Only in Keswick

By Tony Vanderwarker

I wrote about the joy I felt last Christmas but when the event repeated itself this holiday season, I was even more ecstatic. 

Opening the door to the basement in the cottage, I remembered the rush of excitement I felt when I was a little kid coming down the stairs on Christmas morning and seeing all the wrapped presents clustered under the tree. Only this present was even more joy-producing. 

Wrapped in a plastic tarp was the fake Christmas tree we’d purchased at Home Depot last year. We’d stored it in the cellar completely assembled, replete with all its lights, thinking we’d retrieve it next Christmas. 

And there it was, a Christmas tree for the taking. No driving to the Christmas tree lot, no stomping around in the cold looking for the perfect tree (by the way, there is no such thing. In my experience, every tree I’ve ever seen has missing branches somewhere, forcing you to turn the tree so the glitch faces the corner or wall. What do you want for ninety-five bucks anyway?), then tying it to the top of the car, driving home, wedging it through the door and then dropping it into the tree stand. A tree stand, by the way, is one of the most imperfect devices ever invented, right up there with the corkscrew and bulb planter. 

The tree stand is the ultimate time sink. Expect to spend a good hour trying to get the tree straight and then struggling to turn those dastardly bolts that are supposed to grip the trunk so the tree doesn’t topple over. Of course it only comes crashing down when its loaded with ornaments, the kind of glad tidings you only get during the Christmas holidays, like the hot oil exploding when you drop the turkey in or the major present you hid so well you can’t find it. 

Annie and I turned the tree on its side took it out through the cellar door, loaded it the Gator and drove it back to the house. Five minutes had passed and we had a Christmas tree gracing our living room.  Plugged it in, tapped the floor switch and…oops! Two sections of lights blinked on but two didn’t. Was this the ghost of Christmas past coming back to haunt us? Would I have to go to Lowe’s again and buy more lights just like in the bad old days? But no, we quickly discovered that the two unlit sections had come unplugged, I guess when we stuffed it through the cellar door.  When we plugged them in, the lights came on. 

A half hour later, we had the tree loaded with the familiar ornaments we’d stored in the garage. The Mercedes hood ornament from one of our former cars, the Heineken can turned into an ornament, the lobster, the cow, etc. etc. 

Thirty-five minutes total and we had an honest to goodness lighted and fully-decorated Christmas tree (that’s if you don’t look too closely or feel the needles)!

Damn, was I pleased with myself. I had totally eradicated one of the more onerous parts of the holidays. Now all I had to do was find the spray aptly named Scentsations that gave the fake tree that real tree scent and I was in business. 

So, do I occasionally feel a touch of regret for having a fake tree with a fake scent? Have a sense of guilt for ducking out of a hallowed Christmas tradition? 

Not on your life. Not only have I saved a tree from being sawn down, I’ve saved ninety-five bucks, three trips to Lowe’s, countless hours untangling strands of light and frustrating bouts with the cursed tree stand–for as they sing, “There’s no place like home for the holidays…” I might add–especially when you’ve got a fake tree gracing it.

(First appeared in Keswick Life in December 2019)

By Tony Vanderwarker

For a writer, the two biggest fears are the sight of a blank page and the red pencil of an editor hovering over your manuscript. The blank page stares up at you as if it’s saying, “Go ahead, just try writing something, I dare you.” And the longer you stare at it, the more it has to say, “Go ahead, try something, try anything–but you know it’ll be terrible. See, you can’t even start, can you? Maybe you’ve run out of ideas, the cupboards bare. That’s why you’re just sitting there staring at me. So do what you always do, get up from your machine and go into the kitchen and get a cookie or something.”

This conversation can go on for three minutes, sometimes four until you purge the urge to cut and run and summon up the courage to strike one key and then another. When you have completed a paragraph, a great sense of relief washes over you. “See, I can write,” you say. So you’ve conquered the blank page.

The red pencil’s another story. When an editor picks it up, it’s like he’s starting on a hunting expedition and he or she is not going to stop until they find their quarry. The small game is typos and the writer winces at every one the red pencil finds. Then grammar is the target, next is awkward phrasing and pretty soon the manuscript gets shot full of red marks.

It’s debilitating to a writer, like shooting airballs is to a basketball player. I suspect very editor secretly relishes slashing a manuscript to bits.

But not Winkie. She never took a red pencil to even one of my articles for Keswick Life. Never gave me an ounce of criticism or blackballed an article. Instead she’d send a brief email saying, “Thank you, it’s great!” Or, “Love it, thank you so much!” 

So writing for her was always a pleasure. I never had the dread of a blank page or the sight of a red mark. I could write whatever I wanted knowing she’d appreciate it and she’d print it. I treasured the experience of writing for her. For a writer, it was a once in a lifetime experience.

Occasionally, she’d request a writeup of a Keswick event, often with a tight deadline. And when I dallied and she faced getting it off to the printer, I’d get a nice nudge from Winkie, never threatening, never nasty. “Don’t forget the article about the horse show,” she’d remind me, “I’ll need it pretty soon.”

She was endlessly gracious to me and to the community she loved so much. And that showed in the character of her newspaper. It was interesting, appreciative, good-natured and full of life, just like the community it served. And to quote a famous Barkleyism, “There are no secrets in Keswick,” life in Keswick was riddled with gossip but nothing snide or untoward toward anyone ever appeared in Winkie’s pages. That was Winkie. 

And those of us who are left to carry on without her will do our best to maintain the generosity of spirit that Winkie championed and brought to life in the pages of her paper. 

Thank you, Winkie, thank you.

By Tony Vanderwarker

Okay, remember back in early March when everything was still normal? That was a short three and half months ago. We were looking forward to spring, the stock market was making history, Virginia basketball had a shot at pulling down its second national championship and the lacrosse team was on its way to another great season. People went to movies, ate at restaurants, went to church and hung out in bars. 

Then a microbe snuck up on us and changed everything. We went from not even thinking about going out to cowering in our houses, scared to death about getting exposed to the virus. If you went out and happened to run into droplets, you could be looking at being put in a coma and having a tube shoved down your throat. Going on a ventilator for three weeks is not what you call a party. 

So for the longest time we stayed home, only venturing out a couple times to get groceries or go to Lowe’s, always wearing our masks and carefully dodging around fellow shoppers to maintain distance, always dreading that someone would cough up a cloud of droplets that would put us in the ICU. Strange phrases like “social distancing” and “sheltering at home” cropped up in our conversation and grocery stores put circles and marks on their floors to remind you to stay six feet apart.

We’d been to Lowe’s a couple times as well as the Giant and Wegman’s, wearing our masks and dodging around fellow shoppers to maintain distance, but always fearing some shopper would cough up the haze of droplets that would give us the dread disease.

