

It's that time of year when the serious sun worshipers are separated from the timid. Or perhaps its a case of separating the crazies from the sane.

While most beach visitors protected themselves from the brisk winds by donning sweatshirts and turning umbrellas into windbreaks by laying the umbrellas on their side, there were a few hardy soles who strolled the water's edge wearing nothing but a bathing suit.

It gives me cause to wonder if the goose bumps that must surely have covered those few barely clothed bodies formed some type of insulation. Perhaps there is a genetic strain that causes goose bumps to fill with a naturally produced antifreeze.  Or perhaps the antifreeze came from several adult libations before the sun worshipers set off to expose their barren skin to the fifty degree wind chills.

As for myself.  I'll take the warm of the sun on my face while the rest of me simmers beneath multiple layers of clothing.

Salvation?

Christopher clenched the crucifix that hung from the gold chain around his neck but failed to find the comfort he was looking for. It was as though the leaden sky had sealed heaven away from him, left him on his own to deal with this evil. Evil, the forest reeked of it, reeked of things risen from the grave and deeper.

A rumble that might have been thunder but wasn't told Christopher worse was yet to come. Worse. He felt it in his bones. Worse. He felt it on the back of his neck. Worse. He felt in the the cold of the metal within his fist.

Worse. He could not imagine it. Could not imagine worse than the funeral pyre he had left behind. The pyre that he himself had set alight. The blaze that he hoped had commended the souls of the twisted once-human things to the creator; saving them from an eternity of  slipping wraith-like through the shadows.

Gas Slide

It was like a trip in a time machine. I had earned sufficient gas points at the grocery store that I was able to fill the gas tank of my SUV for $2.28 a gallon.

Motivated Mom's calculations put me back at 2007 but I wasn't stopping there.  I slipped all the way back to 1976 when gas was fifty-cents a gallon and filling up my Volkswagen Beetle cost me a whopping four dollars and change.

My VW not withstanding, the roads were filled with vehicles propelled by eight cylinder engines that roared like wild animals when drivers tromped on the gas. People drove for the sheer pleasure of spending a Saturday afternoon checking out the local flora and fauna before pulling into the expanse of a drive-in movie lot.

No one talked about the miles per gallon rating of their car. It was all about horsepower and how fast you could get from zero to sixty.  Sure the gas needle moved like a radio in constant search of a station but there were gas stations aplenty.

Spare Reptile

At first I thought someone had left a spare tire behind after a roadside repair.  You know, one of those little doughnut spares that are good only for speeds up to 40 mph.

When I got closer I realized the spare was actually a generous sized turtle methodically making its way across the shoulder of the divided highway. Studying the turtle's ponderous movement, the slow and systematic placement of one leg after another, I wondered if the turtle understood the peril it would be in once breaching the solid white line that separated shoulder from travel lane.

The outcome of a car / turtle encounter would be good for neither party. Such a collision seemed likely in sixty mile per hour rush hour traffic.

I decided that if, on my home from work tomorrow, there is not a dead reptile on the side of the road the question won't be why did the turtle cross the road, rather it will be how did the turtle make it to the other side.

WIndow Visitor

Sometimes when the lights in the room had just gone out he would catch a glimpse of it; a white face with gaping holes where the eyes and mouth should have been. Always it was in the center pane of the bedroom window, looking in.

He had never been able to determine whether it disappeared because it had been found out, or if the rational part of his brain erased the vision as equally unacceptable and improbable.

He had seen it first on the night of his aunt's passing. The night he had heard his aunt speak to him in his bedroom. The night he had smelled her perfume.