Things I’ve Learned the Hard Way
I’m one of those fortunate people that learn things the hard way. I rarely, if ever getting anything right the first time. Heck, I’ve even been married twice. This gives me the power of guilt and shame in reinforcing any learning experience.
I thought I’d share a bit of my hard won knowledge in case you’d prefer to let others screw up so you can do it correctly.
Lesson 1: You can’t bribe a kid that doesn’t like sweets or money.
My grandson is the only kid I’ve ever known that doesn’t eat cookies, candy, cake, and until recently ice cream. My sons I kept on sugar buzzes while my wife bought off them with cash and prizes. They might have even done some wet work for the right price.
The grandson will have none of that and he’s started offering his grandmother a dollar when he wants something. This kid is definitely management material, but he’ll never make in politics.
Lesson 2: Nothing ever breaks down during the regular working hours.
This maxim includes major car parts, home furnaces and hot water tanks, leaking basements, and weird illnesses. The more expensive and disruptive the malfunction, the later in the day it will occur.
My furnace died on a Saturday night. The hot water tank gave up the ghost in the middle of the night. Every car battery that’s ever failed did so on the weekend. The basement only leaks during the hours I’m working, and people save falling out of coconut trees for the weekends and holidays.
This universal certainty leads to an auxiliary lesson, Lesson 2a: The repairman will not be there anywhere near the time he gives over the telephone. Take the ETA you’re given, add 3, multiply by four, and subtract 1. He’ll show up just after that number, the next day.
There was a single exception to this rule and there is now a cable repairman included in my will.
Lesson 3: There’s no such thing as a “happy woman.” It isn’t in their nature to be satisfied and they’re only too eager to let you know how miserably you’ve failed.
The best a man can hope for is to get his female partner to a state of mild annoyance. This state can be achieved by supplying sufficient funds and credit limit for 24/7 power shopping. Online, on the phone, or in the mall, as long as there’s money to be spent, it will keep her mind off how right her mother and friends were about you.
Lesson 4: No good deed goes unpunished.
I used to think this was just a cynical diatribe. Why should someone be penalized for altruism? Well, it a hard and fast law, second in line to gravity.
The clearest personal example of this fact is my dear Yorkshire Terriers. I didn’t have the heart to put Sadie “Satan” the biter down, I keep Louie “Puke-boy” fed no matter how often he up chucks, and these two pups along with Dottie and Toto have run of the house.
In return I have once solid color carpets that resemble leopard skin rugs, woodwork the appears to have been gnawed by crazed rats, the wondrous odor of urine that migrates to a different spot whenever I find and clean the last one, nearly as many hair care products for dogs as my wife requires, the need to check the couch for half digested kibble every time I sit down, a backyard that looks like a herd of giant rabbits did their business there, and at night in bed the occasional wet nose in places only my doctor has been.
Final Lesson 5: The more aggravating someone is, the cuter they act so you won’t murder them. All the above-mentioned persons and animals are in this group.
Just about the time your carotid artery blows, or you burst a lung, from the latest tinkle puddle, kid’s scream, or wife in general, you look into those wide and not really innocent eyes, and you melt a little. You also avoid doing something you’ll regret later and you stay out of prison.
So, if you’d like to save yourself from these lessons, you can heed my advice. Otherwise, I hear Tibet is lovely this time of year.

Modern Conveniences?
In many ways the existence of the average American is vastly better than any time in the past. Polio is almost gone and there are no Indians in need of shooting, except maybe that bunch of yahoos in Cleveland.
However, not every thing has evolved to make life easier or better. In fact, there are hardships our predecessors would surely find daunting.
Take the blister pack that most everything electronic comes entombed in. Finding Dick Cheney’s secret location whenever anything goes wrong is easier than trying to pry a MP3 player or wrestle a video cable out of a blister pack.
The opening procedure requires kitchen knives, scissors, crowbar, the patience of a saint, the skill of a neurosurgeon, and the muscle of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s nearly impossible to not damage the product or tear the instructions that are strategically placed exactly where the plastic rips.
