Summer smoke has pretty much trapped us in our house for the past several days, but the air is a lot cleaner this morning. Means we are safe to make a quick trip to Fred Meyer for some food and some other stuff.

I used to “help” my wife shop by splitting the list and rounding up items for the grocery cart as fast as I could. Somehow, my efforts always managed to irritate the crap out of her. And then I looked back and remembered my Dad saying, “Women shop and men hunt.”

The “hunting” style is to locate the items on the list, ignore any sales and head for the checkout stand as quickly as possible. In and out, that’s the way to do it. At least that’s how most men do it.

Women, on the other hand, “shop.” I’ve discovered this means going up and down every aisle…sometimes twice…comparing prices by brand name, looking for bargains even if you don’t really need the item. It takes a lot more time than the hunting style, but it must be more satisfying somehow. (I’m not sure I’ll ever understand why.)

If an item on the grocery list is on sale, it might encourage a man to buy a dozen cans instead of one or two, but the women I know will buy something just because it’s a bargain, regardless of its utility.(The rationale is that someone in the family might find a use for it.)

I’m happy to say I’ve finally solved the problem. My wife no longer becomes irritated when we go shopping. It’s really very simple: she “shops” while I buy a book, head for the Starbucks stand, buy a cup of coffee and settle in at one of the small tables. I read until my wife pushes the cart up to my table, sits down and says, “All done.” Wonderful words, those. “All done.” (And we are still friends, after all.)

Rod

For three miles (or is it four?)

Time and earth suspend a perfect piece of Maury Mountains Canyon Creek

I come each Fall to hunt

But more to see the sacred nine-inch King of the Road One Hundred Culvert Pool

I drop an orange salmon egg

And see the sacred trout snatch and gulp and disappear again

So quickly I could doubt the trout exists

A perfect piece of Maury Mountains Canyon Creek

Replete with cattle trail, a dying mountain spring its head, a desert gully for a tail

I flip another salmon egg for proof the sacred trout still lives

In this perfect piece of Maury Mountains Canyon Creek

(I hope the reader will forgive the layout of the poem. I just don’t know how to mess with stanza form on this blog system. Might have to learn how one of these days. Maybe. If I decide it matters enough.)

I often think the fabric of our lives consists of small pleasures…birds at the feeder, a good morning cup of coffee, a favorite song, a hug from our spouse or our grandkids. The Fall hunt is like that for me: a campfire, a good cup of coffee, golden mantle squirrels (chipmunks) snatching peanuts from a stump, camp robbers, good friends, the smell of pine needles. (I haven’t killed a buck in years, but I have let several walk away.)

An old friend of mine hunted for several years with an empty rifle. The rifle was just an excuse to take a walk in the woods. I do understand.

Rod

Age and experience force me to admit I’m smarter than I live. Like a lot of late middle aged people who fight weight problems, I have at least two dozen diet books on the shelves and probably know as much about nutrition as professional dieticians. Seriously. Heck, I think I could write a diet book…a good one. (Tomorrow. I’ll get back on my diet tomorrow.)

I know for a fact a lot of us intend to exercise more…just as soon as the weather improves, the rain stops, or we find a gym we like. In the meantime, our unused treadmill sits lonely in the garage, companion to our weight bench and unused weights.  (If you want exercise equipment at bargain prices, try your local thrift store. The last time I tried to donate to Saint Vincent’s, they wouldn’t take mine. Overstocked. There has to be a moral there.)

At a younger age I smoked more than was good for me. I really liked my tobacco, but with each puff, I worried about lung cancer, heart trouble and emphysema. (I could name a half dozen people who died from lung cancer. But I was quick to point out one of them never smoked, as if that proved something. As I write, I’m not sure it proved anything at all.) Over the years, I quit a dozen times, once for four years, but it took a serious bout of bronchitis and a midnight trip to the local ER to finish my smoking days.

