Creature Comfort

Slee rises from the melting snow in the flower bed alongside our backyard shed. (photo by Lon Horwedel)

Most kids fear they have monsters living in their closets or under their beds. I have one living in the backyard outside my bedroom window… literally.

He’s been there so long now, I sort of take him for granted, but he still freaks out the neighbor kids when they come over to play.

I created my monster 23-years ago in a dusty, ceramic studio on the ground floor of Siegfried Hall at Ohio University. Like most of my ceramic projects, he wasn’t meant to be a monster at all; he just sort of turned out that way.

You see I wasn’t exactly Rodin when it came to clay (unless Rodin was a demolitions expert) because it didn’t matter if my piece was hand built or thrown on a wheel, somehow I always managed to turn something as simple as an ash tray or a candy dish into a lethal piece of C4. In fact, I was so adept at accidentally trapping air pockets into clay that none of my fellow students dared fire any of their pieces with mine for fear their precious vases, bowls, or flower pots would end up as nothing more than mosaic fragments scattered about the floor of the kiln.

Amazingly, despite my aptitude for destruction, a few of my projects somehow managed to come out of the kiln in one piece. Oddly enough, these pieces usually weighed in around 35 pounds. Once I discovered my “extremely large” ceramics projects had a much higher survival rate, it led to a whole string of massive works. My gigantic creations in clay sure seemed like a good idea at the time, but it kind of backfired once I realized I actually had to take them home at the end of the quarter.

Thus began a slow migration of my incredibly heavy masterpieces, one carload at a time, from my rented house at Ohio University, to the front porch of my parent’s home four hours away. It took the better part of the school year to finally heave the entire haul, all 1,500 pounds of it, safely north and out of my sight. 

For whatever reason, my mother didn’t seem to mind, and once she recovered from her hernia after moving the stuff into is new home, she actually grew fond of my work - especially the monster figure that started out as a bust of myself before morphing into more of a Sleestak-like creature from Land of the Lost, due to my lack of ability.

It actually did look like me at first, but because I used such a large volume of clay, once I got past the shoulders and up to the head, things went a bit awry. The weight of the wet clay made the skull begin to sink inward, prompting me to try and stabilize it with modern technological advances like wads of crumpled up paper towels, hair dryers and props made from broken broomsticks.

But it was no use. By the time my clay had become leather-hard, the head of my bust was so misshapen it looked more like the Elephant Man than it did me, so I did the only thing I could think of – I added a forked tongue and some fangs, and then I slapped on some green glaze and turned it into a monster. The only thing left was to fire it in the kiln, which sounds easy enough, but if you think my finished projects were heavy, double the weight for the unfinished ones.

My instructor wasn’t sure if my “slightly larger than life” monster/bust could even be lifted, let alone fit in the kiln, but with the help of the entire class, we carefully extricated the beast from its three-week home on the worktable, slowly loaded it onto a Radio-Flyer wagon, and then rolled it toward the kiln.

To be safe, they shut down Siegfried Hall for the day in case things went horribly wrong during the firing process, and after we crammed my monster bust into the kiln, I hopped on my bike and rode as fast as I could to my house on Mound Street a mile and a half away, where I sat on my front porch and watched for mushroom clouds to appear on the horizon.

A day later, we all returned to find that not only was Siegfried Hall still standing, but the kiln had miraculously held as well. Slowly, we peeled opened the kiln door and found a brilliant, green monster greeting us with a forked-tongue smile. It was far cooler than I ever could have expected.

In the years that followed, Slee (as we took to calling him) became a cult hero in my hometown, especially during Halloween when my mother would put glowsticks inside his eye sockets, making him even more eerie.

Then one day, apparently when my parents realized the weight of my works had begun to damage the foundation of their porch, my mother told me I should take Slee back to Michigan and give him a new home.

My wife wasn't as enamored by my artistic talent as my mother. She wanted nothing to do with poor old Slee, but I couldn’t just throw him away. Because my wife feels sorry for my taste, she compromised and let me put him up against our backyard shed were he now acts as a scarecrow, a snow gauge and a comforting site whenever I gaze out our bedroom window.

