A Father's Day Blog

My dad passed away in 1986, a little over a month before I turned 17.  It was sudden—no long illness—just a massive heart attack in his sleep and he was gone.  We were all shocked and devastated.  But it’s not my intent to write a depressing blog about that time in my life; it’s my intent to write about what came before.

The two words that always come to mind when I think of my dad are intelligent and funny.  Just saying those words on their own, though, doesn’t seem to do him justice.  It’s more like “fiercely intelligent” and “ridiculously funny”.

It seemed like my dad had an encyclopedic knowledge of pretty much everything.  He was an optometrist, so, as one might expect, he knew a lot about the sciences, but his knowledge of science went way beyond the biology and physics that were necessary for his career.  He had a deep love for meteorology and it was clear from the conversations he often had with the television screen that he knew significantly more about the topic than the weather guy on the local news.

But my dad’s knowledge was not limited to science; he seemed equally comfortable discussing history, geography, politics, and literature.  He would freely quote the works of William Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe.  There were times when we thought that he was randomly spouting gibberish, but we figured out years later that he was reciting passages from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Cantebury Tales off the top of his head.  This sort of amazes me to this day, because I was an English Literature major in college, and even when I was actively studying The Cantebury Tales I couldn’t quote it off the top of my head.

My dad did “voices.”  When he told a story about real events from his past he gave every character a unique voice.  But the interesting part is that rather than attempt to imitate the person’s actual voice, he would give them a voice that better fit their personality and/or the circumstances within the story.  This made for much more entertaining reminiscences, as his friends often sounded like Peter Lorre and Cary Grant.  (For more thoughts on my dad’s story telling skills click here.)

Another frequent source of amusement from my dad was his spontaneous, topical song parodies.  For example, during the 1976 presidential election cycle my dad was depressed by the choice between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, as he thought they were both clueless.  One night (possibly after a televised debate—but I can’t swear to that) he started singing his own version of the Fiddler on the Roof song “Far From the Home I Love.”  He changed the lyric that was originally “Oh, what a melancholy choice this is/Wanting home, wanting him,” to “Oh, what a melancholy choice this is/An idiot, an imbecile.”  It was moments like these peppered throughout my childhood, that likely prepared me to work at MAD magazine when I graduated from college.

These days I think of my dad most often when I attempt to wake up my oldest son in the mornings.  My son does not wake up easily and when I was a young boy, neither did I.  This was a major source of contention between my dad and I, and it used to enrage me that he was so perky in the mornings while I desperately wanted to stay in bed.  He used a variety of techniques to wake me up—which I now employ on my own son—including singing, tickling, and anthropomorphizing stuffed animals.  The method that used to irritate me the most was when he flicked my earlobes.  Because I remember despising that technique so much, I almost never employ it myself.  But this morning, in honor of Father’s Day, I decided to try it myself.  I went into my son’s room, told him to wake up, and when he didn’t respond, I flicked his right earlobe.  He swatted me away and turned over, so I flicked his left earlobe.  He swatted me away and turned over again.  I chuckled to myself and walked out of the room.  I didn’t actually need to wake my son up—I just wanted to honor my dad.

Feeding Ducks in Heat

A little over a mile from our house is a man-made lake…or pond…or moat. Really, I’m not quite sure what the body of water is considered to be, but I am relatively certain it is man-made.  Every few months we take the kids to this watery spot—a bag of old bread in hand—to feed the ducks that reside there.  It’s a cheap, fun activity to do with our boys and the ducks can’t seem to get enough of our stale bread and crackers.

This past weekend, after noticing that half a baguette that had been purchased earlier in the week had gone uneaten, I decided it was high time to pay the local water fowl a visit. I mentioned the idea to my boys on Friday night and they were quite excited, but the next day my 7-year-old had lost interest.

“It’s too hot out to feed the ducks,” he said, even though he hadn’t been outside or heard a weather report.  Of course, we live in Chandler, Arizona and it was May 31^st, so I suppose he took an educated guess that the heat would be oppressive.  Turns out he was right.