We hadn’t considered going to a restaurant since that could be like putting your life on the line. Only picking up lunch at Bodo’s or dinner at Orzo or Public through the car window. 

But after two months, sick of being cooped up like caged animals, we decided to take a walk on the Downtown Mall and see if we could find a restaurant that would seat us outside. 

No such luck, it was Father’s Day and the best we could do was a table inside at Hamilton’s.  “We’ll take it,” I said, knowing that we could be signing our death warrants. 

“I’m not sure we should be eating inside,” my wife said.

“C’mon,” I joked, “this is a restaurant, not a gas chamber,” trying to make light of the situation. 

Taking off our masks, we sat down at the table with a bit of trepidation—in the back of our minds was the question: would we recall this experience as the one that finally deported us to the ICU?

Fortunately, our table was isolated from the others and the other diners in the restaurant were all wearing masks. But we kept our eyes peeled for clouds of droplets. If someone had sneezed, it would have sent us diving under the table. 

Now these thoughts and feelings don’t make for a pleasant lunch so we struggled to pretend everything was hunky-dory. 

“The menu looks good,” I said, “what are you thinking of getting?”

Just then, the waitress approached, pulling up six feet away from us, “Good afternoon,” she mumbled through her mask, “how are you folks?”

“I was tempted to say, “Scared s**tless,” but I bit my tongue.

“Can I get you something to drink?”

I ordered a rum cocktail, the wife a Prosecco. 

“So what do you think?” I asked her.

“About what?”

“About being here.” 

“It’s a little uncomfortable, I must admit.”

“C’mon, it feels like being in London during the Blitz, you never knew when you were going to get blown to bits.”

“It does feel risky.”

“Imagine that–here we are sitting in a nice restaurant about to get our drinks and we’re talking about feeling like we’re living in a horror movie, never knowing when a zombie is going to jump out of a wall and start eating your face.”

“That’s what this damn disease has done, taken normal everyday actions like touching your face, shaking hands, air kissing and going to restaurants and turned them into taboos. It’s made us into a bunch of scaredy cats.

The waitress was hovering a social distance away, her pad at the ready. It was time to order.

“I’d like shrimp and grits and my wife will have the beet salad.”

“Thanks, I’ll be right back.”

She was and the food, as always, was good. A second round of drinks made us almost feel normal, like there was nothing wrong with eating in a restaurant. 

But after we finished and took care of the check, as we walked out the door I felt a sense of relief. Like we’d escaped from a threatening situation and lived to tell about it. We hadn’t parachuted out of a plane or faced off against a hissing rattler, all we’d done was have lunch in a restaurant. 

As we walked down the Mall snapping our masks behind our ears, I reflected on how otherworldly the experience had been, how a mundane and routine event like eating out had been transformed into something disquieting and foreboding. My wife summed up the situation perfectly, saying, “Maybe we won’t do this again for a while.”

And I couldn’t help but recall Dorothy’s statement to her dog, “Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Goldfinger

This has nothing to do with Keswick but it’s a good story. 

We all have reminders of who we used to be and the things we did. Photos, an old football helmet, a locket or faded handwriting on an old letter. Me? I have two gold nuggets, one a ring and the other a pendant. 

I was twenty and in the Peace Corps in the Republic of Guinea on the west coast of Africa. Guinea has an important connection to Charlottesville as that’s where the basketball star Mamedi Diakite grew up. He started out playing soccer but fortunately as he began to sprout up, his parents suggested he switch to basketball. The rest is history. 

But back to Guinea. The country has extensive gold mines and Guineans love to wear gold. Heavy gold earrings, gold bracelets, gold chains and bracelets. After a appreciating their gold jewelry for a year and learning that local goldsmiths could craft gold nuggets, I decided to get a couple. I’d become a touch Africanized in my year and a half in the country. Like the Guineans, I wore clear plastic Chinese sandals, brightly-printed shirts and French planter suits, so it seemed totally natural for me to sport a couple gold nuggets. 

The details are now hazy. I don’t remember exactly which village the goldsmith was in or how much I paid for the nuggets but I can remember sitting on the dirt floor of his mud hut and watching the old guy make them. He crouched over his fire and carefully poured molten gold into a batch of pebbles, then, as the gold started to cool, he picked the pebbles out of the gold leaving behind an irregularly-shaped and indented object that seemed to resemble what one would imagine a gold nugget to look like. He made a second one, crafted a ring to attach to the back of it, a loop to hold a chain for the pendant, threaded the chain through the loop and I was in business. I hung the pendant around my neck, put the ring on my finger, paid the goldsmith for his work and proudly strode off through the village. 

It never occurred to me what a twenty year-old white kid from Connecticut would look like wearing a huge gold nugget on my left pinky and another on a chain around my neck until I got to Heathrow Airport on my way home. Going through immigration, I was surprised when one of the officers beckoned me to leave the line and follow him. He escorted me into a small office, closed the door, locked it and began to grill me. Who was I? Where did I come from? And where was I going? And what was that gold jewelry I was wearing?

From time to time, he would get up and leave, locking the door behind him. When he returned, it was the same story: Who was I? Where did I come from? And where was I going? And what was that gold jewelry I was wearing?

This went on for six hours. Back then, I was puzzled. Why were they retaining me? What did they think I had done? Are they going to deport me? But now I realize that with my long hair and gold nuggets, I must have looked like a drug dealer, international smuggler or NFL wide receiver. Or at least, someone worthy of suspicion. 

They finally let me go, never telling me why they’d retained me. But over time, I decided that the nuggets attracted too much attention, particularly back in the States. People looked at me like they were thinking: Why is that kid wearing a honking big gold nugget on his finger and one hanging around his neck? What’s his story?

So I stopped wearing them. But put them away until my wife, Annie, discovered them, she asked: “Can I wear them? They’re great! I’d love to wear them!” Having long ago abandoned the thought of being an NFL wide receiver, I said, “Sure, happy to have you enjoy them.”

So every time she wears my gold nugget pendant or puts on my nugget ring, it takes me back to the mud hut in Africa, the grizzled old goldsmith and the detention center at Heathrow, things I never would have experienced had I not decided, fifty odd years ago, that I couldn’t live without a couple gold nuggets.  

The Ups and Downs of Country Living

For all the serenity and simplicity living in the country affords, there’s a price to be paid. Sure it’s tranquil and beautiful but it has its downsides. 

Praying for rain after a long dry spell? Fed up with crispy, brown grass and leaves turning color way before they’re supposed to? Well, be careful what you wish for because you can get three inches of rain that knocks out your power and disables your TV and internet. Sure the grass turns green again but you can’t get your email or watch ESPN or run the dishwasher.

