Category Archives: Random Toy Box

Posts on the general topic of family.

Cranky old men aren’t what they used to be

Big Man is in 4th grade, which is weird because, in my memory, he started Kindergarten yesterday.

After school, I strain to contain my impatience with the car line so I can drive him the five minutes to home.

On rare afternoons, we find ourselves driving behind a bus from his school that passes within 30 yards of our house. Whenever this happens, I threaten to put Big Man on that bus the next day.

This is an idle threat, as the amount of paperwork it takes to get a kid onto a school bus these days is another thing beyond my patience.

I don’t know if Big Man takes the threat seriously, but he feels he must provide resistance to it, just in case I do harbor such a crazy idea as putting him on a school bus.

The idea is revolting to him. “No, I will not ride the bus!” he insists.

“You’ll love it!” I tell him. “Bus friends are the best friends!”

“No, they’re not,” he responds. “Bus friends are the worst friends!”

The last time we had this exchange, I asked him what was the big deal? It’s only a five-minute ride. “When is was in school, I had to ride a bus for an hour to school and an hour home again,” I told him. “And I had to do it from Kindergarten until I graduated high school.”

  In my day, we were grateful to have a school bus to ride.

He didn’t care about childhood troubles from the olden days, and he likely thought I was exaggerating anyway. In truth, I was exaggerating; the bus ride was probably only 55 minutes each way.

As I considered this, I realized I had given him the classic, old-man, life-was-much-harder-in-my-day gripe. Making myself a cliché was bad enough, but this was as wimpy an example of the old man gripe as has ever been griped.

I didn’t walk 10 miles, through three feet of snow, uphill both ways. I walked 20 feet from the bus door to the school entrance – on level pavement. Yes, the bus ride was a good 10 miles and more, and there was sometimes snow, and no doubt a few hills, but I was riding the bus for cripes sake!

One time the bus got stuck in a snowbank, but no one died. No one even got chilly. We were inside a heated bus. It was exciting, in a completely non-life-threatening way, to hear the bus driver softly swear as he spun the tires backward and forward until the equally comfortable replacement bus showed up.

And that was it. That was the pinnacle of my hard-luck childhood. I had to sit still for nearly two, non-consecutive hours per day. The horror!

I fear the future of a nation whose old men’s exaggerated stories of childhood hardship are so soft and squishy.

For this reason, and to avoid the administrative headaches involved, I don’t think I’ll try to put Big Man on the bus.

When in Greece, climb something

I’m not much of a traveler. Taking our family to Greece for 2.5 weeks was a big step for us, though my wife was the driving force behind the adventure.

I learned some things in Greece, most of them not very useful in my everyday life at home, but a few of them mildly interesting. Following are some observations made in Greece (your experience may differ.)

Greece is hot. Greece is exceedingly hot in summer. They told me this was an unusually hot summer, but seeing all the habits Greeks have developed over the centuries to avoid the summer heat, I’m thinking Greek summers are always going to be hotter than I can stand. Also, air conditioning is marginally effective when all the doors and windows are thrown wide open.

There are lots of hills in Greece. You can’t fail to notice this when you are walking in 100+ degrees Fahrenheit. Just about everything you want to see is on top of a big hill.

There are lots of neat things to see in Greece, amazing, ingenious, beautiful things. If you survive the walk up the hill, you can see them.

The fruits of surviving the walk.

Ounce for ounce, bottled water is the best beverage investment you can make in Greece. It is inexpensive, which is good, because you will need gallons of it. Beer can be purchased anywhere, from a vending machine in the laundry mat to a kiosk on the beach. I found this form of liberty refreshing. What I found less refreshing was the beer. There are many varieties, from Greece and elsewhere in Europe. Almost universally, I found them to be the continental cousins of Bud Light. If you love Bud Light, you’ll find many beers to like in Greece. Otherwise, bottled water.

The kids could not find any lemonade that wasn’t carbonated (as the locals said, “with gas.”)

Athens is noisy. Traffic is a never-ending game of chicken: the one traffic cop I saw was smoking a cigarette; it would have seemed more humane if they had also offered him a blindfold. There are lots of stray cats. The pigeons don’t give the cats a second thought. Greek bus drivers have nerves of steel.

Island villages are more peaceful, but drivers will still park in the middle of the street to run to the ATM.

Beach can mean a place with sand, or a concrete deck with ladders down into the water.

Greek landscape is beautiful. Greek people are friendly.

