Musings and oozings by
Michael Gates
(click for bio)

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Word of the Day

tittup (n or v)

A caper or prance; to move in a lively way

"Well," he says, "it's not much of a place for a tittup. There are one or two jolly old cockalorums there, and, when the season's on, you can go on the scoop in the way of a music-caper, or a hop, and you can get rid of the stuff there as well as anywhere."
--Francis Cowley Burnand, More Happy Thoughts

I haven't felt much in the mood to tittup lately. Scramble the letters and you get "putt it". That's more like it....

posted at 11:50 PM : Permalink :

 
Memories

My father passed away last Saturday. Since I'm the writer in the family, I wrote and delivered the following eulogy during the memorial service on Friday. It was well received. Someone asked me if it was difficult to write. Actually, the writing of it was not difficult -- I work as an editor, and I'm used to "assembling" essays out of diverse bits of text. The hardest part was getting other family members to contribute memories of my father at a busy and difficult time. But it all worked out, I think. I'm posting it here as both a memorial and -- who knows? -- perhaps an aid to someone out there who needs to compose a similar piece.

Thank you all for coming. Today we remember my father, Edward Gates, and I would like to share some fond memories that my family has of him with you, some of the "little things" that you may not know about.

***

My mother has many stories about meeting my father in Tacoma, Washington, and knowing him when he was a pilot stationed there in the Air Force. He used to fly low over her house in his F-86 fighter jet, which impressed her and her mother, but disturbed their neighbors. My mother was charmed enough to marry him and move all the way from a city on the West Coast to a small town in Upstate New York.

My parents built a home and my father built a business on East Main Street here in West Winfield. And in his spare time, my dad liked to work in his woodshop in the basement of our house. He made lots of furniture there, including our kitchen table. He also made kids' furniture and bookcases for me. (And you can see some photos of his handiwork on the table here in the foyer.)

Later on, when we grew up and moved away, he was still making things for us and delivering what he had made in his truck or his trailer. My sister, Nancy, recalls that whenever we asked him to make something for our new homes, he would ask for plans and then rush out to get the materials. He made a cradle out of cherry wood for Adam, for example, who was the first of his grandchildren.

***

Speaking of grandchildren: Every time another grandchild was born, my mom was hoping for a granddaughter, to join Stacie, but instead my parents ended up with six grandsons, which pleased my father. He thought he was on the way to having a complete baseball team of grandsons. Instead, he ended up with two thirds of a team, which included three hockey players, one aspiring film-maker, one future paleontologist -- and only one grandson who actually did play baseball.

***

More memories: My brother Dan, who lives the closest to West Winfield, remembers all the projects he helped my father with. He often helped him attach the snow-blower to his lawn tractor – quite an operation that often also involved Doug Evans, who helped my parents with many jobs around the house in recent years – so my dad could plow the driveway in the winter – an activity he seemed to enjoy. Other wintertime activities that Dan recalls include skiing trips that Dad took us to at the old Gunset Ski Bowl in Richfield Springs and attending Buffalo Bills games with Dad and the Whitchers in Buffalo.

Dad loved his fireplace and his wood-burning stove in the winter, which meant that we kids – and especially Dan – helped him split wood and stack it in the basement. Dad seemed proud of the enormous stack of fireplace logs he collected.

***

My father loved his home but he also liked to travel. He loved to drive, especially in a truck or camper.

When I was a kid, we did a lot of camping with a travel trailer or a motor home. When I was about 13 or 14, we took a camping trip clear across the country in a motor home, which seems kind of crazy today, when gas is approaching four dollars a gallon. I remember visiting my mother's relatives in Minnesota and the state of Washington on that trip. I remember being in the Rocky Mountains and the desert in the southwest, and the badlands of South Dakota -- and even crossing the Golden Gate Bridge in this enormous house on wheels, which seemed like a very surreal experience.

Every year after that, at least once a year, my father would ask me if I remembered that trip, which I thought was strange question and even a little annoying at times. How could I possibly forget it? "Of course I remember it, Dad," I would say. But he kept asking. Gradually, I came to understand that the trip meant even more to him than it did to us kids. It was his gift to us.

***

As a gift to him, a few years ago my brother Ted put together a scrapbook of my father's life which you can see on the table in the foyer. Over a period of days, Ted remembers my father bringing him an astonishing number of clippings and articles about things Ted never knew about, such as the time that my father, as a teenager, found a meteorological radio balloon that landed on the farm where he grew up, or the article that referred to him as a the "triple threat freshman star of the 1946 Hartwick football team."

