So Much More Than a Pet

Tags

comic strips, family, pearls before swine, pets

The cartoon above by Pearls Before Swine creator Stephan Pastis ran in newspapers a few months ago, and instantly struck a chord with many folks who have loved and lost an animal who was more a member of the family than just a pet.

I’m sharing the cartoon today because my family recently said goodbye to Keiko, our English Shepherd mix who provided us with so much joy, affection and wet-nosed kisses over 14 years. Keiko was a constant in our lives through job changes, a move across town, heart-breaks and triumphs, and more than a dozen brutally hot Midwestern summers. During her lifetime, Keiko endured two pet cats, her humans’ hectic work schedules, and various yapping little dogs in the neighboring yards. Meanwhile, we tolerated bare patches in the backyard, the constant shedding of dog hair around the house, and the occasional “gift” in the corner of the basement when Keiko couldn’t quite make it outside in time.

Like Edee in Pearls Before Swine, Keiko was a gentle, nurturing dog that neighborhood kids often approached for a quick scratch behind the ears. In more than nine years, she never once growled or snapped at our son, despite the tugging, pulling, and errant karate kicks little boys sometimes inflict on pets. In fact, Keiko was very protective of our child. From the time we brought a three-day old infant home from the hospital, Keiko would bark and growl at any stranger who approached our doorstep, perhaps knowing how much this little baby meant to us. In a way, he was her baby, too.

For me, Keiko was an enthusiastic walking companion, even on days when the thermostat dipped into the teens or soared above 90. For my wife, Keiko was a tricolored shadow, following her from room to room, especially the warm bathroom on cold winter mornings, or the kitchen, where there was usually a pretzel cracker to enjoy.

Like the beloved pooch memorialized in Stephan’s cartoon, Keiko had cancer, and we had to put her to sleep. The staff at the veterinarian’s office were almost as heartbroken as we were. A few days later, they sent us a sympathy card with an image of a dog bounding across the Rainbow Bridge. Fourteen-year-old dogs affect a lot of human lives.

Does a Rainbow Bridge exist? I’d like to think it does. It would be nice seeing Keiko again. The house seems emptier now. Walking the neighborhood sidewalks without holding her lease feels strange. Even our son, who complained of having to let Keiko out several times a day to go pee in her later years, claims that he misses her. I even miss–at least a little bit–vacuuming the downstairs and pulling up gobs of black and white Keiko-hair from the medium-pile carpet.

Our hearts are a little broken right now, and it could be a while before we welcome a new animal into our family. There’ll be no replacing our soft, sweet companion of more than 14 years.

Rest in peace, Keiko.

Keiko, in her younger years.

Cooling off with a friend.

Runaway Hubcaps

Tags

good samaritan, hubcaps, phenomenon, Stephen Roth

When I was younger, I would sometimes drive past a gleaming hubcap on the side of the road, and I would marvel at how that hubcap managed to come to a rest on its edge after careening off of some car or truck. Time and time again, I would see these hubcaps leaning against light posts and street signs. Funny how they always land that way, I thought.

Later, I reasoned that this phenomenon was the work of some Good Samaritans who had propped up the hubcaps so that their owners might spot them more easily.

I was probably about 35 when this finally dawned on me.

Just Joking!

Tags

comedy, humor, jokes, six-year-olds, squirrels

After a few hundred attempts, my six-year-old son told a funny joke for the first time last night.

Here’s the joke:

Q: How do you catch a squirrel?

A: You act like a nut!

Our child has been trying for years to come up with a joke that will make us laugh. “Is that funny?” he’ll ask us after telling a silly, nonsensical knock-knock joke he just made up on the spot. We patiently explain to him that a good joke takes a little time and creativity. Perhaps he should start by memorizing a simple joke and tell that to his friends instead, we’ll gently suggest. We’ll also point out that if you have to ask your audience if a joke is funny, then it probably isn’t.

I know that the squirrel joke is not an original, but every young stand-up has to start somewhere, and our young son delivered the punchline with flawless timing. He is also very good at acting like a nut, so the humor fits his slap-stick comedic style.

