Thanksgiving on Oasis Avenue

Thanksgiving is about family - no one can deny that.

And when family is as intense and plentiful as I enjoy it, Thanksgiving comes with a ton of memories. Some are unique to our family, to be sure - most probably involve gravy, football games and John throwing some kind of food while protesting his innocence.

But a lot of these memories are generally shared by many other families - things like cranberry sauce cleverly molded into the shape of a can; a card table for little kids; all the excitement about the big 'ol meal and the knowledge that Christmas was a mere five weeks away.

Some of my early memories involve the little kids table. Even when I was older, as a teenager, I was sometimes condemned to the folding card table with children ten to 12 years my junior for my meal of thanks. And the indignity was compounded by molded thin plastic plates - or worse yet, paper - and plastic silverware that would never cleanly cut the meat, but managed to mar the plate to the point that the gravy and other wet foods on the plate drained out and into your lap.

Let us not forget that the sawing action required to make those utensils cut amplified the rickety wobble the table made anyway from the inevitable shorter leg. At times, I was tempted to balance the table leg out with a wedge of turkey or a hardened biscuit.

The turkey - of course, Mom made sensational birds. And the joy of Thanksgiving led to the bliss of the leftovers, like turkey sandwiches and all kinds of other delights in school lunch sacks.

I used to think there could be no bigger windfall in Turkey Land than to get the leg. All that meat! And the delightful roasted skin ... you betcha! But as I got older, the leg gave way to the breast, of course.

I am still talking about turkey here, and not a college date.

These days, I love the dark meat of the bird, the thighs and such. I enjoy breast meat if it is not too dry, and making the bird with juicy white meat is a legend right up there with Bigfoot.

A few years ago I discovered the delight of deep fried turkey. I have fried up a few birds in my day, and they were lip-smacking good - the skin, at least. Imagine a few dozen sets of fingers pulling at the gobbler before it is even sliced ... that is the fascination with the fried bird.

Of course, you lave to lower the bird into the hot - and I mean smoking hot - oil very slowly. Imagine what is going through my head as I stand arm's length away from the hot cauldron, lowering an 18-pounder into the pot as the gas-fed fire burns inches from my legs.

What am I thinking? I am thinking this: "If that oil spills out into that flame ... I will be the first to die. "

Mary Jo will not let me fry a bird. There is a danger involved, as fire department reports from across the south have chronicled. The key to safety? Drying the bird out so there is no moisture on it pre-dunk. Hot grease and water are volatile. And frying a frozen bird is just stupid - so of course, about 6,000 idiots try it every year.

I will not be joining the crowd at Mom's this year, nor will we be part of the Tennessee celebration at Mary Jo's parents. It's her and me this year, after she gets off work. I have a twelve-pound Tom tucked into the fridge, slowly defrosting. I have several pounds of sweet potatoes and the makings for a pumpkin pie, as well as the ingredients for green bean casserole and cranberries galore.

And I am the chef, since Mary Jo will be working. I had better do a good job for her.

Because when she comes through the door and smiles at me, I know what I am thankful for.

A moving experience

Funny thing about this blogging exercise. If you want to do it right, there is sort of a discipline to it. Each blog needs to present the reader with the desire to want a little more, so they will come back and read it more.

Apparently I have that part down. The only thing I lack is the drive/incentive/ability to do it on a consistent basis. I could have sworn I just wrote my last entry, and apparently it has been a few months.

Sorry to the thousands - OK, in reality, two or three - faithful readers who have e-mailed me with messages that begin "WTF?" One day, I will master all this Internet jargon and find out just what WTF means. I swear. Soon.

I have been a bit busy, which I know is the universally accepted excuse of bloggers everywhere who would actually watch reruns of "Rescue from Gilligan's Island" than do their Internet duty. But I have been busy. I have a job, such as it is, to do nearly every day, and I do take a little time for my own selfish interests. That Mary Ann looks good even in her sixties.

My wife has kept us busy almost from the moment we arrived in Dallas with dreams of getting a house. And we have jumped through so many hoops in the attempt to buy a house that there are no more hoops to be had for the rest of you.