Probably the biggest news item was an article from the Tacoma New Tribune that detailed the mid-air collision my father survived when he was a pilot in the Air Force. Typically, my father was nonchalant about all these things.

***

In recent years, the family would gather on almost every holiday at my parents' large, welcoming home on East Main Street.

Originally a farm boy, Dad was up and around in the morning before any of us. We remember him whistling old tunes in the morning, like “Those Were the Days” and “Tammy” as he was going through his morning routine. Sometimes he would sing, replacing the words he would miss with “bum bums” – always in tune and fading in and out as he passed from room to room.

Just one of my father's memorable contributions to these occasions was buying doughnuts for breakfast every morning. When my nephew Josh, who very much wanted to be here today, heard that his grandfather had passed away, he offered to buy the doughnuts in the future. And we may hold him to that.

***

Over the last few days, we've been amazed by the number of messages and cards we've received from people touched by my father's life. Over and over, they mention that they will miss seeing him at the post office. My father's daily routine always included a visit to the post office to pick up the mail – he never wanted it delivered – which we never thought too much about. Now we realize that it was his way of staying in touch with the community he was born and raised in, and never wanted to leave for too long.

In closing, we're all grateful for the years we had with my father. We wish there could have been more time, but we're also grateful that he didn't have to endure more of the ill health he encountered over the last couple of years. We'll remember him fondly, and we hope you will too, and will think of him -- perhaps when you visit the post office.

Thanks again for coming today to remember Ed Gates.

posted at 8:55 PM : Permalink :

 
Micro Fiction: Vanilla

Marcus didn't mind the bus ride back and forth to "the job" every day. The 30-minute transition from his doorstep to desk gave him time to think or meditate. And he had a lot to think about.

He would have to make the decision today. He would have to either decide to try the complicated plan, the one that might offer a bigger reward but that involved certain ethical loop-de-loops, or he would have keep it simple, and let the situation unspool slowly while he held on to his morals.

What to do? That's what he was asking himself, when just about the last type of creature he would want to sit next to on a crowded public bus was deposited on the seat beside him: a tiny little human with a large ice cream cone.

Marcus looked down at what appeared to be a chubby three- or four-year-old boy. His mother sat across the aisle with what looked to be the boy's slightly younger sister. The girl was also licking an ice-cream cone. The mother gave Marcus a tight little smile and a shrug, as if to say, "You pay your fare and you take your chances."

Marcus offered to change seats with her, but she refused. "These two fight if I put them together," she said, "and I want to sit next to my daughter."

There were no other seats to move to, so Marcus resigned himself to sharing his perch with this very sticky little homunculus, who had ice cream all over his hands and a frosty white mustache.

"Please don't touch me," Marcus said, thinking about his latest dry cleaning bill. He disliked children and could hardly believe he'd ever been one himself. The little guy looked up at him and grinned.

His mind wandered back to the problem. What to do? The ultra-complicated course with the bigger potential payoff, but the guilt-inducing dirty work, or the simple plan? Devil or angel – Marcus couldn't decide which to be. And he only had half an hour, the length of this bus ride, to decide.

He didn't believe in prayer, but he did believe in intuition and a higher self, or whatever it was. "Tell me what to do," he thought, addressing the cosmos. "Tell me if I should structure the deal, or shoot it straight, the fancy or the plain. . . .

Just then, he felt something cold in his lap. He looked down and saw a lump of something glistening and white, a blank glob of undifferentiated creaminess slowly oozing between his legs.

The kid was looking up at him with a solemn expression. "Vanilla," he said.

posted at 12:02 AM : Permalink :

 
Today I am....

Contemplating a conundrum.

posted at 12:30 PM : Permalink :

 
Boxed In

Watch some time-lapse video of a man trapped in an elevator for over 40 hours: Trapped in Car 30. A claustrophobic nightmare.

There's an article about this incident in The New Yorker.

posted at 2:41 PM : Permalink :

 
Today I am...