Leaving my older son behind to construct functional aircrafts out of Legos under his mother’s watchful eye, I took my 5-year-old to the lake-pond-moat. As we walked along the banks there was nary a duck to be found. Clearly, the 104-degree heat was not something they wanted to be swimming about in.  Perhaps they had more sense than us.

Eventually, as we walked I spotted a lone duck on the opposite shore about 80 yards away.  I pointed it out to my son.

“That duck is just taunting us,” he said.

(I’m going to pause here to point out that when it comes to my son’s vocabulary I am a boorish, braggart dad.  Some dads are this way about their kids’ athletic abilities or artistic skills, but for me it’s all about the ease with which my boy—who is first entering kindergarten in two months—navigates the English language. All of the quotes I’ve attributed to him in this article are verbatim and none were the result of paternal prodding.)

I suggested that we just start throwing bread in the general direction of the duck to see if he would take notice.  My son surveyed the situation and his brow furrowed.

“I think those rocks are too close to the surface,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He went on to explain that he thought the water was too shallow where we were standing and the duck what have a tough time getting around the rocks to get to the food.  He was genuinely concerned, so we walked about 25 feet due north to a spot where the water was deeper.  As we walked, the duck started swimming toward us even though we hadn’t thrown any bread yet.

Once we stopped and started hurling bits of baguette into the water the duck picked up his pace and began eating our feast.  The fact that this duck was all by his lonesome, without any of his brethren in sight, was pretty unique.  Usually we feed dozens at a time.

“This duck must be pretty happy he gets all of this bread to himself,” I said.

“Yeah, maybe he’s thinking ‘this is my lifelong dream,’” my son laughed.

After a few minutes the duck’s lifelong dream ended, however, when two other ducks took notice and swam over.  A minute or so later a couple more came over. And then…

“Look, a whole swarm is coming,” my son said, pointing.

Soon about 15 ducks were nibbling on the bread that was originally meant to go with our pasta dinner the previous Tuesday.  Considering the small amount of bread and large amount of ducks, the competition to get the eats was pretty fierce.

“I’m voting for the mallard team,” my son said.

“Uh…what?” I asked.

“I’m voting for the mallard team,” he repeated.  After staring at my son dumbly for several seconds, he said, “The ones with the green heads.”

“Ohhhh. I see. You think the mallards will get most of the bread,” I said, feeling a bit out of my depth talking about specific duck species.

“Yeah,” he laughed, tossing some more bread into the water.

It was only then, while proudly looking at my ridiculously well-spoken son, that I noticed the amount of sweat pouring down his face could best be measured in liters.

“Hey, you look really hot. What do you say we stop feeding the ducks and go get a drink?” I offered.

“Okay,” he said. And just like that it was bye-bye mallards and hello orange juice.

I’ll probably wait until October to take my son to feed the ducks again.  Not only will it cool off by then, but it will also give me time to study up on water fowl taxonomy. 

Past and Present Tense

I’m writing this blog by hand! Okay, well, this is the version typed into my computer after having written it by hand, so you’re losing the spontaneity, but the point is that these words were originally written with a Uniball Vision fine-tipped pen (black ink) in a spiral notebook (wide-ruled).

And it was kind of weird writing in the past tense—as though I’d already written this thing I was writing at the time—but it seemed the thing to do, since I knew that later I’d have to type it anyway, so if I used the present tense while typing up something I’d already written, it would seem disingenuous.

I suppose I could have written this whole thing in the present tense when handwriting it in the notebook originally, and then just scanned in the original pages and posted that version to my blog, but honestly, my handwriting isn’t very legible to begin with, and I happen to be writing this while on an airplane experiencing turbulence, so the likelihood of you being able to make out much of what I wrote would be slim to none. (Although, ironically, while I was writing that last sentence, the turbulence calmed down considerably, so the writing wasn’t that bad.)