And, did you notice that no matter how carefully you trim around the outside of the package with your bolt-cutters, there is always one spot that is still welded?
Getting in on the fun, the pharmaceutical industry has gone berserk and put tablets into the same type of packaging. On top of having a newly created disease, the ill, physically weakened, and soon to be driven mad sufferer must attempt to extricate a tablet that turns to dust if stared at too long and that taste absolutely awful if not intact, from a pill pack designed by the same people that gave you the rack and the Iron Maiden.
The nice folks at America’s advertising agencies have jumped on the insanity bandwagon, too. Apparently, the current idea of product promotion is to make the potential consumer nauseous.
Anyone not in a coma has just gone through a prime example of the new advertising gambit in the form of the just released, huge, world-shaking, mind-bending, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Oliver Stone movie about September 11. After weeks of saturation multimedia ads and commentary, we’ve learned the plot and subplots, become acquainted with the background of every character, and been bombarded with so many teasers we’re stuffing dollar bills into our own underwear. I am already sick of the movie before I’ve seen it once.
Perhaps the most insidious contemporary invention/convenience of person-kind is the automated answering system, also known as the “no one actually works here service.”
A recent experience of mine with Ford’s assistance-avoidance telephone system is a blood-chilling example of the long torturous path required since customer service has become passé.
I needed the number of my health care provider to find out why payment had been denied to the hospital. I called the number on the back of my PPO card and got a lengthy series of options, none of which I needed.
I tried a number from my retirement package and got another series of options that was worthless. I went online to the official PPO site and called those numbers. Finally, on the fifth “press 666 for” answering labyrinth I got a flesh and blood human being. Her voice was music to the ear. My heart raced; my mind boggled.
This wonderful woman, to whom I’ve pledged my undying love, figured out that I was using the wrong health care ID card (I think I get a new one every week) and therefore the wrong account number. Yep, I’m a dummy, but I got everything paid for.
After the better part of half an hour with automatons, it took the new love of my life about 60 seconds to figure out my error.
Our forefathers and mothers are rolling with laughter in their graves.
Finally, the worst feature of our new age life style, and something our ancestors must surely be grateful they didn’t have to contend with, is traffic. Semi-rural Lorain County is an utter nightmare to drive in, or through, or even around. There must have been a giant sale on long interval traffic signals and driver’s licenses for the mentally unbalanced that no one warned us about.
A straight line is the longest possible distance and everyone appears to be existentially lost. Every day I encounter drivers who stop in the middle of the road to contemplate their place in the universe before racing off for a short distance, only to repeat the introspection process until they find enlightenment, or the correct address.
In some ways our forebears had it easier. Gone are the days of simple packaging, customer assistance, when the only major travel impediment was a broken horse, which you could just shoot, and when Indians and massacres on the field had nothing to do with baseball.

Families Learned to Make Do
If asked to describe my family’s economic status when I was growing up in the 1960s and early 70s, I can’t say we were poor. We weren’t and if I did say it, my 70-year-old mother would hurt me. Really, she would.
We were probably middle class as it existed at that time. We always had a roof over our heads, though we rented until I was a senior in high school, and we never skipped a meal, as was evidenced by my size upon graduation of over 210 pounds.
My parents kept close tabs on the spending and luxuries were few. All requests for non-food purchases had to be brought before the finance committee, also known as Dad.
Making ends meet with four children required some inventive solutions.
One of the many methods of stretching a buck was feeding an entire family on one chicken. This meant everyone had a favorite piece, whether you liked it or not. I secretly harbored a burning desire for a breast, especially when it was pan-fried. However, I was relegated to the thigh.
Though the eldest, somehow my first pick had been overruled. As a consolation I received a wing every now and then when they were on sale.
This brings to mind one of the major changes in the American diet over the last half century. Chicken wings, and beef and pork ribs, used to be the stuff poor people ate. There wasn’t a lot of meat and they couldn’t be eaten in polite company without grease running down to the elbows and chunks of meat stuck in the teeth. Now, they’re gourmet items and cost more than deli meat.
Apparently, we not-quite-poor folk were ahead of our time.
