The other side of the pond.

“Look, salamanders!”

These are the words that will forever be associated with one of the stupider things my brother and I did.

I can’t remember how old we were; I couldn’t drive, but my brother could – I’d say we were 14 and 18? I can’t remember what led us to leave the house that day, either. What I can say, is that when we passed the irrigation pond on a back road near the local farm, my brother decided that since the pond looked dry, we should “off-road” and check it out.

Let me stop for a minute and explain the vehicle we were in. It was a Nissan pickup truck; it had been used for years as a New York City plumbing truck by my uncle, before he sold it to his brother, my father. The bumpers on this thing made tanks look wimpy. The rest of the truck however, was, well, lower than basic. It was a two wheel drive, stick shift, which should have never left the pavement.

We went on our little adventure, checking out what the bottom of an irrigation pond looks like. The road – and by road I mean dirt trail – that we chose ended on one side of the pond; my brother wanted to be on the other side of the pond. Instead of driving back down the road and taking the other trail that led to this other side, he decided that this truck would be a good candidate for a real off-road experience, across the bottom of a still somewhat wet pond.

He gunned the truck, thinking speed was some type of magic force field that would transport him across the pond, and we started to skid and slide in every direction. When we reached the halfway point, I thought we just might make it. Then I realized that while the truck was making a lot of noise, it was not making a lot of ground.

We looked at each other, laughed a little, and he put it in reverse. We went about two feet before the same “noise, no movement” happened. Still laughing, but a little bit more worried now, we assessed the situation.

The truck had slowly buried itself up to its axles. We tried everything we could think of – we rocked it, put sticks under the tires, pushed it – nothing worked. At this point, I think we busted up laughing, because we knew we had to walk through the woods, and back to our house to get our father to help us, whom we were certain would not be happy about the situation.

As we approached the house, coming from the opposite direction than we’d left and with no truck, my father, who was working on a stone footpath in front of our house, saw us.

“Where’s the truck guys?” is what I believe he asked.

My brother answered with a “Well, funny thing about the truck Dad…”

After explaining to him what had happened, the three of us piled into the family minivan and drove to the farm to see if we couldn’t get that truck out. We brought rope, boards, and shovels – the works. After what seemed like hours, we were nowhere nearer to getting the truck out than when we started.

My brother, the one who was responsible for this whole mess, was in charge of gunning the engine and spinning the wheels, while my dad and I used brute strength to try and budge it at the same time. It was like a cartoon, where you see the car spin the mud to cover the other character head to toe. My father and I were filthy, dripping in mud, and it was getting dark. We struggled with boards and shovels in the narrow beam of brightness from the flashlight my brother was holding, when we found ourselves in complete darkness.

All we hear is my brother saying, “Look, salamanders!”

He was looking at friggin’ salamanders. I think it was at this time my father gave up, on the truck at least. He had already given up on us when we had walked back home with no truck.

My father and I looked at each other, dripping wet, covered in mud, standing at the bottom of a somewhat dried up pond and then at my brother, who was dry, clean, and looking at salamanders. We started to pack up our things, defeated.

My brother pleaded that we try a few more times.

“Come on, let’s hook up the minivan to the truck and pull it out.”

Thank god my dad was home that day to stop that train of thought, or we would have had one vehicle stuck in mud, with the fender of another one attached to it, like an anchor on the shore.

My brother wound up getting a tow truck the next day to pull him out, and since it was on private property, AAA wouldn’t cover it – which caused great pleasure for my dad and me.

After forking out the cash to recover a truck that rightfully belonged at the bottom of a pond, my brother learned an important lesson – when you’re clean as a whistle and two guys who are helping you are covered in mud, don’t go looking for salamanders.

Until next time…

Decisions - Decisions!

So, I have a dilemma.

Where to post the next story.

It's a story, so it could find a home here, but I rant a little, so my Grumble and Praise blog could be a better fit.

Hmmm.

Shelley (my partner) had asked me to share this story, and it is about the current president, so to make it relevant I need to decide.

I have it.

If you want to read a story about how I blame Bush for my mother getting robbed (which is briefly mentioned in an earlier post here) visit www.grumbleandpraise.blogspot.com.

Cool, two posts in one.

Until next time.

I left my cash in San Francisco!

As I was thinking about stories to share, I thought of this one – the ironic twist is that I now live in the San Francisco Bay Area and I know of a few guys who wouldn’t think twice about performing this scam if times were tough…funny how things work out.

It was 1997 and I had just graduated high school and was on a trip to the west coast for the first time with my mother. We did everything the normal tourist did, we visited the wineries, coasted the shoreline, and we went to San Francisco. There we visited the famous “Rock” and strolled along the Piers; it was here that I saw him.

He was standing on the corner with three bottle caps and a pea. The game was very familiar to me, keep your eye on the pea and win big, except, I knew something that he did not… I was a magician.