Want to go for a nice walk in the woods? Get ready to get ticked off. The little suckers burrow into your shin and munch your blood. And some have the effrontery to invade your private parts laying a fat gray egg where you least want to find it.

Plant a raft of tulips in the fall and eagerly look forward to seeing them pop up and bloom in the spring? They might pop up but the deer nibble them to stubby nubs before they have a chance to bloom. 

Looking out proudly on your expanse of green lawn but dreading having to hop on the mower twice a week to keep up? Well when August comes, your rich green lawn will look like someone took a flamethrower to it.

Usually, traffic isn’t a big deal in the country unless you run into an accident on 250 and decide to take 64 instead. Wrong move because the rest of the world has decided to do the same thing and 64 is now a parking lot.

Septic systems are an unseen ally until your toilet gurgles. Gurgling means your septic tank is full of you-know what and you’re suddenly into writing big time checks. You’re lucky if its only six hundred bucks to pump out the tank because you could get hit with a bum pump and then you’re out a couple grand. Suddenly you find yourself paying $3000 to go to the bathroom.

Just when you’ve got the freezer packed with all kinds of goodies you’ve harvested from the garden, a hurricane hits and knocks out the power for a week and you find yourself emptying the freezer into the trash.

You face up to the fact that you need to replace your pool cover. Get a spanking new one that matches the color of the grass so you can hardly notice it. Problem is that deer don’t notice it either and walk right over it, crashing through the cover, ripping a hole in it and cutting up your pool liner with their sharp hooves as they try to escape. The deer-drop-in costs you your insurance deductible. Just feel lucky the deer wasn’t a cow because, as our insurance agent told us, domestic animals aren’t covered.

Zero turn mowers are the sports cars of the mowing world. Nimble and maneuverable, they can run circles around trees and bushes, turn on a dime and deftly respond to your every command. Problem is the two rear wheels are powered separately, which makes them agile but when one wheel gets stuck in mud, since the two wheels aren’t connected the unstuck one tells the stuck one to take a hike so the more you try to power out , the deeper you bury the wheel and mowing quickly turns into towing.

Another downside to country living is when a hurricane or snowstorm is coming, you can’t get to the grocery store fast enough. I don’t care if you go three days before, you won’t find an egg, carton of milk or loaf of bread in the entire store. When threatened with a weather catastrophe, instead of buying shovels or salt or plywood, country people buy bread, turning into locusts, devouring shelves upon aisles of loaves. Grocery stores end up looking like third-world food stores just before a currency devaluation. 

Snow falling in the country is beautiful but there’s a huge downside. Snow brings out the worst in country drivers. When they’re faced with a steep hill, they put the pedal to the metal so the rear wheels spin out and slide the car into a ditch. Same goes for going down a hill, only this time they hit the brake so hard its ditch time again, Moral of this story is, when it snows, stay home and eat whatever bread you were able to save from the grocery store.

Ponds are great, pleasing to look at and fun to fish in. Unless the pool drain begins to leak. Since drains are way down at the pool’s bottom in case you want to completely empty it, when it leaks the drain threatens to drain the pool dry, leaving you a layer of fish a foot deep. So you need to quickly call in a backhoe guy to fix it. Now the backhoe guy knows you’re up against the wall so his fee automatically ascends. He tells you, “I can drop my current job and get over there quick and fix it but it ain’t gonna be cheap.” So the leaking drain not only drains the pond but your wallet too. 

But I wouldn’t trade living in the country for anything. You just need to know peace and quiet can cost you

Weirdnesses In Life

What got me thinking about the odd things in life was a dental implant I had recently. In order to insure that there is sufficient bone below the sinus to hold the implant, the prosthodontist inserts cadaver bone (yup, you heard it right) to encourage my jawbone to grow, kind of a bone growth cheerleader. So I began thinking, I now have a dead guy in my mouth. How weird is that?

I guess I should thank the deceased guy (or female) for being so generous but he or she is stone-cold dead and unaware that part of them is in my mouth. Talk about having your foot in your mouth, how about having someone else’s foot in your mouth? 

So on my Virginia driver’s license, down in the lower left corner is a notation, alongside a tiny black heart, that I am an organ donor. So if I go down in a car wreck, my foot could (or my arm, or shoulder, or leg) go into someone’s mouth. 

I guess that’s a nice thought, better than your bone’s going into soup or something like that, but it’s still strange. 

And I had to sit there in the dentist’s chair while he stuffed someone’s foot into my mouth and it was like nothing weird was happening. The office was painted a restful color, soft music played, everything the dentist and his assistant would touch was wrapped in plastic, it was all normal EXCEPT….

There are other oddities in life, like when I sing in church and nobody looks at me. Because I can’t sing, I sound like a cross between a foghorn and a coyote. I can hear it, it’s grating, so off key there isn’t a noticeable note within five hundred yards. I sound awful. Once I was presenting a commercial to McDonalds, a spot with the McDonalds’ jingle and I was singing along and the head guy stops me and says, “Just read the lyrics, Tony, we know the song.” So why doesn’t the congregation turn and stare at me? How odd is that?

Okay, some other weird things. I like bright colors, I mean really bright colors. Like I have an orange pair of pants, not just orange, but red, yellow and blue too. I mean these pants are so bright, they are almost electric. And when I wear them out, to a party or something, someone always points at me, sneers and says, “Nice pants,” like they wouldn’t be caught dead in them. Does it faze me? Not at all. 

But it should. I mean who wears orange pants to a cocktail party? And I usually top off the pants with a bright contrasting shirt, so I end up looking like a flag semaphore. I guess wearing orange pants and a yellow shirt to a cocktail party is no weirder than having someone’s foot in your mouth, but it’s still weird. I just avoid singing when I’m wearing orange pants, I mean why push your luck?

Here’s another weirdness: I only wear Crocs, you know, those ugly rubber shoes that kids wear with little metal emblems sticking out the holes? I’ve got a foot condition so they are the only shoes I find comfortable. I’ve got them in a light blue color, I’ve got red ones, bright green ones, orange and black ones and a pair of camouflage Crocs. I also have a couple pairs in brown suede that I wear with my orange pants so I don’t end up looking like a walking Jackson Pollock painting. 

The weird thing is back in the good old days, I had a whole stock of fancy footwear. I had crocodile pumps, I had formal black Mary Janes with red piping, I had a pair of wingtips made out of boar’s hide and I prided myself in always having the sharpest footwear. So when I go out, wearing some nifty outfit, my fancy shoe history collides with my stupid-looking Crocs and I feel weird. 

