Poor memory equals loss of wedding cake opportunities

I missed my buddy Bob’s wedding last Saturday. It was—from what I hear—a nice event; casual, fun, romantic. Everything a wedding is supposed to be, but without all the uncomfortable, formal hoo-hah associated with many such ceremonies.

I missed Bob’s first wedding, too, but that was mostly because his first wife hated my filthy guts. Probably still does. I am not universally loved, especially by my friends’ wives.

Apparently, I am a bad influence.

Bob’s new wife, however, is a real sweetie who doesn’t hate my guts. At least, not yet. So I got an invite.

I had been looking forward to the reception for weeks. Bob and I grew up together and all our old friends—Nosepick, BT, Blub and Frizzy Bri, among others—all were going to be there. I couldn’t wait to catch up.

But when the big day arrived, I forgot. It was as simple as that. I just plain forgot.

How, you might ask, could someone just forget something this important? I wish I had an answer for you, but I don’t.

Somehow, Bob and Tally’s wedding just slipped my mind.

So instead of attending a pleasant wedding, followed by a reception populated with good friends, conversation, and great food and drink, I instead did yard work, putted around the house, clipped the dog’s toenails. I feel so cheated!

And all because I have the memory of a 98-year-old recovering alcoholic with a severe cranial injury and late-stage Mad Cow Disease.

I get no sympathy from The Lovely Mrs. Taylor. According to her, my tendency is to “forget” things like roof tile mending, snow shoveling, grass mowing, and trash taking-outing. Also, she rightly notes that I never forget to buy beer, watch the opening credits to Baywatch or pick up new batteries when the two in the TV remote start getting weak.

I’m not sure why I’m so scattered. My schedule is full, but not Type-A-personality-overbooked-stress-inducing-think-I’m-gonna-have-a-major-coronary-by-age-30-die-young-leave-a-frazzled-looking-corpse full.

I stop to smell the roses. I take the path less traveled by. My mind is not chock-full of things I simply must remember. In fact, through a careful mix of avoiding responsibility whenever possible, volunteering for nothing, and cultivating a reputation for being an utter flake, I’ve managed to construct a lifestyle that requires me to remember very little.

Yet, too often, even those few things I should remember—that I want to remember—I somehow manage to forget. Sometimes, my forgetfulness results in nothing worse than a trip back to the grocery to pick up whatever it was Mrs. T wanted me to get while I was there buying beer. Sometimes, it means I miss a good friend’s wedding.

I’m like the dumb uncle in It’s a Wonderful Life, the one who manages to misplace the bank deposit.

Hopefully, my buddy Bob and his new wife will be as forgiving as Jimmy Stewart was in that movie. You know, the one we were talking about a minute ago? I forget the title.



More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

Halloween brings memories of scariest job ever

Halloween’s coming. That puts me in mind of my old buddy Clarence, from Detroit. We went to high school there, back in the ‘70s, and though I haven’t seen Clarence in decades, I still think of him from time to time, mostly around Halloween.

I do so because Clarence, for a few weeks in October of 1976, had the scariest job in the world—night attendant at the city morgue.

The Detroit morgue in the 1970s, was—you should excuse the pun—a lively place. People were dying to get in. (Feel free to groan at this point.)

Clarence had no medical experience, nor did he need any. All he had to do was catalog incoming “residents,” file the requisite paperwork, and lock up when his shift was over. The rest of the time he just read or watched late-night programming on a portable, black-and-white TV.

Despite the “creepy factor” of spending nights alone in a tiny office adjacent to a large room filled with the recently deceased, the job was a cushy one. The only downside came at the end of his shift.

To close up, Clarence had to switch off the lights and make sure everything was locked down tight. Problem was, the light switch controlling the overhead fluorescents was on the opposite side of the room from the exit. After killing the lights, Clarence had to walk, in the dark, through a room full of folks who wouldn’t be getting up for breakfast the next morning. Or ever.

For someone with a less active imagination, this might not have been a problem. But Clarence had seen every slasher movie in existence and consumed the entire catalogues of Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft. His psyche was primed for what came next.

As he did every night, Clarence steeled his nerves before entering the refrigerated room where the bodies lay. He propped the door open with a folding chair to let in light from the office. A water cooler—the sort with an inverted five-gallon jug on top—stood to the right of the door. Clarence paused long enough to fill a Dixie cup and drink.

Then he crossed the frigid room. Fingers on the switch, he turned back to focus on the rectangle of light slanting in from the open door; the exit.

Clarence flipped the switch, enveloping the room into semi-darkness. The dim yellow glow from the office was now the only illumination; the bodies on the tables no more than vague shapes beneath hospital-blue sheets.

Sticking close to the center of the room, Clarence inched his way toward the exit. He was about halfway there when the folding chair scraped free and the door slammed shut.

Clarence froze in the utter darkness, determined not to panic. Mustering his flagging courage, he eased toward where he guessed the door to be.

It was at this point that two unfortunate things happened simultaneously: Clarence bumped into a table containing a “guest” and the water cooler “gurgled,” making a loud, gulping noise.

Choking off a scream, Clarence stumbled backward. Instinctively reaching out to halt his fall, he grabbed the first thing his hand came in contact with—the arm of the table’s occupant. Clarence hit the floor, pulling the body on top of him.

Clarence arrived at my apartment 15 minutes later asking to borrow my phone. He explained to his supervisor that he hadn’t locked up, that there was a body on the floor, and that, as of that moment, he quit.

I don’t think he even went back for his final paycheck.

I sometimes wonder what Clarence is doing for employment these days. Whatever it is, I hope he’s working with the living. He never got on well with the dead.