...circumventing the pervading atmosphere.

posted at 10:53 AM : Permalink :

 
The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Lot's of religion in the news these days. The Pope is visiting and meeting with sex-abuse victims. CNN is obsessed with a bizarre polygamist religious cult. Hillary and Barack are talking about their "faith" in a "Compassion Forum". It all makes me feel like I've eaten something that doesn't quite agree with me. Queasy.

posted at 11:36 PM : Permalink :

 
Quote of the Day

"I can't think of any sorrow in the world that a hot bath wouldn't help, just a little bit."
--Susan Glasee

posted at 10:59 PM : Permalink :

 
Word of the Day

tourbillon (n)

A whirlwind or vortex.

"In this state of things, had I accepted and returned home, do you think that a seat upon the bench would have removed me from the tourbillon of politics?"
--John Quincy Adams

These days, in English, a tourbillon most often refers to a type of watch. My watch is an L.L. Bean field watch. When the battery went dead recently, and I didn't have time to replace it for a week, I took it off - and felt naked for a few days.

posted at 10:25 PM : Permalink :

 
Just Your Type?

DarkCopy is a simple, full-screen text editor with no distractions. All you can do with it is ... write. There's no formating -- you just see green text in a typewriter font on a black background. You can save what you write as a text file, or copy and paste into another program. And it's free. Whoever created it doesn't even ask for a donation. Too good and yet true.

posted at 11:20 PM : Permalink :

 
Whale of a Tale

Truck Spills is "The website of odd, strange, interesting, and unbelievable things spilled on the road by trucks." It currently features a whale on a flatbed and a rather disgusting accident. "Thar she blows," indeed.

posted at 11:22 PM : Permalink :

 
Scattered to the Winds

If there was anyplace Marcus disliked visiting more than a graveyard, he couldn't think of one. But it was Memorial Day, a hot, muggy Memorial Day, and grandma needed tending.

He was the only one around anymore who could do it -- take the geranium to the cemetery, clip the crabgrass around her headstone, spade up the mushy soil and make a little green and red garden on her plot. It was what she would have wanted. She always did have a green thumb; she loved gardening.

"That's probably why, instead of being cremated like grandpa, and scattered to the winds like he had been, she'd wanted herself, well, planted," Marcus thought.

He'd had to steal himself to do his duty, though -- he'd stopped in for a beer at the dive down the street first, wanting to have a slight buzz on before walking through those rusty cemetery gates.

He hated walking across the grass-covered graves, always wondering what was down there beneath his sneakers. The stone angels and ancient obelisks gave him the creeps. So did the eerie silence of the place.

Grandma's stone was plain and simple -- a granite rectangle with "Alice" carved in sans-serif letters. Marcus could still remember her face; she'd died less than a decade ago. Grandpa had died earlier, when Marcus was a toddler, and that face was lost to him.

He started to clip the cowlicks of grass from around the stone's edges, looking up from time to time to observe other people tending the graves of their own dearly departeds -- all of them silent, or muttering softly about the time their Uncle Harry said such and such, or the what their Aunt Vicky thought about so and so.

"I should NOT have had that beer," Marcus muttered, as he dropped the geranium into the hole he'd dug in front of grandma's stone. He had to pee, bad, and there were no restrooms in this garden of eternal rest. There were no restrooms anywhere nearby.

As he got to his feet, he noticed someone standing a few feet away, on the edge of the path that split the cemetery in half. It was an old guy in overalls and a flannel shirt rolled up to the elbows. A fringe of gray hair was visible around the edges of his baseball cap, and he was smiling as he gazed off toward the horizon, where some dark clouds were massing. "Must be the caretaker," Marcus thought.

"Gonna rain soon, I'm afraid," the man said in a wistful voice, to no one in particular, though Marcus was the only person nearby. Then he turned and spoke to Marcus directly: "Gonna get wet," he said.

It was the wrong thing to say to someone who had to urinate. Marcus shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "I'm not sticking around to get wet," he said. "I gotta go. My bladder's screaming. Gotta find a bathroom."

The man smiled. He had a kind, crinkly face. "You know what they say," he said.

"No. What do they say?" Marcus asked.

"All the world is a man's urinal." He pointed toward a thick clump of bushes and trees at the edge of the graveyard.