Here’s another weird thing. My wife thinks I drive too slow, “You’re so pokey!” she regularly says when I’m behind the wheel. So she drives most of the time. But recently, I noticed that she constantly looks out to her left at the passing scenery. Now I have to turn my head to notice her looking out the window so now we’re both looking left. Anyone behind us must see both of us turning to look left at about the same time, both not looking at the road. And we do it almost in unison and there’s really nothing to look at besides grass and trees. So I know the two of us look weird.

Then there’s the pool. When it rains hard, say five inches or so, because there’s only fifteen feet between the pool and the house, water weirdly accumulates between the two and causes the pool liner to float up so the pool steps end up swollen like fat pillows and the floor of the pool levitates up. That’s where the sandbags come in. It takes ten to get the steps to settle and you have to get in the pool and guide the sandbags to the correct places on the steps. That isn’t so bad, but after a couple days when they get waterlogged, getting them out is a Herculean chore. Talk about feeling weird, diving down and trying to hoist sandbags off the steps makes you feel like you’re a prospector in the California gold rush panning gold out of some river. But you’re panning sand out of a pool, not gold out of a river and I call that weird.

How To Tell If You’re Getting Older

There are always numbers, but you can’t put much stock in them. You can keep claiming you’re 39 for a good ten years and “seventy is the new fifty” only clouds the picture. Plus everyone’s chomping down steroids, getting facelifts and taking advantage of other medical advances to disguise their true ages.

So here are some new metrics for you to consider.

Having joints replaced, knees, hips, shoulders, whatever is a surefire sign. You’ve worn out the part God gave you, just like a crankshaft or wheel bearing, and now you have to pick a new one off the rack and have it installed. 

If you have just one friend with a new part, you’re not really getting up there. But if you have three, four, six or seven friends or go to a cocktail party where new hips are what everyone’s talking about, then you know you’re really aging. I once had a dream where a mad inventor put a huge magnet on one wall of the cocktail party and when he turned it on, it sucked everyone with a replacement over to it. I remember thinking, “Look how many of my friends are stuck to the wall. Now they’re old.”

Take me, for instance. I had a pacemaker put in and while it was no big deal (a nurse once told me that pacemakers now are as common as facelifts), it did point out to me that like a cracked cylinder head, my heart wasn’t what it used to be. It needed a machine to run in front of it to, you guessed it, set the pace. So now my heart is chasing a machine and that officially makes me old (Google says 75 is the average age for an implant–plus or minus 10 years). 

But the signs don’t stop there. At a certain age, the garden of aches and pains begins to bloom. This hurts there, that hurts here, my foot, my shoulder, my neck—they’re all talking to me in a way they never have before. You find yourself saying, “Gee, that never hurt before, I wonder where that came from?” 

Turns out there are a whole set of mystery maladies seemingly coming out of nowhere. “I mean, I didn’t fall, I didn’t twist it wrong, I wonder why in the hell my BLANK hurts?” Problem is, they come and go like guerillas in the night. One minute, your back is bothering you, causing you to walk like a pretzel but then that goes away and three days later, you can barely bend your left elbow.

Trouble with all these ailments is that while they randomly attack and then retreat on some weird schedule, you can’t pin them down long enough to get to a doctor. You don’t want to be sitting in some doc’s office and when he asks, “Show me where it hurts?” You have to tell him, “It did hurt right here but it doesn’t anymore.” Talk about getting a weird look. 

The other trouble is that you get no sympathy from your significant other because they too are suffering from mystery maladies. Try for some sympathy for a painful wing and you get, “You say your shoulder hurts, but my hip has been hurting for six months. And I’m not even bringing up my knee.”

Okay, so when you get into competition with your spouse over who’s got the worst aches and pains,  >>>>

<<<< no matter your numerical age, you’re definitely up there.

Then there’s the mental side of the picture, which is not pretty. As you age, the sliding scale comes into play. And it only slides one way. First you have trouble remembering names. While you can dredge up names from the past, the names of people you recently met vanish like hoped-for lottery winnings. 

So before you tell a story, you rehearse the whole thing to make sure you can remember the names of everyone involved. Sort of lets the air out of a story when you start, “So did you hear the one about…jeez, I think I’ve forgotten his name.” You face the same situation with jokes. Once you’ve gotten to the end of a long windup and come to the punch line, it’s not good when you go blank. That’s a hole it’s hard to dig yourself out of. So before telling the joke, you make sure you’ve got the punch line down cold, which is not easy when you’re struggling to remember the body of the joke. 

The dead giveaway that you are old is when you purposefully stride across the house heading to the bathroom to get, say, a Band-Aid. But when you get to the bathroom, the Band-Aid has flown the coop and you’re left standing in the middle of the room wondering what the hell you came in here for. God forbid your spouse finds you staring blankly at a wall because she’s sure to hit you with some zinger like: “What? Did you forget what you came in here for—AGAIN?”

That’s why lists are so invaluable for older people. Only problem with a list is that you have to remember to take it with you. Otherwise you’ll end up standing in a dumb stupor in a supermarket aisle. Or what’s worse, having to call the wife and asking her to read off the list to you. 

Fortunately, there are machines to keep you from going over the edge to total senility. “Hey, Siri,” is like a life ring tossed to you when you can’t remember where the vacuum repair place is, how to get to Costco or what time your dentist appointment is. “Hey, Siri,” gives you a false sense of security until you forget and leave your phone at home. 

The way I see it is that artificial intelligence can’t come soon enough. And I’m not talking about the artificial intelligence I used to run into in advertising. People walking around with fancy MBA’s who couldn’t recognize a big idea even if it walked up and slapped them in the face. 

I’m referring to little machines with odd names like Google Home Mini and Alexa. Losenge-like things that actually talk to you, reminding you of appointments, when your pot roast is done or the name of the junior senator from Wisconsin. Just imagine what they’ll be able to do in the future. Now the things talk to you, in the near future, they should be able to think for you.

For instance, if you find a little senility creeping in, you could activate Alexa and she will take over, monitoring your thoughts, keeping you from acting addled, answering all kinds of questions that normally stump you and making you come across as mentally sound. 

“Dad was starting to lose it until he got his new Alexa machine, now he’s back in the game,” your kids will say. 

Just don’t expect your Alexa will help with your mystery maladies or failing joints, you’ll still have to deal with those. But at least you’ll be able to remember what hurts where. 

My House Can Talk

It didn’t use to, it just sat there like a lump, saying nothing, seeing nothing. But now it’s come alive. 

Because I got a video doorbell. It’s a tiny oblong thing about the size of a Cameo Creme cookie with a doorbell, camera and microphone included. Our old dumb doorbell just rang. Our new doorbell, on the other hand, not only shows you who’s at the door, but it also lets you talk to them. And here’s where the fun comes in. 

The new doorbell comes with an app that shows you who’s at the door and enables you to talk to them on your smartphone.