The ability to make other people laugh is a formidable social skill and one our son already believes to be important. I hope his sense of humor continues to evolve. The world can be a pretty tough place if you don’t learn how to joke about it, and help others laugh along with you.

I Do Love the Football

Tags

alabama crimson tide, bear bryant, college football, georgia bulldogs, herschel walker, southern miss, west point lake

For me, Labor Day weekend always means the start of football. Every few years or so, pro football will kick off its regular season on the Sunday before the holiday but, more often than not, Labor Day is exclusively tied to college football. Tomorrow and Sunday will bring an unusually tasty menu of big games between traditional powers: Alabama vs USC, Clemson vs Auburn, Texas vs. Notre Dame. I can’t wait to see how it all plays out.

My love for college football started when I was 11 years old. That was 1982, Herschel Walker’s Heisman Trophy-winning season, so I naturally became a devoted Georgia Bulldogs fan. Nobody told me at the time that the Bulldogs would not return to the Sugar Bowl for another 20 years after that season. Maybe I would have chosen to root for Alabama if I had been able to peer into the future.

As the years passed, my football obsession grew. On Labor Day weekend of 1984, my father and I were invited to go water skiing on a friend’s boat at West Point Lake. I didn’t want to go. It was the start of college football, and I intended to plop myself on the downstairs couch, eat popcorn and watch games all day. I finally agreed to go to the lake after my dad dug up a tiny little transistor radio so that I could listen to the action of the Georgia-Southern Miss game.

The Bulldogs had a young, inexperienced offense that year, and Southern Miss was pretty good. The game was back-and-forth between the two teams. As we rode in the boat, watching my friend glide in and out of our wake on his slalom ski, I held the radio to my ear and sweated out the final minutes of the 26-19 Georgia win. I remember that the Dawgs’ Kevin Butler (who went on the play for the 1985 Chicago Bears) kicked four field goals in that game. I went home that day sunburned and happy.

Looking back, it probably seemed odd that a 13-year-old boy would prefer to listen to a football game on the radio rather than swim, water-ski and wrestle on the lake’s muddy shore with his friend. Even now I have to shake my head at the number of gorgeous fall afternoons I spent indoors watching football games on TV, regardless of whether the action was SEC, Big Ten, ACC or the NFL. At a time when I was crossing that uncomfortable void between boyhood and adolescence, televised football and other sports were something I could count on every weekend. I might be carrying a D-minus average in Algebra, I might be afraid to talk to the girl sitting in front of me in seventh period, but there was always a chance the Georgia would rise up and beat Auburn on Saturday afternoon (they usually didn’t, though).

Football doesn’t mean as much to me now as it did then, but I still enjoy watching the games, even with all the money, corruption and other negative things swirling around big-time athletics. As the great Alabama coach Bear Bryant once growled, “I do love the football.”

15 Years

Tags

a plot for pridemore, anniversary, kansas city, marriage, sept. 11, Stephen Roth, tortola, wedding

Fifteen years ago, my wife and I got married in a little chapel in the heart of Kansas City. My uncle officiated, five of my best friends were groomsmen and, as my soon-to-be bride entered the building, the double doors swung open and the late afternoon sun embraced her in a heavenly glow.

The next day, we flew to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, went snorkeling, got sun-burned, drank rum punch, and relaxed most afternoons in a hammock below our beachfront cabana. After a week of honeymoon bliss, we flew back to the city to start real life as a newly married husband and wife.

Ten days later, two planes hit the World Trade Center. The country was paralyzed. To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, it didn’t take much to see that two little people didn’t add up to a hill of beans in a crazy, frightening new world.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if my wife and I had scheduled our wedding and honeymoon a little later than we did. The shut-down of U.S. airlines and airports would have forced us to spend a few extra days in the Caribbean. Would we have decided to just stay down in Tortola and never come home? It would have been tempting to do so.

