You’ll recall my Zumba accident, perhaps.

And if you need a new reference, well, then, here you go: I took a trip on a bus this weekend to Atlanta.

Not a city bus that takes you twenty minutes or less from Wal-Mart to a museum, or whatever, where I live we don’t really have city buses. No, the bus I took was with a commercial busing company that we’ve come to know as Greyhound.

I was heading to Atlanta to visit an old friend, and do some networking, and eating, and soiree-ing, and chose not to fly, for obvious reasons, nor to drive because it made U.L. too nervous – the traffic in Atlanta Kris, he said, You’d just be borrowing trouble.

So, I found a solution: the bus.

It did not make U.L. feel any better.

The bus? He exasperated. They stab people on buses, don’t they?

As opposed to assigning seats? I asked. I don’t think so. (By the way, they do not assign seats, either. It’s first come, first served, unless you take the bus from Macon, Georgia, where last year a man was stabbed…with nail clippers, no less).

Here’s the full story, if you’re so inclined – http://tinyurl.com/d9hq9dj.

Now Kris, he began, but I cut him off. I’d already bought the ticket online.

And that’s probably where my problems first arose.

Greyhound, at least in the South, has made an attempt to go online. Which is very convenient. However, it has not felt the need to clue its drivers in on this little fact. Which is very inconvenient.

Inconvenience causes rifts between anxious passengers and bus drivers. It also makes bus drivers mean. But, of course, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to grow up to be a bus driver, so I did cut Bob some slack (the driver on the return trip home). Shay-Run, though, the driver on the trip in to Hotlanta, well, she and I had some words.

I flat-out prayed for her right in front of her face, which is frowned upon. FYI.

It turns out, she got the last laugh. She kept a part of my ticket, the part that actually gave me permission to be on the first leg of my return trip. Junior, the very Ossie Davis of Greyhound drivers, though, forgave me and allowed me to stay on board.

When I take over the world, I will allow him to live.

I think I come from good stock, patient and kind, if cautious, and understanding. But, trust me, when I tell you that I have never met a lazier, more disenchanted, unfriendly group of people than those I met with Greyhound. I would die if I were in charge of employer satisfaction surveys. These people are not only unhappy; they’re also paid to be unhappy behind the wheel of a very large bus.

I will be clear on this one point, though: they drove carefully and deliberately, and I see now that that’s their ruse, their trick.

Who cares if they’re rude or crass to you? If they’re on time and on schedule, you almost feel the need to hug them.

(I did not hug them, by the way).

I’ll start briefly with my trip out of Tupelo. The first thing I noticed is that bus stations, in general, are little pockets of third world countries, living right under our noses here in the good, faded glory of the U.S. of A.

It is, I hate to say it, a poorer, cheaper method of transportation that does not appeal to anyone who does not fit into a) a stereotype, or b) dirty pajama pants and torn sportswear. To be other than either of these two points is to draw attention to yourself which, though quite a feat in and of itself when you consider the general clientele of Greyhound, is nevertheless a bad idea.

I was, needless to say, a very bad idea.

Shay-Run picked us up in Tupelo at a station where most of the seats were stained, and there was significant discoloration along the walls where vending machines had either been stolen or they’d just given up hope like the three 80-year-old men behind the Greyhound counter checking people in, balancing their time between bus passengers and frantic people trying to wire money through Western Union.

Shay-Run immediately, after having us load our own bags under the bus, began her spiel about how to pronounce her name, that the bathroom didn’t flush, and that if we had a cell-phone, we needed to speak softly into it so as not to distract her.

The girl in front of me repeated Shay-Run, word for word, to whomever she was speaking with on her cell phone at the time, and was reprimanded.

Then a stinky, fat woman chose to sit next to me, all the while worrying about her “other baby” that she and her boyfriend of dubious background and fashion had left with his “momma.” Her T-shirt had Eeyore on it and read “Cheerless Leader.”

In this manner, my trip started.

She then began to include me in the conversation. I politely told her I wasn’t interested. And still, she sat by me. The Greyhound passenger, you see, in the wild, has developed such a necessary rapacious ability to survive under any social circumstance that they no longer are able to tell when they’re “not wanted.”

Having left my book at home, I was defeated.

So, I prayed for her, too.

Next stop: Birmingham, where it’s always stormy.

I’ll skip Birmingham, for now.

Once in Atlanta, the first thing greeting you is exhaust fumes and a man who believed he was your instant friend, and felt the need to share his colorful language with you about the “people running this country.”