So you can be say, in Charleston, where we were recently and you get this “ding” on your phone and a message that reads, “Front door camera detected motion on 4-10-19 at 3:33 PM.” You open the app, activate the camera and you can see who’s there. It turned out to be the exterminator spraying around the front of the house. So I tapped the microphone and said, “You want to check the side of the house?”

When he heard my voice, the guy started swinging his head around looking for who was talking to him. Seeing no one, he looked totally baffled. I continued, “There are ants coming in over there.” 

That made his eyes bulge out. Someone was talking to him from somewhere—but where? Now he’s peering around the side of the house, then out toward the driveway. I bet he’s thinking, “The damn house is talking to me.”

I couldn’t resist so I continued, “And I mean lots of ants, millions of them. So I’d appreciate it if you could take a look.” Now he tentatively turns toward the front door as if he’s figured out where the sound is coming from—but no one’s there. He looks like he’s seen a ghost. All he can come up with is, “Oh, oh, oh, okay…”

“Thanks,” I say, and that proves to be too much for him. He gives a weak wave and trudges off shaking his head as if he’d just visited the Twilight Zone. 

We’d bought the video doorbell because we’d heard of a home invasion in a nearby county. Not that we were worried that we’d be invaded, but just as an added measure of security. 

But I had no idea how much fun it could be to talk to people who can’t see you. So I tried it on our housekeeper, getting Annie to join me. Wendy arrives every Friday punctually at 8:20. We waited until 8:21 and sure enough, here comes Wendy up the walk. I get the message, open the app and say, “Hi Wendy.”

She stops dead in her tracks. We’d told her we’d be away so she can’t figure out how we can be talking to her. I nudge the wife and she says, “I put clean sheets on our bed so you don’t have to.”

“Okay, but where are you?”

“We’re in Charleston.”

“That’s what I thought so how can you be talking to me?”

“Video doorbell.”

“Video doorbell?”

“Yup, it lets us see who’s coming and talk to them.”

“You scared the bejesus out of me, totally freaked me out.”

“Sorry.”

“I mean, I recognized your voice but you weren’t there, it was spooky. But now that I know you have one of these things I won’t be spooked anymore.”

Wendy shakes her head as she walks by the doorbell as if she’s thinking, “These sure are weird times we’re living in.”

Now I know she goes out for a smoke break after about an hour. So I wait for the next message. Sure enough, “Front door camera detected motion…” I open the app and say, “You know Wendy…” 

Wendy goes “Eeeek!” And kind of jumps away from the doorbell. 

This time she’s got a smile on her face, “You did it again to me! But now I’m wised up.”

My next victim was the UPS man. As soon as he set the package down at the front door, I said, “Thank you, you can just open the front door and put it inside–we’re away.”

Our front door is indented about three feet so he’s standing there scanning the inside of the doorway while I’m talking. Talk about looking blown-away. I can tell he’s thinking, “Okay, they say they’re away so how are they talking to me? But as he suddenly realizes my voice is coming from the doorbell, he goes, “Aha! You got one of those fancy doorbells that talks, right?”

“Right. Hope I didn’t scare you too much.”

“For a second there, I thought I was hearing things. That’s a pretty neat device, might have to get myself one,” he said as he dropped the package off inside.

Lizzie, a friend who dog sits for us, was to be my next victim. As she came in to feed the dogs, I said to my wife, “I’m going to wait until she leaves and surprise her.”

“Nope, don’t do that, you’ll scare the hell out of her.”

“But it will be fun,”

“Don’t you dare.”

That was the end of that. 

Now I’m conjuring up all kinds of ways to frighten off burglars. I could say, “I’ve called 911 so you’d better get out of here fast.” Or, “I’ve got your license plate recorded so if you dare open this door, the cops will chase you down.”

But I figure just surprising them will run them off. 

“Let me see,” I’m thinking, “the lawn crew arrives tomorrow, maybe I could scare the daylights out of them!” 

I knew it would be cool to have a video doorbell, but I never knew how much fun it would be to have a talking house.

By Tony Vanderwarker

So I’m on the board of Writerhouse, a Charlottesville not-for-profit that helps writers with classes, provides them space to write and supports writing in local schools. At a recent board meeting, we were discussing how to increase awareness and knowledge of our organization.

Being a former ad guy, I thought to myself: Maybe take advantage of all the interest in stupid pet videos on YouTube by having a dog try to write a book? I pitched the idea to the board, saying: “I don’t know if this will work but what if we had a dog get in front of a computer and start to write a book? Maybe the dog will start to type a sentence to engage people and then lapse into gibberish? Could get picked up and create some interest in us. At least get people going on the internet and checking out our website.” 

I was remembering a comedy routine of Bob Newhart’s where he said if someone put an infinite number of monkeys to work at an infinite number of typewriters, sooner or later they would write all the great books. After getting everything set up, Newhart explained that a monitor had to walk down the endless line of monkeys typing away checking to see if they were coming up with anything. Day after day, they came up with nothing but gibberish and he was about to give up when something caught his eye. Leaning over a monkey, he pulled the paper out of the typewriter and took a look. His eyes lit up when he read, “To be or not to be, that is the…” and then a look of dismay came across his face when he read, “…gazorninplat…”

I don’t know if the board believed I could pull it off, but they gave me the go-ahead, particularly when I told them I’d pay for it.

I have a friend with whom I’ve made a lot of videos and another friend who’s an agility dog trainer with three trained Border Collies. I figured I’d see if I could get them to make the idea work.

Both thought it was a funny concept and were willing to help. We scheduled the shoot and one morning we got together, Zach, the cameraman/filmmaker, my friend Lynne and her dog, Zeiss. We set my laptop up on our dining room table with a chair in front of it. Lynne said she’d trained Zeiss to jump up and sit in front of the computer but wasn’t sure how she was going to get him to move his paws over the keyboard as if he was typing. 

“Maybe if I lean over him and take his elbows and see if I can create the impression that he’s typing, that would work.” After filming Zeiss running across the room and jumping up in front of the computer, Zach set his camera up over the laptop so he was shooting down at the keyboard. Lynne crouched down behind Zeiss and when Zack said, “Action!” began to move his paws over the keyboard. We were delighted when Zack stopped shooting, smiled and said, “That looks great.” He showed us the footage on his camera viewfinder and we agreed. By cutting back and forth between the paws on the keyboard and words being written out on the screen, we could create the impression the dog was typing. 

After a couple hours of shooting, we wrapped and went back to our normal routines. All of us saying how much we looked forward to seeing the first edit. 

