Quickies

Texas has the best-looking state flag. Ohio has the worst.

Paul McCartney’s Christmas song seems to be getting much more play than John Lennon’s. Pity.

Someone has posted fliers in my neighborhood offering a $500 reward for their missing 18-year-old cat, a situation I find almost unthinkably sad. My cat Cato, who is in my lap at this moment, is 19.

Salma Hayak may be the most attractive woman in the world who is not my wife. If not her, it’s Halle Berry.

My food tastes are not refined enough for me to be a critic. They are basically binary: yes-no.

Geico’s ads are creative, but its insurance costs more than mine.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is not nearly exclusive enough.

Oldies stations should identify the artist and year for every song they play.

My musical tastes expand as I age - but they expand backward, not forward.

Ole men + Earrings = Bad.

Neil Young’s singing hurts my ears.

Tuna salad without boiled eggs is not tuna salad.

I would like my life to slow down to the pace felt by an 8-year-old in the weeks before Christmas.

Whole Lotto Love

I buy lottery tickets from time to time, whenever the jackpot reaches an amount that I reckon sufficient to fantasize about. That figure is based on my computation of collecting one-eighth of the total amount: half off for taking it in cash, half off the remainder for taxes, and half off what’s left for my wife.

In my financial fantasies, there are no marital debates over spending.

The one-eighth I further compute into a yearly income, calculated on a 4 percent return from tax-free securities. I have no idea if that’s realistic, but it doesn’t seem overly greedy. Greed, I figure, reduces good lottery karma.

Two tickets is my usual investment. My friend Glenn advises that, as a matter of probability, a second ticket (and quite a few more) is statistically insignificant in terms of increasing my chances of winning. I’m sure he’s right, but I don’t care. To me it obviously doubles my chances.

I like to buy as far in advance of the drawing as possible, to maximize the fantasy time I get for my two bucks. A Saturday purchase, for example, gives me three days of imaginary spending until the Tuesday drawing -- which I stretch further by not checking the results until Wednesday or later.

Of course philanthropy factors in my plans. (Still listening, karma?) That generosity aside, yes, I plan some goodies for myself, too. I will not be one of those irksome dimwits who assert that, shucks, millions of dollars will not change their lives. I will:

Quit work.

Travel the world.

Take enlightening courses in subjects that appeal to me, like Asian philosophy, or home-brewing.

Buy a new house down South and put a home theater and gym and pool table in the basement.

And so on.

All of which will be made possible this coming Tuesday night, should the right numbers fall into place. Just in case, maybe I’ll start making a list of charities I could donate to.

You out there, karma?

Rhymes With Rain

Two score and some years ago, Wayne and Kay decided to merge their names to produce a new one for their No. 2 daughter. Thus was created Kayne.

My wife.

It isn’t a unique name phonetically, as anyone familiar with the biblical story of fratricide knows, nor by spelling, as was made clear when she was choosing an AOL screen name. But it has not been in the top 1,000 names for either sex in the United States during any of the last 100 years, according to Social Security, so it’s rare enough to carry a certain novelty.

Not to mention sexual ambiguity, which helps explain why she sometimes gets mail addressed to “Mr.”

But it has never seemed particularly hard for anyone to figure out how to pronounce, until lately.

This is the fault, of course, of one Kanye West, a Grammy award-winning rapper who enjoys considerably wider name recognition. His name is pronounced KON-yay (and, according to YeahBaby.com, means “honor” or “tribute” in some unspecified African language). Unfortunately, some people can’t seem to appreciate the slight - but significant - difference in spelling. (As a Google search of “Kanye West” will demonstrate.)

And so people who would never be stumped by Jayne or Payne or Layne (which happens to be the name of my wife’s younger sister) are suddenly at a loss as to pronouncing my wife’s name. They get out the “K” sound, but then verbally stumble around (Caen? Kaynee? Kane-yee?) with that implied question mark indicating “Boy, this is a tough one.”

It’s not. It’s Kayne. As in raising. Or candy. Or walking. Or sugar. It just looks a little different.

Sunday Blues

I grew up in a state where and a time when blue laws severely limited commerce on Sundays, and when I reached adulthood I opposed them on principle. These days those laws are basically gone from the books everywhere, but I find that I now have my own internal blue laws.

Maybe it’s fitting. I was born on a Sunday, after all.

My rules are rather curious, though.

It’s O.K to wash dishes or clothes, for instance, but not to sweep or vacuum. I won’t mow the yard, rake leaves or wash the car, but I will take out the trash, fill the car with gas or deposit a check at an A.T.M.

Put down storm windows, no. Clean cats’ litter box, yes.

Collect tomatoes or other food from the garden, yes. Stake tomatoes or otherwise tend to the garden, no.

Going to a store for some things is O.K., shopping online for anything is not.