Unfortunately, the last few years haven't been too kind to Slee. His forked tongue and one of his fangs were busted off by a wayward baseball last summer, and his incredible density has sunk him several inches into the earth. But he’s still my favorite work of art and I always smile when I picture the face of the archaeologist who unearths him from the flower bed next to our shed 1,000 years from now.

 

 

 

 

 

The End of an Era

Ann Leidy, center, holding a photo of her late husband John, is surrounded by her children, from left, Ellen, Liz, Peter, Mary, and John, Sunday afternoon in front of the John Leidy Shop in downtown Ann Arbor on its last day of business. (photo by Lon Horwedel)

John Leidy couldn’t have known it would have been like this. He couldn’t have known that hundreds of townsfolk, and quite a few from out of town, would stop by and pay their respects to the gift shop he started back in the late fall of 1951 as it closed its doors for good this past Sunday after 58 years in the business.

He couldn’t have known that a store stocked with inanimate table settings, crystal, porcelain, and other fine gifts, could be filled with such warmth … but it was. 

How could it not be?

The store was built on the premise of customer service, and anyone in Ann Arbor who knew John Leidy, will gladly tell you he was the kindest man you’d ever want to meet. And that goes double for his five children, including his youngest daughter Liz, who took over the store after her father’s death in 1993.

If Liz Leidy Arsenault isn’t the friendliest woman you’ve ever met in your life, then you just haven’t met her yet. Liz refuses to do anything but smile, and if there was a hint of sadness at the demise of her and her father’s store, she kept it to herself.

Which isn’t to say there weren’t plenty of tears flowing as several hundred patrons, friends, and even passers by, stopped into the John Leidy shop one more time to both pay their respects, and hopefully snatch up one last elegant plate, cup, ornament, or piece of crystal, to help keep alive any spark of memory from the little store on Liberty Street they all loved so much.

As a testament to John Leidy, all of his children, not just Liz, were there to bid adieu to the store. His sons John and Peter, and daughters Ellen and Mary, joined Liz and their mother Ann, to meet and greet all those who came to say goodbye, as they said goodbye themselves.

Liz peeks in the storefront window at all the messages left behind by loyal customers.

It’s been a tough stretch for Liz, starting in 2006, when half of the shop closed due to the sagging business climate, and ending Sunday, when a combination of the changing times and the economic downturn made it all but impossible for the shop to remain viable.

It wasn’t an easy decision for Liz to close the store, one that I’m sure cost her and her siblings several nights of sleep, but she had no idea how tough it was going to be on her store’s loyal customers.

“I’ve become everyone’s therapist.” Liz said, noting that every day since she announced the store was going to close a little more than a month ago, patrons have been pouring in asking her “what are we going to do?”

Messages left behind.

“I feel sorry for the older folks,” she said, “because this (the store closing) really makes them feel old.”

As one despondent customer put it, “This was the only place I could go to find such special items … and now it’s not going to be here.”

Worse yet was the daily barrage of customers asking Liz what she “was going to do,” or the false confidence they tried to instill in her by assuring her that no matter what her next endeavor, it was sure to be a huge success.

The gestures were nice and heartfelt, but as Liz put it, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

None of that mattered on Sunday. Not the uncertain future. Not the amazing past. The only thing that mattered was the here and now - the nieces and nephews, the brothers and sisters, the long-time loyal customers, and the even longer-time loyal employees. This day was for them. A closure of sorts, or at least a memorial service with really, really nice table settings for sale.

Bagpipes played. People laughed. People cried. Peter and Ellen sang a medley of songs with John Leidy- inspired lyrics to tunes ranging from “These Are a Few of My Favorite Things” to “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

It was all fun and good until Fred Sleator, husband of Lyn Sleator, an employee at the shop for 41-years, walked out the front door with a ladder in hand, and started taking down the letters of the John Leidy sign from above the main display window, until all that was left was a shadow of each letter.

The finality of it all was too much for Ellen, who cried as she hugged her niece Hannah, while gazing at the store front - Hannah still clutching the letter “h” handed to her moments earlier by Sleator.