When Zach sent it to us, we were delighted, the video was a real hoot. After a couple of fine tunes to the edit, I sent it around to the board–everyone loved it

You probably will too, go on the web and watch Zeiss write a book at this address: https://vimeo.com/366580439

By Tony Vanderwarker

A true fan stands by Virginia sports team through thick and through thin, in good times and bad. The problem is, until recently, in Charlottesville it’s been all thin and awful. So we’ve developed emotional armor to protect ourselves from the pain, thinking, “In our hearts we know we’re going to lose.” It’s more than surface protection, it’s organic since we’ve inoculated ourselves with an anti-optimism agent to protect ourselves from what we know is the eventual disappointment. It’s not just “cover your bets,” it’s “save your ass.”

How many times have you heard, or said yourself, “Well, that’s Virginia football,” or “Well, that’s Virginia basketball.” We grin and bear the setbacks, the loss to UMBC in the first round of the NCAA playoffs. The loss to William and Mary in football a couple years ago or the heartbreaker to Tech last season because we know “That’s Virginia sports for you.” They buoy you up and then drop you down. While out lopsided win in the Belk bowl gave everyone hope about the 2019 season, it was a hope tinged with doubt. As Oscar Wilde once said about second marriages, “It is the triumph of hope over experience.”

So unless you want to be truly bummed out, Virginia fans resign themselves to the fact that no matter how well a team plays, at some point in time, they are destined to bum you out. We get into the NCAA tournament with an astounding 16-win season only to get shellacked in the first game. George Welsh gave us some winning seasons only to have the bottom fall out in his last years. Dom Starsia won us three national championships, then his program collapsed. 

It’s in the cards, in our blood, our favorite teams are going to let us down.

But this year we’ve got a problem. What are we supposed to do with this basketball program, this lacrosse program, this football program? Two teams win national championships and one is voted as the top team in the Coastal. We can rejoice in the incredible victories but we’ve been so burned over the years, shouldn’t we own up to the fact that they might just be one-offs, that they are certain to self-destruct as they always have. 

I remember being a fierce Chicago Bears fan, going through season after season with terrible records. Then we get Refrigerator Perry and a great quarterback, go to the Super Bowl and whip the living daylights out of the Pats. But then we dived back into the ditch and only recently had a playoff opportunity. 

But then some fans start thinking that maybe if we win two national championships in basketball and lacrosse that will attract talented athletes who previously wouldn’t have considered UVa. Is that what’s happening with football? Could it happen across the board and make Virginia an athletic champion? Make Virginia a nationally ranked and recognized sports powerhouse?

Then the anti-optimism inoculation kicks in and you think, “C’mon, stop that crazy thinking, after all, this is UVa. This is just a passing phase. Another disaster is just around the corner.”

So we’re in football season and every fan is on the edge of their emotional seats. Not sure to go all-in and think that like Columbus, we’ve found the New World or if we’re heading back to the bad-old-times and are going to fall off the edge of the earth.

I see people walking around with “UVA National Champions” T-shirts on and I begin to wonder, should I buy one also or should I just wait for the bottom to fall out and pick one up for cheap at Goodwill?

By Tony VanderWarker

“C’mon,” you say, “that’s pretty obvious.” But then ask yourself, How many times have you put something down, a pair of glasses, a set of keys, a phone, and thought to yourself, “Don’t put it there, you dope, you’ll never find it.”

Right now is where the “I’m not as smart as I think I am,” syndrome kicks in. Because you forge right ahead, put the glasses under the chaise in the garden, leave the cell phone tucked into the seat of the mower or leave the keys after you got out of the car on the shelf with the old cans of paint. “Hey, I got a call and I had to put them somewhere,” you reasoned.

When you try to find them, that somewhere gets to be nowhere. Because you’ve gone from the of course I’ll remember I put them on the shelf where the old paints of can are to: “I have no effing idea where in the world I could have left them.” 

Suddenly life goes from breezy and carefree to unglued and capricious. Smacking yourself in the forehead you think, How could I be so stupid? 

Right here is where you get half-crazy because you need the keys to get in the car to pick up the kids, or you have a dinner party coming up and you need your glasses to read the recipes so now you go into a warp speed search. 

This is a setting which involves throwing pillows, tearing apart beds, madly sorting through the trash, shouting things you’d never say in polite company and other goofy actions which turn out to have nothing to do with finding the missing object. The thought that you might be slipping in mental capacity (which your spouse has suggested on multiple occasions) begins to creep into your mind. 

Which only aggravates the situation. And this is where the hard part comes in. 

The Big Goody: you end up finding that you put the keys on the paint can shelf, tucked the cell phone into the seat rail of the mower (it was wrecked), or found the glasses under the chaise in the garden (they were okay). 

So you end up feeling a sense of relief tinged with a feeling of How could I be so stupid? Plus you have to put the beds back together, buy a new cell phone and put the trash back in the bin.

Problem is, if you’ve stayed with me, this isn’t a one-off situation. Like sniffles and headaches, hiding things where you can’t find them recurs on a regular basis. 

And, while I don’t have the facts, I can make the case that it’s universal. 

Why else would Apple, which sells eighty gillion iPhones all over the world, put a “Find My iPhone” function on its phones? Because they know that everyone hides things where they can’t find them. 

And with the genius of Apple, they figured out that people would depend on their phones to find them where they hid them. 

So in our household, we go through a number of “Find My iPhone” situations. Not monthly, but surely quarterly, I find myself saying, “Hey, Hon, can I borrow your phone to call mine, I seem to have lost it.” 

This is where it gets funny. I mean, you’re standing in the bedroom dialing your own cell phone number because you have no idea in the world where you left it, and when it starts ringing you go into wolf-hunting-prey mode, running from room to room trying to narrow down where the ringing is coming from. 

Now these phones set you back good so you’re hoofing around frantically trying to narrow down the source of the sound, hoping it will ring in the house and not somewhere where you can’t hear it. When it rings, you’re triumphant, unless it’s stuck behind the pillows on the couch which muffles the sound. You can hear it but you can’t find it.

This is where the pillow tossing starts again, prompting the wife to remark, “Don’t get so crazy, you’ll find it.” But you’ve already left one on the mower and it got drowned, is going through your mind, that’s another seven hundred bucks I don’t need to spend.

Maybe it’s in the TV room so I run in there.  Then the ringing stops. Need to go back and call again. I don’t want to admit that I’ve had to make three “Find Your iPhone” calls, but I can console myself that at the same time I’ve hidden my iPhone, millions of people are doing the same. All over the world you can imagine people dashing around their houses or yurts or pagodas or tents trying to run down their ringing iPhones. 

So the next time you’re tempted to leave your keys by the old paint cans, stop and ask yourself if you want to go into How can I be so stupid? mode again. But if you’re like me, you’ll probably go ahead and leave them there again. 

