Piddlin’ round of golf on a grey day. My Vandy Boys are taking it on the chin, and without another miracle, will be second, i.e. loser in the College World series to a good Mississippi State team i would root for had not one of them, or maybe more decided to demonstrate the things i don’t like about Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and yes, even Tennessee. This supposedly Bulldog fan hurled racial slurs to the parents of Vandy’s black athletes. i think the idiot must believe the South won that damn war.

The Padres are making a comeback in Cincinnati, but i am tired. Tired of darkness, tired of things not going my way.

So i am going to tell a story that pleases me because it is laughable, unless you are somewhat of a deranged animal lover.

You see, once upon a time, there was  this military guy, who shall remain anonymous here, who had a pet monkey. He loved the monkey.

His work included a lot of parachute jumps, which he also loved. It was a great thrill for him. He wanted to share this thrill with his pet monkey. So he rigged a tiny parachute for his pet monkey in order for the monkey to share the thrill of parachuting with him.

He took his pet monkey on the next parachute jump. When it was his time to jump, he leaped out of the plane holding the monkey, rigged with the tiny parachute, close to his chest. As he pulled his rip chord and his parachute deployed, he pulled the tiny rip cord on the monkey’s parachute and gently let him go, thrilled that he was sharing a parachute jump with his beloved monkey.

Now if you haven’t figured this out yet, our young parachutist had not done a great deal of critical thinking about his project.

If you drop a monkey out of a plane and then let go of him several thousand feet above the earth, the monkey is not likely to be thrilled. He’s more likely to be scared shitless. When a monkey is scared, he does what scared monkeys do, he climbs higher.

Well, the pet monkey did exactly that. He climbed up the parachute rigging to the top of the parachute. This, of course, collapsed the parachute, and the pet monkey began an accelerated fall to earth sans an effective parachute.

The parachutist watched in horror and yelled to the heavens, “OH NOOOO….

i shall not tell the end of this story.

i stole this story from a friend.

i have been having thoughts similar to what Sean expressed in this article:

https://seandietrich.com/candy-coating-things/

This is true for all my friends who spit venom at the other side of the argument without pause. Old folks, who will do nothing about it but rage are worse than the others because they aren’t going to change it.

So why not appreciate what we have?

Thanks, Sean.

i was scanning the news headlines yesterday, as usual skipping any of the bad news, pretty much of all of it, and reading a paragraph or two when i actually found an item of interest.

The headline caught my eye: “US Open commentators better shut up.” The columnist who wrote the text is Phil Mushnick of the New York Post. i need to meet him as he not only expressed my disdain of golf commentators, but all sports commentators.

https://nypost.com/2021/06/19/us-open-golf-commentators-should-shut-up/

Mushnick’s column was particularly appropriate as i watched 12 innings of Vanderbilt scrapping and clawing their way to a 7-6 win over Arizona. It was sweet. It was long, five hours long. But boy, was it sweet.

Except for two things that caused me to turn off the sound repeatedly. The commentators and the play-by-play announcer just couldn’t shut up, just like Mushnick’s golf announcers. They couldn’t wait to point out how a player had screwed things up, how the coaches made bad decisions, how the umpires missed calls even though replay showed the umps got it right. And boy, can they just wax non-stop about a play or something totally unrelated to the play of the game.

And then there’s this Vandy fan who has been around for years. i guess some fans like it because they respond to his whistling, his shrill continually annoying, disruptive whistling. He reminds me of that rainbow hair guy that used to stand behind the tee boxes on televised golf with his sign that read John 3:16. There are places for whistling and signs, but not during a sports event.

Between the announcers and the whistler, my sound will be muted for the U.S. Open in San Diego today and Vandy’s next CWS game Tuesday.

Thanks, Dave.

i won’t elaborate. i have done enough of that. He would not be pleased by too much adoration. As i said in my post about my son-in-law earlier, he liked this poem i wrote about him.

That’s enough.

Hands

when most folks meet him,
they notice steel blue eyes and agility; his gaze, gait and movements
belie the ninety-five years;
but
those folks should look at his hands: Durer, if he saw them,
would want to paint them.

his hands are marked from
tire irons, jacks, wrenches, sledges, micrometers on carburetors, axles, brake drums, distributors, starting in ’34 at twelve dollars a week.
He has used those hands to
repair the cars and
our hearts;

his hands pitched tents,
made the bulldozers run
in war
in the steaming, screaming sweat of Bougainville, New Guinea, the Philippines.

his hands have nicks and scratches turned into scars with
the passage of time:
a map of history, the human kind.

veins and arteries stand out
on the back of his hands,
pumping life;
tales are etched from
grease and oil and grime,
cleansed with gasoline and goop and lava soap;

they are hands of labor, hands of hard times, hands of hope,
hands of kindness, caring.

his hands own wisdom,
passing it to those who know him with a pat, a caress, a handshake.

his hands tell the story
so well.

i have written a lot about my father.

He was a good man. i respected and loved him. He reciprocated love and respect for every human being he met. i will post the poem about him that he not only liked but after reading it for the first time, he asked, “How did you know all of those things about me?”

But this is about another father in my life: the father of my grandson.

i never stop being amazed at how lucky i am to have Jason Gander as a son-in-law. When he married my daughter Blythe, i made my toast at the reception and noted their love for each other was similar to the love of one of the most incredible marriages that i knew: my parents, Blythe’s grandparents. i was not wrong. The two relationships are different in many ways but very much alike in the most important ways of love, understanding each other, and patience.

But that’s not the reason for this post on Father’s Day. Jason is undoubtedly the best father grandson Sam could have. i don’t gush about a lot of things. There’s Maureen, who occasionally produces that gush of feeling about our love. There’s that gush of love and happiness when either two of my daughters do something spectacular, which is often. And of course, anytime i hear from or get information about Samuel James Jewell Gander — and it is appropriate to point out today the “James Jewell” in his name is for my father, not me: perfect — i gush all over myself at what a terrific young man Sam is. i called him the unifier of a nuclear family when he was born, and he still is.

Jason, you are amazing.

…oh, and thanks.

Happy Father’s Day.