Staying in the tropics would have been romantic, but not very realistic. After all, we had a house, jobs, and three cats in Kansas City. What would we do for employment? Not many people in Tortola seemed to work, so maybe we could have just fished and slept on the beach?

At any rate, we decided to put down our roots in Kansas City, and I am glad that we did. There have been many magical moments like that trip to Tortola in our 15 years of marriage. There have also been doses of cruel reality, some which I dearly wish we never had to experience.

Through it all, though, we have stuck it out together. My wife has been so much more than just someone I share a home and a bank account with. She is my friend, ally, collaborator and confidant. You need that in a marriage, I think. Just being in love is not enough. You need someone you can laugh with and suffer with, and you especially need someone who can laugh with you even when you both are suffering.

A few days before our wedding, my wife did something that I felt spoke to her commitment as a partner and companion. I mentioned it in my toast at our wedding rehearsal dinner.

My wife and I had tickets to a Kansas City Chiefs preseason game, and we were trying to find a parking space near where our friends were tailgating. The journey in our Honda Accord took us off-road and onto a grassy ridge where fans had parked and were barbecuing. At one point, to get through all the cars and tailgaters, I had to drive along what felt like a 45-degree slope. It really seemed like the car might tip over at any second as we drove through the crowd. My wife, who sat in the elevated side of the car, opened her passenger door and leaned out as far as she could, both hands clutching the roof like a windsurfer hanging onto a sail. Instead of just bailing out, she thought her quick action might help keep the car from flipping down the hill.

We and our Honda survived, of course. I knew then—if I had any doubts before—that I had found a partner who would be with me all the way, even during times of potential bodily harm.

Fifteen years on, she is still with me, and I am so grateful for that.

What Clint Eastwood Knows About Trusting Your Gut

Tags

clint eastwood, every which way but loose, missouri, show-me state, university of missouri

Clint + Monkey = Cinema Gold

In the late 1970s, when Clint Eastwood read the script for the movie, Every Which Way But Loose, all of his business advisors urged him to turn down the role.

“My lawyer begged me not to do it,” Eastwood recalled in a recent interview with Esquire. “’This is a piece of shit. It’s not the kind of thing you do.’ And I said, ‘It’s not the kind of thing that I’ve been doing—all these pictures where I’m shooting people. I want something you can take your kids to.’”

Eastwood ended up doing the move, of course. And while Every Which Way But Loose was hardly a cinematic masterpiece, it became a commercial hit. It did not ruin Eastwood’s acting career. While the decision to do the movie seemed risky at the time, Eastwood liked the story about a rough-and-tumble trucker and an orangutan named Clyde. It was something different.

“If you make a couple decisions where your instincts worked well, why would you abandon them?” Eastwood said.

I remember one night in the fall of 1988, walking to the mailbox and pulling out a brochure from the University of Missouri. I was a high school senior at the time, and I was looking at different colleges to attend. Missouri wasn’t on my radar at all. I had never been to the Show-Me State, and didn’t know much about it beyond Harry Truman and Mark Twain. In fact, I still have no idea how the people at the University of Missouri got my contact information.

Nevertheless, as I sat down at our kitchen table and flipped through the glossy brochure, I got excited. Something about the place just seemed right. I filled out the application that night and mailed it the next day. Ten months later, I was a freshman in Columbia, Missouri, more than 700 miles from my hometown.

I had practical reasons for choosing my college—I wanted to go to journalism school, and Missouri had a good one. Mostly, though, my decision was based on instinct. It just felt like the right place for me.

I think it was a good decision, and it has directed almost everything that has happened in my life since—my career, the woman I married, the city we live in, most of my friends. All of that would have been completely different had I chosen to attend, say, the University of Georgia.

I am grateful for following my instincts that night in 1988. The life that has unfolded since has been a good one.

As we get older and pick up more responsibilities, it becomes harder to act on a hunch. Often, we choose the safer route because we have so much more at stake than when we were young. We aren’t high school seniors anymore, and we certainly aren’t movie stars who can afford to take a chance on making a goofball truck driver flick.