Marcus took the hint and trotted off to relieve himself. "Watering the garden," he thought, as he did so. He looked back toward where the man had been standing, but he was gone -- scattered to the winds, perhaps, just like grandpa.

posted at 1:16 PM : Permalink :

 
Word of the Day

ampullosity (n)

Pretentious inanity or bombast

"In reading, we also 'cruze about the coast,' but that is where the variety, richness, and fabled ampullosity of the text reside in fractals of renewed delight."
--David Solway, Random Walks

I am full of fractals of renewed delight this evening.

posted at 10:45 PM : Permalink :

 
Life's a Twitch

My left eyelid has been twitching a lot lately. It's an annoying "fluttering" feeling that occurs most often when I'm working at the computer. (It just happened actually.) A Google search reveals that its technical name is "blepharospasm" and it's probably nothing serious. The twitching is usually caused by stress, lack of sleep, too much caffeine or prolonged staring at a screen -- or some combination. Given that list, I guess it's not too surprising that my eyelid is twitching. I'm not living a decaf life lately.

posted at 6:37 PM : Permalink :

 


Here's my attempt at a comic "strip"/philosophical quotation venue. I hope to include more thought-provoking (or just provoking) quotations in the future, not necessarily from big-name philosophers. But the graphic will remain the same, at least for now.

posted at 8:34 PM : Permalink :

 
The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Reading Leaves of Grass, and enjoying it. I've only read a few bits and pieces before. It's like poetic raving.... Extremely windy tonight. As I was walking down the street, white plastic bags were blowing around, like little ghosts. A couple of them attacked me.... Barack Obama seems to be the first national politician in decades who can give a speech that one might actually like to read as well as listen to.... I'm toying with an idea for a comic strip, somewhat modeled after David Lynch's The Angriest Dog in the World, entitled Philosofish. Just something to fool around with.... Why don't I... validate my personas?

posted at 11:13 PM : Permalink :

 
Something Happened

The story starts when your protagonist tears down a wall.

Another character is a college professor who has been tapping your protagonist's phone.

Stuck for a story? You could try this Plot Scenario Generator. Better to twist and exaggerate some incident from you own life, though, I think.

posted at 11:55 PM : Permalink :

 
Word of the Day

antipodean (adj)

Opposite to or of another thing.

"Then, indeed, does the tuckered sylph come out in fairy form and proceed with joy under cousinly escort to the exhausted old assembly-room, fourteen heavy miles off, which, during three hundred and sixty-four days and nights of every ordinary year, is a kind of antipodean lumber-room full of old chairs and tables upside down."
--Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Love Dickens, but he wrote as if he was being paid by the word. Maybe he was.

posted at 10:42 PM : Permalink :

 
Weather or Not Report

Showers and thundershowers this evening will give way to a steadier rain overnight - a rumble of thunder still possible. Low 43F. Winds ESE at 20 to 30 mph. Rainfall near a half an inch.

This has been a winter of mostly rain, not snow, so far. I've only worn boots once, and I've only had to shovel snow once. There's a big, 50-pound sack of ice-melting calcium chloride pellets near the front door, hardly used. I'm tempted to put it down in the basement. I think if I do, though, a blizzard will blow in immediately.

posted at 8:25 PM : Permalink :

 
Random Acts of Poetry

Gnomon*

I am a clock.
I talk with my hands,
tick through tense hours.
My face: a white circle measuring
effort and waste.

Somewhere
there is a perfect Michael,
imperturbable,
easy in nature,
undisturbed by appalling events.

Finding his pinnacles and mistakes
less than a feather
on a March wind,
fluttering and spiraling
into a stiff field

of winter grass,
he confronts
nights, storms, desires, ridicule,
love and cold
with the patience of a tree,

with the calm of a sundial.

---
*According it Merriam-Webster, a gnomon is "an object that by the position or length of its shadow serves as an indicator esp. of the hour of the day [such as] the pin of a sundial [or] a column or shaft erected perpendicular to the horizon."

posted at 6:51 PM : Permalink :

 
Candle Power

Ah, the aroma of a ballpark ("fresh cut grass"), sawdust ("for the rugged handyman"), or the 4th of July ("gunpowder"). All of these manly scents can be yours with Candles for Men: Manterns Man Candles. They also offer candles that smell like beer, dirt, a baseball glove and a tennis-ball can. (I think I'll pass.)

posted at 12:00 AM : Permalink :

 
Going Down

"Is that you, Ned?" Alan asked.

It sure looked like Ned, standing in the corner of the elevator: Ned with dark, dark sunglasses and a fedora. He didn't answer; he only smiled a little, with his lips closed.

"That is you, isn't it?"

