Bicycles provide a lesson in parenting and physics

My quiet walk in the country was being disturbed by the roar and clang of a power saw and hammer. Topping the rise at the two-mile point from my house, I discovered the racket’s source: a young dad and his ten-year-old son building something in the front yard.

Drawing closer, I saw that the “something” was a ramp, the sort kids use to perform stunts on their BMX bikes.

“Evening,” I said. “Nice ramp.”

Dad removed his baseball cap and used it to wipe sweat from his brow. 

“It’s taking us all day to build,” he complained.

Looking at the ramp, I could believe it. It wasn’t just a couple pieces of plywood hammered together with rusty nails salvaged from some old board in the garage. It was a work of art.

Stainless steel sides gleamed in the light of the setting sun; rubber “safety” bumpers lined the edges of the sanded, stained oak. 

Frankly, I’d feel guilty riding a bicycle over that lovely piece of woodcraft.

It was just another example of how much things have changed since I was a kid. Back then, there was no such thing as doting parental involvement. If we wanted a ramp to race our bikes over, we scrounged up a sheet of splintery, nail-filled plywood and propped it over the nearest curb. 

The traffic on Michigan Street only made the ride more exciting for me and my buddy, Jim. We were young and fearless. And mostly brainless.

So it was with a real sense of adventure that we approached the sinkhole in the parking lot of Arsulowicz Mortuary. We’d had heavy rains that fall and the gravelly soil near the railroad tracks had washed away, leaving a hole in the parking lot about six feet deep and at least that wide. The otherwise flawless asphalt had caved in around it.

Jim and I dropped our bikes by the tracks and immediately set about building a makeshift ramp from old timbers that always seemed to be laying around back then. Why?

See the “mostly brainless” comment, above.

Neither Jim nor myself had ever been accused of being particularly bright, but of the two of us, I was the dumber. I volunteered to go first.

I wheeled my 26-inch, bright red, Firestone 500 bicycle to the opposite side of the parking lot, carefully aligning my front wheel with the rickety ramp, which was maybe 8-inches wide and held in place with cinder blocks and wishful thinking.

My cycling skills were every bit as impressive then as they are now. I hit that ramp doing about 22 miles per hour and received an immediate lesson in physics. Namely, that a 75-pound boy riding a big, clunky bike at 22 miles per hour will not fly gracefully over a 6-feet wide hole, but will instead drop like a stone.

I still remember the taste of blood and gravel.

Maybe doting, 21-Century parents are not such a bad thing, after all.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273

You won’t find freedom in your wallet

I was talking with my boss earlier today about money and the role it plays in happiness. I wasn’t hitting her up for more; the conversation was philosophical, not economical.

Money. People attach too much importance to it. This makes them do questionable things to get more of it. Robbing, embezzling, murder, voting Republican … stuff like that.

I used to worry about money.

Like most Americans, I was solidly middle class, stuck in that economic gray area between “well off” and “barely making it.”

Filthy rich people don’t worry about money. Neither do those who have none at all.

It’s the in-betweens that stress over a lack of greenbacks.

This no doubt seems self-evident to many of you, but it took me a few long, painful years to arrive at this revelation. 

Six years ago, I had a nice house, a great job, a healthy 401K, a new truck, a beautiful wife and money enough that I never really had to think about it much. I wasn’t anything approaching well-off, but the bills got paid and there was a little extra in my wallet at the end of every month.

I felt secure. Which, it turns out, is a very foolish way to feel. None of us, ever, are secure. Not you, not me, not Donald Trump. Security is an illusion.

Anything can happen. Anything. 

Like what?

Like my wife dumped me. A few months later, I was downsized from my job. My 401K dwindled to nothing as I funneled off my investments in an effort to hang onto the house. Eventually, it was gone. So was the house. 

If my dog had died, I would have had the makings of a great country-western song.

By the time the dust settled, I was all but homeless. My worldly possessions now fit into a couple bicycle pannier bags. 

Was I depressed? Yup. Suicidal? Daily. 

I found work (of a sort) freelance writing for a couple online publications. I made just enough to feed myself.

It was the undisputed low point of my life. 

Then one day, since I had nothing but time, I loaded what camping gear I still owned onto my bicycle and started riding. 

I rode all that day and camped that night. The next day I did the same. And the next. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. Miles disappeared beneath my tires.

I rode, I wrote, I slept. And little by little, even though I didn’t have a dime to my name, I got happy again. Happiness was there all along, it turned out, even without the nice house, the great job, the beautiful wife, the 401K.

Words can’t express how liberating that knowledge was.

My situation improved. I found a new job, a new girl, a new house. Now I’ve come full circle, back to where I began.

With one difference. My happiness is no longer dependent on money, possessions or even other people. 

I’m free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I’m free at last. 

As are all the things in life that really matter.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 745-9530

This Labor Day, I’m thankful for cows. And barley

No Irish Catholic boy ever loved his mother more than I did. She died several years back and I still miss her. 

