Time Machine: $80

2 Clicks. There it is.

Last night I rediscovered my 1968 high school yearbook on a closet shelf. Seems like every ten years or so I drag it over to a reading lamp and slowly turn the pages while being sucked back to what seems like yesterday. Within the yearbook’s clear plastic cover and yellowing pages are my first few girlfriends, acquaintances with whom I’ve lost contact, and faces whose names I will never remember. Rich and Walt are in there, too, looking both incredibly young and wise. And, of course, there’s me. If I had the power to step back through time and draw these three youths together again in a crowded, locker-lined hallway in-between classes, what would I tell them about the future in three sentences or less?

I was not a very popular guy. Being a military brat I had learned how to blend in. Not make waves. Be an observer, because friendships — when one’s family was transferred from country to country every 2 or three years — were … difficult.

“To Tim: a sweet, funny guy”, “a nice guy”, “a strange guy”. Myriad salutations all the same, with signatures scribbled in blue fountain pen ink.

What happened to all these forgotten people who once seemed to play such an important part in my life? And what happened to their fountain pens? Do these forgotten people perhaps read THEIR yearbooks, too, from time to time and wonder about me, that strange, nice, sweet guy?

I eventually return this book of mixed memories to its shadowy hiding place, and sigh once or twice to myself, grateful for something so fleeting I can’t quite put my finger on it.

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Tim says: just for fun, I Googled “Norview High School 1968 Yearbook“. And, by golly,  there it was, on sale at Amazon for $80 dollars. What an amazing world of technology we live in. What a racket.

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More Better Horseshoe

Feeling a lot more better now. Man, that flu or cold or whatever it was I caught a couple of weeks ago is a real terror. I think I may have gotten out and about a tad bit too early last week, though, when I managed a trip to South Hill to fetch a new set of tires. What was I thinking?

South Hill, Virginia

I gotta tell you, while I was waiting for my tires, I was introduced to the “Horseshoe Restaurant” by my Lake Gaston friend, Al Hartley. Turns out The Horseshoe Restaurant makes absolutely the best hamburger I’ve ever eaten. Evidently, most of the meat on their menu (as well as the vegetables!)  are locally-grown and — whenever possible — of the “free range” variety. Meaning, no chemicals and just about as organic as you can get. The out-of-season tomato slice topping my burger tasted like I had just plucked it from a summertime garden; same with the leafy lettuce.

Bison burgers and elk burgers are also available, a treat to look forward to during my next South Hill visit.

Maybe I’ll even take my camera along and snap some decent pictures so you can see a little bit more of that delicious burger!

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Knock, Knock. Who’s There?

“Hello, I’m Tim— your friendly pots and pan salesman!”

One of my first jobs was as a salesman for a fly-by-night company whose ad I answered from a Norfolk, Virginia newspaper. After two weeks of pumped up sales training (and a non-refundable entry fee of fifty dollars), I was cast out into a cold world not particularly fond of door-to-door salesmen. For two more weeks I honed my selling expertise at the expense of unsuspecting housewives who actually opened the door, which eventually led to my first sale!

Unfortunately, the woman was not interested in my expensive “waterless cookware” package at all. Instead, all she wanted to buy was the electric skillet we gave away as a “free” gift upon purchasing the complete kitchenware system. After placing a call to the office to determine a fair price, I sold her the skillet for nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents, plus $hipping and handling. A steal at any price.

I received my $.97 (five percent) sales commission check one week later!

Two weeks after that, the woman called me back after receiving her free $19.95 “gift”. She was irate at the inferior quality of the electric skillet, and demand her money back. Not only did I have to repay my company the shipping and handling charges, but I also had to give them back their ninety-seven cent commission check, which, I had not yet bothered to cash.

Thus ended my first professional career. And everywhere across the city, housewives sighed in relief.

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The Measuring Door

Visit any household that has kids and chances are there’s a measuring door somewhere near the kitchen. Measuring doors can be identified easily by the progression of fingerprints and pencil marks measuring the growth rate of sprouting children. For me, seeing the miniscule gradations from week to week, month to month, year to year was probably my first realization that change happens, that — despite the seeming sameness of day-to-day comings and goings — we do in fact move through time and space towards a terrible and undefined vanishing point.

UN-philosophically speaking, however, what REALLY mattered to me about the Lee family measuring door was the steadily diminishing distance between my sister, Pat’s growth rate and my own. And in particular, that very special day when MY pencil mark finally nestled one-sixteenth of an inch further from the kitchen baseboard than hers did.