I was never drawn to drugs, but I learned to like my beer. During my  early career with the US Forest Service, we took pride in being hard drinkers and hard workers. I gave beer up too, but America drinks. Boy, how we drink. And it’s no wonder. You can’t watch a TV program without seeing the lead characters drinking…programs like Blue Bloods, NCIS (the famous basement scene where Gibbs dumps the nails out of a pint fruit jar and pours whiskey for an uninvited guest), NCIS New Orleans…the party town.

I think we ignore what we really know in favor of the pleasure of our habits. I know I did. Maybe it’s a left over from our youthful sense of invincibility. Bad habits may kill, but it’s gonna get the other guy, not me.

Rod

My first disclaimer: I can’t say much about chuffy men. Not really. I’m still working on my winter fat from 2015.

My second disclaimer: This is not about the women of the world. Nope. This is about the men.  (Frankly, I’m afraid to be critical of women. That’s gotten a tad risky, at home as well as in the world at large. Testy, they are.)

That said, it seems we men are bent on letting our grooming standards slip to the point of just getting plain ugly. Take the big chuffy guy going into our local Bi-Mart store. If he ever shaved, it had to have been last year, and I’m sure his hair hadn’t been insulted by a comb or brush longer than that. (I mean, I’m mostly bald, and I still brush what little is left.) But it wasn’t beard and hair that stopped me in my tracks. It was the flannel pajama bottoms he had cut off at the knees…to wear to town…and, I guess, to show off his leg tats and fat knees.

(I mentioned the pajamas bottoms to my good wife who said they might just be a wild pair of shorts, but I didn’t buy in. Nope. He was wearing pajama bottoms.)

And I see some of us old guys wearing shorts to town that look like they saw the laundry last month and have been slept in every day since. I guess I’ve turned into an old fuss budget, but I can’t help think, “Where’s the pride?”

The grooming standards I grew up with came straight out of the Great Depression. As one old timer who survived that rough period put it, “Shave, keep your shoes shined, your hair cut and your pocketknife sharp.”

On TV I see celebrities who show up for gala events sans tie, sans shave, sans haircut, studs in their ears, and nose candy hanging like metal snot from their noses. (I have no idea what to say about some of the sleeve tats.) It’s like we men are in some kind of pushing match to see who can move the grooming standards to the next level…and it ain’t one level up.

Nope, I have to believe the new standard for male grooming is, “Let’s get ugly and go to town.”

Rod

Back in the dim and distant past, during my years as an English teacher, I loved my students…mostly…and my classroom. (Except when I needed to run an errand and found I was as confined to school as were my students.) What I didn’t like was the constant record keeping: grades; test scores; tardies; absences…and I forget the rest. It sometimes felt like it was more important to keep records than it was to educate.

One student in particular was frequently late getting to class before the bell rang. (It wasn’t really a bell, just an annoying buzzer, but we called it a bell anyway.) I never knew why he was late, and it wasn’t more than a sixty second lapse, so I really didn’t care much.

But one day just as I flipped the grade book open to mark another “T” for tardy on his line in the grade book, I’d had an idea.

I said, “George, I want you to tell us a good story about why you are always late getting to this class.” (I think it was George, but it might have been Everett. After forty-seven years, the past can indeed become “dim and distant.”)

Then I added, “It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be a good story. If the class likes it, they’ll give you a thumbs up. If they don’t like it, then it’s a thumbs down and I have to mark another tardy in the book.”

Darned if George wasn’t up to the challenge. I’ve forgotten the story he told, but the class laughed and voted thumbs up.

The fun began the next day when I saw two of my seniors leaning against the wall in the hallway outside my door. When the “bell” buzzed, they stepped into the classroom and said, “Mister Collins, we’re late.”

“Okay,” I said. “What’s your story?” (I think, I said that. Maybe…probably.) The class was entertained by two fine tales. And, yes, they voted thumbs up.

Thus ended my career as a keeper of the “T” for tardy records. Thereafter, we started a lot classes with good stories about “Why I was late for class.” No one was ever really late for any of my English classes again…unless, of course, they had a good story to tell. (And I never entered a “T” in the grade book again.)

Rod