A heartwarming tale of Christmas woe

I was in the concluding hours of one of those low-grade bad days. Stuck in traffic, work unproductive, loved ones ridiculed my haircut.

So my mood was grim as I sat down in the auditorium to watch the 5th grade Christmas assembly.

But as fate would have it, my day was destined to improve. I sat down next to a guy whose day was worse than mine. Malfunctioning car needed towed, crabby customers at work and then to top it all off he came home to learn the stupid dog got skunked.

I wish no ill on my fellow man, but if it has to happen I hope it happens on a day when they wind up sitting next to me. I left that assembly with all my Christmas cheer restored.

Nothing warms the downtrodden like hearing some other hapless mope is enduring a worse cosmic screwing.

Today is the 10th anniversary of what was until the 2004 death of my father the worst day of my life.

Thus, it is the most popular story I’ve ever told. It is among my friends becoming a Christmas tradition for them to gather ‘round and ask me over and over “Please! Please, tell the car story! Please!”

It’s like the scene from “The Waltons” where all the kids goad Grandpa into telling the story of the time he wrestled presents from Santa.

A friend of mine persuaded me to share it here, even though the telling of it will take almost twice as long as usual. I rarely take requests, but I recognize the value of vicarious woe. Plus it is the season of giving . . .


It was a dark a stormy night. Honest. It was snowing like crazy. I was happily ensconced in my bar enjoying boozy fellowship.

It had been, for me, a flush year, enough so that I’d splurged on some fancy new duds, including a $375 Ibiza sports coat. It was worth more than all the combined garments worn by the 20 or so patrons, worth more even than several of the duct-taped jalopies in the bar parking lot.

And this I pointed out multiple times to everyone there as I asked if they wanted to touch it.

Paul was there. He’s always there. He refused several offers to touch me and my jacket and seemed put off that I’d shown up in anything besides my standard flannel over a 1983 Molly Hatchet concert T-shirt.

If he wasn’t liking the fancy new me, well, tough. I told him he’d better get used to it.

Our wives showed up to drive us to the party. It was in a friend’s new house about 20 minutes away. We’d never been there. It was dark and snowing like crazy with about two-inches on the already damp ground.

This is the part of the story everyone forgets: I wasn’t driving. Val was. Paul and his wife were trailing us.

When I told Val to turn left she was confused by the snow-camouflaged landscape. I don’t blame her for all that happened next while stipulating if I’d have been driving none of it would have ever happened at all.

Instead of turning on the Westview Court, she turned the 2000 Chevy Cavalier into an adjacent steep and unplowed driveway. Paul and Patti did not. They turned down the road and stopped after recognizing our error.

And we got stuck. Bad. She’d overshot the darkened driveway and wound up in the yard below the vacant house.

Paul and I would need to try and push the car back onto the driveway and up the slope.

Looking back, I don’t know why I didn’t think to take sartorial precautions. The ground was wet beneath the snow as we gave the car a mighty shove.

And I don’t know why what happened when Val gunned the accelerator only happened on the side I was pushing and not Paul’s.

It was like somebody had dipped a big paint brush and did one of those wrist flings that sprayed a two-inch-wide racing stripe of muddy grit from my knees, across my new jacket, clear up to my ears.

I remember looking up at Paul and seeing an expression of pure joy. It was like he was a kid on Christmas morning who’d just spied a big red wagon behind the tree.

Now, distraught, I’d need to go home and change. I told the three of them to go on without me. I’d meet them there later.

It was the first of three colossal mistakes. First, they’d get to the party without me. Everyone would ask where I was. They’d be free to embellish the story as they saw fit.

Second, there was no way I was going to get the car back up onto the road.

Third, I eventually told them everything that happened, inadvertently unloosing a legend.

The lay of the land made it look like I was 20 yards from a secondary road leading to an isolated house. In those pre-cell phone days, I thought I could drift the car backwards about 200 feet, find a friendly face and call for a tow.

I made it about 2/3 of the way there when the car drifted into a shag of bushes.

Emerging from the car was the moment I lost it because I immediately became ensnarled in jagger bushes. Dozens of needle-sharp barbs began snagging my pricey new jacket and tearing tiny cuts in my mud-splattered face.