But our instincts are still there. When is the last time you listened to yours? How did that decision work out for you?

Sometimes, our instincts lead us to do strange things.

Mike Teavee and the Chocolate Factory

Tags

charlie and the chocolate factory, children's fiction, roald dahl, television

Have you ever read a book that profoundly shaped your life?

I have. The book was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When I read it for the first time in the second grade, I promised myself that I would never, ever behave like those awful, beastly children that accompanied Charlie on the tour of Willy Wonka’s factory. I would not be spoiled like the little peanut heiress Veruca Salt. I would not be sassy like the gum-chewing Violet Bureaugarde. I would not be gluttonous like the greedy Augustus Gloop. Finally, I would not watch television all the time like the vacuous Mike Teavee.

As a new reader and an eight-year-old, I loved the subversively dark humor of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was turned down for being in poor taste by several publishers in the 1960s, even though Roald Dahl was already a successful author at the time. But I also understood the book to be a cautionary moral tale. When children behave badly, bad things happen, was the lesson I took from it. I was determined not to become one of those bad kids. For most of my childhood, I think I succeeded.

A few months ago, I read the book to my six-year-old son over the course of several bed times. I thought he would enjoy the book, as I did. Perhaps he’d also appreciate that the hero of the book was the humble, good-hearted, impoverished Charlie, not the loud-mouthed brats who won the other four Golden Tickets to the factory.

My son did enjoy the book, especially the songs that the Oompa-Loompas sang each time a child met some grisly fate. The moral component seemed to be lost on him, though.

“What do you think this book was trying to say?” I asked him after we finished the last chapter.

“Always follow the rules,” my son said after some thought.

“Who was your favorite character?”

“Mike Teavee!” he said without hesitation.

“Why Mike Teavee?”

“He loves television and I love television. And I love my iPad,” my son said, leaping off of his bed and reaching for his digital device. “I want to be known as Mike iPad.”

I could barely hide my disappointment.

A few days later, when I was signing him up for a summer reading program at our library, the librarian asked what password we wanted to use on our summer reading online account (because God forbid we actually tabulate the hours on a simple sheet of paper).

“What password do you want to use?” I asked my six-year-old, who was busy trying to balance a Magic Marker between his upper lip and nose at the time.

“I want my password to be ‘TV!’” he said.

“You are killing me, man,” I replied.

So my son’s password for his online summer reading log is “TV,” and his literary hero is Mike Teavee. Somewhere, out there, Roald Dahl is shaking his head. Or maybe he’s laughing wickedly.

Blue Light Special

Tags

1980s, georgia, growing up, lagrange, midnight oil, u2

Kids who grow up in the city don’t know how good they have it.

Provided you have transportation and a little disposable income, you can choose a different activity for every single day of the year if you live in a large metropolitan area. In the city, there are museums, aquariums, zoos, amusement parks, professional sports, shopping centers and even dinosaur-themed restaurants from which to choose. In the city, there is no excuse to ever be bored, even though my son might sometimes disagree with me.

For kids who live in smaller towns, it’s different. Sometimes you have to make your own fun. Sometimes, that fun may be ill-advised.

I was luckier than most. I grew up in a mid-sized town called LaGrange that had a four-year college, a large recreational lake, golf courses, tennis courts and about 10 months of good weather each year. When I was in high school in the late 1980s, they opened up a six-screen cinema in my town, which was a social and cultural game-changer for me and my peers. I saw my first R-rated movie in that theater (Fatal Attraction with Michael Douglas and Glenn Close), even though my friends and I were under-aged. The new Cineplex brought a little bit of big-city daring and decadence to the town of LaGrange, Georgia.

Still, it could get boring at times. We had to make our own fun. My friend Jason and I swore off drinking for our high school careers, and we didn’t quite have enough nerve to swing though the school parking, where a lot of our classmates hung out on Friday and Saturday nights. Some evenings, we just drove around town in Jason’s Volkswagen Jetta, blasting U2 on the tape deck and somehow hoping that Bono’s words would inspire us to drive into the high school parking lot and talk to the cool kids.