Those who have use for a hoop, anyway.

When we arrived here, we got a nice apartment, which we are currently living in. From this base of operations, and with our house in North Carolina on the market, we optimistically began the search for our dream home.

We looked at townhouses. We looked at patio homes, the patio of which clearly does not deserve top billing. We looked at foreclosed homes, short-sold homes, unsold homes, homes with pools, homes with fences, homes with pools and fences, pools with homes.

And we waited for our house to sell. It did, and as anyone out there who has sold a home in this "economic downturn" can attest, we lost money.

But we got over it, and without the encumbering mortgage to hinder us, we search for a home in earnest.

I use the term "searched" in a limited  menaing of the word. I use the word "we," however, in much more general terms.

Mary Jo was the hunter, and she was the big-game hunter when it came to houses. She spearheaded the sojourn for a home from the word go, lining up realtors, talking to anyone who would listen, leaving countless phone messages and e-mails. She was a warrior.

My part was as active as I could make it. But in my fifty-plus years of living, I had never before bought a home. I bought a mobile home, to be sure, and spent 15 years-plus in it. But buying a mobile home is nothing compared to the purchase of the stick-built kind. Funny how that works. A mobile home salesman will tell you every six minutes that "this beauty is built to stick-built home specifications." All the while the realtor is laughing at him and feeling sorry for you.

More on that another time.

Anyway, Mary Jo hunted and hunted for a home in most of the neighborhoods of the Metroplex - Trophy Club, Lewisville, Irving, Las Colinas, Cedar Hill and may others.

Finally, though the efforts of a broker who has actually become quite a good friend, we looked at a new home in Grand Prairie. Mary Jo was smitten. I was smitten (three-car garage, four bathrooms, and a media room!). We bit the bullet, and will sign the note tomorrow.

Buying a house is one slow process. It is supposed to be. It's the biggest thing most of us will ever buy. I know it is the biggest thing we have ever bought. I know this because as much as my wife loves to shop, she hates being in debt. As a result, she has essentially bought nothing since we arrived in Dallas.

She was saving up for the big present.

We love our house, and one small reason why is that it is brand spanking new. There is something special about buying something no one has ever had before you. I have never bought a new car - until we got here. The feeling is one that cannot help but make you feel good about yourself. We are not having to deal with someone else's home problems, their bad repair jobs, or the skeleton that might be hidden in the wall.

I have to quit watching bad horror movies - or CNN.

So we are packing up the apartment tonight and tomorrow, and the movers come Saturday. Since we left North Carolina, this will be the first time all of our things and us will be in the same home at the same time. And it is exciting.

My nephew just moved - I know this because he shamelessly pandered for housewarming gifts. I am not doing this, since we have a little dignity. We also have enough stuff.

I thought of my bachelor nephew, in his twenty-somethings, moving his belongings to his new place. Probably took two truckloads and about 3 hours. Jeff Foxworthy was right - if a bachelor throws a party in his place and everything he owns is broken, he out about 15 bucks.

I envy my nephew the speed of his move. Mine will not be as rapid. But we will, one day, be cuddled together on our coach in our living room, watching the roaring fire.

We'd be watching TV, but I am betting the installer won't make it in time.

If you come to Dallas, be sure to drop by. Now, we have room for you all.

Fantasy football

Fantasy football has become a passion for millions of football fans. And yes, I am one of them.

I can blame my son for having given me the bug. He invited me to join his league three years ago. I used to enjoy watching football on television with him, but whenever he got the remote control, he would incessantly flip channels. I know, it's in the guy genes to do that, but he was flipping from game to game, looking for his fantasy players and trying to see how they were doing.

It struck me that he was not enjoying the games anymore. He was enjoying the efforts of the players, and not the results of the team. He was interested in his own interests, and the NFL was just a conduit to those selfish interests.

To some degree, I had it nailed.