It was the first time I’d ever engaged in fisticuffs with vegetation.

It wasn’t until I got free that I heard the barking dogs. I ignored the “Beware of Dog” signs on the fence and crept up to a beaten door with NRA and “No Solicitors” stickers in the windows.

I’m not ashamed to admit it, I was scared to death. The dogs sounded like starved Rottweilers and the cinder block structure looked isolated enough to make a dandy meth lab.

And here I was peeking through the window with a face streaked with blood and mud. I felt knocking might risk gun fire without warning.

So I crept back to the car, crawled in the passenger side and decided to take my chances drifting backwards. The car began sliding and I immediately lost all control.

I can’t say I thought I was going to die, but I did think my night was going to end with trauma surgeons scissoring off my fancy sports coat to assess the damage to my vital organs.

Because in mid-flight, the passing scenery proved I was wrong about my surroundings. This wasn’t a secondary road at all. I was picking up speed drifting backward through a string of about a dozen backyards about 1/4 of a mile long.

That I didn’t hit a fence, a tree, a swing set, a tool shed, a swimming pool or other immovable object was to me the greatest Christmas miracle since the Savior’s birth.

The last 20 yards were down a steep embankment that dropped me spinning onto a residential street where I was fortunate no cars were coming.

I remember thinking, man, it’s too bad none of my friends didn’t see that ‘cause that would have looked pretty cool.

My heart-pounding, I shoved the car in gear and drove home murmuring ceaseless prayers of gratitude I’d survived and that the day would not get any worse by having me get partially consumed by a flesh-eating bacteria I’d picked up outside the meth chef’s house.

It’s been 10 years since I spun out of that hilly hell.

And in those 10 years, the story of one of the worst nights of my life, a night of unrelenting pain, fear and humiliation, has brought nothing but joy and laughter to the hearts of friends who revel in the misfortunes of others. I’m sure I’ll hear it all again tonight as we return to that same neighborhood for that annual party.

Know what I have to say to that?

Merry Christmas!

And be careful making that sharp left onto Westview.

The good, the bad & the repaired TV

Gone 19 days, the TV is back home where it belongs and I am diminished by its return.

The welcome home lavished upon it dwarfed any reaction I’ve ever received, even the times when I come bearing gifts.

The children did euphoric little cartwheels across the carpet and Val’s relieved expression matched the look on Livvy’s face when John Walton came through the door after the harrowing winter evening that was the dramatic catalyst for the Walton’s Christmas special, “The Homecoming.”

It’s understood. My presents are trinkets compared to the evergreen gifts of a really good hi-def TV.

It has nearly 1,000 channels that bestow comfort, laughter, suspense and hours and hours of Disney wisdom.

The TV never scolds. It never corrects. It never tells the girls it’s time for bed. It never grosses them out with a really loud fart.

How can your average father expect to compete with that?

The TV plays so many leadership roles. It settles disputes. It unites us. It is our Speaker of the House.

Actually, with surround sound, it is our Five Speakers of the House.

No one would give a damn if the refrigerator or the washing machine went on the fritz. It wouldn’t tear at the social fabric of the family (but if the washing machine went down it would likely diminish some of the family’s other fabrics).

So when the TV goes down, we all feel it’s pain.

Worse, I knew the cure for the suddenly black screen could kill -- not the TV set.

Me.

That’s because once again I’d be dealing with Daryl, a man so mean he makes Dick Cheney seem cheerful.

I’d dealt with the old man before. He was rude, abrasive and tactless, a self-contained Axis of Evil so malevolent I felt like alerting the FBI.

I knew the broken TV meant he’d be poisoning my otherwise sunny days.

That’s just one sacrifice I make to support America’s Main Street businesses over the town-killing big box stores.

If your Best Buy TV breaks, you just drop it off at the store and two weeks later they tell you it’s fixed. It’s like sex with a hooker only without all the warranty issues.

But if you bought from a local reseller, you’re dealing with Daryl.

I wasn’t there five minutes when he insulted me.

“You’ve got a B.O. problem,” he said.