I can’t tell if Greeks are whispering sweet nothings or screaming bloody murder at each other. The hand gestures and voice volumes look and sound exactly the same to me. Maybe that’s how they keep Americans from knowing their business.

Travel tip: You can avoid the hill climb by visiting the LEGO version in the museum.

The blockbuster novel sweeping the nation (but it won’t do the nation’s windows)

Okay, so the title might be a bit of hyperbole. I think that’s what marketing people do. I don’t have marketing people, so I have to exaggerate all by myself. But hey, have I told you about The Other Place, other than in two of my last three posts? That’s more marketing, as I understand it. Granted, my understanding of marketing may be flawed.

So, to go back to where I left off hitting you over the head with posts about my new novel, The Other Place, that I kept telling you was going to be out soon: it’s (drum roll) out now!

[Steamers, confetti, etc.] Use your imagination. My mind is knee deep in confetti right now.

I’ve put together this sell sheet, which I hope you find enticing. It’s the sort of thing marketing people would do for someone who has marketing people. I did it myself, right after I washed my own damned windows.

Here are purchase links for those now sufficiently enticed:

Paperback

Kindle

For all others, I will talk to my marketing people about what they can do to up the enticement level. We’ll see what they can come up with. Meanwhile, there are unpaid internship opportunities available in my marketing department for anyone who wants to help me spread the word (e.g. share a post, tell a friend, throw confetti at strangers).

Thank you from the bottom of my corporate empire (which is the level within my corporate empire where I work).

Filling time while my writers are on strike

You know how sometimes a guest will come on a talk show and all they want to do is plug their new movie? Well, this is kind of like that, only worse. This is how it would be if Johnny Carson (because I’m old and can’t stay awake to watch the current shows) used his own show to plug his new movie.

Here I am (for the second week in a row, no less) corrupting  my own cozy little family blog with book promotion. Well, at least it’s not a movie. Either way, it’s dreadfully annoying, right?

Blame my kids. They’re growing up, and they don’t inspire so many cute stories by doing adorable things as they did when they were toddlers. Yeah, Big Man still refers to pulled pork or ground sausage as “chicken” sometimes, but how many heartwarming stories can you squeeze out of that? Face it, teenagers and pre-teens are just not the blogging goldmine that little kids are. In a sense, my creative team has gone on strike forever.

So, we’re left with book promotion.

The book will be out later this month. Meanwhile I got a pre-publication review from BookLife. Apparently, they ran out of space for the part where they say, “Best book ever!” but that’s okay, I prefer they don’t put too may spoilers in the review anyway. Here it is: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Actually, I didn’t put an author photo on the cover, so that cut down significantly on the ugly.

This fascinating supernatural tale from Nagele (A Housefly in Autumn), told in an offhanded style that keeps readers off balance, opens with five-year-old Emma’s asking, at a family dinner, about “The Other Place.” She has recurring dreams of a mysteriousFront being, The Gatekeeper, who takes her from present-day Pennsylvania to a late nineteenth century farm where she sees an older girl, Mary Ellen, who looks very much like Emma. For mysterious reasons, the Gatekeeper repeatedly forces Emma to get the other girl in trouble by setting fires—and he threatens to harm Emma’s parents, Rob and Marcia, if she disobeys. Rob and Marcia alternate between dismissing Emma’s dreams to fearing that she might be losing her grip on reality, echoing the thinking of Alex and Janet, Mary Ellen’s parents. That couple frequently beats Mary Ellen, as punishment for the fires, and The Gatekeeper urges her to take murderous revenge.

Quick paced and unsettling, The Other Place offers readers teasing mysteries to work through along with Emma’s parents. One surprising thread: what is the connection between The Gatekeeper and the song version of William Hughes Mearns’s poem “Antigonish”? As Emma’s dreams increasingly seem like they might be real, she finds herself inside Mary Ellen’s mind, fighting to keep Mary Ellen from being driven to murder, while Rob and Marcia eventually accept that their daughter is not delusional, they struggle to save both girls from The Gatekeeper.

Nagele weaves an intriguing story about families, childhood, the supernatural, self-sacrifice, and innocence both lost and saved, though the pace and pared-down language come at the expense of fleshing out the characters, especially Emma and her family. Scenes of abuse and terrorized children will put off some readers, but Emma’s fight to save Mary Ellen from evil is admirable, her determination and kindness shining through. The Other Place is rich in detail of the places past and present, and readers of horror-tinged historical mysteries will be intrigued to learn more about Glenn Miller and William Hughes Mearns.

Sorry Johnny, but you know how it is when the writers go on strike.