The Alligator

Last February, my little Honda and I took a brief spin through the snow and down into a ditch. Last month, driving very late at night, I hit the biggest alligator that I’ve ever seen. An alligator is what truckers call a piece of tire shed on the highway. I was told years ago that the term originated from the real alligators encountered on Florida highways. Highway alligators are usually retreads off 18-wheelers, and most often they fly apart on the road, normally in pieces no bigger than 2 or 3 feet.

This one was a monster. It must have been the whole tire. It had peeled off in a single strip, coiled up and twisted, lying there sideways across the entire lane of the Indian Nation Turnpike, about an hour this side of Tulsa. It was one o’clock in the morning, pitch black outside. I was engrossed in some radio show far away.

Suddenly, there it was in my headlights, dead ahead. In those first fractions of a second, I thought it might be a deer. Or even a human being. Maybe a dead cow. While I was trying to figure out what it was, part of my brain said, “Swerve!!” The other part said, “You don't time! Hit it straight on!!”

I hit it straight on. The built-in recorder in my brain went into slow-motion. First, a sickening crunch, then about 2 or 3 Gs of downforce, the car is launched about 2 feet off the ground, and I’m thinking, ”Aw, ****!!" But the car lands perfectly straight. Not a moment of lost control, unless you count the time in the air. Four of the five senses, already at DefCon One, listen and smell and watch and feel how the car is driving. I detect a tiny rumble in the front end, but drive on for 20 minutes ‘til a state trooper gets me doing 83 in a 75. I told him about the monster alligator. “Someone could get killed,” I said. He left to check it out.

I was happy that the car was undamaged. Only later did I see the impact scar on the front bumper, and notice that some piece of thin metal was rattling under the car, the transmission was shifting oddly and the air conditioner was blowing hot.

Three thousand dollars later, the Moral:

Live alligators bite; highway alligators bite your wallet.

FEWER LESSES

Being a grammar freak has its good points and its bad points. Good is appreciating the talent and skill it takes to write well. Bad is reading (or hearing) bad grammar.

What has my dander up these days is the misuse of "less." I hear it everywhere:

"Less dollars!"

It's like fingernails on a blackboard, and it seems to have grown exponentially in the past decade.

Even "The New York Times" blogged about it last month.

Being a simple man, I see two possible explanations for the problem: either teachers are not teaching the difference between "less" and "fewer," or students are not learning it.

The former is unlikely; the latter is very likely.

"Fewer," the rule says, "applies to things that are countable."

Therefore, it's fewer dollars and less money.

Fewer gallons. Less water.

So, please -- fewer lesses!

I feel better now...

Ask Not

We are running out of time, and soon it will be too late. Al Gore’s ecological “tipping point” has an evil twin in Finance, and he is at our door. The U.S. must reduce its debt. Not think about it, just do it. I’m talking about virtually nuking the way we have lived and starting over.

We are in this mess because previous congresses and presidents lacked the political will to solve the problems. Doing so would have cost them re-election, most likely, but they would have served their country in the spirit they so earnestly proclaimed in their election campaigns. Democrats and Republicans share this responsibility equally. More importantly, so do we because we allowed it. It is we who must lead now, not our politicians.

There is only one approach that offers a realistic chance of getting the nation out of its fiscal quagmire: a war. A real, no-holds-barred, financially bloody, scorched-earth war against the political, economic and social sloth that has led us here. Here’s a possible war plan:

First, the children. Stop raising them “easy.” Don’t buy them everything they want. Make them earn it. Better still, make them save up for it. Don’t let them play more than one sport at a time. Make them learn music. Teach charity. Remove the TV from their bedrooms. Restrict their computers and cellphones. Make them read a book a week and write letters to their grandparents or cousins. Give them chores. Take them to church. Teach them how to cook, fight, shoot and ride. Teach them humility and manners. Be tough. Be loving. Be a parent.

Second, you. Lead by example. You and your kids save up for their college or they don’t go unless they win a scholarship. Want a new car? Buy it outright or keep and maintain the one you have. To hell with what your co-workers and the neighbors think. If they ask what’s up, explain that you’re a soldier at war to save our country, then recruit them.

Third, Washington. Outlaw lobbyists. End foreign aid. Make banks be banks and nothing more. Take the exotic out of Wall Street: stocks, bonds and commodities only. Give cheaters and frauds long, long jail time.

Fourth, the tax code. Nuke it and go to a flat tax. No write-offs, no deferreds, no loopholes, no exceptions.

Do at least these things – constitutional amendments as needed -- and maybe we can get our country back.

Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do to save it.

The Gift

As a young man, I enjoyed a nearly perfect sense of direction. Rain or shine, winter or summer, I could tell within ten degrees on a compass which direction I was facing. Not everyone my age had this gift. Its display was even met with envy at times. I wasn’t much good at anything else, so it was nice to be good at something.

The gods, however, award such gifts grudgingly. My internal compass began to fade in my 30s, and has long since shut down entirely. Built-in obsolescence, I suppose.

Without that factory-installed compass, I am lost. This is wholly unfair. Mature men need it more than young men, for the young are much more adept at faking it.

My wife has watched this erosion (and happily complained about it) for years. It used to be that I knew which way to turn and she didn’t. This was immensely satisfying. Men, you see, must be acutely aware of their surroundings at all times so as to pounce on any approaching threat.