Ellen Wilhite and her niece Hannah, fight back tears as they watch the John Leidy sign being dismantled.

John sat inside the store, looking out the front window with an expressionless face. Mary and Peter milled about and took photos. Ann clutched a picture of her late husband taken off the wall from inside the store. And Liz Leidy Arsenault did what she does best, what she always does - she smiled, only this smile was a tinged with a hint of sadness.

The end of an era had come, and it was happy, and it was sad - and it was everything in between. And you knew it signaled much more than that, and you knew it was important, even if you couldn't pinpoint why. But whatever it was, you knew one thing for sure - after 5 o'clock on Sunday, things would never be the same.

A mother and cancer - Part 2: "Cancer's Gift"

My parent's gravesite - a black marble bench for us kids to sit on when we come and visit. (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

The decision to go ahead with cancer treatments was probably tougher and more painful for my mother than the treatments themselves. After all, by going through with it, she was going back on her word. She always vowed she would “eat a gun” before she would put herself through that hell. But there she was, last week at the Cleveland Clinic, being fit for a modern-day, but really more medieval, stabilization mask to help keep her perfectly still while the doctors radiate the tumor in her throat - five times a week, 38 times in all.

Of course, the 24-hour-a-day chemo drip she’ll have to endure the first five days won’t be a picnic either.  Everywhere my mother goes that first week in the hospital, she’ll have an IV pole as a dance partner, slowly poisoning her body one drip at a time until every rapidly dividing cell in her body, good or bad, is painfully extinguished. Despite all that, she knows the first week will be her best - the radiation won’t start to really do its damage until much later, and the chemo most likely won’t have her begging for mercy until the middle of the second week.

That first week she’ll still have her hair, she’ll still have an appetite, and she’ll still have her teeth. Later in the treatments, the chemo will claim her hair and her desire to eat, and the radiation probably will cost her some teeth. If her throat swells too much from the treatments she also may need a tracheotomy and a feeding tube - that’s if she’s lucky enough not to die before any of the side effects kick in.

So, why do it? Certainly none of us kids, or my father, wants to see her suffer, but we don’t want her to die either. In the end, it didn’t really matter what we thought, this was her decision, and hers alone. What probably tipped the scale was knowing that if she did nothing, she wasn’t going to die peacefully in her sleep six months down the road. She knew, and the doctor’s affirmed, that by doing nothing, her last six months would be a slow and painful trip to her demise until she either choked to death on her tongue or died from starvation.

Whatever route my mother took one thing was for sure - it was going to suck. So, in a world of suck, she decided to take a route that at least gave her a chance for survival, knowing, of course, that even if she does survive, the cancer someday will return and kill her.

But cancer, with all its power to take away life one malignant cell at a time, also gave me a gift. After 10 years of watching my mother battle this horrific disease, as well as seeing my aunt, my best friend, and countless others perish at its doorstep, I can honestly say it no longer strikes fear into my soul. I’ve become numb to the word “cancer.” It carries no meaning for me anymore. At this point it’s nothing more than my zodiac sign. Cancer takes away so much that it’s hard to see any good it can do. But this squamous cell carcinoma, the same cancer that will eventually kill my mother, also gave me something in return.

It’s given me a decade of not taking anything for granted, of treating each day with my mother still on this planet as a true gift. It lets me fully enjoy our phone conversations and it helps me relive my wonderful childhood every time I return home for a visit. We all knew the day would come – it will come for us all – but my mom’s cancer has shortened her time line and made everyone in our family soak in each moment more fully and with a much greater perspective.

As gruesome as it may sound, cancer has given us the chance to prepare for the moment, even my parents, who recently bought a plot in our hometown cemetery  - a beautiful black marble bench with all our names engraved in the stone. My mom wanted us to be comfortable if, and when, we ever came to see her grave -so much so, she gave us a place to sit.

