Category: Humor

What do you see?

.Reading time 4 minutes.

What do you see when you look at this picture? Look closely on the roof.

I pass this house on my daily commute and it makes me happy.

When I pass it I hear the pat of a ball bouncing once, twice, three times and pray it will clear the gutter and come back to me. 

I hear the thwump, thwump, thwump as a tennis ball pounds against brick and I wear a path in the grass beside the driveway in a hard-fought battle to lob it back. 

I smell the fresh cut of grass mixed with sweat and the unique scent of my favorite Reds cap – an odor no amount of washing can remove.

I see this and wonder if the Frisbee has been there for weeks or months. I wonder if a father was annoyed when he saw it or if he laughed and reminisced of his own father climbing a ladder to pull down balls and frisbees from the roof.

I remember the gasline that ran through the neighborhood of my youth and left a perfect baseball field that transitioned to football when the mood struck. 

I recall the glory of the day I won 57 games and set the known record for Wiffle Ball wins in a single day. To my knowledge, that record still stands. 

And that one warm Saturday, when a couple of dads joined our baseball game and then a few of us went and rounded up more. Soon we had a full-on father/son pickup game that only ended when Johnny’s dad took a line drive in the groin and had to go to the hospital. That became a warning to us all – glove down!

I’m suddenly riding my bike and not driving. We couldn’t afford the premium brands: Mongoose or Redline so I got a silver bike and bought Tommy’s old Mongoose pads and it looked cool… cool enough. My bike route has boundaries – Taylorsville Road on one side and the industrial park on the other. I usually don’t go outside of them… usually. 

Up with the sun, I’m sitting on Jeff’s porch waiting for him to arise. I know not to knock, his older brother taught me that the hard way. I just wait. He’s got a clover patch beside his house and I swear I’m going to find one with four leaves – not just the three-leafer that I split into four that time. Everyone knew. When he comes out with rooster-tailed hair, we play and play, swap baseball cards, eat lunch at my house, and play some more until the streetlights come on. That’s the sign to go home. 

Summers that never lasted long enough. Neither did those innocence days. Good days… great memories. 

And traffic moves again. It’s like the sadness of hearing the ball settle in the gutter – game over.

 

I saw this Frisbee every day for weeks and each time I smiled as I felt nostalgically lost in reveries of bygone summer days.

And suddenly, for just a moment, even Atlanta traffic didn’t seem so bad.   

A Question of Motives

.Reading time 4 minutes.

It’s a dangerous thing to question the motives of others. Without the ability to read minds, it becomes impossible to know for certain why people do what they do. Still, we try. We project our own experience, morality, and beliefs into situations we know little about and become certain of motives about which we have only cursory knowledge. Then we judge. Oh, how we judge. We make our judgments based on limited facts and our own deep reasoning.

Being a man of only shallow reasoning, I have trouble understanding my own motives at times so how could I possible know what drives you?

Take for example my recent outdoor experience.

I recently acquired a burn barrel. Now I’m not saying she’s the love of my life, but we do spend significant time together over the weekends. I fill her up until she glows and when she flames out, I lift her in an embrace and gently empty her. If that’s not love…

There is constantly fuel for my burn barrel in our woods and I wasn’t running low, but I also had to trim the hedges. You could say I “over-trimmed” or got carried away. If one were to question my motives they might say that I was looking for more fuel because the hedges are now gone. And when I say gone, I mean not only are they removed from the front of my house, they are smoke and ash. (insert little boy insatiable grin here)

When you get the fire hot enough, newly trimmed hedges are awesome to burn because of the moisture content. They sound like nature being tortured. But what happens when we torture nature? It tortures us back. Case in point the recent story about the rhino poacher who met the elephant and his buddy Mr. Lion. Karma hurts and I found out the world of flora has teeth too.

On day 3, God was at his creative best making lush meadow grasses, mighty oaks, roses, and lilies. Yet for some reason, he decided to throw in a little hell-weed called poison ivy. I’m not questioning his motives… but why? What could possibly be the purpose.

I know what poison ivy looks like and I know what to avoid, but somehow it snuck in my burn barrel. Listen children – don’t burn poison ivy. God not only made it a topical nuisance, he decided that inhaling it in smoke should be detrimental to your health, as well. Yeah God.

I won’t detail my itchy conundrum of the last few weeks. Let’s just say it took a while to get over that little patch of stupid. 

And did I learn anything?

It’s highly unlikely. I still burn yard debris, but I am more selective and watch out for ropy vines.

I’ve been trying not to doubt God’s motives in all this. I do wonder if red ants, mosquitos, and poison ivy are his little way of getting back at us for all we do to destroy what he created on day three. In the end, it was nice that he didn’t throw any giant venus fly traps in the woods.

I wonder if they would burn?