One night, just to try something different, we grabbed a flashlight, a roll of duct tape, and a large, blue plastic cup from Jason’s house. Our hope was that, by taping the cup over the flashlight, and turning the light off and on rapidly, we could simulate the kind of pulsing blue light that police officers mounted on the dashboards of their patrol cars. To test our experiment, I stood on the side of the street and watched Jason whiz by in the Jetta a few times, his right arm holding the flashlight over the dash and turning it on and off just as fast as he could. Sure enough, it looked a lot like a police light.

When you are a pair of bored 18-year-olds who suddenly have invented your own police light, your next move is obvious. We hit the road on a warm Saturday night, patrolling the unlit rural routes that wound around and across West Point Lake. At about 10 o’clock that night, we pulled behind a red Chevrolet pick-up that was going about 10 miles above the speed limit. Jason turned the volume down on the Midnight Oil album we’d been listening to. Riding shotgun, I turned on the blue light and held it to the windshield, my thumb doing double-time over the switch to create the perfect effect. I might have even been whistling siren noises at the time.

After a quarter mile or so, the truck slowed and stopped on the gravel shoulder. Jason and I stared at each other in amazement. Did we just pull this guy over? What do we do now?

Jason gave it half a second of thought, then stomped the accelerator. The red pick-up was a blur as we sped by. Jason did not slow down until we entered the city limits. Along the way, I looked nervously in the side-view mirror, expecting to see the Chevy’s headlights cresting the hill behind us, its driver furious at being snookered by a pair of skinny, wanna-be cops in a 1985 Volkswagen Jetta.

Fortunately, we got away. Jason and I took the blue light out on the road a couple more times that summer, but we made only half-hearted attempts at enforcing the county’s traffic code. My friend and I were just a few weeks away from going to college in different parts of the country. Neither of us wanted any trouble when we were so close to our first tastes of freedom.

I sometimes think about that summer and how we might have been charged with a felony if we’d been caught using a flashlight and a plastic cup to transform Jason’s Jetta into a Georgia patrol car. If that happened today, of course, we’d be on the six o’clock news, and all over social media. Our lives would be ruined, at least for a while.

That’s why I feel for the kids growing up in the smaller towns, and maybe even the kids in the cities, too. The tolerance level for teen-aged mistakes is a lot lower these days, and the amount of public shaming is at an all-time high. One act of stupidity, and a kid could be in serious trouble. And who hasn’t done something stupid when they’re young and bored and aching for a little bit of adventure, like pretending to be a patrol officer for a night?

My Piano and Me

Tags

author, billy joel, humor, music, piano, piano man, Stephen Roth, yamaha

One of my unrealized dreams in life is to learn how to play the piano really well. As a kid, I took piano lessons from the 3rd through 8th grade, but I didn’t enjoy it. I never really learned how to read music, and I played most songs by ear.

As I grew older, I began to think about how gratifying it would be to just sit down at a piano and play whatever sheet music was in front of me. Shortly after we married, my wife and I bought a cherry wood upright Yamaha that we put in our front living room. For a few years, I would plop down at the piano and play the 10 or so songs I knew by heart, and work my way through a few new ones. I fantasized about having friends over for dinner and leading late-night singalongs from my Yamaha, playing the hits I knew from the Beatles, Joe Cocker, Aretha Franklin, Coldplay, Billy Joel and Elton John.

This never came to pass. Not quite, anyway. One Saturday, my friend Brad and I had plans to drive up to the College World Series in Omaha. We were going to meet very early in the morning at the home of a mutual acquaintance I didn’t know very well. When I arrived at the house, the man and his wife invited me in, and we chatted while waiting for my friend to show up. I admired the upright piano they had in their living room.

“We just got it,” the man said. “Neither of us knows how to play, though.”

“Brad told me you play,” his wife said sweetly. “Would you play a song for us? We’d love to hear how our piano sounds.”

