Henny
01/14/25
When the clock struck midnight today, I turned 70 years old. Actually, I don’t know what time I was born, so midnight is close enough. I’ve been a little grumpy the past few days leading up to this milestone… I mean, 70 IS pretty old.
Grumpy is not allowed by Natalie, my much younger and much more fun wife. She put an end to my sour mood quickly and told me, “It’s better than the alternative.” She has a knack for snapping me out of my old man mood and making sure I’m always positive and always active.
I’m retired from my various past “real jobs,” so I typically have plenty of time on my hands. When Natalie gets home from work, she always asks me what I’ve done that day. “Well, I let the dogs out several times, I called the HVAC guy about our broken unit, and I went to Food City.” She looks at me like I sat around and ate M&M’s all day (which I did). Productive to me is different than it is to her… she sets a high bar. If she was home all day, she probably would repaint the entire upstairs bathroom and fix the running toilet while waiting for the first coat to dry.
I appreciate her high energy, and I do my best to keep up. But that’s pretty much the best I can do… keep up. She loves to have events on the calendar and looks forward to finding trips, concerts, plays, etc. Sometimes those activities lead me into some awkward moments, like when we attended the farewell tour of the Spice Girls. Hey, it was fun and a great concert, but I could have been everyone’s father… or grandfather. Plus, I think the female gender outnumbered the males about 10,000 to 1. I was the one.
Years ago, she decided we needed to learn to swing dance. So, she found an online course and we practiced in our living room. She picked it up faster than me… she was pretty good while I was still trying to figure out the box step. It’s uncanny how she can find events, and guess what? She found a Swing Dance Weekend at Grove Park Inn in Asheville, NC.
We were going!
When we entered the ballroom, it was like we walked onto the set of Dirty Dancing. We were wide-eyed as we watched couples twirling around, dipping their partners, and maneuvering the dance floor like Olympic ice skaters. To say we were intimidated would be a big understatement. We sheepishly sat at a table and introduced ourselves to others at our table, and learned they were all either professional dancers or teachers. When they asked about our dance experience, we had to confess that, so far, we have only danced around the couch in our living room.
Natalie looked at me with a “please don’t kill me” expression, and I wanted to say, “someone please pull the fire alarm.” After the initial panic, we managed to dance a few dances and realized that this wasn’t the high school prom, and everyone was actually very nice. We eventually melted into the crowd, had a good time, and even managed to dance with our Astaire/Rogers table mates once or twice.
I’m aware I’m slowing down with age, but I try to keep moving. I can identify with Mimosa, our 15-year-old dog, who has very weak back legs. She has a hard time getting around, so if we make her walk, she eventually gains strength in those legs and gets where she’s going. Like Mimosa, when I get up from a sitting position, I literally have to wait a few seconds for my aching back to assume an upright position, and I have to give my bad knee a few steps to work out the limp. I look over at Mimosa and she seems to say, “see, it ain’t easy old man!”
So, please excuse me if I’m a little cranky as I enter my seventh decade. I’m aware the runway behind me is much longer than the runway ahead of me, so thoughts of taxiing to the gate inevitably creep into my temperament. Thankfully I have a partner who won’t allow me to dwell on my mortality and pivots me to more youthful and fun activities.
She recently informed me we’re going to see an Elvis impersonator on Valentine’s Day. I’m looking forward to it but hope she doesn’t expect me to dance and swing my hips like him. I do my best to keep up, but even that’s too much to ask of a seven-decade man.
But it’s better than the alternative.
Henny
01/03/25
When you’re six years old, and playing on your very first organized baseball team, things can be a little intimidating. I played for the Pirates, which happened to be the worst team in the Pee Wee League, a league for boys 6-8 years old. My addition to the team certainly didn’t give our coach visions of saving the Pirates from the bottom of the standings. I was relegated to right field where the ball never landed, threw dirt clods at my teammates, and learned to chant, “Hey batter batter…. Swing!”
That was pretty much the extent of my rookie season with the Pee Wee League Pirates.
I think I went 0-40 at the bat, and a good game was when my mom said, “well, at least you swung.” I admit to being terrified when I was at bat… I mean it was a real baseball, and the pitchers threw it as hard as they could, and maybe threw a strike about every 10th pitch. This was before the more easy-going t-ball, so you had to be a man and stand up at the plate and put your life on the line. The only chance a kid like me had of getting on base was to walk, which leads me to one of my most memorable, or forgettable, moments in my entire sports career.
