Headlights.

My first car was a 1972 Dodge Colt wagon, that was so rusted out my friends nicknamed it “Cancer”.  It had other issues, like the time I went 6 months without a starter motor.  Good thing both home and school were on a hill, so I could compression start it.  But it did limit the places I could go without bringing several friends to push it.

But this story has to do with the headlights. It must have been my junior year, late one weekend when we were just cruising around in the car (just like on “That 70’s Show).  It was well past dark when my headlights decided to just go out on me.  Pfft, they’re gone.

Now, any thinking person would have gone home, parked the car and spent the next day figuring out what went wrong.  But I was 17, with my friends, having a great time, and that just wasn’t an option.  So we just kept driving around.

Until a cop pulled me over for driving without my headlights. 

“I’m sorry sir, they just barely went out, and we’ve got to drive the girls back to their house, and then I’m going straight home.  Promise.”

The cop said OK (it was the 70’s), and told me not to drive the car any more than absolutely necessary.

After another hour or two of cruising around, during which time we actually did drop the girls off, we run into the same cop.

“Yes, sir, I know sir.  See, we went to drop the girls off and then hung out at their house for the last couple of hours, and we were just now heading back to my house.”

“Ok, go straight home.  Drive careful and get those lights fixed right away.”

“Yes, sir, no problem, sir.”

Another undetermined number of hours cruising around and we run into the same cop again. He walks up to the car, I roll down the window, shrug my shoulders and say:

“Sorry, I don’t even have an excuse this time.”

“That’s OK, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

And then he wrote me out a ticket.

Hunting with dad.

For my birthday, my dad gave me this birthday card: which is in reference to my one and only hunting experience.

I can’t remember if my older brother was still in high school at the time, but I know I was.  My father wasn’t a fanatical hunter, but he loves the outdoors and took the opportunity to enjoy it with his buddies every hunting season.  This year, my brother and I were invited to join them.

Now, dad and his friends got up there the first day of the season, spent the week getting up at 4 AM, getting up on the ridge and working hard to stay downwind from the deer.  They had not got a single deer in their crosshairs by the time my brother and I showed up halfway through hunting season, in the middle of the night, relatively unprepared.  The next morning all the adults were up bright and early, scouting for good spots.  We, the teenagers, on the other hand, got up at the crack of noon, had a hearty breakfast and headed out to hunt in the afternoon.   We’d been walking around in the woods for an hour or so, talking the whole time, just kind of wandering around, when we came upon a clearing right on the ridge of a hill.  We sat down at the edge of the woods, at the top of the clearing, to have our mid-afternoon snack.  Joking around, I said to my brother “In about 10 minutes a deer is going to stop right there (pointing out into the clearing at the edge of the ridge), look right up here at us and stand there and let you shoot it.”  About 15 minutes later, with my back to the clearing, I see my brother’s eyes go wide, he stands up, aims the rifle and says “The deer, right there!”  Yeah, right.  I’m not that gullible.  Until the shot goes off right next to me.

So, to recap:

• 
  
  We show up in the middle of the hunting season
• 
  
  We come in in the middle of the night
• 
  
  We get up at noon, start hunting in the afternoon
• 
  
  Spend an hour wandering around the mountain
• 
  
  Get the first deer of the group
• 
  
  Leave, with a deer, before the end of our first day of hunting.

We were never invited again.

Internet in the last millennium.

Anyone out there remember this one: Hamster Dance?  I know it was before Y2K, I was still teaching at Churchill, and it wasn’t my last year.  The internet was nothing like we know it now.  DSL, Cable and fiber optics did not exist for anyone other than the Armed Forces, the entire general public was still on dial-up. 

Ok, so maybe I exaggerate a little bit, or it could just be that I’m a little fuzzy on the details.  But I do remember that the Hamster Dance  was all the rage, you didn’t hear music or see things moving, let alone both, very often back then.  This was amazing.

