Listening

I remember writer Ray Bradbury’s past television series, The Ray Bradbury Theater, in which, at the beginning of each episode, Mr. Bradbury ascends to his studio in a rickety elevator, unlocks a door, and steps into his mysterious writing chamber. The room is filled with curiosities of all sorts; knickknack items crowd every square inch of shelf space and windowsills. While the TV show’s credit music dies down, Mr. Bradbury peers around the room through his thick glasses while he tells us he’s waiting for inspiration. That broken clock over there or that odd piece of jigsaw puzzle here; or perhaps the cracked African voodoo mask in the corner sitting next to a mirror in whose reflection dangles a Cupie Doll hanging from the ceiling. He feels a story in that one, he tells us. A story waiting to be written if he but listens.

Well, I’m listening right now, searching for a thread of inspiration or direction, but all I hear is my computer’s cooling fan and a strange thumping outside my window. I get up from my chair and press my face against the glass. A shadow brushes the window pane one-eighth of an inch from my eyes. A dark hand thrusts through the dirty glass, grabs me, pulls me through the tiny window without my body even breaking it. Cold air fills up my lungs and – – shivering in an unexplainable chill and surrounded by a musky odor like damp wolf hair – – I am whisked effortlessly up into a treetop. From there I see a light shining from my bedroom-office window. Is that me looking through it?

+ + + + +

Ray Bradbury passed away in 2012. He was not only one of my favorite writers but an inspirational figure to thousands of young writers everywhere. I am grateful he left behind such a rich legacy for us to enjoy for centuries to come.

Read Full Post »

FFT: Bacon Roulette

FRIDAY FOOD THING

I am a bacon aficionado. I have no scruples opening up those cardboard sample windows on every package of bacon in the grocery store cooler until I find one that has a conspicuous absence of fat. Or, carving away the fat from within purchased packages and returning it (the fat) to the store from which I purchased the bacon. “See this?” I pleasantly explain at the Customer Service counter while dangling my Ziplock bag of pork fat . “Six ounces of FAT in a sixteen-ounce package of premium bacon!”

Since I rarely get an acceptable response other than personal agreement, I have come up with my own explanation as to what’s really going on with bacon:

1. Pigs are getting  fatter.
2. Packaging technologies are getting better at displaying only what manufacturers want us to see.

Browsing the processed meats display cooler (one of the most heavily trafficked areas in any grocery store) for a great-looking package of lean bacon is difficult. There are so many different types of bacon, hot dogs, sausage, scrapple and assorted meats shoved into the same display area that’s it difficult to tell which item tag belongs to which item. Bad design: time consuming, frustrating and confusing within a crowd of people vying for space while checking out the goods, especially when I am not the only one peeking through the clear plastic window of each and every one to make sure that the particular package does indeed contain bacon rather than pork fat.

Sometimes, a line of shopping carts pile up such that the patrons trapped in-between cannot even move, moreover browse the bologna labeling. As a result, savvy shopping cart drivers often park their carts in nearby aisles in an attempt to avoid the gridlock, resulting in mini-traffic jams all over the store.

I think it would make sense for bacon manufactures to package bacon with a representational slice clearly visible through the front window of the packaging and to remove the cardboard flaps altogether from the rear side of the packaging. Who wants to buy a package of bacon with an already torn open cardboard window pane anyhow?

Read Full Post »

Duck – Duck

One day while cruising Lake Whitehurst in my “Molly B” kit-built canvas canoe, I discovered an errant duck egg sitting in an abandoned nest on a weedy shoreline. There were perhaps six or seven broken and hatched eggshells scattered about. Later, library research revealed that a ninety-six degree incubation temperature 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 a fuzzy “Duck-Duck” emerged — a bizarre 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’s education included long swimming sessions paddling within Molly B’s wake. But no matter how hard I tried to ditch the duck in the months to come, no matter how fast I paddled, Duck-Duck managed to keep up.

Mom became quite fond of Duck-Duck; even our dog, Yankee, accepted this innocuous, feathered sibling as an equal at the 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 waddled Duck-Duck over to the Norfolk Botanical Gardens Petting Zoo (less than 1/2 mile away), where he was an immediate hit with the clamoring kiddies. Cleverly, and unnoticed by the petting 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 knew I had moved through another important part of childhood: it was time to leave the duck behind.