Maybe I should get that gizmo that lets  you call your keys? One for my wallet too. That way I can find everything I hide. That will make me happy and probably Verizon too. All over the world people will be calling their phones, keys and wallets and the phone companies will be raking it in, Who knew?

By Tony Vanderwarker

You might have read recently that Berkeley, California (always in the vanguard of progressive ideas) is leading the way to a new genderless future.*  The city voted to purge gender from its communications. And it’s about time. I mean, how thoughtless it is to say “manhole” when instead you can say “maintenance hole” which Berkeley is suggesting. 

Berkeley is just picking up on a trend that has been going on for some time, “stewardesses” have become “flight attendants” and “waiter” and “waitresses” are now called “servers”, and “chairman” has morphed to “chairperson”. The gender bias has been rooted in our culture for too long, and must be completely eliminated if we are going to have a truly egalitarian society. If Joe Biden knows what’s good for him, he’ll stop saying, “C’mon, man.” And start saying, “C’mon, human.” Or maybe he should be saying,, “C’mon, huperson.”

“Policeman” needs to change to “policeperson”, “no-man’s land” to “no-human’s land,” “manhandling” to “humanhandling” and “menopause” to “personopause.” 

And the Berkeley City Council takes the issue to it’s logical extreme, getting rid of gendered pronouns like “he” and “she” and using “they” instead. So we should no longer say of someone, “He’s his own man.” To be correct, we should now characterize them as, “They are their own person.” 

While we’re at it, might as well deal with “woman” and “men”. “Woman” is easy=”woperson”. “Man” is trickier. The best I can do is, “otherperson”. Maybe the folks in Berkeley will weigh in on this one. 

So how do you signal the difference between public bathrooms when you can’t use “his’ or “hers” or “ladies” and “men’s”. The Three Notched Brewing Company in Charlottesville has figured it out. The former ladies room now has “Sally” painted on the door and the men’s room has “Jack”. Not exactly gender neutral but heading in the right direction. 

*https:www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/us/Berkeley-gender-ban.html?smprod==nytcore-ipad&smid=nyt-core—pad-share

Getting to true gender equality will take some work across our entire culture. 

The song that includes the term, “Mr. Sandman,” will have to be changed to “Mr, Sandperson, bring me a dream…” and the “Girl from Ipanema” to the “Human from Ipanema.” “Man in the Moon” to “Person in the Moon” and “Rooter-Man” will have to become “Rooter-Human,” “Manpower” changes to “Personpower” and “manufacture” to “humanufacture.” 

You will no longer “man a station”, you will “person a station”, and you won’t “manage” anything anymore. You will “personage” them instead. You will not call your dog, “man’s best friend,” he will now be “a human’s best friend.” And “one-upmanship” becomes “one-uppersonship”.

While initially, words like “humanufacture”, “personage” and “one-uppersonship” might seem awkward or even confusing, in a decade or so everyone will come to appreciate the importance of the change and the words will be rolling off everyone’s tongues.

Now being creatures of habit, going to a true genderless language might be a bit tough for us. As tempted as you might be to say, “Boy, oh boy, did you see that home run?” You’ll have to catch yourself and instead exclaim, “Small person, oh small person, did you see that home run?”

In time, famous works of literature will need to be retranslated as in, “The Old Otherperson and the Sea”. In newspeak, the opening paragraph would now read, “They was an otherperson who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and they had gone eighty-four days without taking a fish. In the first forty days, a small person had been with the otherperson. But after forty days without a fish, the small person’s parents had told the small person that the otherperson was now definitely saleo, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the small person had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the small person sad to see the otherperson come in with his skiff empty and he always went down to help the otherperson…” You get the idea.

Now when you cross the pond, you run into some real problems. Take “German” for instance. Does that become “Gerperson”? Hmm, might have to leave this one up to the E.U.

You have to thank the folks in Berkeley for pointing the way out of the sticky wicket we’ve been in. I mean how many years have we called it a “manhole” without realizing the harm we’ve been doing when in reality it’s so easy and so correct just to call it a “maintenance hole.” 

You go, BCC!

By Tony Vanderwarker

I recently volunteered to teach a class at Writerhouse, a not-for-profit supporting local writers with workspaces and classes, on comedy. What do I know about comedy? I’ve been writing funny stuff for twenty years so I thought I could pull it off. Since most of my comedy-writing abilities are intuitive, I sat down and tried to formalize them, make them concrete so I could talk about them. 

What’s funny, I decided, was when an author or comic takes you in one direction, then suddenly shifts into another, swerves, you might say, and the audience ends up in an unexpected place. Like in Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s the 2000 YEAR OLD MAN, when Reiner asks Brooks, who’s playing the 2000 year old man, “How many children do you have?” 

Brooks answers, “I have over 42,000 children (SWERVE)…and not one of them comes to visit.”

“What’s the biggest change you’ve seen?” 

And Brooks answers deadpan, “In 2000 years, the greatest thing ever devised was (SWERVE)…Saran Wrap.”

Or in Catch-22 when Yossarian explains that the only way to get out of combat is to be certified insane. But since it’s sane to want to get out of combat, you can’t be considered insane, as Yossarian explains, “That’s some catch, that’s Catch-22.”

Now I have the theory of writing comedy, but as the date of the class approaches, I start getting a creepy feeling. Will the class laugh at the funny writing? What if they sit there stonefaced? I start to sweat just thinking about it. An hour and a half of people staring at me, not laughing, just blankly staring. And I’m signed up for two days, three hours total, that could be terrible, just terrible.

One of the best things about writing comedy is that you don’t have to worry whether people will think its funny or not because you’re not there when they read it. They either think its funny or they don’t, the only way you know is when they come up to you and tell you what you wrote they thought was funny. So you’re insulated, in a sense. But in this class, I feared, I won’t be insulated, if they don’t laugh, I’ll be right up there dying. 

Adding to my growing fear was the suspicion that, for some reason, written comedy isn’t as funny when it’s read out loud. I was planning to read from my comic novel, Ads For God, from I’m Not From the South But I Got Down Here As Fast As I Could and from some of the pieces I’ve written for Keswick Life. 

As the date for the class approaches, I get a call from Writerhouse, “No one’s signed up yet, but you never know, most people wait until the last minute.”

No one’s signed up, maybe I’m off the hook, I think. And I put the class out of my mind. But three days before the date, I get another call: “We’ve got six signed up and I’ve heard that two or three may join in, so we’ll have a good group for your class,” Sibley, the director, says. Oh, sh**, I’m thinking, in three days, I’ll be facing the music. 

But then I get an idea. Maybe I’ll start by playing the 2000 Year Old Man. I get out my cassettes of Brooks and Reiner and play the 12-minute comedy sketch. It’s hilarious. Stuff like, “You claim to be 2000,” 

“Yes, but not yet. I’ll be 2000 on October 17th,”

And, “How did Bernie discover women?” 