I was sitting in the front row in the auditorium with my good friend, and Spanish teacher, Adele and the Vice Principal at some community meeting.  We were bored.  We were annoyed at some of the things people were saying about teachers and our profession.  To save our sanity, we were drawing little dancing hamsters on a pad of paper, and whispering “da, da, de da de, da, do, do..” to each other.

Our senior counselor, Smarsh, was talking to the audience when out of the blue he gestured over to us, called out our names and asked “right?”, looking for confirmation on whatever he was currently talking about, which, for the life of us, we had no clue what it was.  DEER IN THE HEADLIGHTS.  Out of sheer panic I blurted out “Why, of course.”

Personally, I think he did that just to wake us up and make us pay attention.  Kind of a classroom control thing.  I gained a lot of respect for the man that evening.

80 year old party animal.

Grandma Ida again.  She used to come visit us here in Salt Lake on a regular basis, every couple of months or so, since she was living in Tucson.  My parents often invited her to parties they were going to when she was here, she seemed to like to go and their friends liked her to come.  She must have been in her 80’s at the time, but she could party with the best of them.

One of the times when she was up visiting for my high school graduation.  My best friend’s (Ed) father was here too, although his mother was unable to make the trip from New York.  Since Ed’s older brother was a colleague of my father, Ed’s father was invited too.  They all went out to a bar in Salt Lake that was called “My Wife’s Place”, which, not because of their behavior, is now names “My X-Wife’s Place.”  Being underage at the time, I wasn’t there, but it seems that when everyone else was ready to go, Ida and Ed’s father were just getting warmed up.  They hit it off pretty good, in a platonic drinkin’ buddies way, and ended up closing the bar that night.  I can still picture my parents and Ed’s brother sitting in a corner falling asleep and Ida and his father party it up until the bartender finally has to ask them to leave so he can lock up.

Another time she was at a party at one of my parent’s friend’s house.  They lived in an area where a gully bordered their property, so walking around the back yard included a lot of stairs.  According to my mother, Ida, glass of Gin in one hand, cigarette in the other, took a tumble down one these short flights of stairs.  Eyewitnesses saw her do a full 360 somersault and come up without losing a drop of the gin, cigarette still smoldering.  Yup, for all her faults, Ida never believed in  wasting a good vice.

The case of the bootleg bus pass.

My grandma Ida moved to Tucson, Arizona just after we moved out to Utah.  Partially to be closer to her only child (my mom) and grandchildren, but also to get out of the cold New York winters.  She lived down there in the same apartment complex as her last husband’s sister (Sadie) and Sadie’s sister-in-law, Adele.

In fine Jewish tradition, she married her late sister’s widower, my “Uncle Sid”, many years after divorcing my grandfather.

I was somewhere in my early 20’s when my older brother and I went on a road trip to southern California, via Tucson.  Yes, it’s quite a bit out of the way, but we decided it would be nice to visit her while we were out and about.  Other than blasting “Hotel California” as we crossed the border between Arizona and California, my most vivid memory of that trip was an argument between the three elderly ladies over a $5 bill and a bus pass.

While we were visiting with them, my grandmother asked Sadie if she would pick up a bus pass for her, since she was going down to get herself one then next day anyway.  Sadie said of course and my grandmother took a $5 bill out of her purse and handed it to Sadie.  As Sadie was tucking the bill into her own purse, Adele chimes in and tells her to pin the $5 bill to the inside of the purse so that she would know which one was Ida’s.  I’m taking a little poetic license here, because I don’t remember the exact conversation after all these years, but it went something like this:

Adele:  Make sure you pin the bill to the inside of your purse.

Ida: Why?

Adele:  So she can make sure she buys the bus pass with your $5.

Ida:  What does it matter?

Adele: If she doesn’t use your $5, then it won’t be your bus pass.

Ida: It doesn’t matter what $5 she uses, I gave her $5, she gives me my bus pass.

Adele:  But if she doesn’t use your $5 it won’t be your bus pass.  It will be her bus pass, and then she’ll have two.

Ida:  It doesn’t matter what $5 she uses, it will still be my bus pass.

This went on for, I kid you not, 15 minutes before Sadie finally gave in and said “Here, look, I’m pinning it to the inside of my purse.”