That night Yankee waited patiently beside her dog bowl for her friend, but after a while she made the dog food disappear.

+ + + + +

Update: Five decades later when eyeballing multitudes of ducks as they swim past my dock, I often catch myself wondering about Duck-Duck. Could it be that one over there with the weird mixed coloring is a descendent of a Norfolk Botanical Gardens Petting Zoo escapee?

Read Full Post »

Little Girl Fishing

The other day while sitting on the dock just after sunrise, I heard and then saw a bass boat stepping down off its plane way up at the mouth of my cove. After a while the boat trolled into view around a weedy point. Sitting in the rear seat was a young girl, maybe six or seven years old. She was so small that her pink tennis shoes dangled a foot above the carpeted platform of the boat. While dad manipulated the trolling motor and cast his lure into the edges of the weeds, the little girl was carefully watching him and casting her own lure in and out of tight areas of cover.

She was quite good at it.

I remember how excited I always became when Grandpa announced he’d be taking me fishing on the following day, and I recall how those long hours leading up to a sunrise fishing trip dragged on and on forever just like Christmas Eve. As I watched the young girl casting out her spinner bait and retrieving it slowly, I felt a connection to something infinitely pure, and for the briefest glimmer of time I was allowed to experience a gift: sharing the exact same thrill the young girl had surely felt when dad plopped her down in the boat and headed out into a day that would be profoundly remembered by the grown-up girl years later when she headed out with her own child for a glorious day of fishing with mom.

+ + + + +

Note: because my friend, Rich knows how much I enjoy fishing, and because he remembers the Little Girl Fishing story of mine from more than a decade ago, he sent me this outstanding viral video link: Little Girl Catches Bass on a Barbie Fishing Pole is what fishing is all about.

Thank you, Rich, and thank you Grandpa.

Read Full Post »

Where Cool of Fall meets…

Mornings are something special at Lake Gaston when nighttime temperatures drop below the lake’s surface temperature; where cool of fall meets  warmth of summer, fog happens. The period of time just before the fog moves on is transformational: in a matter of minutes visibility can increase from zero to hundreds of yards, a dawning of distance and acuity, reality and rebirth.

Carl Sandburg got it right in his poem, “The Fog”…

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Read Full Post »

Yum your tummies all day long

For someone like me who swears that McDonald’s Egg McMuffin is one of the finest fast food items offered on this planet or elsewhere, I applaud McDonald’s latest marketing announcement that breakfast will now be served all day long beginning October 6, 2015.

Although the thought of being able to order a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin any time I want makes my tastebuds blush and my feet tap lightly on the floor beneath my keyboard as I write this, I can’t help but wondering:

1. Will breakfast items be prepared in bulk during regular breakfast hours and then nuked later in the day as they are needed?
2. And if not—since McDonald’s fish sandwich is the second finest fast food item offered on this planet or elsewhere—will the McDonald’s afternoon menu eventually be offered during normal breakfast hours?
3. Finally, by golly, is there any chance McDonald’s will offer to compensate me for “McBreakfast Yum your tummies all day long” marketing rights?

All I gotta do now is wait a bit before I drive into town and buy a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin for lunch.

+ + + + +

copyright© 2015 by Simply Tim’s Blog Spot

Read Full Post »

The Crash of Tuesday Last

I do not normally run around naked at 2 AM with the blue beam of a flashlight sweeping my roofline and treetops for the crush of a massive fallen tree.

An hour earlier I had been reading peacefully in bed, my softly backlit iPad wooing me back to sleep. That was when The Crash of Tuesday Last yanked me screaming from bed while outside the terrifying death-groan of an oak tree ripped chunks of timber and brick masonry from my rooftop.

Except for the naked part, I must have looked like a bare-footed Agent Mulder in an X-Files episode searching the treetops in the dead of night within the beam of an FBI-grade Magna-Light. Rain fell. I was cold. Thunder grumbled overhead. I found nothing.

The next morning, with the benefit of a spectacular sunrise, I searched again. I found neither fallen tree limbs nor damaged roof. Just another nighttime mystery.

Until yesterday afternoon when I opened the door to my spare bed/storage room and discovered my antique glass collection scattered on the floor. Errant pieces of of dark Depression Glass and shards of crystal bowls that had been gleaned through decades of countless yard sales and impromptu garage rummage events… gone, just like that. Turns out that an aging,  wall-mounted bookcase built in 1982 had finally decided it could no longer support the weight.

