Paradigms...where shift happens!

The Little Frog & Duck Boy in the I.E. Part 9

So there you have it, the tale of two grown men who in one evening dragged an innocent child down to their level via the glorification of farting poultry. It was an aromatic job but one that needed doing, nevertheless.

That was the last night I would be at Alain's. Since ‘She’ was still in the hospital, a host of relatives was due to descend The Little Frog and Duck Boy the next day and Alain needed to be tending to family business. There was one more stop on my itinerary in Rancho Santa Margarita about an hour north and west of Murrieta and then on Sunday, I would one again commit my body, soul and trembling psyche to the tender care of America West Airlines for the return trip to Dulles Airport.

There was another reunion on this trip but it is one I'll not get into just now. The balance of that story is yet to unfold, even for me and time will sort it all out. If I were totally comfortable with the idea of destiny I might be more inclined to wade right in. Still, the last year and a half has been a remarkable period in my life, one during which I have learned a lot and changed a lot but that’s nest saved for another day.

I've delayed posting this final accretion, trying, vainly as it turns out, to come up with some suitable denouement but the loose ends have defied my efforts to tie them up. I thought perhaps there would be some final seed of humor or insight that I could drag out to neatly wrap this up; I was either wrong or unsuccessful in finding such.

The trip back to Washington was a mixture of numbing emotional flatness and a repeating loop of a wonderful but seemingly all too brief interval. I suppose that the freshly created memories did make the transition back into the daily routine easier at first but the rhythmic rut of daily life quickly reclaimed its dominance of my reality.

Thanks to you all for having the patience to wade through all this. If you have read this far I suppose there must have been really one or two moments in the tale that were worth telling. I'm returning to California in September for another visit. The anticipation is beginning to build and perhaps there will be more to tell.

Until then, may all your encounters with the south end of a northbound duck be at the appropriate distance and if not….wait for it!

The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E. Part 8

Yesterday, Alain's Zen postage finally worked it's mellow magic and the pictures arrived. Duck Boy will be obvious and the picture of the two derelicts features the Little Frog in the Virginia t-shirt and yours truly...not in the Virginia t-shirt. As you can see, the word "Little" is a vertical qualifier. If it were horizontal then it would not apply to either of us:

And now the story of how Daniel became Duck Boy….

If there is anyplace more relaxing to be than in a hot tub with an old friend, I don't know where it would be. The second night I was there Alain, Daniel and I adjourned to his hot tub. We thought about getting in the pool but that seemed like an awful lot of trouble. It was to be Daniel's lot that night to be regaled with songs and TV schtick from our creaky cob web cluttered brains. He was a sport about it despite his tender age. At one point for some reason we began to talk about our favorite Brit-coms from PBS. One of my favorites is a lesser known one called "The Vicar of Dibley". It featured Dawn French as a female Anglican priest in the small rural village of Dibley. As is so often the case with small towns Dibley had its traditions, one of which was an annual village talent show. Traditions imply repetition and such was the case in Dibley with the same talent acts being repeated year after year, one of which was a gentleman farmer of rather 'earthy' character and his famous farting duck. When it came his turn on the program he would stride from the wings to center stage. There he would stand erect at center stage with his performing duck tucked securely under his arm, business end pointed towards the audience. A hush of anticipation falls over the audience and when the silence suits his performer's sensitivities, he utters in a quiet but dignified voice. "Wait for it". No sooner are the words spoken but surrepticiosly he squeezes his performing partner with his arm and a subtle but unmistakable rattle bursts forth from the business end of the duck in question. Suitable impressed the dreadfully British audience applauds politely as they no doubt mentally compare this year's duck fart to last year's.

Daniel, having the finely honed taste and perception of any normal 8 year old boy found this to be hilarious and for the balance of my visit 'chez Duck Boy' the watchword, the shibboleth was "Wait for it!" Thus Daniel became Duck Boy although the affectionate moniker did not occur to me until I was on the way home. Indeed Alain, told me that one morning, a couple of days later, while he was still in bed and well before he was prepared to drag himself out of the bed he felt that soundless presence of a child near him just before he woke up. He cracked one eye open and was greeted with "Wait for it!"…Duck Boy had struck and we had created a monster of a memory for all three of us.