Speaking of deli meat, what I remember as a kid is three basic types of specialty meats. You had your choice of roast beef, which was too expensive, or ham, that came in a variety known as “chipped” that we could afford, and bologna, which we ate fried, as a salad, on bread with Miracle Whip, and plain after chewing a “smiley face” in it.
Then there was my mother’s forte, grocery shopping, where stretching the budget was mandatory. The woman could wring the tears out a dollar. She clipped coupons and timed her bi-weekly food raids to coincide with sales on hamburger and bread. Back then a hundred bucks got you a car trunk jammed full of food. Now, I can fit a hundred bucks worth of groceries in a lunch bag.
Which brings up “bagging” school lunches. I always had a nice balanced meal in my brown paper bag, but I yearned for the school lunch. You could smell the aroma all morning long and after a few months you knew what was cooking before you ever saw it in front of some other kid.
It turns out the baggers were the lucky ones. When I made it to high school I bought a few school lunches with my own money and immediately went back to packing my lunch. No wonder I had so many offers for my bologna sandwich in exchange for the meat-like substance in gravy the consistency of phlegm over what may have been mashed potatoes.
Another tactic the nearly solvent instituted was the inclusion of pasta, bread, and crackers in the diet. (You can tell we took care of our stomachs first.) I love anything made from grain and one of my favorite meals is spaghetti with bread and butter. It is the antithesis of the Atkins Diet and fabulous example of carbo-loading. This explains why my stamina isn’t so hot. (It can’t possibly be because I don’t exercise and haven’t been aerobic since the last time my wife scared the devil out of me helping me drive from her co-pilot position the front passenger seat.)
So, my siblings and I all grew up to be healthy, if somewhat annoying adults. We never thought we were doing without since most people we knew were in the same boat. Although, if I had it to do all over, I’d work harder to get that chicken breast.

Behind Closed Doors
My significant other and I are enjoying our lives as mature adults, or more accurately, wrinkled teenagers with disposable income. We like the freedom to do as we please and being irresponsible without worrying about someone yelling at us.
We now have the privacy we never had when there were kids, some of them ours, roaming in and out of our home at all hours. We worked the 50-hour plus weeks and then came home for our second shift of monitoring the bedlam in our house, always looking forward to the time when we could do all those things I read in Penthouse. Well, I was, anyway.
That time is here, but reality has trumped fantasy. Anything I read in Penthouse would probably kill both of us. What we really want is a good night’s sleep.
We’re not doing well. Half the time we have matching luggage under our eyes and we’re at wits end trying to come up with a way to get comfortable. It has become apparent that the human body reaches a point of what one might refer to as the “unending total mind and body spasm.”
Your body just can’t relax; your mind races constantly with issues you can’t fix, and you hope to see your own obituary in the morning paper just so you can go back to sleep.
For me it started some years ago with my snoring, which could be described as sounding like bull moose in rut. It is so bad the din will awaken me at times.
This situation was complicated by my 1996 neck surgery. Though I’m out of pain I can’t sleep on either side or face down. I have to be in the optimum position for Olympic class log sawing, which is flat on my back.
After a few years of pokes in the ribs from a sleepless wife and contorting my body into Cirque du Soleil positions, I’ve finally found an arrangement that sort of works some of the time. Employing pillows of various sizes and materials, I’ve come up with an arrangement of 2 pillows under my head, one specially designed bone pillow under my neck, and 1 pillow under my calves. I snore less often and sometimes get through an entire night without vibrating the blankets onto the floor.
The catch is I can’t move all night long. I have to re main in pretty much the same position all night long or I wake up with a pain in the neck, and not just the one lying next to me.
My wife has her own problems achieving that Serta-Perfect slumber and they are no less annoying to me.
Her saga started on our first night together. She had to have the right side of the bed. It didn’t matter that that had been my side my whole life. She claimed it and that was that.
Then, there had to be a fan blowing on her. She’s always too warm, so this was beneficial to her. I’m the freezing type and it took many years before I stopped shivering through the night.