Cancer also has given us a chance to do things with my mom we might not have done otherwise. My sister took my mom to Italy a few years ago to fulfill one of her lifelong dreams. My brothers make it a point to come by the house as much as possible, and my wife and I did what little we could do by giving my mother three grandchildren she could teach to swear and pass on a lifetime of dirty jokes.

In the next six weeks I’ll be making frequent trips to Ohio to help out my mother as much as possible. In that time, I’ll see her health steadily decline as she fights to keep up her strength, and even though I’m not overly religious (spiritual for sure, but not overly religious) I will pray.

I will pray for a lot of things, but mostly I'll pray my mom will stay strong and keep up the fight, because as nice as it is, neither I, nor my siblings, nor my father, want to sit on that bench at Riverside Cemetery any time too soon.

A mother and cancer - Part 1: "The shoe has dropped"

Mom sleeping on the couch with dad, circa 1982. (photo by Lon Horwedel)

The first shoe dropped 10-years ago when my mother was diagnosed with cancer (squamous cell carcinoma) in her throat. She was only 53 at the time, but already she'd lived about 14-years longer than she thought she would.

My mother did everything early - by choice - because she figured she’d be dead before she turned 40, just like her mother who died from ovarian cancer at the age of 39.

My mom was only 13 when that happened, but really she was more like 30. She had to be. For two years she watched in horror as radioactive rods were thrust vaginally into my grandmother’s body as a last ditch effort to kill the cancer. It didn’t work, and witnessing her poor mother having her “insides burned out” before she died, left my mother with a minefield of emotional scars that never really healed.

While my grandmother was slowly dying, it was my mother who did all the cooking and cleaning for her family - way too much to lump onto the shoulders of a young girl trying to come to grips with mortality. And when my grandfather remarried shortly after my grandmother’s death, it put my mother over the edge. She wanted out, and she found her out by getting married at a young age – real young, 16.

My grandfather, of course, didn’t approve of my mother’s plans, so she crossed the Ohio border with my dad and got married in Michigan where it was legal to wed at such a young age without parental consent. But when she returned to Ohio, she was stung again, this time by her school, who expelled her for being married - not pregnant, just married. The school didn't want her "influencing" other girls in her class, so my mom, the smartest person I ever met, never graduated from high school, and that left behind even more scars that never really healed.

When she was 17, she had her first kid - my sister Dina - and by the time she was 23, she had three more. I can’t imagine having one kid at that age, let alone four, but I never thought about any of that back then. Back then I only knew it was cool having the youngest mom come and visit my school on parent’s day. While other kid’s parents looked old to me, my mom always looked young and pretty. It made me so happy I wore it like a badge of honor.

Unfortunately, the Tour de Kids took its toll on my mother’s reproductive organs. Five years after my youngest brother was born; she had most of her ovaries removed as well as a hysterectomy. At that point, two things were certain, at 28, she was done having kids, and if she did die before she was 40, it wouldn’t be from ovarian cancer. Again, more scars, but at least these scars would heal.

Through it all, my mom (still a child herself) raised me, my brothers, and my sister, on heavy doses of The Beatles, The Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Moody Blues and The Who. She introduced us to rock operas like Tommy, Hair, and Jesus Christ Superstar. My dad was guilty too, often looking like he and Peter Fonda had just walked off the set of Easy Rider with his long sideburns and a denim jacket that had a giant marijuana patch sewn on the back above the words “Do yourself a favor!” To me, my parents had it all figured out, they knew all the answers, they were, dare I say it ... cool! But now I realize they were just growing up too - right along with her kids.

When my youngest brother flew the nest and the house was finally empty, my mother was barely 40. She’d outlived her mother ... and her prophecy. The years that followed wouldn't be so kind. Her sister Lori would die young from lung cancer, and her brother Frankie would die young as well from a freak allergic reaction. She was devastated. Again, more scars.

When my wife was pregnant with my youngest son, we got the news about my own mother's cancer. Cancer comes in so many packages, you never know what to expect. Some people beat it; some people don't. And some people will just battle it, and battle it, and battle it, until it finally kills them. 