Impossible, I said. Old Spice has never failed me.

He explained he meant “back order.” He was messin’ with Sasquatch.

With atrocious bedside manners, he said, “This could take a long, long time.”

Still, it’s a hostage situation. I’m entirely at his misanthropic mercy.

I walk out of there dumbfounded how any man who spends his days healing sick TVs can be so unfeeling. Doesn’t he ever tune any of his myriad sets to the Lifetime Channel?

How can a man skilled at repairing 72-inch hi-def sets fail to see the big picture?

The situation was saved by one of life’s nifty little symmetries.

It was because of our dealings with the world’s most dyspeptic TV man we also got to better know one of the industry’s friendliest.

He’s Vince Zaccaria of Premiere Audio/Visual Services in Mt. Pleasant. It’s guys like him that are the reason I’ll always buy from local independents.

He’s so well regarded his home theater construction skills have been showcased with meathead ex-jock Tony Siragusa on the DIY Channel’s Man Cave shows. He’s done a bunch of them all over the East Coast.

So he’s a busy man. But when he heard we were without a TV he reacted like Ike Godsey did when one of The Walton kids got sick.

He brought medicine.

“I just felt so bad when I heard you were without a TV,” he said. “I couldn’t let you go all that time without one.”

He gave us a spiffy loaner and when Daryl finally said the TV was fixed, Vince was there within hours to hook it all up.

So an event that began with me confronting human nastiness ends with my family having the opportunity to bask in goodness, generosity and dazzling magnificence.

And I’m talking about the TV, not Vince.

Vince is nice and all.

But he’s no TV.

Doin' drugs at the ol' drive-in

One Pill Makes You Larger

One Pill Makes You Small

And the Ones that Mother Gives You

Don’t Do Anything At All

Grace Slick, a direct descendant of Mayflower pilgrims and the first person to say “m-----f----r” on live TV, wrote those words in 1966.

In an era when psychedelic rock was beginning to share the pop charts with Pat Boone, Slick had to assure nervous radio programmers the song “White Rabbit” was just her rockin’ tribute to “Alice in Wonderland.”

More than 40 years later the majority of the TV program sponsors are the ones touting just how truly wonderful drugs really are. And they do so with the same kind of homespun themes that once made shows like “The Waltons” so popular, although the Waltons -- “Goodnight, John Boy!” -- never felt compelled to warn that viewing might lead to thoughts of suicide.

A 2009 study by UCLA indicates the average drug-drenched American is exposed to 18 hours of drug ads each week.

I spend a lot of time thinking about drugs and it is making me sick. Over-the-counter remedies for my many illnesses are available all over right here in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

And that’s the problem.

The cure is the cause and vice versa.

Yes, Latrobe, hometown and inspiration for “Mister” Fred Rogers, is losing its charming drive-in theater.

The property owners cut the legs off a family business that had been leasing it for at least the 20 years I’ve lived here.

In its place will soon be yet another bland big box drug store that will be indistinguishable from the five already here serving a town of about 9,000 residents.

Come September, pills in Latrobe will outnumber the people by about 50,000-to-1. We can’t gobble them up fast enough.

Man, am I going to miss that drive-in.

We’d take our two girls, 10 and 4, there about five or six times every summer.

Each time -- the movies rarely mattered -- it was a wonderful slice of Americana in a town that takes a back seat to no other when it comes to true Americana.

As mentioned, Fred Rogers (1929-2003) was born here and his family’s McFeely-Rogers Foundation has been a local font of benign largesse since 1953. 

Of course, just about everyone knows Latrobe for another famous son, Arnold Palmer. He still lives here seven months a year.  

When Rogers and Palmer were graduating Latrobe High School in 1946 and ’47 respectively, the men would seem to have absolutely nothing in common but hometown roots.

All these years later, they share at least one uncommon distinction: both are recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom: Rogers from 2002, Palmer from 2004.

And as far as drug stores go, Latrobe used to be home to a dandy.

It was here in 1904 apprentice pharmacist David Evans Strickler took time away from his potions and invented the first banana split. It happened in the old Tassel Pharmacy down on Ligonier Street.