Some things are not meant to be. But the good new is part of my collection survived, along with idiotic mementos from my fragmented past.

How about that Pat Boone Speedy Gonzales record album? I won it as a prize back in the day, and managed to get it autographed by former Chief Justice, Earl Warren. My family was living near Athens, Greece at the time, and I was a Boy Scout competing in a swimming completion, and… well, that is  another story for another time.

+ + + + +

copyright© 2015 by Simply Tim’s Blog Spot

Read Full Post »

Train Time: a Tribute

(original story circa 2002)

Each week Mom used to pack me up in the front seat of an old Packard and drive through the Indiana countryside to a spot not far away, where a train track cut through miles and miles of cornfields. I stood patiently counting crows that congregated on twin vanishing strips of telephone wires, narrowing towards each corn tipped horizon. After a while the tracks began to vibrate softly, loosening tiny grains of sand that danced where they touched the magic steel rails. With each passing second my little boy’s brain filled with the thrill of an as-yet unseen locomotive, soon to be overwhelmed by the slow, steady rumble of an approaching train.

“Train time!” shouted Mom.

Where the tracks curved out of view, hidden by corn stalks and refracted sunlight, a wondrous engine appeared. A single headlamp — brighter than the sun — flashed momentarily; then, a piercing shriek from a  whistle that scattered crows in all directions. Just to be sure, Mom held my hand in hers, and together we felt the rush and massive displacement as the engine pounded past; a wave from the friendly engineer, another screech from the whistle just for me. The wheels growled with a steel-on-steel voice so deep and regular and resonating it made my insides ache. The pavement all around shook and shook and shook. Unimaginably huge cars thundered past — each one with a different sound — and in-between each tonal shift, stroboscopic shadows flickered rhythmically where sunlight was interrupted.

Boom, boom, boom, boom. . .

All too soon the caboose rattled past, cartoon-like, chasing the diminishing train back into the cornfields. The dancing grains of sand and sound subsided along with my pounding heartbeat.

(present day)

Tim says: this is one of my all-time favorite Simply Tims, ever.

+ + + + +

copyright© 2015 by Simply Tim’s Blog Spot

Read Full Post »

“Wish I didn’t know now…”

One of my favorite songs is Against the Wind, by Bob Seger. The song was released in 1980 at a time in my life when I was young and foolish and free and impressionable and just beginning to travel down a path that eventually delivered me to where I am now. Hell, yes. Against the Wind was kick-ass back then. The song was so popular and so much air time was given to it that it captured a Grammy Award that same year and embedded itself into the hearts and minds and consciousness of millions of people. Me included.

Changing our points of view is what good art, literature, music and poetry is all about: a glimpse, a sound, a special light or shadow, a hint, the glimmer of something forgotten or sensed for the first time, a recollection or fleeting scent; when it happens we may not even be aware that something amazing has melded with our souls. Bob Seger songs are good at doing that. “Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then” is a line from Against the Wind that has stuck with me through the years. Although the words refer to an obvious love affair gone wrong, as I grew older and less foolish and less impressionable, the lyric’s interpretation took on various and more ominous undertones.

Mom passed away in April of this year. She was 95 years old. She once mentioned to me during one of our daily early morning coffee break telephone chats that she had been puzzling over how the things that we learn to do better as we grow older would have helped us so much more if we had known about them when we were young enough to appreciate them better. Wish I didn’t know now what I should have known then.

I can live with that. Mom, I will miss you.

+ + + + +

copyright© 2015 by Simply Tim’s Blog Spot

Read Full Post »

Gluttony Dogs

I am about to become a hypocrite, so let me get that out of the way right up front. I’m a hypocrite because many years ago, when I was a PM Magazine story producer for WBRZ TV in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I produced a “Hot Chile Pepper Eating Contest” feature story sponsored by WBRZ. The contest took place in a steamy Cajun bayou bar on a Friday night. A hot steamy night. The story was so entertaining it was included on PM Magazine’s national reel. I enjoyed writing the script and editing the story, and although the contestants were some of the craziest people I had ever met, I enjoyed being at the event and even thought it somewhat socially redeeming.

How does that make me a hypocrite?