And I now realize that with all this self-reflection—and moving back and forth between present and past tenses, as though I were an extra in the film “Memento”—I’ve strayed horribly far from the point I was trying to make in the very first sentence of this blog. I’m writing this by hand!

I have my laptop with me, but the battery is running low after playing three games of Scrabble in which I was humiliated by the computer; so I decided to power down and put away the laptop so I didn’t have to look at his smug little screen anymore.

Now I’ve whipped out the notebook and am writing hand to paper. I’m making a big deal about this, because these days, who writes this way anymore? Seriously, I’m having a hard time remembering the last time I sat down and wrote by hand for as long as I’ve been doing since I started writing this entry. And that’s probably another reason that my handwriting is so lousy. I’m out of practice. And I bet you are too. And you. And you. And especially you.

Writing by hand is a lost art, like metallurgy and phrenology. Computers may be convenient and efficient, but if by using them we sacrifice our penmanship, are we not eroding our very humanity? Give a man a pen and he can write for a day; teach a man to pen and he can write for a lifetime. Okay, I’ll admit I’m going off the rails a bit here, but I’ve been in the air for the past three hours and I’m starting to go a little stir crazy.

Anyway the point is/was…um…not really sure anymore. I’m fairly certain there was a point at one time, but I think I’ve become so distracted by the process of writing by hand that whatever the point was is lost somewhere in the ink.

And if you’ve read this far, I apologize. Nobody should be subjected to the hopeless ramblings of a man using a tool as antiquated as a pen. I assure you that my next blog entry will be written on a computer. (I mean, the original blog will be written on a computer. Obviously this blog was written—in the sense of typed—on a computer, but that was only after this blog was first written—in the sense of created—with pen and paper. But I think you got all that.)

I’ll be quiet now.

Ten Solid Predictions for the 2014 Major League Baseball Season

With the start of the MLB regular season coming tomorrow and the scent of peanuts, crackerjacks, and outrageously-priced stale beer invading our nostrils, it is time to turn our attention to America’s favorite pastime. (And no, I don’t acknowledge the two games played between the Dodgers and Diamondbacks in Australia as the start of the regular season. If baseball isn’t played in the good ole US of A it ain’t baseball. That’s right, in my eyes the Toronto Blue Jays only have an 81 game season.) In any event, below are ten ironclad, foolproof, take ‘em to the bank predictions for the 2014 baseball season…

1. After the revelation that Alex Rodriguez was taking illegal gummies, MLB will institute new urine testing procedures that can detect the presence of Twizzlers, Kit Kats, Starburst and Butterfingers, just to be safe.

2. Suddenly realizing there’s still one good player left on his team, Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria trades 2013 Rookie of the Year Jose Fernandez to the Atlanta Braves for a bottle of Jim Beam and three restaurant gift cards to be named later.

3. In an effort to outdo last year’s beard growing antics, Red Sox team members will instead see who can sport the most outrageous facial piercings.

4. A scant 45 minutes after getting hit in the head by a meteorite, Miguel Cabrera still goes three for five with two homeruns and four RBI.

5. In an unprecedented move during a Rangers-Mariners game, umpire Joe West suddenly ejects all of the other umpires because they told a joke during the 7th inning stretch and he didn’t get the punch line.

6. Rookie base-stealing sensation Billy Hamilton gets overzealous after drawing a walk and proceeds to steal second, third, home and the batter’s box while Kyle Lohse is still in the stretch position.

7.  Halfway through the season Cal Ripken makes a surprise comeback and ends up playing more games than Jacoby Ellsbury.

8. During a meaningless September snooze-fest between the Twins and the White Sox, the game is delayed by 23 minutes when the umpires huddle around a monitor to review a contested homerun ball, but instead get caught up in a rerun of “How I Met Your Mother.”

9. After running out of his own teammates and opposing players to antagonize, Yasiel Puig becomes the first player in baseball history to get ejected for getting into a fight with himself.