But I eventually accepted his invite to fantasy gaming because as a fan, I have always thought that somewhere in the back of my fan;s mind, I was a better GM and coach than the ones doing it for real. This is essential for fantasy players - you got to channel your inner Tony Dungy or Jerry Jones.

Scotty explained the technical side - pick players in each skill position and track those players in each week's game. Your team gets points based on the performance of those players. You win if the team you are matched against scores fewer points than your team does.

You get to pick players to "start" (players whose points will count) and who to "bench," trade other teams for players, check the waiver wire and adjust your lineup based on injuries from week to week.

It has enough variants to make the game interesting, and it give you a little extra incentive to pull for teams or watch games you might not have watched.

Ask the wives or girlfriends that become football widows if that is a good thing or not.

We held our fantasy draft a week ago, and 11 of the 14 league owners came together for an afternoon party and live draft. I attended via Internet, which was an adventure in itself. I got the first overall pick, which sounds like a good thing since you get the best player out of all the NFL players, but it can be a drag in that the picking order was serpentine (from 1-14 and then back from 14 to 1). I could not pick another player until everyone else had picked - twice.

I am still glad Adrian Peterson is running for me.

It is important to note that the people in the league are friends, most of them buds since college. That is something a little different than most fantasy leagues, made up of casual acquaintances or virtual strangers who are bound only be their love of football and their common egotistical belief that they are the evil genius of gaming.

Strangers, throwing down against strangers, will compete every weekend this fall on the backs of real athletes who will be playing for their usual motivations. Is this a great country, or what?

I have got to admit that I have drank the Kool-Aid of fantasy football. I won the league last year and I really want to do it again. There is luck involved, but just enough skill that you can take some pride in your results.

And interesting dichotomy exists among the NFL Folks. The analysts, coaches and purists of football hate fantasy football because it dilutes the team effort and enhances individual effort. The players, to some degree, share that philosophy. But most of them are players in leagues.

Football is the only fantasy game I play. No golf, baseball, hockey or basketball leagues need to contact me for a further conversion to nerd-dom.

This is not World of Warcraft. This is reality.

Really.

I mean it.

Reality.

The Clan of the Williams

I come from a big family.

Not big in the sense that we all need to try out for "Biggest Loser Families." Well, we probably could do that, but I don't mean big like that.

I mean big in the sense that I have four sisters and two brothers. That makes seven children - nine people living in the house that I grew up in, when Mom and Dad are thrown in.

That's unusual. That's not Ripley's-Believe-It-or-Not unusual, but it is not something you see every day. Growing up in a suburb of San Diego, California in the 1960's, it was definitely not something you saw every day.

Unless you lived in our neighborhood. Then you saw it a lot.

A kid living near Oasis Avenue in Chula Vista naturally gravitated to our house nearly every day, because something was going on there. The seven kids' ages spanned just nine years, so it was easy to find something to do with kids your own age - you pretty much showed up and looked to see if something was happening that you were interested in.

My brother Tony was likely playing football in the front yard, or basketball in the driveway. My sister Glenda was in the house (on the phone) or in the bathroom or the back patio, with a few of her teen-aged friends, fooling around with their hair and talking about boys.

Brother John was in the back yard, on restriction. John was always on restriction. Ask anyone. This was because he could not stay out of trouble - not the kind of trouble where you picked him up at the police station at 4 a.m., but the kind of trouble that meant he was staying after school and the teacher (or principal) called Mom, and then Dad would yell at him and extend his restriction again.

If he served out the actual time he was given, he'd still be in the back yard - and he'll turn 54 this year.

Mom and Dad, looking back, did an amazing job to keep us all fed, clothed, healthy and unsuccessful in our efforts to kill each other. Dad was career Navy by the time the younger children arrived, and instead of moving us every few years as happens to most military families, the Navy left us in San Diego for 12 uninterrupted years. Dad took any assignment he could that kept us there, so he worked a variety of Navy jobs at a variety of Navy bases from north of Tijuana to northern San Diego County.

