When I was a kid, I dropped my then-baby cousin Dean on his head in the kitchen. Mom was pissed. She was babysitting our cousins Tracy and Dean, Tracy being the older of the two. I’m not sure where my brother and older cousin were at that moment; probably scooting around in on their butts in the basement with paper grocery sacks wrapped over their feet, pretending the sacks were cars. That or playing with Legos or something, as these were the pre-Atari years.

Anyway, Dean, who I assure you has grown to middle-aged adulthood and has survived in an almost entirely normal fashion, was toddling around the kitchen and my mom was trying to cook at the stove. Mom instructed me to sit at a kitchen chair and hold onto him while she cooked to keep him from getting underfoot, and I did just that… for a while.

Something distracted me. I don’t remember what, but I know it was something that absolutely required the use of both my hands. Of course, to take care of this immediately impending incident, I had to relinquish control of my cousin for at least a few seconds.

Toddlers have terrible balance, it turns out. Dean did the Nestea Plunge straight onto the kitchen floor. “Bonk!” Toddlers also have great lungs, it turns out, ’cause he screamed louder than I’ve ever heard him scream and he cried for a very long time.

As a child, I “guilted” my mom into quitting smoking.  This may be only true in my imagination, but I like to think it’s so.  I brought home the “smoking stinks” pins and the “smoking is very glamorous” posters, the ones with the hideous woman puffing on a cigarette.  I brought home pictures of black lungs.  Eventually, mom started cutting back and eventually quit smoking.  Mom hasn’t smoked in decades and it was due to my nagging… or possibly she just decided to quit on her own and I remember it differently.

Lately, mom’s not been walking so well.  It apparently has been due to knee pain, which she’s been naturally hesitant to have checked out because of the humanly natural aversion to possibly being told something unpleasant needs to be done to correct the matter.  As a nurse, from listening to her complaints and assessing the symptoms, I knew something unpleasant needed to be done to correct the matter.  So, I became a major pain in my mom’s ass until she decided to get an appointment with an orthopedic specialist (at least I like to think it was my nagging that made her decide to do that).

Her surgery is scheduled for the third week of November.
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Image is a 1972 poster given away free by The American Cancer Society,
not a photo of my mom :)

My mom used to leave my brother and me in the car while she shopped. In my home town, back in the ’70s, people weren’t worried that much about creepy people stealing their kids, and many times the kids didn’t want to go into the stores anyway.  Of course mom would take the keys so we didn’t have any underage driving misadventures, and on really cold days we’d go inside anyway.  You know what? Scratch that, ’cause I do happen to remember playing with the windshield wipers one winter and having the window cleaner fluid freeze up on the glass.

I remember on the times I would be left alone in the car, I would suggest to mom that she bring me a “surprise” from the store, hoping for candy, a HotWheels car, or maybe one of those balsa wood airplanes that was powered by a wound-up rubber band.  When my brother and I were left in the car, sometimes we’d do things like sing songs really loud to get the attention of passersby.  Sometimes we’d fight.  Sometimes we’d compare “pee-pees.”

My cousins were left to their own automobile-confined devices too. I remember once when the four of us (my two cousins, my brother, and myself) were left waiting in my aunt’s Dodge Supervan.  After playing with the furniture and the frig (vans were like little rolling apartments back then), we eventually started playing with the cigarette lighter.  I know I ended up charring the tip of a finger and I think someone else did too, but I don’t remember which one.

When the car in question was a station wagon, good times were had ’cause you could fold down the back seats and the “way back seats” and you’d have a great big flat surface to play on.  Back then, station wagons were HUGE.  If we were left in a regular car, sometimes things got boring.  It’s hard to move around in an Oldsmobile Cutlass.  One time out of sheer boredom I started searching the glove compartment of my mom’s Buick Electra Convertible.  I found a button that I thought might open the top of the car and pushed it.  I heard a clunk, but other than that, nothing seemed to happen.  When my mom got back to the car, I was scolded for having opened the trunk of the car.  “Oh, that’s what that button does,” I thought.

These days, kids are strapped down in their own personal little protective roll cages with so much padding and so many straps they can barely move.  There’s no playing in the back of the station wagon, and hell today’s station wagon is called an SUV and the seats don’t fold down flat in most of those.   No, the kid endures his parents’ frustration and physical struggling to get the belts and straps all right and get all the padding in place for the two mile trip to Target.  Then the kid endures all the same frustration in reverse at the intended destination.  My theory is that kids don’t learn to undo their own car seats out of curiosity and learning, it’s that they don’t want to hear their parents bitch for several minutes while getting pinched in the gut by a strap they can’t get undone.  All that, and the kid never gets any “alone time.”

My dad invented the first automobile cup holder.  He couldn’t really market it, ’cause it was his crotch.  He’d spread his legs open just enough to slide a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon securely between his thighs. Oh yeah, and my dad drank PBR well before the hipsters brought it back from obscurity.