League rules said only two walks per inning, otherwise the pitcher would walk the entire team. So, my hope was to be one of the first two batters when it was my turn to bat. Lucky for me, the batter in front of me made the final out of the inning, so I was leadoff the next inning. I dutifully took my pitches and walked. The guy behind me walked, so we had guys on first and second, no outs. Our next batter was our best player, who connected and hit the ball past the outfielders.
The coaches and parents were jumping up and down and yelling for me to run, which I did… the Pirates were actually going to score some runs! The only problem was I couldn’t find third base. As luck would have it, it rained the night before leaving the field a muddy mess, so the coaches set up makeshift bases in the grass. I ran around like a confused chicken, and ended up who knows where, but never found third base. Meanwhile, my more experienced teammates ran the bases and scored, but due to my fatal baserunning mishap, we were all out.
I managed to turn a 3-run homer into a Pee Wee League triple play.
Things did get better for me as I progressed from one league and sport to the next. I played all the sports – baseball in the summer, football in the fall, and basketball in the winter. Unfortunately, I always seemed to land on losing teams, so I learned humility at a very early age. That, and the fact that my mom’s strange sense of humor thought it hilarious when I finally got my name in the paper, and it said, “Hank Brown was the high scorer for the losers.”
I was much better at the sandlot versions of these sports, honing my skills on the vacant lot across the street, or the basketball court in my backyard. If it was up to me, that’s where the games would be played, but that’s not how it works in the official sports world, and I eventually graduated from my comfort zone to real ballfields and gymnasiums.
I’d love to make this a rags to riches story where I went back to my old high school and proudly saw my picture on the wall. Sorry, didn’t happen. I did make the junior high basketball team, and even started a few games, but quickly realized my point guard skills weren’t good enough to move on to the high school level. When I decided to quit basketball to run cross country, which was a life changing moment for a 16-year-old, the basketball and cross-country coaches simply said, “well okay.”
I continued to play sports for a long time, and loved intramural flag football, rec league softball, church league basketball, golf, tennis, and just about anything that involved a ball. I was always “good, never great” at any of these sports.
I remember a friend telling me, “You know, you’re a jack of all trades, and a master of none.” I know he meant it as a compliment, but when those words first hit my ears, it kind of made me feel like I was always coming up just a little short at all my athletic endeavors. Maybe my mom’s sense of humor was prophetic… I was the loser. Pretty good, but never great.
But looking back, I have great memories of all the sports I played. Even if I was never on a championship team, even if I never won a tournament, and even if I single-handedly turned a 3-run homer into a triple play, I always had a good time and made some great friends along the way.
And in the wise words of my mom, at least I swung.Henny
12/19/24
I was recently driving through downtown Bristol on State Street, aptly named because it splits the states of Tennessee and Virginia, allowing those who are brave enough to stand in the middle of the road with one foot in Tennessee and the other in Virginia. Also, if you are brave enough, you can park on the street, but only if you know how to parallel park. This is a skill I strangely mastered at an early age, and don’t care to show it off, even as other cars wait for me to pull up to the car in front, then maneuver skillfully in reverse until I’m neatly in the parking space.
When I exit the car, I bow to the crowd to a rousing ovation. Yeah, not really, but I am proud to sneak a peak at my car sandwiched perfectly between two cars on Bristol’s most prominent street.
If I’m being totally honest, my driving skills are pretty much limited to parallel parking. For some odd reason, pulling straight into a space confounds me every time.
“You’re crooked as a dog’s tail,” says Natalie, my wife. And she’s right. So, I try again and end up “less crooked.”
Self-parking cars and back up cameras have made my parallel parking talents less useful in this high-tech world we live in today. It’s one of those rare things I can honestly say I’m “good at,” so I’ll put this in my bank vault of trivial skills that in the grand scheme of things have gotten me absolutely nowhere.
That vault includes rope jumping. Yeah, you read that right. When I was an early teenager, I decided skipping rope would be my ticket to being a star on the junior high basketball team. I never became a star, but I learned to jump, and mastered it to the level of being asked to perform by the PE teacher at a school assembly with two other guys… all to the tune of Sweet Georgia Brown. It was pretty cool and will go down as my one and only highlight in my very short performing career.
Even today, in my advancing years, I can still pick up a rope, and skip while my feet barely leave the ground, throwing in double jumps, reverses, and crisscrosses. At my age I limit my “performance” to just a few minutes but can still dazzle elementary school kids when I substitute teach PE class. Fame is fleeting, so I’ll take it whenever I can!