I didn't know what my mother would do, or how she would react, but I knew my mother wasn’t about to go to battle and lose. She’d spent several years working for the Erie County Chapter of the American Cancer Society. She’d seen plenty of cancer’s ravaging effects up close, but more importantly, she’d also seen the ravaging effects of cancer treatments. No, this wasn’t a path my mother would travel. She was fine with surgery as a treatment option, but there was no way she was going to go through radiation or chemotherapy.

For the past ten years my mother has cheated death. In 2005 she even spent a month in the hospital in a coma, but somehow she pulled through. “God has chewed me up and spit me out so many times I’ve lost count.” She told me. With every recurrence, she’s been lucky enough to have the skilled doctors at the Cleveland Clinic cut away at the cancer and buy her a few more years. A few more years of seeing my kids, her only grandchildren, get older - a few more years of watching her own kids continue to grow.

Slicing out a cancerous tonsil bought her an extra birthday; the removal of her soft palette - another Christmas; hacking away a third of her tongue – the Fourth of July. Whenever the cancer would return, the doctors would cut ... and cut ... and cut, until they hit clean margins. 

But this time it’s different. This time there are no clean margins. This time there’s nothing left to cut. This time a tumor has lodged itself deep inside her throat near her epiglottis, spreading to her lymph nodes as well. This time the cancer is invasive - Stage IV. This time she's either going to have to undergo the chemotherapy and radiation treatments ... or be dead in six months.

After 10-years, the other shoe has dropped.

 

…to be continued.

 

 

Sweet Tooth

The heavenly sight of chocolate filling the cases at Kilwin's. (photo by Lon Horwedel)

Sunday is Valentine’s Day – a day for love and romance, a day for flowers and jewelry, but more importantly … a day for chocolate!

Ahh, chocolate. In a world that looks down on, or even makes illegal, most sins of pleasure, somehow, chocolate gets a free pass. In fact, I could walk out my front door right now, drive down to the corner gas station and score a Snickers bar, or better yet, a Baby Ruth, and not have to worry about a thing.

Of course, sometimes I feel like a nut ... sometimes I don’t, and if it melts in my mouth and not in my hands, that’s cool too. But this time of year, I’m really more a sucker for the Forrest Gump boxed variety of chocolates, you know, the kind where you bite into one hoping for a cherry filling, only to find you got maple cream instead. Not to worry, I have perfect, boxed chocolate etiquette - I always finish what I start, even if it’s something as horrid as mocha or rum. My sister, on the other hand, will happily take a bite out of a chocolate and then put the half-eaten piece back in the box if she gets one she doesn’t like.

When I think back to my love affair with the dark, smooth and creamy, it probably started when I was five or six. That’s when Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory came out in the movie theaters.  At the time I was more of a fruity, candy kind of guy – Chuckles, gumdrops, jellybeans, and that sort of thing, but when poor Charlie Bucket found that dollar in the street and used it to buy a Wonka Bar, it changed my life.

Just the way he slowly unwrapped that candy bar with his grubby little fingers had me salivating in my seat before he even got to the chocolate. By the time he found that stinkin’ golden ticket, I was in a cocoa coma (although I have to admit, Augustus Gloop plopping into Wonka’s chocolate river kind of grossed me out).

But what if, like Willy Wonka, you lived in that world of chocolate every day? Could you take it? Would the smell of chocolate drive you nuts? Or would you become immune? Would you, God forbid, even get sick of chocolate?

To find out, I visited Kilwin’s Chocolates & Ice Cream in downtown Ann Arbor earlier this week. There I found co-owner Chera Tramontin happily working behind the counter humming to the oldies station playing on the radio. The fact that Tramontin looks nothing like the Biggest Loser contestant you might expect to find behind the counter of a chocolate shop made me wonder if she even liked the stuff, or maybe was allergic to it.

But it turns out she does like the stuff … a lot.

“So, just how much chocolate do you eat in an average day?” I prodded.

“Oh God, that’s embarrassing,” she said, “I don’t even want to answer that … I really don’t want to answer that … I probably consume daily, about a half a pound of chocolate … at least! And when the cook is cooking next door – we have a great cook here, she’s fabulous – and when she’s working on some experimental stuff it’s always ‘try this’ or ‘taste this’ and whew, you’re buzzing by 3 o’clock.”

