Mitchell Way
The piano melodies of Bach, Chopin, Beethoven, and Brahms echoed around the walls of my small room. Occasionally, my mother would sing an opera or classical favorite from the 1940s while accompanying herself on the piano.
As far as I can tell, there are two groups of boys in high school: those who are comfortable with girls and those who are terrified of them. I personally, though not being afraid of girls, was still of the elementary school mindset that they were icky. As far as I was concerned, life in high school would have been far less stressful without two of the annual school sanctioned activities: Prom and Tolo.
“Seat belts on; Doors locked; Brakes set; Circuit breakers in; Fuel selector valve on both.”
Four of us were sitting in a Cessna 172 at the parking area of the Roche Harbor Resort airstrip preparing to depart.
Thou shalt not sit down on T- Bars
For you first time users, T-Bars like rope tows are a means of pulling you to the top of the hill. You must first stand in an interminable line of skiers watching the skiers at the head of the line move into position where the attendant slaps them on the rear end with a T-bar as it comes around. To the first-timer watching the process, it all seems very straight forward. The cable with the T-bar comes around the bullwheel, the attendant slaps you in the hips with the bar and up the hill you go. What you may not know is that the T-bar cable is on a retractable reel and must feed all the way out before it catches and starts pulling you up the slope. It came as a bit of a surprise to me, a first-timer, when I skied into position. I felt the attendant slap my hips with the bar, which I assumed I could sit on. The result was a rather unglamorous flop onto my back in the snow as the cable continued to feed out of the retractable reel. Then, when the full length of cable had retracted, the T-bar shot up the hill, raking down the back of my legs, slapping the skis off my boots and causing raucous laughter from the interminable line of skiers behind me.
Sometimes the best laid plans work too well.
The Screech Owl- Scientific name: Megascops asio. We had many of these smaller owls in our neighborhood. The first 30 years of my life I lived in a house close to the main railroad tracks which stretched from Vancouver, B.C. down the west coast of the United States. We had so many trains travel by daily that we didn’t even notice the noise anymore. The tracks followed the top of a cliff which dropped 100+ feet down to Bellingham Bay. The sides of the cliff had layers of sand and clay. During the summer months, the Angel boys across the street (Craig and Doug) and my brother and I would spend endless hours climbing the cliffs, jumping from the cliffs, and using trails on the cliffs as the shortest distance to travel to explore the beach itself.
This was the scene last Saturday morning. I was lying in the middle of the Guide Meridian, motorcycle helmet and protective coveralls on. Slowly I was able to get up on my hands and knees and crawl back over to the side walk.
Never, never, ever use Rogaine ™ that has gone beyond its expiration date.
Snow skiing ranks quite high on my list of humiliations and though, through the years I have impressed others with an innate ability to humiliate myself continuously on the ski slopes, last year’s little incident which I call, “the getting to know you ride,” sums up my life on the slopes.
Actually the idea should have worked. The premise was this: “The Fall Out Team”, namely Neutron (me), Atom (Myron Voth), Proton (John Zylstra), and Electron (Rex Ely) were highlighted as possibly showing up at a high school rally of 800 kids in the Seattle area.
When moms have their first born child they tend to want to try out every thing they learned in High School home economics class. In my case, how to sew a circus jacket. All I really wanted to do was to run around the yard and chase the cat with a stick. So we struck up a bargain; if she could sew me suits, I could chase that cat around the yard with a stick. This agreement continued up until I graduated from high school.
The story I am about to tell, though it may seem far-fetched and made up, is indeed 100% true. It is important that I protect the names of those involved, so it is for that reason I will be going by the name Mike.
And so you see, this is what happens when you are singing, “The hills are alive with the sound of music” and a hawk swoops down and grabs your toupee.
Being intrigued by the constant barrage of late night TV ads which challenge you to find your lineage, I signed up with Ancestory.com and traced my family back to medieval times in ancient Britain. Knowing for sure that I must be a descendant of King Arthur or Sir Lancelot, I was sorely disappointed to learn that my oldest relative on record was an extremely colorblind and nearsighted foot soldier named Larry who accidentally chopped up seven of his own fellow warriors in battle before being reminded that the Vikings were the ones coming to shore from off of the boats. O well. He wasn’t a bad looking dude though.
Last night my grand dog Milton Barry and I were sitting on the living room couch telling stories. He starts telling me how he fought in the great Dog and Cat War of the 1950s. I know he’s lying because he can’t possibly be that old but I let him ramble on and I try to keep a straight face because I know that out of courtesy he listens to my lies too.