Music Returns to My House

It's been a rough week for us, but sometimes after the storm, the birds sing. I heard my sweetie singing downstairs as she's been cleaning. The disease she's fighting is cruel and one of the things it took from her these past few years is her music. When I heard here sweet voice singing our old lullabies and folk songs, I had one of those misty moments guys aren't supposed to get. Pretty soon we were singing the songs together and when she sings with me, it makes me sound so much better.

She has a beautiful voice and perfect pitch.  I have a weak voice and require the use of a bushel basket to carry any kind of a tune. My choir director at Valley Grande stood me between a strong bass and a baritone hoping they would influence me in the direction of the tune. Oh, I wanted to sing in the worst way, but I soon realized I just didn't get the gift.  Mr. LeBard let me in the choir, I think, mostly because he hoped I'd be a good influence on the bass section.

Sheila and I couldn't remember some of the old tunes, so I looked a few of them up as I was sitting at the computer. Then I dug out a few tunes on Youtube. After a while I fired up my favorite music machine - Pandora.  Now this isn't exactly a commercial for Pandora, but whoever came up with the idea for Pandora.com is a genius. I don't listen to the radio anymore. I literally cannot find a station I like.

With Pandora you can build a personalized radio station around a favorite genre, a favorite artist or even a favorite song.  To give you an idea, the station I'm listening to has the following search criteria:  The Roy Rogers song, "Happy Trails", "Pearly Shells" by Burl Ives, "Aloha Oe", and Danny Kaye. What's come up is everything from Sons of the Pioneers to several beautiful Hawaiian slack guitar pieces, some country folk pieces, Glenn Miller's "In the Mood", a Jimmy Durante piece and a duet with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.  If stuff comes up I don't like, I hit the "thumbs down" button and it jumps to the next song and learns what I like and dislike. If I want to hear something again on that station, I hit the "thumbs up" button and it will show up again in the mix.

Earlier, I was listening to a video of Doc and Festus from "Gunsmoke" talking philosophy.  Doc said, "A man only gets three things in his life if he's lucky, a good horse, a good dog and a good woman."

Cinnamon

I'm lucky, I've had all three.  I rode a beautiful little red quarter horse named Cinammon for two years when I started the Odyssey Harbor Equestrian program for emotionally disturbed kids. She and I learned to ride together. I hated leaving her behind when I left Odyssey Harbor. She was a great horse.

I cut several miles of new riding trails back through the woods on her back. I'd cut limbs with a machete, like a cavalry officer swinging a sword.  She never jumped or reared. She'd have been a great war horse. She was half-broke when we got her. I read a book on horse training and as I learned she did. She was a very forgiving animal.

Me and Daisy

My dog, Daisy, is with us now. She was a gift from God and the best dog I've ever had. She practically house-broke herself. She's obedient and she's the only one in the house that believes that I am the alpha dog around here. I just hard down love this dog.

She and I walk 3 to 5 miles a day. She is the first dog I've ever had that enjoys playing fetch. Sometimes, I think she understands English. She's fiercely loyal, protective of us and has very sharp teeth and a bite so powerful, she reduces bones and hard rawhide chew treats to flinders in a matter of minutes. She loves everybody (except UPS guys and the postman). She has a fan club among the kids in the neighborhood and never met a person she didn't like if they'd scratch her behind her ears.

Sheila

As to the good woman, I've been married to her for 38 years and counting and as she came through a couple of minutes ago, I swept her up in my arms and twirled her around the floor while Jimmy Durante sang "I'll Be Seeing You".

It was just a moment, but life is good because of those moments.  The vacuum cleaner is going again and my sweetie is making the place smell good.  Louis Armstrong is singing "La Vie En Rose" on Pandora and my good dog Daisy is scratching my leg to tell me she needs to go outside.

I think maybe a man needs a good radio station too and that's pretty much it.  My life is complete, I guess.

Thanks Pandora, Daisy, Sheila and Cinnamon....

Tom

Unhorsing Your Knight

My niece posted one of those snarky female comments about men the other day on Facebook.  The quote read, "Every Girl Is Entitled To A Knight In Shining Armor, Mine Just Took A Wrong Turn, Got Lost, And Is Too Stubborn To Ask For Directions."