That is our story of Daniel's metamorphosis into Duck Boy and we are (WAIT FOR IT!!),  by God, stickin' to it...

The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E. Part 7

Our shuffle or stumble down memory lane began almost immediately…the catch phrases that we remembered, the bizarre sales experiences, the parties, people we had known all began rushing through our brains. Had it not been for a lot fewer follicles in active production it was just like old times.

Reunion reminiscing can grind to a halt at times and so it is important to keep the machinery lubricated. Preventive maintenance is the key here and Alain had stocked up on some fine New Zealand lubricant. He must have sensed that I might be the weak link in the chain of memory because he immediately put a bottle of New Zealand's finest adult discretionary beverage in my hands. We had joked several times about getting a little outlandish so we felt obligated to begin that immediately.

When old friends reconnect, memories don't bubble up slowly; they are like a geyser, rushing to the surface, pausing perhaps for a few moments then erupting again. Properly connected, two people in the throws of reunion reminiscing don't even need complete sentences to do their mischief….

Someplace in the process the conversation will touch on something that's not so funny and then the stories of harder times begin to unfold. A person doesn't live nearly 60 years without spending at least some of those years in Plan B. Maybe sometimes we are in Plan B and don't even know it. Alain has had his share of time there and so have I.

In some ways, Alain is like one of those children’s blow up punching bag toys. Giving that thing your best shot might rock it back to the floor but it doesn't stay there. To put it in more contemporary terms, “he’s got game.” One of my favorite analogies that I either read or made up is the comparison between how a person looks at life and the operation of an automobile. The windshield is so much larger than the rear view mirror that we should know where our focus needs to be. Alain has one of the smallest rear view mirrors of anyone I have ever known.

As tempting as it is to recount a few of the episodes we re-hashed for you here, I’ll spare you that. You’ve probably all been involved in some sort of a reunion scenario and so you know how it goes. The hilarity of the old days is easily recalled by the participants and absolutely unfathomable to the entrapped observer. There is, however, one exception to the “entrapped observer” phenomenon…more on that the next time when you learn at long last how Daniel became “Duck Boy”.

The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E. Part 6

It's about 70 miles from the Long Beach airport to Murietta, California, home base to the "Little Frog", "Duck Boy" and "She Who Must Be Obeyed" as the L.F. refers to her. As you know by now the "Little Frog" is Alain, my old friend from Fredericksburg. Alain was born in France emigrating to this country when he was 10 years old. He is the sort of person that if his mother had not been ready to come to America, Alain would have come on his own. Ten years in France, another ten years in a French fluent home combined with several years in the Air Force left Alain fluent in French, English and "in a language the clergy do not know."

"Duck Boy" is his 8 year old son, Daniel. It should be self evident how Alain got his nickname but "Duck Boy" is another story, one which I shall inflict upon you in due course. Suffice it to say that Daniel has the same ready smile and devilment in his eye that his father has and they are quite a duo.

"She Who Must Be Obeyed" is Alain's wife, Jeanette, a delightful lady in every respect. I only met Jeanette for a very few minutes during my visit since she was in the hospital recovering from a fairly scary health episode. Knowing Alain as I do I must conclude that "She" is a person of remarkable equanimity. On the other hand I would not want to be the medical provider who told her that she was not yet ready to be released from the hospital when she felt it was time to go. I should note as well that in spite of her health issues, she greeted me as if we had known each other for years. Alain has a way of finding people like that and I think people like that have a way of finding Alain.

After 90 minutes in my very small cobalt blue rented Mitsubishi Something LE (AKA 'my foster car')on California highways, I finally pulled into Alain's driveway, convinced that perhaps there was something worse than flying. At last I was out of the plane and off the road…laissez les bon temps roullez, I had cheated death yet again.

One of the nice things about the 21st Century is that men can hug without feeling totally self conscious. Of course the hug is always punctuated with a hearty rib cracking back slap…just in case anyone is watching. It's best if the back slap is audible as well…just to be sure the hugger and the huggee don't get mistaken for stunt doubles from some show on the Bravo channel.