Next, the bed wasn’t soft enough for her. I’d had the same mattress for 20 years at that time and hard it isn’t, but we had to get a down mattress pad. This isn’t overly bothersome except for the occasional feather up the nose. Our bedroom resembles a hen house recently raided by foxes between weekly vacuuming sessions.
Not to be outdone by me, my wife now has neck problems and can’t sleep in any position except on her back. Her snore is kind of cute compared to my timber saw on concrete sinus-music, but it’s there along with the harmony of our three Yorkies.
The baritone in the chorus is our 5-year-old, 10-pound pup, Dottie. There is something seriously wrong with this dog. It’s difficult to tell who has the worse snore. I worry that she’s causing serious harm to herself since it sounds like there’s something loose rattling around in there.
Some night I need to record the quintet we must be performing. I’m certain it’s like something out of a Three Stooges episode with Shemp and Curly Joe thrown in for good measure.
My wife is going for her neck surgery this week and maybe I’ll be able to assist her in her quest to find a comfortable arrangement for sleeping. Of course, it would be the first time she has ever took my advice, but that’s another column.

Sleeping With One Eye Open
The people that have met me are naturally astounded at what a nice guy I am. It’s always difficult to convince these people that I may have an annoying habit or mannerism that might induce someone to want put me out of my misery. The first person to let me know in no uncertain terms that I may be breathing my last was dear mother.
This was many years ago when I was a teenager and it’s forced me to sleep very, very lightly to this day. Having helped to raise a couple of teenaged boys I can completely understand this desire.
Unfortunately, it seems I’m still as aggravating as ever and my poor wife can attest to this fact.
Among my more obviously irritating proclivities is the irresistible need to move things. My wife’s filing system includes most flat surfaces in the house and my obsessive-compulsive inner-demon makes me shuffle, sort, and switch this piles.
This often results in a lost receipt or irreplaceable document, which I must then search for. I have lost track of the number of times I’ve dug through coffee grounds and rank-smelling chicken parts to find something. You’d think after the hundredth time of combing through crusty used tissue I’d have gotten a clue.
I take undue pleasure in over-stuffing the napkin holder on the Lazy Susan on the kitchen table. Watching 60 napkins fly across the room when my wife tries to get just one out is always good for a chuckle.
I have the uncontrollable urge to respond with exactly the same comment whenever my wife says something, usually the dogs, are driving her crazy. I try to hold it in, but, “I don’t think you can blame that on the dogs,” always come out. I think it’s that demon again.
We have a serious laundry problem. In spite of 80 years of experience between us, the wife and I cannot agree on how to wash and fold clothes. Our definitions of what constitutes whites, darks, things that make fuzzies, and underwear that disintegrate are diametrically opposite.
The deadliest departure we have is how to fold blouses/t-shirts. I’m of the “who cares” school that puts a nice crease down the center of the chest, mostly because it’s easy. My wife does a beautiful job of perfectly folding freshly washed clothing to look like it’s ready for display at Dillards. I make attempts at this method, but the shirts generally look like they were spindled and mutilated, but not folded.
Another inclination of mine is to make odd similes. Though they are hilarious, they rarely get the intended belly laugh. For instance, my brother wrote recently that he was concerned about his wife after a minor traffic accident.
I commented that my wife was doing well, except she had begun reminding me of my 10-year-old Ford Probe. I explained that, “she still runs fine and looks good except for a few dings here and there. My only complaint is she's getting awfully expensive to keep on the road.”
Perhaps, most mind-numbingly disturbing is my inability to actually listen to anything my wife says. I see her mouth move and I know there are sounds emitting from her lips, but they don’t register. She can talk for hours explaining a matter of utmost importance and apparently I’ll respond to her prompts, though I’ve not heard a single syllable. It goes without saying that she’s never pleased to discover I wasn’t listening when she asks me about a subject she’s just thoroughly explained five minutes earlier.
All this brings me back to my mother’s warning. My adolescent behavior provoked my mom to tell me to beware because sooner, or later, I’d have to go to sleep, at which point she’d correct my errant ways.
I’m not taking any chances I’ll get a similar warning from my spouse.