Hello old friend

At last it's over; the long personal nightmare of driving the rental Suzuki Forenza. If you're thinking of buying one, I suggest renting first. One of the windows never worked and two days before returning the car to Enterprise, the small orange engine shaped idiot light came on. The car only has about 30,000 miles on it and averaged only 22 mpg for the five weeks I had it (this is a Corolla sized car with a 2 ltr. four banger)... what a sled.
Forty-eight days from the day I was hit on my way to work till my car was back the way it should be... a little better actually. The side of my car Kenny G hadn't damaged had been smacked about a year ago by a brave Marine pilot splitting lanes on his crotch rocket one morning. He didn't stop or anything; probably too busy defending my freedom to worry about some trivial little hit & run. Marine officers get saluted @ the gate leading into the base, civilians like me are told we can fill out a form if we feel like waiting. Of course, I was on my way to work so I didn't have time. Anyway, I got the motorcycle dent fixed for an $88 add-on to the other damage (two hours labor charge), can't beat that with a stick. To victimhood, "no" say I.
Speaking of Kenny G, Why would anyone buy a Christmas album recorded after 1969? Give me Vince Guaraldi, the Rat Pack and their ilk any time.
To handle the 90 minute errand of returning the rental and picking up my own car I took the whole day off. This allowed me to do my wrapping and mail a package to my brother Roger. It feels strange to have everything wrapped before Christmas Day. I won't have any excuse for being late to the family gathering this year...oh wait, traffic! I'll be there as soon as possible, it's not my fault!
The Kenny damage came to about $1,700. How could that take five weeks? Progressive was so busy defending Kenny's past premium payments, I think they lost track of the fact that they were paying for my rental car. I wonder if there is a statistical science dedicated to the "break-even" point; the place where you need to stop arguing price and just pony up. The actual work only took eight working days so if we call one weekend a gimme, they paid for 25 days of rental on the Suzuki to bicker price with Toyota.
Now I'm home; Vince, Frank, Dino and their ilk are on the stereo and there is much unapollogetic singing about a baby in a manger and that feels like the kind of Christmas Dad used to get excited about. Nice.

The Darndest Thing

Last Sunday I attended the yearly Christmas party for a non-profit I help support. Nice party, good food, lots of people. I talked for a while with the husband of one of the volunteers and found out we had some mutual acquaintances. He had gone to his junior prom with Carolyn Flournoy. His Sunday school teacher had been Mr. Flournoy..."The Admiral". One of the Triumvirate of Burford St. Admiral Flournoy, Father Stevely, and Mayor Shirley represented the three branches of neighborhood government; the military, the church, and the politburo. Coincidentally, they each had very attractive daughters.
Fr. Stevely and the Mrs. (unusual for a priest even these days) seemed to have warned their five blonde daughters that boys were the devil incarnate. Each girl waged her own brave spiritual warfare against fraternization up to about the age fifteen when the warnings actually began to seem like the truth. The local boys had acquired a WMD... Lee Gangloff. Up to that point the biggest gun in our arsenal had been the naughty Sea Shanty record Eric's dad had brought home from Hong Kong (Aboard the good ship Venus, you really should've seen us...Etc)
Mayor Shirley's greatest concern was his Hi-Fi system. It was tragically condemned to a lifetime of playing bagpipe records WAY TOO LOUD (to show off all the dazzling highs and rumbling lows that one would hear if they were wearing a live cat-fight as a hat). His son Scott was the keeper of the pool and had each guest sign a written vow not to spit in the water and submit to a DNA test whenever a random bubble was found floating on the surface.
Admiral Flournoy was a veteran of The Great Snow Battle of 1975 Or So. His landing craft (a white station wagon) took a direct hit amidships, but with no thought to his own personal safety, he left the vehicle in mid street to pursue the insurgent who had attacked his vessel. The local populace wouldn't point out the guilty party (me) and I managed to blend into the local surroundings.
The tech sector lived next door to the Admiral. The name escapes me (something Russian I think) but I fondly remember their donation of approximately ten cubic yards of fan-fold computer paper at our first fictional paper drive (usually used to supply paper to cover local cars). No one had that quantity of fan-fold just lying around in those days (or today either I guess). Quickly realizing it was a smoking gun, we elected to get the stuff out of sight by moving it directly from Tommy's wagon to the nearest storm drain.
Months later came the storm...
Then came the flood...
Then came the scuba divers.
Today it would probably be called enviro-terror and get referred to Homeland Security, back then the term used was "the darndest thing".

The Secret Garden of Alcazar

Maybe every neighborhood has one; a house cloaked in mystery, whether benign or sinister, that only the nearby residents are aware of. The gangster, haunted, wealthy, nudist, hippie rock band, dead kid, or maybe even space alien house. Ours wasn't sinister, it just didn't look like it belonged on our street. Instead of the usual Clairemont ranch style tan box, this house looked like a Zen meditation clinic. It seemed lower and longer than usual and was a dusty rose color with a wider entryway than it's neighbors. Flanking the door (with it's knob in the center -not at the edge like an American door) was that wavy glass you can't really see through. The whole place looked peacefully Chinese and I'm sure it would have made a perfect home for a wind chime collector. Seeing a car in the driveway was the rarest of events and usually sparked a week of whispering and speculation.
Being a pack of eleven-year-olds, some of whom had read Tom Sawyer, we were certain to try to learn more about this strange house and it's occupants. We had already discovered the wonderful secret of the run-down house on the corner; they had a marvelous array of owls, ravens and other birds of prey in the backyard which we were told not to even look at. It turns out that if you look directly at a B-O-P, they take it to mean you want to make them lunch and get very offended.
We decided to look at the mysterious back yard for clues as to our unseen neighbors. A swing set, swimming pool, putting green, anything that would shed some light. What we found was a garden with three key ingredients. 1) a tangelo tree with juicy sweet ripe fruit in ample supply; 2) a small bamboo patch with stalks flexible enough to catapult surplus tangelos into the sky; and 3) an avocado tree. We didn't care much for avocados, but Ricky's mom liked them enough to give us her proxy permission to enter the back yard on the condition that we brought her back the goods. For some reason, the tangelos were treasure to us, but the undesired avocados were dirty things the birds had probably contaminated.
We never got caught. I've never had a store bought tangelo as good. Maybe I should buy a tree, put up some barbed wire and wait for summer. In the mean time I can only envy the Zen nudist rock stars as they await their mothership.
Steve