10. In an unprecedented move after the All-Star break, the Houston Astros decide to swap out their entire major league roster for their entire Triple A roster and end up going on a two game winning streak—their longest of the season.

My Million Dollar Ideas-- Free to You! (Well, Almost)

Every couple of years I come up with an idea so brilliant and amazing and revolutionary that I am forced to wonder: a) How come nobody has ever thought of this before?; and b) How many millions of dollars would I make if I actually got off my behind and attempted to bring this idea to fruition? Then I usually shrug my shoulders, eat another Twix bar and continue watching videos of amusing chimps on YouTube.

Clearly I’m no entrepreneur. I’ve never bothered to patent any of my ideas or even take the radical step of googling the phrase “How do I patent my ideas?” The only person I’ve ever shared my earth-shattering concepts with is my wife and she’s only slightly more entrepreneurial than me. (Of course, this is like saying Rush Limbaugh is only slightly more liberal than Michele Bachman.)

While the selfish side of me has been frustrated for years that my inherent laziness is causing me to miss out on truckloads of money, recently the selfless side of me has been weighing in as well. Forget the financial reward—these life-changing concepts can contribute to the betterment of mankind, so by doing nothing about them I am diminishing humanity.

This is where you, my faithful—and hopefully driven—readers come into the picture. Knowing that I am never going to follow up on any of my concepts, now, for the first time, I am going to reveal four of my best ideas in the hopes that some of you might act upon them and bring the world a sliver more joy and happiness. All I ask in return is that if indeed you become filthy rich as a result of this, you buy me a flat screen television. (*Note: by reading this blog you automatically agree to make Andrew J. Schwartzberg equal financial partners in any resulting endeavor and will relinquish 50% of all profits to him in perpetuity and e pluribus unum.) Onto the ideas…

The Watchdog – Although I am not a dog owner, it is clear to me from conversations with dog owners that sometimes dogs need to be walked. Indeed, it seems that often dogs need to be walked around the same time every day. Sometimes dogs seem to approach their owners in a manner that indicates that they (the dog) feel it is time for them to be walked. Perhaps the owner isn’t sure if it is, indeed, time for the dog to be walked and maybe they’re not wearing a watch or near a clock at that moment. Is it time to walk the dog or isn’t it? How can you know? Wouldn’t it be nice if the dog could tell you the time? Crazy, you say? Well, not with the Watchdog! The Watchdog is a dog collar that has a watch on it. It’s fashionable and practical. When your dog comes running and seems to want to be walked, all you have to do is look at its collar to see if the time is right!

Indoor Running Rest Areas – It’s summer vacation and you’re on a long road trip with your family. You have two young children in the backseat who are getting restless. You’ve driven for three hours and have at least two more hours before you hit the next rest stop. Boy would it be great if you could just stop and let the kids run around for 20 minutes before they kill each other in the car. Only problem is you’re on I-8 in the middle of the Sonoran Desert and it’s 115-degrees outside. Wouldn’t it be great if somewhere in the middle of this barren wasteland there was a gigantic, enclosed, air-conditioned, carpeted empty building that your kids could run around in? You bet your bippy that would be great! Yes, I’m talking about a building at least the size of a Costco that has absolutely nothing in it—no furniture, no merchandise, no structures of any kind. Cool, comfortable emptiness in which your kids can manically run around—and then hopefully zonk out for the rest of the ride as soon as they get back into the car.

Rentable Man Caves – We live in a small three-bedroom house and each one of those rooms is claimed by an inhabitant. The garage houses our minivan, the attic houses wiring, pipes and dust, and there is no basement. There is no good place for me to do private man things. If I want to blast Led Zeppelin or watch a gory horror flick, I do it on my 12-inch laptop while wearing a headset. Pathetic, I know. For years I wallowed in self-pity about this and one day it occurred to me that I can’t possibly be the only man in this predicament. While there are millions of guys out there who have managed to create their own man caves in a spare room or toolshed, there must be millions of others who have no such luxury. Would they pay $20 per hour to rent one for an evening? To get their own private man cave with a big screen television, incredible sound system, and fridge for beer and macaroni salad? I know I’d pay top dollar for a set up like this every once in a while. I envision a large retail space with a dozen or so soundproof units for rent. Once inside renters can do anything they want within legal reason…except listen to Michael Bolton. Man Caves have their standards.