As you might expect, money was tight with all those kids and just a Navy paycheck. So Mom and Dad worked nights at the base's NCO club to make the money go further. That left Glenda in charge, which permanently made her the most unpopular kid amongst us seven - the boss, after all, is the bossiest.

We pushed her around, to be sure. But the ultimate retribution was on Glenda's side - "I'm telling Mom and Dad on you!" And she did, too.

Dad was a yeller, a lecturer in reality. He was the grand pooh-bah of household punishment. As the son of a minister that believed in not sparing the rod, he intended to raise his kids in the same manner.

Now don't go all right-wing, corporal-punishment-is-abuse spastic on me. He was administering what he saw as tough love. And there is a difference between smacking a kid's backside and bloodying it with a switch. Thank God he knew the difference.

He believed in gang mentality behavior - if one kid did it, they all got punished. So he would line us up for spankings, oldest to youngest. Of course, by the time he got to the littlest kids, he was so worn out that we just got sent to our rooms - which we gladly accepted.

Mom, however, was different. She delivered swift and terrible punishment, on the spot, with the quick wrath of a lightning bolt. She was handy with the palm of her hand, supporting the convicted child with the non-swinging hand clenched around an arm so they were left to dangle as she paddled.

She was impressively good with her slipper, which came to be the delivery method of choice as we got older. She would throw it at you, hit you, then tell you to "bring that back to me." The child then had a tough balancing act - get close enough to Mom that you could give her the slipper back and stay clear of the swinging zone and another barrage, whilst not being so far away as to be accused of "throwing my own slipper at me."

Mom learned this from her mother, my Big Momma. She was revered for being able to throw slippers around corners. I never saw her do it, but both my brothers swear to her doing it.

But punishments were not so frequent. The best method of gaining control was clearing the house of non-family members and sending the kids to their rooms or the back yard. Dad or Mom would walk out the front door and deliver this message - "If you do not live here, go home. If you do, go to your room!" In about five minutes, calm was restored.

Of course, you never had to tell John. He was already in the back yard, remember?

A few friends had special privileges. Glenda's friend Janet Holmes had free run of the place, and Tony's bud Robert Phelps, who lived down the street, would frequently walk into the house and just jump into whatever Tony was up to. Someone challenged him to at least knock before he came in once, and from that point on Robert would walk in the front door as he always did, and knock on the hallway walls, yelling, "It's Robert Phelps!" Robert had a pool in his backyard, so he was a shoo-in for popularity among the neighborhood kids.

Sister Kathy was sneaky, at least to me. She never seemed to get into trouble. I am sure she did, but she was very low-key about it, having her on-the-edge fun when it made the smallest splash.

The big kids - Tony and Kathy, usually - apparently had this past time when Mom and Dad were not home of climbing onto the roof with their friends. The house had a typical flat roof and was very low to the ground, so it was easy for an average-sized teenager to get up on it. As far as I know, that was Kathy's big home risk. I guess she did her thrill-seeking out of the neighborhood.

Cindy was the good one. She usually went along with whatever everyone was doing, but she was not in nearly the daily trouble the others were. Later in life we would pick on her about being "the sheltered one" who seemed to never get the off-color jokes we heard and repeated.

We had lived in military housing in Coronado ( Pam and I were just babies), so we had a life before Oasis Avenue. But Dad bought the house shortly after it was built and moved in. We saw our world grow from that little neighborhood. The elementary school was just a block away, our friends were across the street or down the street, and you could go outside and play after breakfast and play all day, with a break for lunch, and not come home until dark without anyone worrying about you.

Gradually, our world got bigger. We all started junior high and high school, met new friends, and matured. Glenda would bring home boyfriends. Tony was suddenly too cool to hang with the little kids, which infuriated John the most.

He was the in-between child, fourth in the line, and stuck in the middle. He was too young to be considered a "big kid" as were Glenda, Kathy and Tony. But he always felt too old to be a "little kid" like Cindy, me and Pam. It was a point of contention for many years with him, and it manifested itself in our bedtime.