So it’s rare I make any disparaging comments where mom is concerned. But I’m going to today.

She didn’t have many faults, but she did have one: she couldn’t cook a steak to save her life.

I only hope the poor cows who gave their lives providing meat to my family never looked down from Cow Heaven to see what had become of their earthly remains. It would only depress them.

The beef that went into my mother’s frying pan looked pretty much like any other. What came out of that pan was better suited to the manufacture of uncomfortable dress shoes than eating.

Part of the problem was my old man. He liked his meat incinerated to the point it could no longer really be called meat. What made it to our family table more closely resembled something an archaeologist might unearth than anything food-related.

As a kid, I didn’t know any better. I assumed steak was what people who couldn’t afford good food ate. Steak was served in prison — or so I imagined — to inmates guilty of particularly heinous infractions. It was the main reason I never shoplifted comic books.

Then one day… 

We were at my Aunt Madeline’s house, a Labor Day barbecue. She asked a question that changed my life forever.

“How do you want your steak, Mikey?”

I had no idea what she was talking about. How did I want my steak? Well, in a lead-lined, sealed container on a bullet train headed for Tokyo would be nice.

“How do I want it?” I said.

“Do you want it well done, medium, rare?” she replied.

I was only nine year old, but rare sounded good. If something was rare, I figured, it was more valuable, right? Surely the same applied to steak. I ordered mine rare.

My mother stepped in. “Oh, no, Mike always has his steaks well done,” she said.

“No, I want rare,” I said, mostly to contradict my mother, something I was getting good at even at age nine.

Five minutes later, my Aunt Madeline dropped a steak onto my paper plate. It looked like absolutely nothing my mother had ever given me. It was juicy. It was pink. It was — gack! — bleeding all over my paper plate!

Just the sight of it made me slightly nauseous. But I was determined to prove my mom wrong and appear grown up. 

I cut a minuscule slice from the most cooked section and forked it tentatively into my mouth.

Suddenly, I could hear angels singing! Bells ringing! Millions of years of carnivorous evolution asserted themselves as I dug into that steak with an avidity generally seen only in packs of ravenous hyenas. 

It was the beginning of a love affair that has endured five decades.

In preparation for Labor Day, tonight I will lovingly insert two beautiful inch-thick sirloins into a bath of Lori’s secret (and beyond sublime) marinade, where they will absorb all that is good in life until Saturday afternoon, when I will nestle them onto the grill — briefly — before allowing them to transport me to my own private gastronomical Nirvana.

When I was a kid, chocking back my mom’s burned-to-a-cinder steak, she always provided milk or Kool-Aid with which to wash it down.

Then one day, shortly after my 19th birthday, someone handed me a frosty can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. But that’s a story for another time.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273

Waiting for the end of the world for fun and profit

The world’s going to end in late September. Asteroid strike.

If you’ve been thinking of making things right with the IRS or calling that girl you used to date in high school, don’t bother. I mean, what’s the point? By October 1st, we’ll all be dead.

Now, the scary thing here isn’t the asteroid, which is entirely fictitious. The scary thing is that some people believed me.

Scarier still, some folks will continue to believe me even though I just admitted I was lying through my teeth. 

In fact, if I found a dozen NASA scientists willing to testify as to the baloney-ness of my asteroid apocalypse claim, some folks would STILL spend the weekend digging asteroid shelters in their back yards!

I know all this because for the past couple weeks I’ve been watching it happen in real time on Facebook. Somebody somewhere (or, in Facebook parlance, an “expert”) posted a scary-looking Photoshopped picture of an asteroid the size of Texas zeroing in on Manhattan, along with “data” about the big rock’s trajectory. 

The claim was 100 percent pixie dust and had no basis in fact, but in less time than it’s taking me to write about it here, that post was “shared” a zillion times on social media sites around the globe.

A few hours later, real NASA scientists did weigh in on the subject, assuring the public there was no danger of an imminent cosmic collision. This denial only added fuel to the conspiracy theory flames.

Now, claimed the breathless posts, the government was “in on it.” The government. You know, those guys that can’t find their backsides with both hands. Somehow, they were managing to keep the end of the world a deep, dark secret from everyone on the entire planet.

I mean, c’mon, Bill couldn’t even keep Monica a secret. If the world really were about to end, somebody would spill the beans.

My point is, there are people out there that will believe anything. P.T. “There’s a sucker born every minute” Barnum knew it, and unlike me, he figured out how to make a buck off it.

I figure I’ve got about a month to cash in on this fictitious asteroid. Deep impact insurance? Ten buck discount baptisms guaranteed to get even the most grievous sinner into a decent after-life situation? Asteroid-resistant sunscreen?

I dunno. There’s got to be an angle somewhere.

It’s hard to come up with anything good when you know the world’s going to end in less than a month.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273

There but for a knock on wood go I

“If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” — Woody Allen.

That quote is one I’ve in large part lived my life by. 