Tramontin admitted her daily dosage of chocolate rarely has her seeking out lunch. And no, she never gets sick of chocolate – maybe one type of chocolate, but variety seems to be the key.

“I’m definitely dark chocolate, but I switch around depending on my mood … I really do, this week has been caramel and peanut butter.” She laughed.

And what about the stock variety chocolate? The M & M’s and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups of the world? Will she eat those too?

“Oh, I admit it, I’ve become a chocolate snob.” Tramontin said. “I don’t eat that other stuff anymore.”

Apparently, the rest of Ann Arbor also is a little snobby when it comes to their chocolate … or at least more health conscious. Tramontin said the Ann Arbor Kilwin’s branch is the only one that sells far more dark chocolate than it does milk chocolate.

“None of our other stores can believe it.” She said. “We have customers coming in all the time asking us for the percentage of cocoa in our dark chocolate.”

When I told Tramontin about my half-eaten-morsel-leaving sister, she chuckled and then showed me a little Kilwin trade secret.

“See how the swirl on the top that chocolate looks like the letter R?” She said. “That means it has a raspberry filling … and that one that looks like an M - that has a maple nut filling, and this one with the fork marks – that’s a turtle. Now you never have to be surprised again.”

After 20 minutes I could take it no more. The intoxicating scents and the stacks and stacks of fresh chocolates had me standing in a puddle of my own drool. I said goodbye to Chera and walked out Kilwin’s feeling a little like Charlie Bucket after he found his golden ticket – only instead of a golden ticket, all I had was a pocket full of lint!

Happy Valentines Day!

Hair Apparent

My head has been reduced to a proving ground for toy trucks. (photo illustration by Lon Horwedel)

A few weeks ago, while working on my computer at a high school basketball game, a young boy who couldn’t have been older than three, came over and sat next to me. I smiled at the boy. He smiled back. I tried to continue working, but he put his hand on my knee and leaned in closer. I thought maybe he was interested in what was on my computer screen, but he seemed more spellbound by my face. Seconds later, he moved into the bleacher row behind me and leaned up against my back.

I figured someone must be missing him, but no one seemed too concerned, least of all, the young boy. I tried to ignore him, but he was so close I could hear his breathing. Before I knew what happened, he put something on top of my head – toy trucks, it turned out. I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat there as he joyously rolled them back and forth across my hairless pate.

Finally, the boy's mother spotted him (along with everyone else sitting in the bleachers behind me) and laughter erupted. Embarrassed, she came over and tried to pull her playful young son and his toy trucks off my dome.

“So this is what it’s come to?” I thought to myself as I assured the mother that her son’s actions were perfectly fine.

It wasn’t always like this you know. Before the top of my head became nothing more than a state route for toy trucks, I actually had a lion’s mane of gold. In fact, when I was a kid, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind I’d live my entire life looking like Andy Gibb, even if heredity suggested otherwise.

You see, my dad was bald; his dad too, but I was sure I would be different because in a German/Italian family full of nothing but brown-haired, brown-eyed moms, dads, brothers, sisters and cousins, I sprouted forth into the world a blonde-haired, blue-eyed freak of nature. My golden locks were so strikingly odd, my mother was certain I’d been swapped at the hospital for the only other boy born that day - a West Virginian kid named Buttons.

My golden locks and baby blues soon became the talk of the town, often leading to rude comments from other parents like “So, when did you guys adopt?” or “Where did this one come from, Sweden?"As I got older and my hair got longer, and I mean really long (hey, it was the 70’s, what can I say?) the comments changed, but got no less rude. “Your daughter’s gonna be a real looker!" They’d say. I didn’t care, I figured the crude comments were born out of jealousy for my flowing, blonde locks. I took pride in my hair … and it’s length.

I was a hair snob. On hot summer nights, I’d hang upside down from my top bunk and let the fan blow through my freshly washed mane while running my fingers through its silky-smoothness, thus helplessly trapping my younger brother in the bottom bunk with my Narcissism.