We left the next day, so I’ll never know if Sadie really used Ida’s $5 bill, or if Ida spent the next month riding around on the bus with Sadie’s second bus pass.

My best friend, Ed.

It’s been over 30 years and still every time we meet someone new together they get to hear this story.

I was 16, it was Christmas break of my Junior year.  The department my father worked for was having a conference up in Park City, so there were professors from all over the world coming into the Salt Lake airport.  I was one of the people hired to shuttle them from the airport to Park City in my dad’s 1974 Dodge  Van, about a 35 mile drive.*  Ed (who was brand new to Utah, and whose brother worked in the same department) was hired to assign people to the different vans.

I was getting paid good money, for a 16 year old, so my parents tacked on the added responsibility of taking care of my little brother.  No big deal,   there was room in that big old van.  Except…

When I picked up Tanja.  If you’ve ever watched “That 70’s Show”, Tanja was our Fez my junior year.  She was a Foreign Exchange Student from Holland that hung around with my group.

So, my little brother, Tanja and I walk up to the table where Ed is sitting in the middle of the airport and somewhere in the conversation I con him into watching my brother while I drive up to Park City (and back, alone with Tanja) shuttling professors to the hotel there.  For the next 3 or 4 hours my brother had the run of the airport, and I had 30 minute stints alone with Tanja on dark, and fairly deserted, I-80. 

I didn’t know it at the time, but as Ed tells it now, he was a little bit impressed at my manipulations that night.  He says that as I walked away with this  tall blond Dutch girl, my brother  sitting next to him, he thought “I have to hang around with that guy.”

A month later we ran into each other on the stairs at school and the rest, as they say, is history.

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*Yes, it was 1976, when a 16 year old was allowed to drive University professors 35 miles in a big old van without seat belts, and you could stick a complete stranger with your 10 year old brother in an international airport.  And nobody thought twice about it.

Sadness, memories and humor.

I just got news that the older brother of my best friend in high school passed away this week.  The details are not important, but it did remind me of this story.

E was my best friend in high school, and we are still close as ever 30 years later. We met because his older brother, C, taught in the same department as my father, and in the winter of ‘76-‘77 E came out to Utah to live with his brother.  (The night we first met is a whole other story).

I was 17 the one and only time I got myself arrested.  I had some beer in the car, and a little bit of an illegal substance.  As I was coming home from E’s apartment on the Avenues, I flipped an illegal U-turn on the U of U campus.  I was pulled over several blocks away, and immediately went for the registration on the visor.  Oh, crap! I was driving my mother’s car, and she didn’t leave the registration on the visor.  It was in the glove box, with my –ahem- substance.  Now, mind you, this was 1977.  Cops would still have their faces in the driver’s window as you went through your glove box, which made it really hard to hide anything you didn’t want them to see in there.  But hell, I was 17, I was smarter than any adult, I’d just quickly move the papers around and that dumb ol’ cop would never know.  Yeah, not so much.  He noticed, and I got handcuffed, stuffed in the back seat and brought down to the U of U cop station.  

As luck would have it, my parents were in the middle of hosting a party when I called home with my one phone call, and my dad and C were elected to come pick me up.  They got there right as the cop told me I had to pour out the beer (Heineken imported from Evanston, Wyo.), and the first thing my dad said to the cop was “Uh, I’m over 21, can I take that home?” Nope, it just needed to be poured out.  Some lucky squirrel had the night of it’s life.  I don’t even remember how long all the paperwork took, but I do remember the drive home.  I got some of the best advice of my life from my father that night - “Don’t break two laws at once.”  If you have illegal stuff in the car, drive p-e-r-f-e-c-t-l-y.  This has helped me many times in the last 33 years, for things as simple as making sure my registration is up to date before I go on any long trip, because I never really had many heavily criminal tendencies (and there’s another story to that). 

C, on the other hand, gave me a big lecture on how you NEVER hide your marijuana in the glove box.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  Under the seat, in the trunk or even in your book bag, but never in the glove box.  Might as well sit it right up there on the dash.