They looked at me, smiling expectantly. I nodded and slowly made my way to the piano bench. It was about 6 o’clock in the morning.

I played a few chords from “Piano Man,” which is one of the easiest tunes I know. I began singing, because the song sounds sparse without the familiar words that are drunkenly crooned in every American piano bar every single night of the week. The couple gamely sang along. I missed a few notes. It is hard to play a musical instrument and sing at the same time, especially in front of other people. After the second round of “La-da-da-da-da-da-daaa,” my friend showed up at the front door, and I was allowed to stop.

“That was really nice,” said the husband, whom I have come to know better over the passing years, but who has never asked me to play the piano again.

Today, our busy family life means I no longer have time to play the piano. The cherry Yamaha mostly gathers dust in our living room, except for the occasional moments when our six-year-old wants to bang a few notes on it. I have tried to teach him “Chopsticks,” but he doesn’t have the patience for it. I would love for him to take lessons someday, but I think he would rather play guitar, if anything.

I feel guilty not giving such a nice piano the attention it deserves. I haven’t gotten it tuned in a couple of years. Someday, when things are less busy (maybe retirement?), I tell myself that I will sit down, re-master the handful of songs that I know, and learn a few more. Then we’ll have that dinner party with friends, and everyone will gather around my piano to sing along to a string of 1970s hits.

I am NOT a Granddad!

Tags

aging, author, children, grandparents, humor, parenting, Stephen Roth

NOT a photo of me and my child.

It’s only happened a few times, but I remember each one vividly and painfully, the way you might recall a bee sting or getting a really bad spanking when you were a kid.

The first time happened when my son was just a few weeks old. It was a warm, spring evening and I was pushing him around the neighborhood in his new stroller when we passed a plump, platinum-haired lady who lived across the street from us and whom we knew slightly. In fact, my wife had just purchased a photo print from the lady at her garage sale a few days earlier.

The lady stood before us, stooped toward the stroller to inspect my child, and cooed, “Oh, what a beautiful little grandson you have!”

My mouth dropped open. This batty old bird lived a hundred feet from our home. Surely she knew we had just had a baby. At the very least, she must have noticed the cardboard stork and blue balloons in our yard.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I stammered before pulling the canopy over my son and hurrying back home, frightened and ashamed.

The second time happened just a few months later. I was at home awaiting a service appointment, and I answered the door with the baby in my arms.

“Sorry I’m late, Mr. Roth,” said the handyman with the ripped Dale Earnhardt Jr. T-shirt and the slight stench of marijuana smoke. “Oh, hey, nice grandkid!”

“He’s my son,” I said tersely.

“Wow! My bad! I guess I just—”

“—That’s okay,” I replied. It really wasn’t, though. I felt a strange panic invade my body. Being a new dad in my late 30s, I expected to be the oldest person at my child’s Gymboree music circle and at all the daycare holiday parties. But did people really think I was a grandfather? Was this how it was going to be for me throughout my son’s growing-up years?

“It’s because you’re bald,” one of our less-tactful friends advised, giving me a pitying little pat on the shoulder.

Thankfully, several years passed before another well-meaning stranger mistook my perch in the family tree.

My son wasn’t even with me a few days ago when I purchased a little something for my wife for Mother’s Day.

“What a cool gift,” said, the chatty, 20-something clerk with onyx studs the size of nickels in both of his ears. “Somebody is going to have a very nice Grandmother’s Day!”

My first thought when I heard this comment was to say, “My grandmother is dead.” Then, it dawned on me that he wasn’t talking about my grandma. The clerk was implying that my wife was a grandmother—and I was a granddad.

I just smiled and nodded, anxious to complete the transaction and return to my office, where I will likely toil for 20 more years before reaching the age when most granddads can retire.

This case of mistaken identity is probably going to happen more frequently as I continue to age. Hopefully, at least, people will perceive me as one of the cool grandpas, like the Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man in the World,” or one of those grey-haired guys in a Cialis ad, driving his classic Camaro home and always finding that the light is on in the upstairs bedroom window.