The beginning of the end, my senior year in high school.

Everything in my spun-gold-beach-boy world was perfect until the summer after my high school graduation. It wasn’t like my hair started falling out in clumps or anything, but there definitely was a recession of sorts starting to take place.

I convinced myself my slight hair loss only made me look more like Sting, but secretly I was worried my receding hairline wouldn’t stop until I looked more like Phil Collins. No amount of scalp massaging or topical Rogaine could stop the hereditary nightmare that had befallen me. At the ripe, young age of 19, I found myself snagged in the horrid throes of male pattern baldness!

The denial I put myself through was comical at times: I only hung around people shorter than me, I wore hats, and I toyed with the idea of the comb over. Eventually I conceded my fate. I think it happened my last trip to the barber, when, after only two minutes in the chair, he looked at me, scratched his chin and said, “Well … I guess I’m done.” After that, I did the only thing I could think of – I went home and started growing a beard.

Ironically, the only place I seem to have trouble growing hair is on top of my head; the rest of me is fairly gorilla-like. It's gotten so bad, I'm afraid I’ve become that guy at the pool - you know, the one who looks like he’s draped in a bearskin rug when he gets out of the water.

Amazingly, I actually met a woman who likes me bald (I married her right away). My wife happily tells me I look like Ed Harris (maybe it’s the blue eyes) but if I had my druthers, I’d rather resemble Sean Connery. It’s nice of my wife to say these things, but the truth is, those guys look good bald. Me? Not so much.

The problem, I suppose, is that my head is shaped more like a dinosaur egg than an actual human skull. When I had hair, this fact was conveniently hidden, but now there’s no denying it. Worse yet, to prevent a sunburned scalp in the summer, I constantly wear a ball cap which leaves behind a nifty, mid-cranium tan line that makes my head look like a matchstick whenever I take off my hat.

At some point I’ll most likely shave off the remaining hangers on that encircle my scalp and go into full "Yul Brynner mode." Until then, I’ll keep clinging to the precious memories of my adolescent coif and pray my own son will somehow break from tradition.

 

A Winter Kiss

A hoar frost turned my neighborhood into a "winter wonderland." (photo by Lon Horwedel)

Last week winter slammed me to the ground and broke my elbow. This week she picked me up and gave me a kiss. It was just a gentle, little peck on the cheek, but still, it was nice.

In just seven days, the hard-packed snow and ice that broke my wing had been replaced by a true Mother Nature masterpiece. And it’s not like we get a lot of those around here, especially in the dead of winter. You know, the stuff jigsaw puzzles and postcards are made of – real Currier & Ives material.

A rare, hoar frost had set in overnight transforming the entire neighborhood from ugly gray to virgin white. The frozen fog had dressed the naked trees in a brand new skin - a powdered sugar miracle that made them look both brand new and really old all at the same time. Now it was mine to enjoy on a beautiful Sunday morning.

There was no sun, and yet it was bright. I could feel the air’s moisture on my face and I wondered if it was freezing to my beard in much the same way it had frozen to the branches. You know, making me look much older – real Burl Ives material.

Each exhale seemed to freeze in space inches from my face and fall like needles onto my boots, and the dormant grass drooped over from the weight of its brittle payload. One step in, and they’d surely snap under my feet like uncooked spaghetti.

So I stood there and took it all in. I didn’t move forward; I didn’t move backward. I just stood in one place and slowly turned a full circle until I’d taken in all 360 degrees. There were no birds; there was no wind; just a perfect, little moment between Mother Nature and me.

It wasn’t that cold for January, a tropical 30 or 31 degrees, but plenty cold enough to create the meteorological magic that carpeted the landscape before me. 

Every Christmas morning should look this way. Every couple on a first date should walk through this wonderland. Every first kiss should take place right where I was standing.

I soaked it all in for as long as I could until my glasses fogged over.

If Ma Nature was apologizing for my broken limb, she had a nice way of doing it.

“Thanks” I said, to no one on particular.

Then I rubbed my throbbing elbow, and walked home.