The little kids always went to bed at 8:30 p.m. and the big kids went to bed later on. John saw it as a tragic miscarriage of justice that he had to go to bed with the little kids, and he was always vocal about it come bed time.

For me, I loved it, I was a scaredy-cat as a kid, and I hated going into that dark bedroom alone. I would casually insist that John always go first, to scare off the night-beings that stayed in the closet when no one was looking, intent on slaughtering me as I walked across the bedroom floor.

When he finally received the coveted "big kid" designation, I am not sure it was all he thought it was. He got to stay up, sure. But I don't think he ever got control of the TV watching that he thought he would get.

More later ...

Medical Macinations

Doctors have one heck of a racket going for themselves.

I went to the doctor yesterday, and for reasons of tact I will not go into the specifics. It was my first experience with this particular doctor and this particular clinic, and it was good. The people were nice, helpful, and best of all, empathetic to the patients they were treating. I left feeling pretty good about the experience overall, even though there were certain parts of it I would not enjoy repeating.

That experience, I have found, is much more the exception than the rule.

The whole thing about dealing with medical environments is that is the one thriving industry that does not care if it is customer-friendly. If you sit out in the waiting room - or the examining room - for a few hours, well, you are just going to do it. Unlike your favorite restaurant or the dry cleaners, you have to see these people. Your ball is in their yard and you have to play their game to get what you need.

That may not be true for general practitioners, because you certainly can change to other ones. But even there, the racket that is medicine rears its head. Most people do not get a new doctor if their current one ticks them off. You have to fill out hours of paperwork - the same paperwork you filled out with the previous doctor - and the new guy has to accept your insurance (assuming you have insurance).

He may even decide that he has enough patients right now and does not want to accept you as a patient. How does that work in other walks of life? Have you ever pulled into a car wash to get your ride spiffied up, and the manager says, "Well, bud, I am swamped right now. I am just too busy to deal with you at all. Good luck."

Are you going to rush back to him after you ride down a dusty road? Heck, no. But we all queue up at the doctor's office no matter how badly we were treated last time out.

Customer service is certainly hinted at in the medical profession. If not, who would have invested in waiting rooms? Which reminds me - why in the name of sanity would a doctor not subscribe to a wide variety of magazines, instead of the ones that just suit their tastes? I have sat in countless waiting rooms, praying for something at least slightly interesting to read, and the best I can come up with is Good Housekeeping, Entrepreneur, or Kayaking Quarterly, all of which are six months old. The most current Newsweek I found celebrated the election to the U.S. Senate of a newcomer from Illinois named Obama.

The office manager should turn to page 155 of their two-year old Ladies Home Journal and discover fourteen wonderful ways to recycle this stupid waste of trees.

I usually go to female doctors. Perhaps I am seeking a maternal influence from my medical professionals. I haven't really gone into any deep analysis about this. Perhaps it boils down to the basic requirement that if anyone is going to touch my personal areas or have their finger up my butt, we are not going to share similar gender. If this is homophobic, so be it.

I was reminded of a line from the movie "Same Time Next Year," a classic in which a couple carry on an affair over the same weekend every year for over 20 years. The man, who was played by Alan Alda, was talking about how he had a woman doctor and she was giving him a rectal exam. She asked if he was tense, and he said he was. She asked if he was tense because she was a woman. He replied, "No, I get tense whenever anyone does that to me."

No wonder doctors are often accused of being God-like. In what other profession would a person walk in into a small room with you, drop their pants and point their bare posterior at you - all the while knowing what you, as the doctor, were going to do? You don't go to that personal a level with just anyone. What a power to behold.

And I wonder why it is that over the course of medical history, no one has come up with a better way to check for problems with the prostate? I mean, in the age of MRI, CT scans and high-tech peeks inside the human body, the best way to see if the prostate gland is acting up is to stick your finger in your patient's butt?

Who first suggested this, anyway? Can you imagine the reaction he got at that medical convention? "Sure, Larry, I'll try that as soon as I get back home. Try not to drink so much before you present your paper next time."