That's the way Alain and I greeted each other in his driveway that hot southern California afternoon…a fitting punctuation to our nearly 20 year long separation. The hug began two days of random wanderings down Memory Lane…I would not meet Duck Boy until later but damn, it was good to see the Little Frog again.

The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E. Part 5

A note here about California highways and driving: apparently since Erik Estrada hung up his mirrored sunglasses and knee-high CHIPS boots anything goes out there speed-wise . At one point as my foster car was rocked in the backwash of yet another barely sub-orbital SUV I thought I must have been crawling along at way below the speed limit. I looked down at my speedometer to find I was doing 85 mile per hour. I haven't driven that fast since I reached voting age.

Although I was the three legged stray in my traffic pack, at least there didn't seem to be all that many people telling me I was Number One so I must not have been doing that badly. It is nevertheless highly intimidating to be a freshly whelped highway cub in a pack of 3000 pound automotive alpha wolves.

Each of the cars that passed me must have had a steering wheel and a driver with at least one finger on that wheel but there was something subtly different about the way they moved down the highway, a sort of ballistic quality to their guidance, like a SCUD missile.

After all the ominous predictions about California traffic I had been given I was happy to find myself in actually moving on the highway. Every comment I had heard up to that point was that the difference between rush hour and non-rush traffic was that non rush traffic actually moved. In contrast, cars emerging from the morning and evening Cal-Lock were reported as being covered with something looking oddly similar to lichens or moss.

So as I rocketed down "The 15" or "The Whatever" I found myself beginning to relax a bit. I had made it through a couple of fairly risky multi-lane changes without becoming a statistic and the miles were ticking off on "The whatever-the-hell-road-number" I was on. I was seeing the same town and exit names on succeeding signs with shorter and shorter distances to the points they marked. That was a good thing it seemed and so I let my mind wander a bit and began to ponder why Californians refer to the state and interstate highways as "The ###"…The 15 or The 415.

Back East we refer to Interstates 95 and 64 as "95" and "64". Adding that extra word, "The" changes it somehow, elevating the status of highways to a sort of imperial level akin in a way to the royal "we". We don't revere them here like they do on the Left Coast. Californians' fondness for the cult of the car is well known; perhaps this little colloquialism is consistent with that.

By the time I headed back to Virginia I was prefacing every highway number with “the” but I got over that as soon as I pulled on to Interstate 95 on my way home from the airport. I also left behind my speed demon alter-ego and became once again, a good citizen of the highways. I drove home at a reasonable enough rate that a couple of passing cars even gestured to me that they thought I was the #1 citizen of the highways…that is what they meant, right

The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E. Part 4

Once the terrain began to change from flat to featured, it changed rapidly. I found myself looking down on mountain tops. Looking up at the peaks of a western mountain range from below agitates the imagination. What is the view from top? How far would I be able to see? The mountains from 30,000 feet above them looked unexpectedly friendly, inviting almost. On the ground, the next vista is hidden and tantalizing, demanding effort to get there but from the plane it's just a few seconds away. The mystery of what's over the next hill is solved almost immediately, almost too easily.

Washington.

The descent into  Phoenix , where I was to change planes, revealed some the detail I had been straining to make out from cruising altitude. Closer to the ground though meant that the view was changing more rapidly until finally it disappeared altogether as we flew over the outskirts of the city. Once on the ground, America West would hand me off to something called Mesa West for the one hour final leg to Long Beach  Municipal Airport.  According to the schedule I would have about  90 minutes between planes to get a drink and enjoy the sandwich I had bought in Washington. I was wrong on so many levels.

Traffic at the Phoenix airport seemed gridlocked as we waited to cross a runway until what seemed like several dozen planes landed. Not waiting would have resulted in our being the lead story on the eleven o'clock news (10:00 PM Pacific Time) and that didn't seem like a particularly good thing especially since I knew I wouldn't get to see it. So,  I was content to wait…and wait…and wait…  Finally, a break in the flow and we 'darted' across the main drag onto a taxiway where we again came to a stop, this time consuming another 15 minutes of my sandwich time. Guessing that this delay was due to no available gates, I imagined the airport equivalent of the Christmas time mall parking buzzard, cruising the lanes of the parking  lot, watching for signs of an imminent opening, going into hover mode when one appears.