I knocked on Pat’s bedroom door politely because she had her mocking DO NOT DISTURB sign displayed.

“Can’t you READ?“ she howled. The “Rubber Soul” Beatles album played in the background, its groves worn nearly smooth from continuous use.

“Yeah. . . BUT this is really IMPORTANT!“

The door flew open. “What do you WANT?“

“Nah, nah-na, NAH-na!” I hooted. “I’M taller than YOU are!”

“Big, deal!” She slammed the door.

So much for diminishing vanishing points.

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Irene

The feeling is like a bad taste or an unpleasant odor in a confined space. A crowded elevator. A rancid memory, refusing to rise in order to purify itself, instead choosing to fester just below the blister of consciousness. Transparent, like a stealth weapon ninety-nine percent ghost. A vaporous déjà vu that will not leave me alone. This feeling I have is like all of that, this dread that will not go away. This thing called — Irene.

Hurricane Irene — whose name means “peaceful” (I bet some higher-up got a chuckle out of that) — plows a belligerent path northward toward a steamy rendezvous with inevitable landfall. A juggernaut on a mission: a collision with North Carolina and everywhere else.

No. Collision is not a good word to describe this terrible meeting of wind and land mass. The real word should be more subtle. Something akin to convergence or assimilation, or — confluence. Yes. A confluence with North Carolina. I like that. But I still have a very bad feeling about this Hurricane-Irene-whose-name-means-peaceful.

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Molly B and Duck-Duck

One day while cruising Lake Whitehurst in my “Molly B” kit-built canoe, I discovered an errant duck egg sitting alone in an abandoned nest on a weedy shoreline. Later, research revealed that a ninety-six degree incubation temperature (or thereabouts) was a great start for wannabe ducking hatchlings. Eventually a tiny duckbill poked out from the carefully manipulated and temperature-regulated heating-pad-environment egg. Two hours later “Duck-Duck” emerged — a strange chromosomal mixture of wild Mallard and white domestic genetics, no doubt the end product of confused parents.

Duck-Duck  immediately “imprinted” on my physical characteristics, and in no time at all I was a — Mom!

“Peep, peep!”  Duck-Duck agreed.

Duck-Duck’s education included long swimming sessions paddling behind the Molly B boat wake. No matter how hard I tried to ditch him, no matter how hard I paddled, Duck-Duck always managed to keep up. My mom became quite fond of Duck-Duck, and even our dog, Yankee, seemed to accept this innocuous, feathered sibling as an equal at the dog’s dinner bowl. For nearly a year Duck-Duck protected our back yard from whatever encroachments and obtrusions Yankee — in her old age — neglected.

Then one day I walked Duck-Duck over to the Norfolk Botanical Gardens Petting Zoo (which was less than a mile away), where he was an immediate hit with the clamoring kiddies. Unnoticed by the zoo’s curators, I gently placed the too-overweight-to-fly Duck-Duck inside the duck pen and walked home. As his panicked quack attacks succumbed to distance, I felt as if I had moved through another important part of childhood: it was time to leave the duck behind.

That night Yankee waited patiently for her friend beside her dog bowl. Eventually, she made the dog food disappear.

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The Molly B

When I was a kid I mowed yards to supplement my allowance. Actually, I did quite well mowing yards. After the first year my client list had risen to nearly twenty-five yards. The end result was a surplus of funds, which I spent on whatever struck my fancy (including a riding lawn mower). Mom was only somewhat surprised one afternoon when my $21.95 mail-order canvas canoe kit arrived at the front door.

Within a week the sleek shape of the two-seater had begun to take form on the garage floor. The final procedures required wrapping the plywood frame in tightly-stretched canvas and fiberglass resin, and then coating everything with expensive epoxy paint, which was not included in the kit because marine quality paint cost almost as much as the kit. I selected a deep blue bottom color and pure white sides. Seeing as how the nearby shallow Lake Whitehurst was filled with stumps, Mom was dubious about the seaworthiness of a vessel made of canvas right from the get go. But she remained supportive of the venture providing I officially christened the new vessel to her liking: “The Unsinkable Molly Brown”. Very carefully, I painted “Molly B” on each gunnel in deep, midnight blue.

The “Molly B” was a fine ship.