“I used to have a banana split every day at lunch down at the Valley Dairy,” Palmer  once said. “They’re delicious. I never knew they’d become world famous.”

Imagine, a drug store that sold something, anything, involving nutritional fruit.

That drug store is long gone, as are the values it represented.

I’m guessing there’s bound to be a pill that could send me back to the days of drive-ins and soda shoppe drug stores before chain pharmacies became more spacious than automobile showrooms and saturation drug ads began warning me and my children about the dangers of three-hour erections.

It’s one pill I’d be tempted to pop.

In 2009, the drug industry reported $643 billion in revenues, with almost half -- $289 billion -- being sold in the U.S.A. Drug revenues have been growing at 12 percent a year for the past 12 years.

The combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses combined ($33.7 billion).

The industry is currently earning $100 billion revenue more than the total sales of the once-vaunted U.S. automobile industry.

And why not?

Who needs a gas guzzler when there’s a really swell trip waiting for you right there behind the bathroom mirror?

Walton's reruns help prepare for Great Depression II

I’ve been preparing for the coming economic siege by rewatching old episodes of “The Waltons.” We grew up watching the show about how a big close family struggled through the Great Depression.

They didn’t take fancy trips, dine on lobster, upgrade their iPods every couple of years, or enjoy any of the extravagant silliness that’s made the last 20 years so much superfluous fun.

I like that John Boy, a writer, never considered himself some sort of artist. He considered himself a tradesman, someone who’ll get better and better at his craft if he keeps working at it.

I liked that he wrote for the sheer joy of it even when there was no money around. I remember one episode he did a piece of writing for a down-on-his luck country editor and the guy paid him by giving him a live chicken.

I’ve never been paid with a chicken yet, but I’m open to bartering. I like to think of this blog the way John Boy thought of his writing. I do it because I love to write. For me, it’s great fun.

I happen to be writing this while I’m absolutely ensconced in luxury. I’m currently staying at the fabulous Delafield Hotel near Milwaukee. It’s one of those places so nice I’m having trouble figuring out how to turn on simple things like lights. The bathroom is nicer than some spas I’ve been to. It has a whale-sized bathtub with subsurface jacuzzi jets. The shower with six different functions, including rain shower and multiple body jets, one of which keeps goosing me in places where even the most intimate lovers rarely venture.

They’re treating me so nice I haven’t even thought of stealing things like towels and drapes like I usually do from a nice hotel.

This is one of those oh-so-sweet press junkets that are always tempting to someone as casual about journalism ethics as I am. Yesterday, I played Erin Hills and tomorrow I’m off for the stunning Whistling Straits. They’ve plied me with rivers of fine liquor, free golf and the kind of meals that would have had cranky old Grandma Walton huffing about fancy people dining like royalty when working men and women were surviving on scraps and apples.

But I’m here with a clean conscious because I have a bona fide assignment to write about Wisconsin golf and tourism for Kingdom Magazine. I take one of these trips for every 50 I’m offered. Taking more than that would be unfair to my family, it’s uncertain I could get stories published about the destination, and years of watching the Waltons has taught me not to be a pig about such things.

I’m thinking, too, that this might just be this travel writer’s swan song. It looks like we’re in for some damn hard times ahead. People aren’t going to be traveling to swanky resorts for a while.. That means swanky resorts aren’t going to be buying advertisements in golf and travel magazines. That means golf and travel magazines won’t be hiring guys like me to write stories.

Too bad for me.

I once asked my grandfather, who recently died at the age of, yikes, 97, what the Great Depression was like. “You know,” he said, “it wasn’t really all that bad. We had a lot less stuff, but people really helped each other out. It wasn’t too tough.”

That should be reassuring to anyone who listens to the doom sayers who grimly predict we’re in for another Great Depression.

Me, I’ll have some nice memories of my trips to places like this. I’ll scramble to find work, but that’s always been the case with me and many other freelance writers.

On the upside, it’ll give me plenty of time to attend to this little blog, something I enjoy doing. And thanks to those of you who take the time to read it and have told friends to do the same.

It doesn’t earn a dime, but I’m hoping maybe someday a grateful reader will send me a free chicken.