I’ll buy groceries (which includes beer), medicines, and toiletries, but not clothing, appliances or athletic equipment. But doing something athletic or sporting is all right, and I consider shooting pool to be in that category.

I try to limit my reading to newspapers or books about philosophy, religion or spirituality and avoid fiction/entertainment. But I include martial arts under the broad heading of mind/body improvement, which qualifies as spirituality, and going to a movie or watching TV is allowable.

Listening to music is fine, even that Godless rock ’n’ roll.

Downloading music is not fine, though uploading pictures from my digital camera is.

The list of rules here is incomplete; and in fact I’ve never before considered enumerating them. I just know intuitively what I will and won’t do. Besides, on a lot of Sundays none of the prohibited activities come into play anyway, because I don’t really have time for them.

I work on Sundays.

Whatever Happened to...

If the current incarnation of Ralph Edwards popped up to do a “This Is Your Life” show on me, I would want all this to be part of the script and guests:

You considered her your second-grade girlfriend, but she may never have known it: AMANDA DAVIS!

You had a fight with him at Cub Scouts, then went on to become good friends: PETE TROWBRIDGE!

You sat behind her in third grade, and she used to wear a hula-hoop like thing to make the bottom of her dress stand out: GINGER BIGGERS!

You looked down at the hand-watercolored Valentines he gave out in elementary school because they weren’t store bought, before you learned what real value is: PAUL SPOONER!

You thought you were a pretty smart guy, until she moved to town and you saw how much smarter a girl can be: CLISBY WILLIAMS!

He may be the only person other than you who actually remembers that you pitched a no-hitter and hit a home run in a Little League game, because he’s the guy who was pitching against you: DAVID WEST!

Just as your crush on her was gaining traction, she moved away: JO JO MARTINEZ!

He told you you might have been able to get a scholarship to a small college if you hadn’t quit high school football, and you’ve always wondered, How small?: COACH MIKE NELSON!

He was your “big brother” before you de-pledged your college fraternity, Delta Psi: MAC HALBROOK!

You wanted to take her picture while riding on a train somewhere in Britain, just because she was so pretty, but you were too shy to ask permission. Now you can’t even conjure up a mental picture: UNKNOWN FEMALE!

Well into an evening of drinking in Oxford, England, he invited you to go with him to a birthday party, upon which you discovered that, not only was he was crashing the party, he was also due to go to jail for assault or some such: LARRY FROM BELFAST!

He was your “big brother” before you de-pledged your college fraternity, Delta Psi: MAC HALBROOK!

Jeet Kune Joe

i told my best friend i was thinking about taking a martial arts class and he asked a simple question:

why?

or maybe it wasn’t so simple, since i launched into a longish story about how i’d always wished i’d done it sooner but finally realized i couldn’t do it any sooner and that if i was ever going to do it at all now was the time, etc. , etc.

so i set about trying to find a school with classes that fit my upside down, work-at-night schedule, within easy distance, that didn’t require leaps into the air and/or head-high kicks.

my ambitious goal: become a black belt in 5 years.

points in my favor included a reasonably good health and fitness level, all things considered; a fairly athletic background; and a determination that can border on obsessive/compulsive disorder.

points not in my favor included a near-absolute absence of any type fighting experience or knowledge.

but this, i was later told, could actually be helpful, in that i have no bad habits to unlearn.

so, after exploring various options including aikido (i liked the taoist concept of non-aggression, but not the required one-year financial commitment) and brazilian jiu jitsu (i found the idea of fighting while lying on the floor unappealing) i settled on a school teaching jeet kune do, the simplest explanation for which is that it is the martial art of bruce lee.

i am now three months month into my training and enjoying it thoroughly. it is occupying much of my physical and mental attention, since i am the type who supplements doing with reading about doing. and talking about it. the other day a work colleague asked if i could kill him now. i said that, if he stayed still and offered no resistance to multiple assaults, i could probably bruise him up pretty badly.

The Offer

i was heading for a late train, walking down eighth avenue, when i saw her on the sidewalk in the distance.

she looked as if she might look good, and the closer i got, the more she did look good, which is something that doesn’t happen nearly enough. i can still picture her face; she reminded me of some female comic i’ve seen on tv with dark hair and kind of new-york-sounding whose name won’t come to me.

she smiled real big as we neared and i thought, that’s nice, something else that doesn’t happen nearly enough, and then she spoke:

ya wanna date?

whoa, ouch. for the first time in my life i had been identified as a man who might be willing to pay money for sex. in other words, desperate.

i suppose there is another explanation, that she was in fact suggesting that we go to a movie, or drinks and dinner. maybe even that, since she brought it up, she would be willing to pay. or to go dutch.

it seems unlikely, though, even if i try hard to believe it, and the thought didn‘t cross my mind at the time. nor did a clever response, though anything would have been more clever than what i said, which was:

no.

then i went home and told my wife, who for some reason found this much more amusing than i did.