Naturally, the angst of the missus grew inversely proportionate to my fading sense of direction. The worse it got, the more she dutifully pointed it out. Thanks, babe.

For awhile, I could blame cloudy skies or nighttime for obscuring the sun by which I navigated. That argument survived for about three days.

At length, one of my sons – acutely aware of the crisis – bought me one of those GPS things. Voila! I installed it at once, carefully licking the suction cup on the windshield mount and planting it, just so. It had a for-real compass built in! Screw the cloudy skies! Screw the dark of night! Problem solved!

The gods must have been amused by this. For sport, they inflicted near-record heat on Texas summers. The defenseless GPS began falling off the windshield, clanging right onto the steering column and scaring the crap out of me and the missus.

There are some things one absolutely should not attempt while driving, such as grabbing one’s crotch to protect the boys from incoming.

Only slightly less dangerous is driving while attempting to affix a GPS mount to the inside of a windshield. While steering with both knees to keep the hands free for the task. And at night. And (naturally), while trying to remember directions to an unfamiliar address which you expected to find easily because you had this GPS but which from this moment forward stands not for Global Position System but instead for ***-damned Piece of ****.

I wonder what we did with that old street map . . .

THE TEST

She stood outside the office building, trying to light her one cigarette of the day. She used to smoke a pack a day, but for the past three years she has been cutting down. "Almost there!" she said.

She was nervous, anxious and near tears. She said that she had just come out of her nursing exam and she wasn't sure that she passed. For three years she had read and studied hard and prepared for this day. The hours-long test was over, and in a few days she would know her fate. She would not be able to sleep until then.

So here she stood, trembling a bit but trying to hide it from the others trickling out the door and heading to their cars. She had been so nervous on this day that she asked a friend to drive her to the test site. Now, she waited for her ride to take her back the nearly one hundred miles to the small town where she lived and had studied and crammed for months and months.

She said that she's wanted to be a nurse for years. She couldn't recall when she decided that. She likes helping people, she said. It gives her great satisfaction to help ease another person's discomfort or pain. There's nothing like it, she smiled.

She worries most about the medications part of the rest. See, all candidates must answer at least 75 questions. The student can opt for more, up to two hundred and something, she said. The test-givers randomly assign a few in the class to submit to the whole test. She had opted for the whole battery, and she believes that she did okay except for the very last question. Now she worries. Maybe her whole future in medicine lies in that one, lousy test answer written on a piece of paper in a large room in a tall building in a big city.

She is among hundreds of thousands of nursing students attempting to enter a profession that is begging for qualified practitioners. This woman -- a single mother of three -- may someday tend to your mother or father, or maybe even to you, or your spouse.

If she passes today's exam.

Wish her well. Tell her will that it is an important calling that she has answered. Ask any doctor: a good RN is worth his or her weight in gold.

We need everyone to be really good at what he or she does, actually. We are Americans, after all.

We are family.

We are the American family.

Obama's Oil

That's the message being broadcast everywhere. It's the President's fault. Well, okay, he didn't actually cause the spill, but he hasn't done enough and quickly enough to fix it. Yeah, that's it.

"Why has the Bush Administration been so slow to intervene into what was from the first day obviously a major environmental crisis?"
--The Los Angeles Times
March 30, 1989
(six days after the Exxon Valdez disaster)

Back then, there was public debate about whether to allow oil and gas exploration in ANWR -- the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Bush administration -- barely two months into its first term -- was for it, but the Exxon Valdez disaster killed the idea. The Obama administration recently proposed allowing it 50 miles off the East Coast. The BP disaster has now killed that idea, too.

The fact is: we Americans demand fossil fuels and oil companies meet that demand. Government is supposed to protect us from shoddy practices but it cannot. Whistle-blowers go unheard until there's a disaster (think Countrywide, undertrained pilots, ignored intelligence).

That's SOP unless and until we change it.

THE GREEN ROOM

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. –The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

It wasn’t a 30-yard fence, but a patio we had enclosed to create an additional room. Never mind that we never used the darned thing. For one thing, it’s ugly, with siding all ‘round, and emerald green indoor/outdoor carpeting laid by the previous owner. For another, we’re just not “outside” people: we don’t go camping, hiking, picnicking or any such thing. At most, once a year we drive to a remote spot to watch the 4th-of-July fireworks over downtown. We’re pasty-white indoor folk.

So there it was, an outdoor-indoor room that needed painting. I knew how to paint a wall, but it had been awhile. “Preparation,” a housepainter once told me, “is the thing. Get all your gear on-site, ready.” So I prepared exactly nothing. How hard can it be? I thought. Just paint the damned thing.

The wall that we created to enclose the room was made of fence wood, board-on-board. At the time, we thought it was a good choice. It was not. It soaked up the paint like a sponge. An hour into the task, I had completed one wall when the phone rang. A friend and I talked for half an hour. By then, the paint roller had stiffened a bit. *sigh*

And what’s that on the floor?? A big drop of paint that went unnoticed ‘til now. And another over there! Jeez.

Thus it went for the next three hours until I’d had enough. Clean-up took another 45 minutes because paint rollers hold a lot of paint.

Tonight I sit here, achy and hungry. My arms and shoulders are threatening legal action against my brain, and my jeans are sporting new designs that suspiciously resemble painted finger wipes.

Tomorrow, the remaining two walls.

Don’t say a word; two walls in one afternoon ain’t bad. But if you spot Huckleberry Finn, tell him I'd like a word with him.