Once inside the terminal I had only about 20 minutes until my flight began boarding. That left just enough time to grab a fifty cent drink for which I was charged three times that. By the time I got to the gate the flight was already boarding and I had just enough time to discover that I would have been better off checking my sandwich through so the airline would have had the opportunity to loose it for me.

Other than the 30 yard stroll through the pizza oven they called a passenger walkway to the commuter plane and the fact that the seats on the commuter plane were padded with a single layer of 'Charmin' the next to last leg of my trip was uneventful. We landed at Long Beach more or less on time and the luggage appeared on the carousel so quickly nobody even had a chance to gripe about how long it was taking. In fact, the Long Beach airport terminal was small enough that I could peek around the edge of the outdoor carousel and see the luggage actually coming off the plane.

A short luggage lug across the street to the Enterprise Car Rental office where my reservation was actually in their computer at the correct price and I was on my way. The final leg would be my introduction to driving in California, an hour and a half of trying to survive on a series of roads, all of which were referred to as "The" as in "The 15" and "The 415" and so on. More on my puzzlement at that colloquial nomenclature later...

The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E. Part 3

After taxiing half way to West Virginia and twenty ear popping minutes of climbing, we were not only airborne but at cruising altitude. Most of the people on this plane took the flight as a pretty routine thing; maybe it was. They've done it before and so have I. There were three little girls in the row behind me traveling home to Utah with their mother for the summer. They played quietly, not even bothering to look out the window although we had a clear view of the ground from our cruising altitude at 35,000 feet. Approaching 60, to me this was still an amazing experience. I think it was my age that made for such an impressive experience. The memory of my first plane trip is foggy after 50 years but there was a two engine propeller driven DC-something and a set of roll away stairs that I climbed to get aboard. Resting back on its rear wheel left the plane already tilted skyward, an awfully positive attitude it seems to me now. The flight was from Roanoke, Virginia to Allentown, Pennsylvania for a visit with my Aunt Susan. She lived in a huge apartment in Catasaqua, near Allentown. The visit was memorable for me not only because it was my first flight but because I would discover cartoons on TV there, a phenomenon which for some reason had not worked its way to southwest Virginia where I lived. Disney and the like were still doing plain black and white cartoon art but I was entranced by them.

We were traveling at about 600 miles per hour, six miles above the earth in air conditioned comfort. Two hours in the air had put us over one of those really flat states; the ones this Easterner can never seem to keep sorted out….Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas…somewhere with corn, cows and presumably combines. The roads were arrow straight with right angle intersections. What a great market for selling "STOP" signs.

The grid below was totally geometrical, the regularity of the patterns emphasized by random tracks of rivers, streams and creek beds, which were in turn revealed by the foliage growing along their banks. I saw three recognizable shapes in the regimentally cultivated earth: rectangles of grains, the regular ovals of athletic tracks and the distinct diamond shape of the baseball fields. No doubt when we get over a more populated part of the country the turquoise spots that are swimming pools will be visible as well.

As we moved farther west the terrain changed to show more contour, evident in part because the occasional terracing of some of the farm land is also visible now almost as if it were a topographic map with contour lines.

I tried shooting a few feet of video out the window as the terrain changed but the windows on the plane weren't too clean so the video was not clear. In some of the fields I saw patches of dark green where the trees and other foliage had defied the farmers’ efforts to clear the land.

Further west the squares gave way to the circular and semi-circular profiles of irrigated parcels. We were too high to see the giant wheeled pipes that the shapes said were there. The ones that aren't complete circles seem mimic giant pie charts showing the profit and loss or expense distribution for the farms they make up. The farther we went the more circular patterns there were until finally the earth looked almost as if it were a giant checkerboard after the early moves of a new game. Most squares were still covered in straight lines, almost perfectly aligned except for a few spots where it looked as if some invisible giant old men had made a few moves.

After a while even my wide-eyed wonderment began to fade. They showed a movie but I passed on America West's kind offer of a headset for the paltry sum of $5 so I could hear the sound on a movie I had seen. They wanted to sell me something they called a 'SkyBox' as well, a little cardboard treasure chest intended to fend off starvation. This time I saved $2.00 and so between the head set and the 'SkyBox', the unspent $7.00 offset the cost of the sandwich I bought in the terminal to bring with me.