Down Home

The farther I live from Mississippi, the more Mississippi I feel.
Three decades ago, in my first job, I worked with a guy from Texas who was ever happy to talk about what he saw as the many inherent superiorities of that state. If Texas is so great, I finally asked him, what are you doing here in Mississippi?
“Missionary work,” he responded.
He has long since gone back to Texas, and my path has carried me steadily north. Since 1998 I’ve lived on Long Island, which I probably couldn’t have found on a map before my first trip here that year. It’s a perfectly serviceable place and allows me to have a yard and enough square footage to house my considerable stuff. Manhattan, where I work, would not.
But there’s no mistaking it for Mississippi, just as there’s no mistaking me for a New Yorker.
I lived in Nashville for eight years and never became a Tennessean, either, though I suppose I could have at least passed for one. Just as, in some respects, Tennessee passed for Mississippi - but a Mississippi with more people, more money, and more scenic views.
I felt no particular need to proclaim my Mississippi-ness; I had, in effect, just moved next door. I still pretty much sounded the same as everybody else, looked the same, ate the same food.
Not now.
Now I’m the guy with the accent, asking the waitress at the local diner if they serve grits (they do!), looking for turnip greens and black-eyed peas in the grocery store. And I’ve bought two sweatshirts and a long-sleeve T-shirt proclaiming my alma mater, Ole Miss, the first time I‘ve worn anything like that since I walked off campus more than 30 years ago.
I even have an Ole Miss mouse pad at work. And in the basement hangs a Mississippi flag, in bold (though private) display. I might even make more use of it, if it didn’t incorporate the Confederate battle flag. I have considerable ambivalence about that feature.
I talk up Mississippi when I can, looking for positive news items and pointing to current (Eli Manning) or past (Elvis, Eudora Welty) claims to fame. I don’t deny the lingering issues of racism and its impact, but I note the progress and point out that Mississippi (and the South in general) doesn’t hold the patent on problems like that.
I go home when possible to get my Mississippi booster shots from family and friends, to eat gumbo at the Jackson County Fair, a shrimp and oyster po-boy at Big R’s, or meat loaf and peach cobbler at CS’s. I soak up the hospitality and ambiance, and try to bring some of it back with me when I leave.
And I’ve made plans, when my days on earth are over, for one final trip to Mississippi.
And so might come the same kind of question I used to ask my friend from Texas: If Mississippi is so great, what am I doing here in New York?
Not missionary work. I’m not looking for converts.
I’m an ambassador.

Friends and Strangers

My friend Mack was in town for a quickie visit, and as I headed to meet him at the St. Andrews for a drink the other night I thought about telling my friend Alan, due for a visit just days later, that I’d seen him.
Then it occurred to me: Alan won’t care. He doesn’t know Mack.
This sort of thing happens not infrequently to me. My brain tends not to file friends under geographic or temporal headings, but the fact is those are divisions they arise from.
I’ve lived significant chunks of my life in different places: youth on the Mississippi coast; college in North Mississippi; a few years back on the coast; then to Jackson; then to Nashville; now on Long Island.
All along the way I’ve picked up friends: Furby, McCool, Gary, Sherry, Vaughn, Brad, Ed, Carolyn, Kim, Glenn, Nancy, Tori, Lew, Mona, and so on. They all pretty much rattle around in my head in the same file folder, marked “Active,” no matter how long it‘s been since I saw them.
It’s as if they’re all hanging out at the same nonstop mental party, and I’m the host.
Leaving aside for a minute the fact that I am in reality a terrible host, this concept works quite well for me. Until, as in the case of the other night, I find myself about to refer to one person in conversation with another, and realize that while both are friends to me, they are strangers to each other.
Over the past decade or so this has happened most frequently with my wife (picked up in Nashville, by the way). As a result I’ve learned, for the most part, to attach explainers when mentioning someone she’s hasn’t met: my old high school buddy McCool, for instance. Who, I will sometimes add, was the personable guy everybody gravitated to, sort of like Brad, only not. That way I‘ve linked somebody she does know, Brad, to someone she doesn’t, to strengthen the association.
She usually nods, as if to say, Oh yes, your old high school buddy McCool, etc. Good wives humor husbands like that.
In that same way Mack used to always be “my friend Mack, the comedian.” That changed when Mack came to stay for a couple of days last fall. Now the reference to him is much shorter -- Mack -- in addition to being more meaningful.
With that in mind, I propose that all my friends -- and for this purpose I include my wife -- take it upon themselves to meet one another.
Some had an initial opportunity to do this a few years ago, when I had a 50th birthday party in Jackson and a number of people attended. But not everybody made it, and even among those who did I suspect that no one met everyone. I know I certainly didn’t make enough introductions (see “terrible host,” above) for that to have occurred.
And maybe, in this day of technology, they wouldn’t even have to get together at all. Surely they all have e-mail addresses. They could form some sort of discussion ring, or whatever it is such things are called. Exchange biographical information, perhaps include little essays about how they came to know me, the significance I hold in their lives, that sort of thing. Tell funny stories, taking care not to find the humor too much at my expense.
This would make things simpler for me, without imposing an undue hardship on them. I mean, they’re all good people, or they wouldn’t be on my friends list. They’d be sure to get along fine.
(this needs a better ending. it sort of thuds. i plan to come along and revise it at some point.)