By the way, a quick little English lesson: Prostate is a gland in the body. Prostrate is lying down. Mixing these up makes you look stupid. (Excuse me while I check these facts ........... yep, that is correct.) Remember: You get prostrate to check your prostate.

Know why? Because if you were on your feet and someone tried to do that, you'd run like hell.

My favorite person in the world that agreed to marry me says that all doctors are learners. What she means is that doctors do not know it all, and probably never will. What she does not say is that if a doctor does not know what is wrong with you, by and large, they will decide you are making it up or are imagining the symptoms. If you had something wrong, by God, they would have found it.

That is the attitude - and believe me, it is prevalent - that pisses me off about doctors. I will gladly go to them and see if they can take my pain away or fix what ails me so I can live to a ripe old age. But for crying out loud, let's not stop when the problem gets too challenging.

Many will recommend a specialist. That is the out for a GP - he can always send you to someone who specializes in this particular part of the body. But when those guys recommend other specialists, what they are really saying is, "Dude, it beats the hell outta me; let's ask this other guy."

That starts a chain of guys who have no idea what is going on. There are not a lot of original thinkers in the medical community. Most doctors stick to research and book learning to treat a patient, and if it ain't in the book, then someone is flat out of luck - the patient.

Of course, a doctor that thinks out of the box won't be good friends with his lawyer or his insurance company. But sometimes you just have to look at something from a new perspective to gain some insight.

We will all still keep going to doctors and keep doing just what they say. There's no way around it. And to show my support of changing the health care system in this country, I am willing to make the following deal with all the other patients. I will donate a year's worth of my prized Sports Illustrated magazines to the waiting room of the next doctor's office I visit, if someone out there will pledge to do the same with their US News and World Report.

Shoot, I'd settle for Reader's Digest.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Silverfern Chronicles!

I am blogging because I like to write. I could have been blogging a few years ago, but I am not one who falls into this computer-Internet-New Age stuff without a little trepidation.

I figure a lot of you are out there are my age, and have now come to the realization that this computer fad just might stick around. And you want to play with it, send messages on it, use it and receive the same unbridled joy and passion your kids and grandkids have expressed.

But you're scared. Or at least, a bit hesitant. You have it in the back of your mind that one errant keystroke will cause your computer to burn up and set off the smoke alarm. Or the many options available to the online-literate are so dazzling that you do not know where to begin.

I hear you. And I am here to help.

I am not expert myself, so I will speak your language. In case you need help that is beyond my scope of knowledge - shoot, it is a certainty that you will ask questions beyond my scope of knowledge - I will go and find the experts and get back to you.

This blog may even go beyond the world of tech. If you are my age, and you feel like the world is passing you by for a younger, savvier, more brash generation - in my family, they are called "The Cool Kids" and believe me, the title is not one they earn - then we all have felt pushed aside, no longer a generation that could change the world, but a generation condemned to live in it as the next generation holds the wheel.

I am here to say that you are not heard because you are not speaking loud enough. Get your feelings out there! Let the advertisers know that we are important and we do not care to see feminine hygiene products being peddled while the football game is on. Let the employers know we did not just suddenly get stupid when we changed the lead digit on our ages. Let the rest of the world know that we value ourselves, and they had better value us as well - or they will be left wondering why those old folks don't come to my restaurant or shop in my store or stay in my hotel or buy my car.

Case in point - any one use one of those Jitterbug cellular phones? This may be a good product, but for Pete's sake, can the commercial be any more insulting? A phone for old people - we know this because a couple of seniors are dancing to the "Jitterbug" jingle - that is stripped down to the most basic thing a cell phone does, send and receive telephone calls. If the oldies are too dimwitted to handle that, we have a special operator standing by to help you get it done.

Please. We can use a cell phone. If you want to be helpful, how about making the numbers bigger so I don't dial three numbers when I was aiming to hit one?

Anyway, that is where I am hoping to help you out. Bridge the generation gap and make sure no one misses the point - that people past a certain age do not need to be led out onto an ice floe and floated out into the ocean, never to be seen again.

Let's see how we do, OK?