When I was a kid, I thought this was completely normal behavior. I thought everyone’s dad did that. After all, pretty much every one of his friends did it too. I can’t really remember if I thought there was anything inherently wrong with it. I mean, I did understand that drinking too many beers could make you drunk, but I had no idea what that felt like or that it could impair your reaction times or judgement in the way it does, because I had no first-hand experience with that.

I did understand the implications of my dad’s drinking and driving by the time I was ten years old or so… but before that, it was completely normal for me to see an adult swigging a can of beer with one hand while steering with the other.  I even remember taking trips to the drive through liquor store on one of the main streets in my home town.  It was called “Benny’s” and I loved the place because they always gave me bubble gum.

My children won’t experience that.  They won’t see me swilling beer while driving my car and they definitely won’t see my drink perched between my thighs next to my crotch.  No, in modern times, cars have cup holders, and those are for my perfectly harmless four shot mochas.  Yeah, blog about that, kid!

OK, I lied.  I don’t love veggies.  Mom says I used to like celery,carrots, and strained peas. I don’t believe her.  Peas make me wretch.  Seriously, between the flavor and the texture, I start to throw up just chewing them.  Carrots don’t make me throw up, but I don’t enjoy the taste of them at all.  As for celery, I don’t know how I liked the stuff, but I do remember eating it when I was little, or at least I remember helping myself to celery from the frig, anyway.

Mom used to make little celery snacks with cheese or other spread stuff in the little curve crease of the celery stalk.  I specifically remember there being a plate of them in the frig and I vaguely remember getting one for myself at least one time, although I don’t remember eating it.  Maybe I didn’t.  Maybe there’s a 40 year old wilted celery stick with dried mold where the cheese used to be sitting in some long ingnored corner of my mom’s house.  It is entirely possible.  After all, I also remember there being a cat that got shut into a closet only to end up dying there.  I remember finding it on the third shelf from the bottom.  Dad put it in a plastic garbage bag and took it to the curb.  Maybe the cat ate the celery.  Is celery bad for cats?  I think I have a theory forming…

In a nation becoming more and more polarized, neither side seems to want to deal with their share of the blame for what’s happened to our country’s economy, politics, productivity, and world respect.   Everyone’s quick to point fingers, nobody’s into introspection.  It’s the fault of the damned tax-and-spend liberals. The bullheaded Republican Congress is hindering our recovery.  The banks swindled everyone out of their money.  The cops are too violent.  The protesters are a bunch of lazy, dirty hippies.  Really, though, I see problems on all sides.  Picking up a banner and chanting or pointing fingers at the protesters and commenting on their lack of efficacy?  Pfft. Here’s my take from the perspective of an Oakland resident:

• Shame on the BANKS for letting people sign stupid loans with stupid terms and then knowing the loans are bad, selling off the loans as high-rated assets.
• Shame on the BORROWERS for signing such stupid contracts in the first place.  Putting your name on the dotted line to speak for most of your money over the next 30 years is risky enough… add to that doing it for the full selling price of a house with an overinflated value on an interest-only adjustable rate mortage?  Dumb.  Just because someone lets you do something stupid doesn’t mean you should be absolved of responsibility for it.
• Shame on the protesters for not pursuing more negotiations for a clean and orderly protest vs. trashing a public plaza with tents, boards, trash, urine, and misc. crap.  Shame on them for not realizing “freedom of assembly” does not include freedom to set up a shanty town in a downtown park.
  
• Shame on the Oakland Mayor Jean Quan for not organizing a better protest area to avoid trashing a public plaza.  Shame on her for first stating she would allow the protesters to use the downtown Ogawa Plaza and then deciding to break up the encampment at 4:30 in the morning.
  
• Shame on the fools who threw things at the police raising their ire and inciting them to a violent reaction.
  
• Shame on the police for responding to a few people having thrown  bottles and paint with teargas and flash grenade attacks.  Sufficient police presence was made to isolate the few non-peaceful individuals in the crowd and make arrests without causing injury to innocent bystanders.
• Shame on the police for needlessly using rubber bullets and then lying about having done so until evidence was provided to the contrary.
• Shame on the ultra-conservative “Dittohead” types who automatically side with government and the police and big business without considering any opinions from the liberal-minded or moderates.  
• Shame on the “progressives” who automatically side against the police and government, assuming the worst, regardless of their actions or intentions.
• Shame on the police for not realizing they’re part of the 99%.

I used to chew up soda crackers and spit them out to use as hummus-like substance to put on other crackers.  I specifically remember doing this.  I’d make this “hummus” by chomping on the saltine until it was nice and pasty and then I’d spit it out, roll it into a ball, and put it between two crisp crackers.  Sometimes I’d play with the ball of gooey cracker mash like play dough for a while.

Of course, as an adult, the idea of this completely disgusts me.  I don’t think I could even do it on a dare, but then I won’t even eat some regular foods on a dare.  Tomato?  Forget it!  As an adult, it took me a while to get to the point where I’d eat real hummus because it reminded me of my childhood diversion with the saltines.  Only recently I’ve discovered Trader Joes’ garlic hummus, which, when eaten with pretzels or Triscuits is pretty damned yummy.  I’ll even eat the stuff with potato chips or flatbreads, but never saltines!