Aren't I clever…that's a rhetorical question, OK?

The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E. Part 2

Only in the last couple of years have I begun to accept that God intended us to fly in the air despite the fact that we are not born with variable pitch propellers attached to our noses. Because of this reactionary point of view I find myself assuming a peculiar mindset when traveling by air. I think it is equal parts fear, humor and anticipation against a background of deeply ingrained annoyance, all hopefully hidden behind a façade of being an experienced traveler.

I do not fly well. It's not just the forced immobility inside a flying petri dish with 90 of my closest friends, traveling six miles above the earth at barely sub-sonic speeds in air cold enough to cryogenically preserve Ted Williams head. It's not even the prospect of surviving for 6 hours on a small bag of dime sized pretzels from the Cretaceous era and a sawed off plastic cup of diet Coke. It's all the rest of the dumb stuff that goes with the experience. We don't even have to be in the air for me to get pissed off.

It starts with the boarding experience. Everyone gathers around at the gate, poised in their starting blocks for the mad dash to the boarding ramp. Up front, of course, are the people in Boarding Group 5, oblivious it would appear to the order imposed by their boarding pass or maybe hoping the gate lady will for some reason decide to go counter to God's laws of numbers by starting with their group. Behind them are the lame, the halt and the blind along with those "boarding with small children." I saw one family on this trip with 3 children small enough to need help; they should have just given them the plane for crying out loud.

Now, I assume that all this regimentation of the boarding process is intended to speed things up. What happens is quite the opposite. Once on the plane we find a line of people looking first at their boarding passes and then at every bloody row number, struggling with the concept that the numbers are in sequence and not random. If you are standing at row five and your row is seventeen, move the hell on. You are perfectly safe not looking at the numbers again for at least a few rows. You’ll get a hint when you're in the area; it's called row sixteen.

There is also a mysterious process that goes on during boarding. The person in the window seat always, always gets there after the aisle and middle seats are occupied. If anyone knows why this happens please let me know.

Finally on the subject of boarding, to the folks at Southwest Airlines, God invented seat rows for a reason! Lose the colored cards and use the numbers. An airplane with a center aisle the width of Lance Armstrong’s bicycle seat is not the place to use "general admission" seating.

Airlines have rules about carry on luggage that supposedly limits us to one personal style item and a small bag which will fit in the overhead. They even have a little box thing at the boarding gate as a kind of a template for carry-on bags, the airline equivalent of the "you must be this tall" bar at an amusement park. The bar at the "Tilt-N-Hurl" ride seems to work because you almost never get puked on by a toddler there. The baggage box is a totally different story; it's there for no apparent reason other than perhaps intimidation.

Look at the bags people drag down that aisle. I've seen smaller apartments and the bigger the bag the smaller the person dragging it. Instead of that luggage box at the gate, they should have a person who makes sure that the passengers can bench press at least twice the weight of the bag. That would put a stop to 75 pound girls dragging bags so heavy they come equipped with dual axle wheels and then waiting helplessly for some chivalrous soul to hoist all their earthly possessions into the already overstuffed overhead.

By the way, when you land the flight attendant always warns you to be careful when opening the overhead compartment doors because "stored items can shift during the flight." Yeah, right! By the time every one is aboard any plane I have ever ridden, those compartments are so full, sand couldn't shift up there. They will also remind you that anything not stored above must fit underneath the seat in front of you. Dust was the only thing that would have fit under the seat in front of me.

With all that bad air travel attitude, you might think I would be somewhat of a rebel once on board the plane. Quite to the contrary, I become peculiarly submissive; I grovel in fact. The flight attendants are the "alpha wolves" and I am but a freshly whelped cub. My theory on this compliant attitude is that somewhere up there, behind the clouds there are airplane spirits and I do not want to annoy them. If I am a good airplane citizen somehow that magically insures my particular plane will have an equal number of take-offs and landings and I think we'll all agree that is a good thing.