Peripheral Frame Lenses – I have exceptionally good eyesight, so I’ve never had to think that much about glasses; on the other hand, my dad was an optometrist, so optometric thinking must be in my DNA. That genetic predisposition to eyewear knowledge came up big the other night while talking to my wife, who wears glasses. She mentioned in passing that due to the thickness of her frames, her peripheral vision is blocked while driving. In other words, the frame itself creates a blind spot for her. Oh, the irony! I said, “Wouldn’t it be great if instead of making the frame out of opaque plastic, they made it out of the same material as the lens and made the frame itself to your prescription?” A second after the full impact of that thought set in I shouted, “I’m going to be a millionaire!” Then I went on eating my Twix bar.

Looking for Orange Juice-- Not Comedy

Every so often at my house, we have breakfast for dinner. Scrambled eggs, toast, hash browns—you get the idea. (And no, on those days we don’t have dinner for breakfast.) A couple of nights ago was one of our breakfast nights and as soon as the yolks hit the frying pan it occurred to us that we had no orange juice.  In order to avert this potential tragedy, I ran screaming from the house into my car and headed to the nearest convenience store. (The screaming wasn’t so much about the orange juice, as it was about the stubbing of a toe on the way out the door.)

The closest place to us that sells orange juice is a CVS located about a quarter of a mile from our home. So that’s where I headed with all due haste, since the eggs were frying and there was no time to waste.* I got a spot right in front of the store and trotted in. I quickly grabbed a bottle of Tropicana and headed to the checkout area, happy to see that there were no other customers around. “Great,” I thought, “I’ll be in and out of the store quickly.”

As I approached the counter, orange juice in hand, the cashier—an older, rumpled looking gentleman—said, “Are you old enough to buy that?”

“Uh, what?” I said, not quite sure I heard him correctly.

“I said, are you old enough to buy that orange juice? You better have some ID on you, son,” he said with a crooked smile.

Suddenly it dawned on me that he was attempting to engage in witty banter. I figured I’d give a quick rejoinder, grab my o.j. and get out of there.

“Oh no, don’t worry, it’s not for me. That stuff gives me the shakes.” Satisfied, sir? I played along with you there.

“Okay, because I don’t want to be responsible for what might happen to you if you drink too much of that.”

At this, I just smiled and nodded, thinking, “Ho, ho! You’re a crackup. Now ring me up, so I can be on my merry freaking way.”

But the man kept on going—making lame jokes about my CVS discount and telling me that he wanted me to come back later to give him one of the mimosas he was certain I would soon be making. So frazzled was I by his incessant attempt at amusing small talk that I ended up entering the wrong pin number into the machine, which only brought on a new barrage of sub-Carrot Top-level one-liners.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, but probably only amounted to three minutes, I managed to get out of there with my orange juice—even as the barbs kept on being hurled toward me while I was walking away.

My first thought as I left the store was, “Sheesh! Is it really too much to ask to get in and out of a convenience store quickly? That’s the whole point of calling it a CONVENIENCE store! Having to wait through a Vegas lounge act when I’m just trying to buy a bottle of juice isn’t what I’d call convenient.”

Then, as I pondered the situation some more it occurred to me that the cashier, standing at a register in an empty store on a Saturday night, was probably bored out of his mind. Joking around with me was probably just his way to break up the monotony. And maybe I was the one being the jerk by not engaging with him more.

When I got back home, our breakfast-dinner (a.k.a. “brinner”) was not quite ready yet, so it turned out that in the end, the clerk’s feeble jesting really cost me nothing at all.

“Hmmm. Maybe I should bring the guy a mimosa after all,” I thought. But then I realized I didn’t have any champagne, and the last thing I had any interest in doing was interacting with a liquor store clerk.