I, like most magicians, have seen variations upon variations of this game and I knew most of them inside out. I quickly picked up on the fact that this man was here to make serious money, I spotted his two plants, the ones that kept winning and losing to entice the “suckers” to play. I saw the men who just happened to keep eye contact with him from across the street, scanning the crowd for those officers who patrolled the strip for illegal activity. Well, I thought if he can scam them, why not scam him. I mean I could use some cash. So I watched, I watched him palm, slide, misdirect and exchange that pea for others, so that every time the “sucker” picked a cap, it was nowhere to be found.

Well, I waited until the pea was under a cap (instead of waiting in his hand to be placed anywhere at his convince) and piped up “I know where it is”. He glanced at me and saw something, a challenge, he knew he was about to be had.

Then it happened, I let my guard down, I forgot to have the money ready. He asked that all bets be placed on the table, I looked away for only one second, enough to get my wallet and lay forty dollars on the table. Once I had let go and watched the money float into his hands, I knew I would never see it again.

He was waiting for that moment, the perfect, most natural misdirection you could ask for, and the thing was, I knew that he had taken the pea away. It probably was the most innocent little move to obtain it, but he had it. It would not have mattered which cap I chose, it would not have been under any of them. It was in his palm, like so many other times. I just looked at him, gave him that little look of “ok you win” and pointed to a cap. He smiled and showed to all that I too had been had.

Needless to say, I felt it my duty to help the next guy out, I was out the cash, but why ruin a perfectly good plan. After my causing a little uncomfortable help to others, he was forced to relocate for the day. All my mother could do was fret about how I had lost forty dollars. All I could think was that I had paid forty dollars for an unforgettable and wonderful story of San Francisco; one that I did not regret in anyway.

So for all those who are on the streets scamming us, thank you for the memories.

Until next time.

There’s a dead body in my mom’s attic

I can’t keep it to myself anymore, I have to turn her in - There’s a dead body in my mom’s attic.

I blame a bad week for what pushed her over the edge. Otherwise I don’t think the body would still be there.

It started when she came home to find her house had been broken into. On-top of that she was told that her car, which had been serviced – and by serviced I mean some scumbag “fixed” her car in a manner that made it need a whole lot more servicing - was going to need a repair job (by a reputable mechanic to fix the scumbags work) that would cost thousands.

My mom is a teacher and while she works in Connecticut, which pays its teachers a little better than other states, she is still a teacher, a job that gets lots of thanks; but not in a monetary manner.

So, she just had her house broken into, and was given a bill that was going to put a dent in the budget and that’s when it happened, that is when the body appeared in the attic.

She heard a noise - At first she thought that the burglar was back. Then she realized that it sounded like what our cat use to sound like, when he would run up and down and all around for no apparent reason. Her Sherlock Holmes deduction was, that from the sound of it, it was quite a bit bigger than a mouse– elementary dear Watson – seeing that mice usually don’t make much of a noise, with the exception of faint scratching. Friends of hers suggested a squirrel or a bat – A BAT! I do not want to see the bats these people have in their attics if they sound like a cat high on the nip.

Anyways, my mom starts to think back a few days and remembers that she had smelled a funny odor in the kitchen that smelled a little like cat pee, but not quite. She also had thought to herself that it seemed to come more from "up" than "down", but couldn't exactly tell.

She said she had searched for days and couldn't figure it out, and started to think that maybe the "robber" also pissed on her kitchen rug, just to be mean, but figured that was probably unlikely. Yeah because people who break in to other peoples homes are nice and wouldn’t do something like that.

So that brings us to the noise – which, did she go and investigate, to see what type of damage this crazy animal has done to the uncountable boxes of the mementos of my and my brothers childhood that my mother just had to keep? Of course not.

The next morning, she started to notice not just a pee smell, but now a REALLY disgusting smell. Again back to her Sherlock Holmes like observations, she has deducted that whatever was up there had gotten trapped, went crazy, ran around in a fit of deathly panic and died. Since it was in the attic, in August, it also began to decay rapidly.

When I asked her if she has now gone up to the attic to see if this is what really happened she said “if I start to see yucky stains showing on my ceiling, I'll know I'm correct.”

So there you have it, my mom has a dead body in her attic and she doesn’t seem to really mind too much.

Until next time…

What is "There's Always A Story"?

For as long as I can remember, friends and family have said that there's always a story to be expected from me. Sometimes it is a crazy adventure that I recently had, or just a retelling of an interesting fact. A few years ago, I started to write down some of the better tales that got retold at parties or in casual conversation, and now I have decided to retell them here. Not every post will be an amazing and crazy adventure and not every post will necessarily be a story, but possibly a thought expanded, to get others to think and or tell their own story. I hope you enjoy.