Before the man could say anything, the elevator doors rumbled open and several people got on -- too many people. Alan was pressed against the control panel, where he tried not to touch any buttons, and Ned, or whoever it was, was jammed into the opposite corner. Alan could hardly see him behind an obese man in a business suit and an old woman wearing a parka. Ned, if that's who he was, wore a trench coat, which made him look, with the hat and glasses, like a secret agent.

Alan hadn't seen Ned in years, not since losing his job in the big shake up at Klax-a-Co. Ned had been the only decent guy there -- the only one who had protested, at least a little, when the knives had come out for Alan.

It was too awkward to continue talking to Ned (or pseudo Ned) with so many silent people standing between them. Alan would have felt foolish if it wasn't Ned, and if it was -- well, they could catch up when the elevator stopped.

It was an express between the 13th floor and the lobby, and Alan felt his stomach flutter as the car began its quick descent. It was similar to the feeling he'd had in his stomach a few minutes ago, when Dick, his boss, had yelled at him about that idiotic Masterson Report. He hadn't exactly yelled, Alan realized, now that he felt a bit more calm, but it had felt like he had.

The elevator slowed, making Alan feel for a moment as if he weighed an extra 50 pounds, and stopped. The doors rolled open. Sunlight from the glass-walled lobby poured in. Alan had to step aside as the crowd brushed past, and Ned managed to get off several seconds ahead of him. He scanned the lobby, but Ned had disappeared. He had a quick impression of him getting into a taxi outside the revolving doors, but he wasn't sure.

Was it Ned? Was he in trouble again? His head felt light, like a balloon. There was a couch along one wall of the lobby, and for the first time in the three years he had worked in this building, Alan sat down on it.

posted at 11:30 PM : Permalink :

 
Whether or Not Report

Today: Sunny. Highs in the lower 40s. West winds 5 to 10 mph.

With all the snow on the ground, temperatures in the 40s will undoubtedly result in slush -- an cold, gray substance that hesitates somewhere between liquid and solid. It's ambiguous. Ambiguity is fine in art but annoying on the sidewalks. If the past is any guide, the sun and (relatively) warm temperatures will tempt me to venture out with just my sneakers on, and then the slush will make me wish I'd worn my boots. This is puddle jumping weather.

posted at 12:21 AM : Permalink :

 
Spare Me

Check out a series of surreal, minimalist watercolors by Canadian artist Marc Johns at roadside scholar. They are like mildly humorous passing thoughts captured on parchment. And they make me want to start doodling again.

posted at 10:12 PM : Permalink :

 
Word of the Day



boanthropy (n)

A mental disorder; the belief that one is a cow or an ox.

"Tea will cure your lumbago and strengthen your frail and nervous constitution. It will enhance your virility and cause your you-know-what to grow. It prevents hangnails and may even aid in cases of boanthropy, the bizarre and often mistaken belief that one is a cow." --William I. Lengeman III, epicurean.com

I've never been much of a tea drinker. I used to drink green tea for a while, because of its supposed health benefits, but the awful taste got to me. There wasn't much I could do about it; "they" say if you add milk to green tea, it obliterates the anti-oxidants. Coffee contains anti-oxidants, too, just not as many. So I started drinking more coffee to make up for it. Ha.

posted at 10:50 PM : Permalink :

 
The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Talked to somebody who attended the Sundance Film Festival today. She said she liked the film In Bruges there. Somebody else said Sundance is only for lightweight comedies. Hmm.... Speaking of lightweight comedies (ahem), Citizen Kane is playing at the Loews Theater on Friday night. Must see that on the big screen.... Interesting that the Kennedy family is split on whom to endorse. The "bigger" Kennedys, the ones that still have some of that old Camelot "mystique" about them -- that is, Ted and Caroline -- endorsed Obama; the more down-to-earth RFK branch is going for Clinton. My preference bounces back and forth like a ping-pong ball. I could vote for either of them.... It's recycling night. I like to think about all of my junk mail becoming a poetry book or, more likely, a roll of toilet paper someday.... Why don't I... talk about fictional characters as if they were real? I know someone who does....

posted at 11:49 PM : Permalink :

 
The T&T List

Black-tie event
Brown algae
bird seed
pizza
Twin Peaks
Mazda 5
Hiroshima
Risperdal
cable modem

My weekend revolved around all of the above in some way. Hints: I went to a "ball" in our new car, which was manufactured in a Japanese city. The rest mostly involved various errands, chores and time-wasters. Such is life.

posted at 9:52 PM : Permalink :