*Rhyming unintentional  

Email Reveals Surprise Dutch Treat

Recently, while emptying my Junk E-mail folder at work, I came across one email that stopped me during my deleting frenzy.  The email subject was simply “Dear Andrew J Schwartzberg” and it was from “Dutch Law Firms.” I opened it and read the following:

Dear Andrew J Schwartzberg,

I am a Citizen of Netherlands and a Personal Attorney to Late Engr. Roxon Schwartzberg; I need your assistance in repatriate the funds left behind by my client. (Late Eng. Roxon Schwartzberg), before he died with his entire family. He deposited One Trunk Box/Diplomatic Personal Treasure, containing the sum of $12,752,000.00 with a security company here in Netherlands,

Every attempt to trace any member of his family has proven unsuccessful and abortive.

I'll give you more information upon your response to this plan with your full name, address and direct telephone.

Regards,

Advocaat Netherlands

(Attorney at Law)

(Personal Attorney to Late Engr, Roxon Schwartzberg) Friday, January 17, 2014

I was quite intrigued by this electronic missive from Mr. Advocaat Netherlands (an odd name to be sure, but hey, he’s Dutch) and wondered how it was that I never knew I had relatives in that part of the world. And I was deeply saddened that at the same moment that I learned of my Dutch relatives, I also learned that they simultaneously met a cataclysmic end. Indeed, morbid though it may be, I found myself wondering how that entire branch of the family all perished at once. Did it have something to do with Roxon’s job as an engineer?  Was he tinkering in his basement workshop when KABLAM! the whole house went up in smoke?  Or did Roxon go berserk, wipe out his entire family with a wooden shoe and then turn the clog on himself?  Or maybe they went out to dinner one fateful night and all succumbed to tainted sushi.

Of course, whatever caused the untimely deaths of Roxon and his entire family no longer mattered. What’s done is done and I was now left to deal with the financial ramifications. It seemed odd that Roxon would choose to place $12,752,000 into a Trunk Box (presumably half trunk, half box) rather than have it spread across various bank accounts and investments, but Roxon was kin and I trusted him implicitly. The only real question that remained was what to do with that kind of money.

As a grant writer, the first thing that came to mind when I saw the eight-figure sum I had coming to me was to use it all to start a foundation on behalf of the deceased—The Roxon Schwartzberg Foundation.  The tricky part, however, is that I would want to distribute the money to the causes that Roxon held close to his heart, but I have no idea what those were.  Would he want to save the rainforests? Or find a cure to eczema?  Or provide honorariums to starving puppeteers?  Without knowing Roxon’s wishes I could potentially do more harm to his legacy than good.  For example, if I distributed funds to the Jane Goodall Institute, but it turned out that Roxon had a deep-seated fear of chimpanzees, I would never be able to live with myself. No, well-meaning though it might be, starting a foundation with these millions would cause too much of an ethical dilemma.

My next thought was that I could use these funds as seed money to start an engineering firm in Roxon’s honor. But, of course, this idea poses the same type of problem as the previous one. I don’t know what kind of engineer Roxon was. Was he an automotive engineer? A computer engineer? A structural engineer? A biomedical engineer? There are dozens of possibilities and the reality is that I struggle with long division, so no matter what type of engineer he was, I may not be the most qualified to start an engineering firm.

Finally, I thought it might be best for me to spend the money on a Samsung 85-inch Ultra HD TV, a 2014 Porsche 918 Spyder, and 300,000 Kit Kats.  And the more I thought about this, the more I realized that Roxon would have wanted it that way.

Of course, the first step is to get a flight over to Amsterdam to claim what’s rightfully mine.  Once I have the money in hand I’ll not only be able to make all the purchases I mentioned above, but will also be able to pay for a separate trip to Africa to claim the additional monies I have coming to me from a Nigerian prince.

Looks like 2014 is going to be a VERY prosperous year!