Digging deep into my treasury chest of useless skills, I’m also pretty good at ping pong (or table tennis) and can juggle 3 balls at one time. These talents have never found their way to my resume, and never earned me a dime. But put me in front of a ping pong table, and I can hold my own with most anyone except maybe Forrest Gump.
I wish I had spent my youth learning something more valuable like guitar or piano. The crazy fact is that even though my mother’s family is like the New York Philharmonic, with piano players, opera singers, and even music composers, the music gene somehow bypassed my mom. So, she didn’t push my siblings or me into music lessons. We had a piano at the house, but the only song I remember us playing was Chopsticks. That was totally fine with me, as I was preoccupied across the street playing wiffleball… another one of my worthless skills.
Natalie has more musical talent in her small toe than I have in my whole body. She suggested I learn the harmonica, and then the ukelele, which if you Google “easiest musical instruments to learn,” these instruments are 1 and 2. I failed miserably. I couldn’t even read the music. It made no sense to me.
Don’t even ask me to sing. The only singing I do is when a fire truck passes our house and the Brownies (our 3 little brown dogs) start howling. I’m allowed to join that chorus.
So, I guess I’m one of those guys who can amuse friends by wiggling my ears, or showing off my double-jointed fingers, but you don’t want me to gather around the piano at a party and sing Christmas songs. I definitely struck out when it came to entertainment skills, but the next time I’m teaching PE, I’ll grab a rope and impress a bunch of 10-year-olds. Then I might even beat one or two of them in a game of H-O-R-S-E.
Now, that’s something to brag about.Henny
12/11/24
Our cat’s most favorite time of day is in the morning when I sit down to put on my socks and shoes. Squirrel (yes that’s her name which is another story for another time) walks under my left knee, bumps her head into my hand, then keeps going as I rub from head to tail while she emerges from under my knees on the other side. Then she turns around and does it again, swishing back and forth against my captive hands and legs. This goes on for several minutes as I pull on my socks and shoes… left sock, left shoe, right sock, right shoe. In that order. Every day.
Yes, I’m just a little OCD.
Don’t ask me why it has to be in that order. It just does. If by chance I put both socks on before my first shoe, I start over. Socks off, then left sock, left shoe, right sock, right shoe. Then I can proceed with my day.
I didn’t grow up this way. It just kind of evolved. Of course, my OCD’ness doesn’t stop with socks and shoes. The toilet paper has to roll over. Never under. Never. If I go to a public bathroom and the TP is under, I’ll go to another stall. Or, heck, I’ll hold it if I have to.
All the bills in my pocket must face the same way with 1s on the outside, then 5s, then 10s, and 20s on the inside. This goes back to my college days when I worked as a bank teller and we were trained to keep our bills in the drawer in order, all facing the same way. Made perfect sense to me. When I receive change back at the McDonald’s drive thru, I hold up the line while I rearrange my bills. Can’t drive otherwise.
Don’t get me wrong, my anal personality doesn’t impair my social life. I still function just fine, thank you, but I guess it helps that I’m retired and don’t have to interact with too many people who don’t require as much order in their daily routines. My wife, Natalie, is accustomed to my eccentricities, and thankfully accepts my behaviors as just “how I am.” She’s a very organized person, and is an eternal planner, but her persona is such that she’s just fine if things aren’t “matchy-matchy.” I cringe when she wads up her bills and stuffs them in her billfold, but it’s her money.
I’m also a runner, and you’d think I’d run the exact same course every day, but strangely, I don’t. I don’t even start my watch for most of my runs, which is double puzzling. Maybe this is my way of giving myself a little vacation from myself, if that makes sense.
We own a timing company which times 5Ks, 10Ks, half marathons, etc. Our crew has worked with me for years, and they know me. Mr. Littles, our work van, must be packed/unpacked a certain way, I use the same laptop with the same mousepad, and I sit at one end of the table under the scoring tent. It works for me. When I lay out my wardrobe for each race, I might choose any combination of shirts, caps, and cargo shorts, but the one constant is my Chucks.
Without my Chucks, it might be total chaos.
I dare say that most timing companies are owned by OCD dudes like me. I think it kind of goes with the territory.
The territory for me is one where I know things are just so. I know my jeans are folded with the pockets facing out, my dress shirts are hung all facing right, and the milk is always on the upper left shelf of the refrigerator. It’s my weird world and I’m walking through it…with my socks and shoes in the correct order.
Squirrel wouldn’t want it any other way.