I recently watched several minutes of the 2015 Nathan’s Famous 2015 Hot Dog Eating Contest before switching channels. Unlike my Hot Chile Pepper Eating Contest, I found the hot dog eating contest a disgusting display of gluttony and uncomplimentary commentary indicative of why the American lifestyle is often perceived as it is by many global communities. What I saw was… embarrassing.

The 2015 Nathan’s Famous 2015 Hot Dog Eating Contest winner consumed an incredible sixty-two hot dogs and buns in ten minutes. Consuming a hot dog was a two-step process. To speed things up a bit, the contestants were allowed to “dip” each hot dog bun in water for several seconds to make them mushy and *easier to shove down the contestant’s throats. The bun-mush mixture was then swallowed separately from the hot dogs themselves, which were crammed into the mouth 2 at a time in a kind of plunger motion.

I suspect my hypocritical perspective change from the perceived humor of teary-eyed contestants plopping hot peppers into one’s mouths compared to the repugnant ingurgitating of beloved all-American hot dogs is as much a matter of being 30-something then vs 60-something now.

“I can eat fifty eggs.”

*I wonder how many eggs Paul Newman’s character could have eaten in the movie, Cool Hand Luke had he been allowed to eat them scrambled instead of hard boiled?

+ + + + +

copyright© 2015 by Simply Tim’s Blog Spot

Read Full Post »

Tree Fall

I recall a visit from my friend, Rich more than a decade ago. It was a particularly beautiful afternoon and we relaxed in the side porch shade, leaning against the railing and gazing into the heavily wooded yard. Rich was talking about Virginia wines and I was staring at a dying pine tree that needed to be cut down. At that very moment the tree tilted over and crashed to the ground with a very loud ka-thump!

“What was that?” asked Rich, searching the shadowy forest.

“Something very strange,” I said. “A tree I was staring at toppled over right when I was looking at it.” I pointed to the tree. “What are the odds of that happening?”

Rich studied the fallen tree in a prolonged silence. “Must have been rotten,” he finally offered.

“Yeah, must have been,” I agreed.

+ + + + +

copyright© 2015 by Simply Tim’s Blog Spot

Read Full Post »

Yum, Yum Cats

“Fancy Feast Broths” (screenie from outstanding *commercial. See bottom of post)

I’m not a cat person, but you already know that: cats are too finicky and… just plain persnickety. The Purina Fancy Feast TV advertisement screenie above — although one heck of an ad — has persnickety written all over it. Even so, whatever is in that bowl, I want some!

What the hell am I’m looking at here to the left anyhow — a delicate Shrimp & Shredded Crabmeat Bisque? A yummy Seafood Veggie Gumbo? Holy smoley. This can’t possibly be cat food. Add a bed of Jasmine rice, a sprig of rosemary, a sliver or two of red onion, maybe a dash of oregano…

Man, oh man.

Although I might consider paying decent bucks in a restaurant for something that looks this tasty, I admit I’m having a difficult time envisioning a cat dipping its whiskers into this exquisite presentation and slurping it up with that prissy, backward-lapping sandpaper tongue-thingy all cat family species share. And afterwards, of course, licking its claw-tipped paws until they are perfectly just so.

This Fancy Feast meal to the right looks like some kind of Creme de la Chicken dish. Or maybe Creme du Chunk Tuna, with shards of carrots and complimentary-color green bits of what — mint, parsley, collard greens, catnip? I know, lets float some shaved parmesan or flaked Asiago cheese, a dash of Cayenne pepper and a dollop of sour cream. Or perhaps just some Baby Swiss, lightly seared, awash in sexy candlelight.

Yum doesn’t get any better that this.

Time for some very serious questions for those of you who are cat people:

1. Does this stuff really come out of the can looking this delicious?
2. Have you ever been, you know, uh — tempted to taste test it?
3. Do cats like carrots?

Yep, I’m not a cat person, but I certainly wouldn’t mind being one at a Fancy Feast Broths dinner table. Hats off to the folks at Purina for making me hungry.

+ + + + +

* Fancy Feast television commercial

+ + + + +

It’s no secret that pet food has been considered as an alternate and much cheaper food source for humans during impoverished times. Apparently, “human grade” pet food is now a reality; the human consumption of non-human grade pet food, often called “free grade”, remains an ongoing debate. Many pet food manufacturers now offer organic product lines for persnickety pet owners.

Read Full Post »