Wow, it has been almost 24 hours since I heard a variant of the "men won't ask for directions" complaint from a woman. I feel compelled to respond, if only to warn my niece of the danger inherent in blithely accepting that a man's reluctance to seek directions from some stranger is necessarily a bad thing.

This female obsession with her Knight in Shining Armor's asking for directions reveals a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the male of the species. This misunderstanding, I believe, has lead women to a classic psychological double bind where their men are concern.

First women seem to want strong, capable hero-type guys as their mates.

Then, they want them to ask for directions, help with the dishes without being asked and spend long hours talking about feelings.

And women everywhere are now saying, "Yes, exactly!"

Men everywhere are rolling their eyes and picking up the TV guide to see if there's a Thursday night football game on this week.

Let me explain something. We knights in shining armor don't ask for directions because we know where we are! We're right here. Finding the place we're going is the whole point of the quest. The journey is the worthier part. Give us time to find our own way, girls. You'll like us much better if you do.


Have you ever noticed that the first thing women complain about after they get their husbands successfully domesticated is that they have become boring? Teach us to ask for directions and next thing you know we're couch potatoes, taking our cues from television. After that, we don't go anywhere that no one has gone before. We no longer do anything unless it's safe.

For a young man, life is a grand adventure stretching before him.  There are worlds to conquer, mountains to climb, damsels to rescue!

Pack up your knight's armor and domesticate him at your own risk ladies.  He may be easier to handle, but he'll also be a lot more dull!
 
I could be wrong...but I don't think so.
 
Tom King
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Fetch Me the Duct Tape Woman!

One nice quality of duct tape is that you can use it to tape your own mouth shut and it will not only hold your lips securely together, but when you are done, it comes off without causing permanent damage to your face. For a man with a beard, this is an important feature.

My problem is that I never learned the ultimate truth about women that my grandfather tried to teach me all those years ago. Grandpa believed firmly that all men were henpecked. That is because my grandfather was absolutely raised to believe that no man should ever strike a woman. His father absolutely adored his mother and grieved away within a year after her death. Like his own dad, Grandpa was utterly devoted to my grandmother, who rode him like Seattle Slew all his life. My grandmother was still griping at Grandpa about the quality of his workmanship for two years after he died.

"That man!" she would puff. She did love him though and missed him terribly. I could tell, but she stayed mad at him.

My Grandpa was a quiet man for most of the years I knew him. I thought that was just his nature, till I started prospecting for family history. Turns out, as a young man, my grandpa was quite a talker. He was tough as nails, opinionated and played a mean piano. Near as I can figure, my grandmother was the one who silenced him.

If I got him out under the tree in the backyard and away from the house, Grandpa could tell stories till the cows came home - literally. I have a recording of him telling stories to my son and it is priceless to me. He was funny and witty. He’d pull out his harmonica and play scurrilous old songs to the grandkids, who for years bought him new harmonicas for Christmas and birthdays when his old ones wore out.

When my grandmother was in attendance, however, he was as silent and taciturn as Calvin Coolidge. He had learned a valuable lesson about getting along with women that I have been slow to pick up.

If you shut up, there are only a limited number of things they can argue with you about.

Good advice. I may, however, need a little duct tape to heed it.

I’m just sayin’

Tom King

Operation Chaos - 1972

I've been accused on more than one occasion of having a problem with authority. I suppose I do when it comes right down to it, but I like to think it's more of a problem with "oppressive" authority than with authority per se.

I ran my own version of the soon to be infamous Operation Chaos during my senior year of high school. There were 5 girls that ran the school pretty much the year I graduated from Academy (1972). It was a little boarding school down in Weslaco, Texas just 3 miles from the Mexican border. Lovely school, but the good old girls network that determined pretty much everything that went on amongst the student body really were beginning to get on my anti-authority genes by year's end. So I, being me, started a subtle campaign to drive them crazy.

I come from a long line of folks who left their home countries because they didn't want to be bossed around by people who believed they had a right to boss everyone else. I can't resist poking little holes in well-deserving gas bags, so I spent the last couple of months of school merrily deflating things.

The campaign culminated in a classic protest march.

It was near the end of the year when we had the annual Picnic in the Orange Grove - the big student body event of the year. Debbie, our Student Association President and leader of of the 5 was even going to make a speech. A couple of other hairy revolutionaries and I got together and I proposed a Men's Liberation March. It was the 70's and ever other day, angry women were getting together to burn their bras. So we got together a bunch of the geekiest guys we could find, mixed in a couple of jocks (literally as you'll see in a moment) and made some signs.