More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

Back to the dog days of summer at the Taylor house

When our beloved beagle mutt, Kipper, went to that big fire hydrant in the sky this past spring, The Lovely Mrs. Taylor vowed: “No more dogs, at least for a couple years!” The pain of a pet’s passing is just too hard on the family, she said.

At the time, I had my doubts as to Mrs. Taylor’s ability to follow through on this vow. My doubts, it turns out, were well founded.

We’ve been re-dogged. And just as the grass in the backyard was starting to come in nicely.

Mrs. Taylor was introduced to our new pooch at one of those greyhound rescue open houses, held a few weeks ago at a Grand Rapids pet store. I should never have asked her to stop there to pick up bird seed for my finches, but it’s too late now.

At any rate, she met Prince (that’s the dog’s name, and yes, I know it’s gayer than RuPaul’s summer wardrobe) at this show, and she fell in love with him.

Despite his sissified name (his full, AKC moniker is “Prince Lee III of Stratford on Avon Count Viscount de Shangri-la” or some such poofy nonsense) he’s a big hound. The biggest the woman from the greyhound adoption agency had ever seen, in fact, at least for his breed. He’s nearly as large as your average Great Dane, or slightly smaller than a Shetland pony.

At the moment, he’s sprawled out in the living room. And the dining room. And part of the kitchen.

He’s big.

He’s a great dog, though, and being a greyhound, spends most of his indoor time just lying around chewing his collection of squeaky toys into ragged oblivion. Prince (lordy, I hate that name) has only been with us a week or so, but already he feels like a member of the family.

It’s a good thing he’s working out so well, because getting him was an exercise in patience. With a normal dog, you just go to the humane society or pet store and say: “Gimme that one.” After paying for the dog, you take him home, tell him not to whiz on the carpet, and hope for the best.

Not so with a greyhound. These are former track animals, retired from racing, who—in the bad old days—would have been “put down” as young as age three. Now, thanks to the many greyhound rescue agencies nationwide, they are instead placed with families like ours.

The adoption process, however, is fairly stringent. Mrs. Taylor and I were required to provide several references and all our vet information. We had to fill out forms and supply emergency contact numbers. Inspectors from the adoption agency checked out our house, our yard, our fence.

I was waiting for them to ask for blood and urine samples, maybe fingerprints and a retina scan.

We could have adopted a Chinese baby with less hassle.

In truth, they only wanted to make sure the dog was getting a good, safe home, and I can respect that.

It’s good to have a dog in the house again. To me, a house doesn’t feel like a home without a mutt tracking mud through the kitchen on rainy days.

I just wish he had another name. Max. Buddy. Rover. Anything but Prince. But that was his name when we got him and Mrs. T—who is a big fan of the pop star of the same name—loves it. What can you do?

I’m thinking of calling him The Dog Formerly Known as Prince.

Or maybe just “Dog.”



More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

From beer to moon landings: Men can do that, if women make them

I’ve always maintained that were it not for women, men would have stopped inventing things shortly after the advent of beer and television. We are by nature sedentary creatures, content with simple pleasures—happy to scratch, burp and occasionally change the channel from ESPN to CNN.

Women, for whatever reason, expect more of us. And we, for the most part, deliver.

Why? Because women have what we want. No, not that. I’m talking about the niceties of civilization; medicine, democracy, abundant food, soft pillows, Law & Order reruns. Oh, sure, men may have invented most of those things, but we only did it to impress women, to gain their favor.

And, let’s be honest, guys, it just plain feels good when a women assumes you can do something. Whether it’s fixing a broken doorknob or creating a timeless work of art, if a woman looks at you with those big, blue eyes (I’m thinking of The Lovely Mrs. Taylor here) and says, “Can you, honey?”, chances are you’re going to at least give it a shot.

Men are suckers.

I was reminded of this fact last weekend at the annual Fallasburg Park arts and crafts fair. Mrs. T drags me to this thing every year. I say “drags me,” but in truth I enjoy it myself. They have corndogs there.

And I have to admit I’m fascinated by the traditional, old-time crafts, created—often on-site—by area artisans. This year, I saw a woman weaving cane chairs by hand, another operating a real, working spinning wheel. I saw a guy carving furniture from big blocks of oak. There was an artist doing incredibly intricate origami work. It was all way cool.

But at each exhibit, especially those at which I was thinking of actually making a purchase, Mrs. Taylor repeated a variant of the same comment: “You could do that yourself.”

One artist was selling photographs; very good photographs. A large, black-and-white print of a meadow seen on a foggy day especially appealed to me, though the price tag did not. Still, I stood in front of the print for a while, contemplating how nice it would look over the living room sofa.

“You could do that yourself!” Mrs. T said, before I could make any overt moves toward my wallet.

And maybe I could. I’m a decent photographer, own a decent camera, and am possessed of a fair understanding of composition. I will never actually drag myself out of bed on a foggy morning and sit around a dewy field waiting for the moment when the light is perfect, but I could.

The crazy thing is, Mrs. Taylor made that same comment while we were watching the guy who carves chairs. And the origami guy. I can no more carve a chair or do origami than I can levitate or speak Farsi. But apparently, Mrs. T believes I could, if only I applied myself.

Ah, feminine confidence; the grease that smoothes the gears of civilization.

Next summer, we’re thinking about taking a couple days to visit NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. I’ve been there before and it’s amazing. They have real moon rocks there, and one of the original Mercury space capsules, though no corn dogs.

I’m looking forward to it, but I’m also a little worried. As we walk past the video footage of moonwalks, lift-offs and Mars Rovers, will Mrs. T glance my way and say, “You could do that.”



More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.