Mitchell Way
My wife says I drive a duffer car. It’s a 2005 Hyundai XG350 which I bought from my stepdad and it’s not at all sporty like the cars young kids drive but who cares, I’m 65. I think she just gets cranky when she follows me in her sporty Prius C and the whole way I am driving 5 mph under the speed limit with my left turn signal on.
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.
It was an experiment that went horribly wrong. Down deep in the bowels of my high school, somewhere in the area of the air raid bunkers and the furnace room, three women in white coats, their hair in nets worked around the clock surviving only on black coffee and chain smoking. Their orders were to create a recipe.
Dough was made from various flours experimenting with varying amounts of butter, salt, sugar, and yeast. Oven temperatures and baking times were tested. The breads were pulled from the oven, tasted by the three and kept as a candidate or thrown in a garbage can. Cinnamon and raisins were added in varying amounts and lastly and the most time consuming was the perfecting of the frosting. It was unique and one of a kind. It was… delicious! Each day the principal would stare from his office window at the chimney stack on the roof which came from the bowels of the basement until one morning a puff of white smoke appeared in the air; the recipe was born. The three bakers in their long white coats had created the perfect cinnamon roll.