A Reason to Root

(this was originally written in april 2004...)

Finally, after five years in New York, I have a reason to pull for a local football team. As of last Saturday, I’m a Giants fan.
Eli’s coming.
I admit, my loyalties are fluid. I was prepared to be a Chargers fan, until Eli said he didn’t want to be a Charger. I considered the possibility that the Raiders might draft him second, which would have been fine. I could have pulled for the Raiders, even if they do have Charles Woodson, who robbed Peyton of the Heisman Trophy. But the Giants possibility sure looked sweet.
Broadway Eli.
I grew up in Moss Point, Miss. There were no local teams in any professional sport when I was a kid, so I affiliated myself through my favorite players. In 1961, my first year in organized baseball, I became a Yankees fan because of Roger Maris.
In 1967 I switched allegiance to the Red Sox, courtesy of Carl Yastrzemski. I stayed with the Sox through the Clemens years. When the Sox dumped him, I dumped them, and became a Toronto Blue Jays fan - every five days.
And then a Yankees fan again.
And now, every five days, an Astros fan. I sort of wish the Rocket would stay put.
In a similar fashion but a different sport, I became an Ole Miss football fan in 1968, after reading about this skinny quarterback named Archie Manning who Coach Johnny Vaught thought might become pretty good.
Smart guy, Coach Vaught.
The NFL draft of 1971 made me care about the New Orleans Saints, and I followed them through all Archie’s ill-fated seasons there. Then Bum Phillips came along as coach, and out went Archie. I couldn’t find it in me to pull for the Oilers or Vikings as Archie’s career fizzled to an end. But I abandoned the Saints, and nurtured a cold contempt for Bum that exists to this day.
The college recruiting of Peyton revived my Manning fascination. I understood why he chose not to go to Ole Miss. I would have loved to see him at Florida State (my adopted alma mater, owing to my esteem for Bobby Bowden) but OK. I could accept Tennessee.
After all, I was living in Tennessee by then. So what if the school color is so scorchingly ugly that it hurts even my color-blind eyes. So what if one of my happiest days ever was the Saturday when Archie Who and the Rebels beat UT 38-0 after a certain Volunteer linebacker spoke ill of the Rebel talent.
As I said, my loyalties are fluid. I learned to embrace my inner Vol and, with astonishing ease, came to hate the Florida Gators. (Assisted by my Florida State affection.) They were four good years. I even managed, through residual affection, to feel reasonably happy a year after Peyton’s departure, when the Vols won the national championship. Over my Seminoles.
Ideally, to keep my NFL allegiance in-state, the Tennessee Titans (nee Oilers) would have drafted Peyton, but they were too far down in the draft order and didn’t need a quarterback anyway. So he went to the Indianapolis Colts, testing my ability to warm to a franchise that, let’s face it, shouldn’t even be in Indianapolis.
I warmed. I now want the misplaced Colts to win a Super Bowl. A couple, even.
Eli’s decision to attend Ole Miss renewed my link, never severed, with my true alma mater. I waited through a redshirt season. I waited while he backed up Romaro Miller. I waited through a winning season with no bowl game and, finally, enjoyed the first 10-win season since my freshman year.
Onward to the pros. But where?
From Tennessee I had moved on to New York, where I had no local allegiance. If Peyton had bypassed his senior year, he might have been drafted by the Jets, a team that Joe Namath once made my favorite. (I also, for years, favored first the 49ers and then briefly the Chiefs for their quarterback named Joe. Hey, you blame me?) I could easily have revived my Jets fervor if Peyton had come along.
But he didn’t. Joe Willie’s Jets legacy wasn’t strong enough to command any enduring affection, and I couldn’t find any reason at all to focus on the Giants, a team with all the charisma and appeal of the Microsoft Corporation.
Enter Eli.
It wasn’t pretty. I would have preferred that the Giants traded up to take Eli, relieving him of the booing he got when the Chargers selected him. But all’s well that ends well, I read somewhere, and that Giants blue and red is close enough to the Rebels red and blue.
I may buy a hat. Even a No. 10 jersey.
Fran who?