Just as the wing ding was getting under way, a bunch of us guys came marching out of the grove doing the Winkie Army marching song from the Wizard of Oz - Yo wee oh, yo ho....

Leading the group was this skinny fresman kid with a sign that read "How would you like to be a mere sex object?" We had lots more signs of a similar nature. We gathered in front of the podium (an early 70s version of speaking truth to power).

I climbed on a picnic table and did an Abbie Hoffman-style speech complaining about mistreatment of males by our oppressive matriarchal overlords and then we lit up a jock strap and a pair of Fruit of the Looms.

What was even funnier was that our 5 Amazons thought we were absolutely serious. They even wrote snotty comments in my yearbook about it weeks later. I went back and asked them if they thought we were serious.

THEY DID!

They did find a couple of ways to get even with us by ratting us out one night, but it was worth getting detention for skinny dipping in the school pool at 1AM  for a chance to tweak the noses of our oppressors.

There's an appropriate text in Revelation that comes to mind. "The smoke of their torment riseth up forever and ever...."

Women are the Key to Civilization

Every major invention, innovation and improvement in human history was created by men in order to impress women...

Without women, men would still be living naked in the forest eating berries and raw squirrel. Not a pretty picture....

For instance,

• When men began to be expected to help with the household chores - Voila! The invention of the sewing machine, the washing machine, the dishwasher and toaster oven.


• When women got tired of being dragged by the hair when they went out on dates - Voila! The Wheel!


• When women got tired of not knowing who to blame for their kids lousy behavior - Voila! Monogamy!


• When women got tired of chopping wood and stoking fire places and made men start doing that - Voila! The gas range and the coal furnace.


• When women started making men pull up the carpets and beat them - Voila! The vacuum cleaner with 200 attachments so there would never be any danger of their having to do anything remotely like beating carpets again.


• When women got tired of their husbands telling the same old stories night after night - Voila! The printing press which lead to the radio and the television and the Internet!


• When women got tired of peeing in the woods, bathing in streams and washing dishes in the yard - Voila! Indoor plumbing.

Historically, women have held us men to a high standard of behavior - or at least have through most of the last 7000 years of history. The last 30 years or so, women have been surrendering their position of authority in society. As a result, men all over America are beginning to revert to a primitive knuckle-dragging state.

Males without strong female supervision deteriorate rapidly into grunting wildebeests who smell bad and watch football all day - forgetting, of course, that the television was originally invented by men for the purpose of convincing women to live with us by offering them soap operas and game shows to keep them amused all day while we go forth to get food and animal skins. Only later did we discover you could use it to watch football too.

My advice is, continue to hold them to a high standard of behavior or they will revert to grunting boar hawgs. Make them behave themselves. Make them act like gentlemen. Require a tie when they take you out and verify whether they are, in fact, actually single. Slap 'em if they ain't. They expect it and if you don't give it to them, they think it's because you want them to be low down cheatin' hound dogs.

Men are easily confused. Let them get away with behaving like hounds and they'll never understand that you really want them to behave like knights in shining armor.

We're really easy to control. Most of us are just so glad that you all let us live in the house with you that we'll do practically anything to make sure you are happy so we don't have to sleep in the yard with the Rottweiler.

One caveat, however. We do not know what you are thinking. We do not have your ability to read minds and know what you want.

Ask us if you want something. If you can state your needs in concrete terms, especially if you give us something to do that we actually know how to do like chop wood, climb mountains or fight off packs of wild Dingos, we're there for you.

It's not hard. You just have to recognize our limitations and work around them. Women who are expert horse trainers and dog trainers often make excellent wives. They understand the use of the bit, the spur and the rolled up newspaper (as well as the curry comb, the pat on the head and the soft tone of voice).

One Warning: Some of your sisters seemed determined to undo 7000 years of work done by your mothers and grandmothers and great, great, great grandmothers over the centuries. They are your enemy. They come after your sons and husbands and fathers like some kind of feral she-wolves with no scruples at all. Poorly trained men are confused by this and may begin to exhibit negative behaviors or stray from home. You should do something about these gals. They're messing up the whole deal undoing all our training.

And a confused man is but a short step from reverting to a wildebeest.

I'm just saying....

Tom King