And Brooks answers, “Well one morning, he woke up smiling.” 

Or, “What was the means of transportation back then?” 

Brook’s comeback: “Fear.”

The audience laughter on the track is contagious, you can’t help but laugh. So at least for the first twelve minutes, I’ll be on solid ground.

The day of the class, I bundle up my books, Mac, cassette and head over to Writerhouse. As I sit at the head of the table in the conference room. Six women, a couple guys, all ages, troop in and sit down. Sibley introduces me and I briefly explain what I’m going to be doing, go through my swerve lecture and start the cassette. 

Everybody’s laughing, whew!

I read some stuff from David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty Some Day. On a scale of 1-10, the laughs are a 3. Uh, oh. This stuff’s not funny, I mean it is, but not when you read it out loud. I quickly jump to Ads For God. I get a 6 there and a couple 7’s. 

I go to Not From the South, the rich story about Chita Hall and her husband, Chet, as told by a neighbor, “That parrot talked awful. Dirty, dirty, dirty. And Chet taught it all kinds of nasty tricks. Once an encyclopedia salesman came to the door and knocked. No one was home but that didn’t stop the parrot from saying, ‘Come on in.’

The salesman let himself in. The first thing he saw was an enormous Doberman sitting on the front hall rug. And then the parrot screeched, ‘Sic him, boy, sic him!’” The salesman barely escaped with his life.”

That cracks them up. I check my watch, only fifteen minutes to go. So I say, “Now you all must have some questions.”

They’re full of questions, even running over the time limit. This is going better than I expected. And the second class is the students reading their funny stuff, so the ball’s in their court. 

The next day, we assemble again. I ask who wants to start first. A woman starts reading, her stuff’s hilarious. So are the others. My class is a success, who knew?

By Tony Vanderwarker

It started with the TV in the bedroom. While I’d been watching it the evening before, in the morning I got a Directv screen that said, “No connection.” I tried the usual tricks, checking the remote, turning it off and on, disconnecting it, all to no avail. That meant a visit from our geek squad, cost:  $175. 

Before I called them, I checked the set in the TV room. It too was on the blink as was the internet router. To see if I could reset both, I had to open the doors in the back of the enclosure that held all the stuff, get down on my belly and squeeze into the 18” space where all the connections were, unplug both components and see if I could get them to restart. Dark and cramped, the experience is akin to cave diving, okay for a limber, younger person but not for an oldster like me. Unplugging the router and TV, I laid there in the gloom for thirty seconds waiting for the gizmos to reboot. Plugged them back in, struggled to my feet and hustled back into the TV room to see if I’d solved the problem, No go, the router and Directv lights refused to come on. 

I tried calling Directv but just got an automated voice that kept telling me to do what I’d already done. I got so frustrated that I found myself yelling, “I tried that, I tried that.” Until I realized that there was little point in yelling at someone who wasn’t there. Then I tried Directv.com but it too stonewalled me. They instruct you to tell them what your problem is and then respond, “We don’t have any information on that.”

So I gave up and called the geek squad, well aware that three problems would now cost me $250 or more. And we’d just made a big investment in a new business venture so we were running thin financially. Plus I’d recently had oral surgery that cost me five grand so I was feeling really poor.

In the meantime, the pool guy had been opening our pool and I heard him knocking on the door. 

“Got it going?” I asked him.

He shook his head and said, “Barely, it took me an hour to prime it. You’re going to need a new pump.” And then his face took on an ugly sneer and he snorted, “And I’m not coming back here unless you put in a variable speed pump, I’ve had it messing with that piece of crap.”

“How much is that going to cost me?”

“Fifteen hundred plus parts and labor.”

“Can’t you find me a used one? I’m getting a little short on funds.”

“I told you, I’m not messing with anything but a variable speed pump. You can find someone else if you want to.”

Here I was getting an ultimatum from a supplier, but what choice did I have?

It didn’t stop there. After the pool guy took off in a huff, my wife came out of the laundry room saying, “Goddamn washing machine won’t go through its cycle. We’re going to have to get the repairman out. I just hope he can fix it and we don’t have to get a new one.”

I’m totaling up the potential costs, $250 for the TVs, $2500 for the pool and possibly $600 for a new washing machine, thirty-five hundred bucks so far and counting and it isn’t even ten o’ciock. What else could go wrong? 

I soon found out. Hopping in the Gator to start my weed-whacking, it would start but when I put it into gear, the engine cut off. Three times, four times…no go. The last time Chris had come out to fix the Gator it was eight hundred bucks. Now I’m over four grand in repair costs and headed for five. 

Okay, I try to rationalize to myself. The house, Gator and washing machine are twenty years old. I guess I should expect things to go on the fritz, but five in one day? And the day’s still young yet. 

I call the geek squad, they can’t get here for four days, Annie calls the repairman, he’s coming in three days. I decide to run into town and talk to John, the owner of Charlottesville Sanitary Supply, about my options for the pool. He’s the local pool genius, selling all kinds of pool stuff and he recommended the ornery pool guy. I tell him the story and he shakes his head and says, “You’re not the only one who’s complained about him.” He hands me a card, “Call Steven, you need a second opinion, he’s a straight shooter and maybe he can give you another option.”

Steven says he’s in the neighborhood and will be glad to stop by. “Be over in a half hour,” he tells me.

In the meantime, I return home, grousing about my predicament, to find Annie smiling at the front door. “I fixed it,” she says. 

“Fixed what?”

“The two TVs and the router.”

“How’d you do that?” I ask.

“They don’t call me Engineer Annie for nothing. Just had to flick a few switches and presto, they came back on.”

Steven shows up, I take him into the garage where the pool stuff is and point out the failed pump to him. He turns a few levers, flicks off the pump for a minute  then turns it on again.

“Your pump’s fine, just needed to be backwashed. Your filter sand is dirty but that’s no big deal. I can take care of that easily.”

“Wow!” I’m thinking. The TVs and internet are fixed and the pool is no big deal. Things are looking up for Tony.

But it doesn’t stop there. Wendy, our housekeeper, takes a look at the wash machine and says, “I think I know what’s wrong.” And she fixes it. 

This afternoon is turning out to be a symphony of positives and it isn’t even afternoon yet. Thinking I might have a Royal Straight Flush, I hop in the Gator and give it a try. Nope, I just end up with Four of a Kind. 

But who cares? I’ve gone from being out five grand to somewhere under one and I get to watch the basketball semi-finals tonight.  When George finally shows up, it only took him a half hour to get the Gator going.

Just goes to show that some days everything turns out right—who knew?