Even before I’d heard Woody’s wisdom, I had somehow sussed out the capricious nature of the universe: that despite the best laid schemes of mice and men, things frequently “gang aft agley.” (Which is Scottish for “take a high dive into a shallow puddle,” more or less.)

In fact, over the years I’ve come to think the universe (the fates, God, Allah, Krishna … I believe exactly what you believe, so relax) is not only capricious, but actually out to get me.

Fortunately, I also believe there are preventative steps which may be taken to counteract this phenomenon. These include not walking under a ladder, lighting only two cigarettes from a match but never three, picking up a penny for good luck (head’s up only!), and most importantly, knocking on wood whenever you say or write something that might potentially “jinx” you.

I employ the knocking on wood technique at least a dozen times a day. Is it ridiculous and superstitious? Oh, you bet. Does it have one iota of scientific corroboration? Nope. Do I feel like a schmuck for believing — even tenuously — in such nonsense? Absolutely.

But why take a chance?

I knock on wood for the same reason a more rational person establishes a 401K account early in his career and then later resists the urge to cash it out to buy a red sports car during an early onset midlife crisis (but that’s a story for another time).

The point is, superstitious hooey or not, so far, knocking on wood has worked.

But every once in a while, I’ll have a terrible thought and forget to knock. That happened last week, when my column dealt with the hostility I was beginning to feel toward the Hoveround people who keep sending me offers to purchase their little electric geezer-mobile.

In that column I wrote, “I may be old and tubby, but when I’m ready for a Hoveround, jerk-faces, I’ll call YOU!”

I wrote that and failed to knock on wood! A week later, to the day, I was riding around Meijer on one of their industrial strength scooters, purchasing crutches, ice packs and the bucketful of drugs it was going to take to get me on my feet again.

Knee problems. Hopefully temporary. The drugs — steroids among them, so I’m sure to look like Schwarzenegger by the time this is all over — seem to be working. Of course, that could just be the painkillers talking; I’m on enough of ‘em to make Keith Richards jealous.

But I really do seem to be improving. Meanwhile, that celestial laughter I’m hearing is all the reminder I’ll need to, next time, knock on wood.

That’s my plan, anyway.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273

I’m getting pretty tired of geezer-fied ‘offers’

When I was kid, I loved mail. Mail was birthday cards, copies of the “Weekly Reader,” postcards from Grandma’s vacation and the X-Ray Specs I’d ordered from the back pages of a Superman comic book.

Then came adulthood. No more X-Ray Specs. No more birthday cards. No more “Weekly Reader.” 

Instead, I got offers from lenders enticing me to spend money I didn’t have and bills from creditors demanding I pay back money I’d spent already.

Mail was no longer cause for celebration.

But like every reluctant grownup, I dealt with it and moved on. I figured the worst was over. 

I figured wrong.

My mail in recent months makes bills and credit card offers seem like party invitations by comparison.

I know why this is happening. I’m approaching a certain … age. A decade marker that separates the kiddies from the geezers. Come November 26, I will be landing firmly on the McDonald’s Senior Discount side of that line.

My mail reflects this fact.

Last week, for instance, I received an offer for financing on a “Hoveround,” a battery-powered scooter that’s supposed to help transport my decrepit, wrinkly self down to the corner store for my weekly purchase of Maalox, T.V. Guide and lottery tickets.

Mind you, this offer arrived three days after I completed an 80-mile bicycle tour along the Leelanau Penninsula. I may be old and tubby, but when I’m ready for a Hoveround, jerk-faces, I’ll call YOU!

Likewise, I’m not interested in any fancy refinance deals in which some mortgage company gets my home when I croak. I’ve dealt with too many banks and don’t trust ‘em not to kill me in my sleep in order to collect the house, should I live too long to suit them.

And if I get one more “offer” from the AARP, I’m going to track down the young kid in charge of sending out the mailers and beat him senseless, just to prove I still can. Maybe they’ll take the hint after that.

The final mailbox insult came in yesterday’s post. It was one of those sneaky, little insurance company mailers that looks for all the world like a bill for something I’ve already purchased.

They try to pull this stuff because old codgers (like me) aren’t supposed to be able to remember anything. We’re (apparently) easily confused and therefore likely to just send money.

It’s insulting, is what it is. But not as insulting as the “Family Keepsake” included in the envelope. 

Said “keepsake” is nothing but a sheet of paper upon which to list your next-of-kin, an abbreviated genealogical history, and your “funeral and burial arrangements.” 

This treasured document will give your kids something to ignore when they find you keeled over in your rocking chair.

Lemme tell ya buddy, the funeral director who’s going to handle MY planting hasn’t been born yet! I plan to go down kicking and screaming shortly after pulling an all-nighter at a wild New Year’s Eve 2065 party.

Until then, what I don’t need is daily reminders that time is no longer on my side. What I DO need is something to counter all this ageist propaganda.

I’m thinking it may be time to order some X-Ray Specs and take out a subscription to “Weekly Reader.” As I recall, the print used to be pretty big in that magazine. Maybe I could still see it without my reading glasses.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273