The Perfect Song Blog

Went to see the Mansfield University production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast today. I had seen it Thursday night and loved it so much I took my mother-in-law today. It was a Sunday afternoon and the 1300 seat theatre was nearly full.

The word had gotten around about it.

The set was gorgeous. Everything about the play was right – the actors had great singing voices. The orchestra was superb without overwhelming the actors. The lighting moved between being subtle and lovely to dark and mysterious.

I had tears in my eyes at several points because of the power of the above and the story line.

Several optimistic mothers brought their three and four year olds thinking they were going to sit quietly enchanted for three hours. So, at different periods many adults leaned forward to hear the lines over screaming kids.

It was okay though. I kept thinking, we’re in an age when kids lock themselves away with computers and cell phones. It’s a period when live human interaction is nearly a lost art.

Yet here we were in an auditorium, 1200 people of all ages sharing the action and emotion on the stage. We all laughed at the humor, clapped loudly at the close of a rousing song.

At the end we all rose for a standing ovation.

No matter how isolated we become with iTunes and text messaging, there is nothing more powerful than losing ourselves and sharing — in real time — a good story

The 16 inches of snow that plopped itself down over the course of 24-hours, brought everything to a standstill. We have a 300-foot driveway that leads up to the two-lane road at about a 30 degree slope.
We also have a garden tractor with a plow that lay buried and emanating weak signals saying: “Don’t even try me. I won’t plow until you shovel.” I hate it when tractors communicate, especially when they tell you what they’re not going to do.
I called several places that advertise snow plowing. I found no amount of money or promises would bring them here.
“I’ll give you a thousand dollars,” I said to one.
“I’m busy.”
“I’ll pay you twice your rates and give you an all-expense paid trip to the Bahamas where barely dressed beautiful girls over 18 will play interactive video games with you,” I told another.
“Forget it,” the guy said. “I’ve had a better offer.”
The last one was honest with me. “Nobody will plow your driveway,” he said. “It’s too long and steep. There’s no place to push the snow up there in the woods. A snow blower will get stuck. The only thing you can do is hand shovel it.”
“I used to do that,” I said. “There’s too much snow. I’m too old.”
There was a pause on the line. “Don’t have a heart attack,” he said quietly. “There’s not an ambulance in the county that will pick you up.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You’ll just lay there and the way it’s snowing, you’ll be buried in an hour. If the heart attack doesn’t kill you, you’ll freeze to death. The wind chill is 15 below zero. When it’s that low, even if you don’t die, they’ll have to amputate a lot of extremities. So shovel at a safe pace.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
Leigh and I went out and shoveled. We discovered that Tristan, the Aussie puppy, loves to leap at the snow when we throw it. So we all had a snow shoveling party for six hours. Nathan braved the closed roads and came up to help for a couple hours. By 6 p.m. we had an 8-foot wide path dug
I dug out our tractor with the plow. “Think you can do it now?” I asked.
I could feel it shrug as if to say, “I’m not real enthusiastic but I guess that’s what I’m here for.”
By 7 p.m. we had enough snow shoveled and plowed to get the cars out. I came in and had a drink to help stave off heart attack and tried to get the words to Winter Wonderland out of my head.

I have spent my life trying to learn how to relax.  To do this, in good weather, I take the dogs to the creek.  Sometimes I play ball with them.  In winter I’m not good a relaxing at all.
My brother Dave was here for the weekend and brought a bag of movies on DVD.  It was a quiet Sunday morning.  Dave and Leigh’s mother were watching Caddy Shack  I had gone through my emails, favorite Web sites and RSS feeds.  When it was time for a break, I pulled out the coffee, put three scoops on the hopper and closed the lid so it would brew automatically.
I lit my pipe and stood smoking by the sliding glass door listening to the Caddy Shack dialog.  The dogs were lying in the living room sleeping.  It was a perfect Sunday morning and I appreciated the fact that I wasn’t running around, worried about things that needed to be done.
It was a perfect Zen moment.  I was appreciating the present.
Then Leigh came around the corner, and stopped with a look of horror in her eyes.  “Oh my God!  What are you doing?  What are you DOING?
Since I really wasn’t doing anything, this was a confusing question.  I looked in the direction that was the focus of her shocked attention.
Hmm.  I have made coffee at least a thousand times in my life.  Apparently I was so relaxed this time around that I forgot to put the coffee pot on the coffee maker burner.  Coffee was flowing down onto the burner, through the burner, onto the counter, down onto the dishwasher and onto the floor.
Ten cups of coffee, when not contained, covers a lot of territory.
Leigh shoved the pot onto the burner.
Without a word I grabbed the sponge and Leigh took the dishcloth. She also picked up my cell phone which lay in the middle of the caffeine tsunami.
“What were you thinking?”  It was a question Leigh has asked me hundreds of times over the years.  When I was young and had more energy, I’d offer a lot of things:  “I was thinking about Einstein always having a bad hair day. . .I was thinking about how amoebas divide in half and are complete amoebas again.”
But anymore I just shrug and state the obvious.  “I wasn’t thinking.”
We’ve been through this two-line dialog a lot over the years.  “What were you thinking?” and “I wasn’t thinking,” seems to be enough.  Marital poetry, as it were.
There was enough coffee now in the pot for one serving.  So I poured myself a cup.
“Would you like coffee?”  I asked.
Leigh thought a moment.  “Yes, and I’ll make it.”
I nodded.  “I thought you might say that.”  I took my coffee and went downstairs to try and relax.

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Don’t forget to check out my novel, The Perfect Song, (written under the pseudonym, Damon) available at amazon.com  

To make things easier for my mother-in-law, Leigh bought one of those plastic contraptions that raises the toilet seat by six inches. I warn you now, this is definitely PG-13 if you don’t like potty talk, because I’m talking about real potties.
Anyway, I didn’t think much about the raised toilet until I had to go.
There are several steps in the male peeing process. Males are familiar with the process so you can skip this section, unless you want a refresher for whatever reason.
The first step, of course, is unzipping the fly.
Step two is the release of the member followed by the actual peeing (step 3), then the little shake to be rid of excess droplets (#4). Next is hauling back in and zipping up. Men usually don’t think about all the steps because with so much practice it becomes a pretty fluid process, as it were.
Now, suddenly, I found myself confronting a seat with a small hole and six inch high walls. As I stood there studying the situation, it became clear that I was about to shoot from an approximately 30 degree angle which meant I would hit the sides and subsequently catch the devil from my wife. So I found myself straddling the damned thing and aiming straight down.
To aim straight down, one has to bend forward.
This is not easy.
I was holding on with both hands for maximum security on a vertical shot for the first time in my life.
It’s now or never I thought.
I went.
I failed.
I hit the side.
I stood there, still straddling the toilet realizing I had to go to step four. There is no way to shake it without hitting the sides and the top. I shook it just a little– and proceeded to hit the sides and the top.
I cleaned the seat and studied it from various angles. I sat down at the computer and developed various charts involving angles, heights, trajectory and even velocity. I concluded there was no way to succeed with step four. Shaking, no matter how you do it, creates random patterns. It’s simple physics.
From that day I avoided the bathroom with the raised seat. When I have to go I trudge upstairs, or make a trip downstairs. Or I just wait until I’m outside. Fortunately we live in the woods.
Now, when I call the dogs and say “Let’s go out and go pee-pee,” the pack includes Tyler, Tristan, Zeus. . . and me.