I wouldn't think of leaving my seatback in anything other than its full upright position when landing and taking off. It's unclear to me why that's required but if the flight attendant says do it then consider it done. Likewise with my table, it's fully in the up position and locked just the way they tell me. Seat belts? Forget about me because I have that puppy cinched down so tight my knees turn blue and I can drink two veinte coffees from Starbucks and still cross the continent without needing to use the bathroom. Moreover, that seat belt stays cinched down not just until the plane comes to a stop at the gate but until the ground crew has washed out the holding tanks and all the empty toasted almond bags have been dug out of the nooks and crannies underneath the seats. Then and only then will I arise from the seat, drag my belongings (ever so carefully of course) from the overhead compartments and tiptoe into the terminal, chanting my post-flight mantra, "Hah, cheated death again!!!"

By now you are asking yourself what this has to do with "The Little Frog and Duck Boy." Not too much I suppose except it gives you a little context for what, I, a flight-o-phobe was willing to endure for the sake of this most special reunion.

The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E.

I think I was fourteen when I won the trip to Disneyland in Anaheim, California for selling subscriptions to the Ogden Standard Examiner. We lived in Brigham City, Utah at the time and I had my first and last paper route. The man who delivered my daily inventory told me one day that I was a single subscription short of qualifying for the trip. When my parents heard that they happily bought one more subscription and I was on my way. At the time I thought they were just helping but in recent years it has occurred to me that I might well have been a bigger pain in the ass as a teenager than I thought I was. Anyway, I made that trip but to this day remember almost nothing of my first trip to California other than a very long bus ride.

I liked California so much that I waited 46 years to make second trip. I was going to re-connect with an old friend I had not seen in nearly 20 years. Alain and I had first met in Charlottesville Virginia when he was hired by the same company I worked for. Shortly after he signed on we both were offered a chance to move to Fredericksburg and move we did, into the same gated community where we became close friends. I'm not sure I would go so far as to claim we finished each other's sentences but our minds did spend a great deal of time in similarly skewed universes. I've never been too fond of the concept of 'best' friends because of what that says about the rest of the people in my life but if I have to claim one it would be Alain.

Alain left the company after a couple of years because, I think, it just wasn't what he wanted his life to be about. Sometimes I wish I had done the same but that's for another time. He left and went back to California and has been there ever since except for a few minor displacements to places like Africa (Peace Corps gig) and Richmond Virginia selling televisions and working for the American Red Cross as a traveling vampire (without portfolio).

We reconnected for one brief snowy weekend in the mid-80's and then he and his ex-wife and son somehow got out of my life yet again. I don't understand why we let dumb stuff like that happen in our lives but we do. (I have been charged with being a dumb ass many times but never convicted even though I was clearly guilty.) It's really a stupid thing to happen and we should know better. How is it we hold on to grudges and slights with a death grip and let friends slip away?

I can't remember what triggered the Google search but a name like Alain's was pretty easy to search on and in a matter of less than an hour I had located him and his business in Murrieta California about an hour north of San Diego. (One of the great things about locating a person via the internet is imagining their surprise when an e-mail pops up in their mail box from someone they haven't spoken to in almost two decades.) For the next year or so we chatted back and forth by e-mail interspersed with a very few phone calls.

Alain has repeatedly invited me out for a visit and I have always found feeble wimpy excuses to postpone the trip. Finally this year all the excuses had been used up and I decided to go. The delays were never about not wanting to see Alain again but came strictly from my own conviction that as soon as my plane took off, everything here would go to hell in a hand basket. Bad things are always just waiting to happen, right? Tsunamis, earthquakes, alien invasions and swarms of locusts are waiting just over the horizon to wreak havoc on my world. If I am here, they are afraid to show their scurvy faces.

The decision was made though and despite the looming and imminent catastrophes I found my way to the long term parking lot at Dulles Airport at an absolutely heathen hour on Wednesday June 22nd. America West was the airline that was not going to feed me that day so I figured that arriving two hours before flight time would leave plenty of time to get something to eat. Check in was easy but by the time the shuttle bus got me to the correct gate I was convinced I had ridden at least half way to the west coast before I even boarded the plane.

Stay tuned for the adventures of an air travel wimp with attitude...