Early one morning, Mom waved from the shore during the Molly B’s maiden voyage; I paddled off like a ghost across the quiet and misty lake into a new and independent wave of childhood.

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Yucca Plant

One day while chasing a football across my front yard, I ran smack dab into the middle of a five feet tall yucca plant. In my mind, planting a yucca bush in one’s yard is tantamount to placing a spear-tipped sculpture in a play pen: nothing good will come of it.I can think of no plant less useful to a teenaged, soft-bodied, wannabe wide receiver. A bottle of iodine, a box or two of cotton balls, and a couple dozen Band-Aids later, I used a machete to prune the yucca plant down to its obnoxious and pulpy stub of a trunk. And then I dug that up and threw it in a garbage can.

“What happened to my yucca plant?” asked Mom when I showed up for dinner. She took one look at my bandaged body. “Oh!”

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Fly Away Home

Three weeks later I received the second shipment of twenty thousand ladybugs. Surely this time experience would guarantee I made no mistakes.

At 6 AM sharp I carried the refrigerated ladybug container into the garden, where I carefully clipped off the box’s protector tab and proceeded to gently place handfuls of the cool ladybugs in various choice garden locations: some on the ruby Swiss chard, some on the zucchini squash, some on the turnip greens. More here. More there. Chilled ladybugs everywhere.

The ladybugs sat, clustered together for several minutes testing their wings in the warm sunlight. They were already wandering around looking for a meal! How cute they were, hunting in the dappled sunshine. Then –  one by one –  twenty thousand speckled ladybugs took to the air and disappeared in a reddish swarm over my back yard fence, gone from my garden forever.

A week later a shipment of one hundred preying mantis EGG CASES arrived at my front door.

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Tim says, Ladybug recap:

1. turns out the ladybugs were THIRSTY from their postal travels. Had I read the instructions more carefully, I would have discovered I was supposed to have watered the garden BEFORE releasing the ladybugs.
   
2. It took months to vacuum up the dead and dried ladybugs who had managed to gain access to two floors of the house, as well as the attic and basement areas.
3. When they arrived, each one of the preying mantis egg cases had to be fastened (tied) to a scattering of bushes and shrubs.
   
4. About a month later I had a slew of juvenile preying mantises crawling everywhere. Within a short while there was a conspicuous absence of bugs in my garden. Which worked out well because — once the bugs were gone — the growing preying mantises began devouring each other.
5. The price of ladybugs has gone up!
6. Ladybugs are not necessarily welcomed.
7. Preying mantis egg cases are still available, too.

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Ladybug, Ladybug

Tim says: Over the past fourteen years of Simply Tim history, “Ladybug, Ladybug” has been one of the most requested stories I’ve written. It just so happens to be one of my favorites, too.

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Ladybug, Ladybug

I had an invasion of ladybugs, once, years ago, in the early 1970s. Well — not really an invasion, I guess, because I willingly invited them into my home. At that time I was a dedicated organic gardener who couldn’t pass up the Organic Gardner Magazine advertisement for twenty thousand live ladybugs delivered right to my front door. Ladybugs, it turns out, had voracious appetites and a reputation for mercilessly devouring gazillions of garden-pest insects, entirely eliminating the need for using pesticides.

I was sold!

The ladybugs arrived in a cardboard box perhaps two feet square. The sides of the shipping carton contained breathing vents covered by mesh similar to window screening material. Placing my ear against one of them, I could clearly hear scratchy bug noises emanating from the dark interior. Instructions dictated immediately placing the ladybugs in a refrigerator and chilling them for a day or two. This was supposed to calm them down in preparation for deployment in the garden, where they would proceed to scour the growing vegetables and dutifully consume any and all insects foolish enough to await the unstoppable flurry of creeping, carnivorous polka dots.

I scheduled “the invasion”, as I called it, for two days later at precisely 6 AM.

At the appointed hour I carefully removed the ladybug container from the refrigerator and snipped off the protector tab from the box’s lid. As I passed through the kitchen — heading for the back door overlooking my garden — I slipped on the discarded cardboard tab, scattering a bewildered mass of frigid ladybugs into my living room, where the container tumbled across the floor. Like a scene from a Stephen King novel, the writhing red and black-speckled hoard expanded like a demon fog, momentarily shaking off the effects of the cold.

Then, the orange cloud of TWENTY THOUSAND helicopters buzzed off to all areas of my home in a dazzling display of flashing color intermixed with splashes of morning sunlight streaming through the Venetian blinds.

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