It was the same on the return trip. (I assume he lives in the seat of Gate 2)

We stop, again, in Birmingham.

I’ll skip Birmingham, for now.

Fast forward to Bob. I don’t like Bob. He was my driver on the way home; Bob, who pulled two people off the bus and left them in Birmingham. One, because she didn’t have a ticket for that leg of the trip (dodged a bullet there, didn’t I?) and the other because he had a knife and apparently engaged in inappropriate behavior with an underage girl in Piedmont Park.

(You win, U.L. I mean, who are these people??)

Bob drove me all the way from Birmingham to Tupelo, eyeing me from time to time in the rearview mirror all because I asked him twice if the bus in section one (back at the Birmingham terminal) was the bus that went to Tupelo. (I’d gotten on the wrong bus back in Atlanta, and just barely escaped a forlorn trip to Cincinnati with Helen, the woman who had been standing in front of me waiting to get on the bus and was headed to Cincinnati “on account of a grandson done got put in jail.” Of her five teeth, I liked the one that jiggled the most. He had personality.

I had merely wanted to make sure I would end up in Tupelo, a place I’ve never thought of as heaven until this weekend. I was even looking forward to the nasty seats at the station because yes, they’d be nasty seats, but they be nasty seats in Mississippi, where God’s people are.

Those were my nasty seats.

Here’s a record of our exchange:

ME: “This is the bus to Tupelo, right?”

HIM: “Idn’t that what I told you?”

ME: “Well, you just pointed, and I wanted to make sure.”

HIM: “I just checked you in! Right?! And ain’t I the driver??”

ME: “I. I don’t know. Are you?”

HIM: “I think I know what I’m talking about.”

ME: “Well, I hope you do because I sure as hell don’t.”

Then, I really quickly got on the bus because I scared myself. He had a glass eye, I think. The other one was either bloodshot or glaucoma.

In case you’re wondering, it’s very uncomfortable to be stared at via rearview mirror with a glass eye and either a bloodshot eye or glaucoma.

Still, we got to Tupelo on time, and I wasted none of my own, grabbing my suitcase and leaving.

Of course, I have only myself to blame. I wanted the experience; I wanted to support American transportation. I wanted us to be cool like Europe who manages to have safe, affordable and fun bus and train excursions from country to country.

Truth is, though, I guess we’re just not ready for that.

I’m certainly not, after all was said and done. I had to take half a Xanax this morning when I saw the school bus pick up our neighbor’s kids.

But, I calmed down when I realized that they probably both had knives of their own. So, they’d be safe.

They’d be safe.

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I’m a liar. I mean, I do sleep a lot because I love sleeping so that part from my blog the other day is not a lie.

But, the part where I said I don’t watch a lot of TV?

That was a lie.

A big, fat, bald-faced lie – so called because 18^th-19^th century businessmen often grew beards to mask facial expressions when making “deals,”(Check it out http://tinyurl.com/5s9k7).

By the way, though: Props to bald people. Get a rough end of it, don’t they?

But back to me. I’m obsessed with TV right now.

It wasn’t always like that. TV just got good again. It comes and goes, and as a trendy person I notice this. It rides a wicked wave of popular, topical, social-media driven themes, I’d argue, and I’ve been known to need a Dramamine to get through more than one episode of several shows, but thanks to Netflix (didn’t see that “thank you” coming, did you?) and Hulu, not to mention YouTube’s and Yahoo!’s experimental forays into television-esque programming based on their subscribers’ likes and such, TV has never been easier to watch. 

Or harder to get away from.

So, at the risk of becoming a broken record, but also because a hit’s a hit, regardless, that’s why you listen to the same song over and over, I’ve chosen to chronicle lessons learned from another show that I can’t live without, just like Downton Abbey, The Walking Dead. (Although, I don’t have nightmares of a dowager countess attacking me with verbal insults as I repeatedly bash her head in with the broken handle of a hoe).

Also, I promise not to make a habit of these lists.

For now, though, just humor me.

Ten Things I’ve Learned From Watching The Walking Dead

1. Leave the children. They’re nothing but dead weight anyway. Point them toward the woods and tell them to run and look for culverts. Remind them ants are edible, in a pinch.

2. Don’t trust a church in the middle of a cemetery with bells on a timer. But, do take a moment to go inside and pray. It is always good to pray. Kill any zombies that are also in the church praying because they are not, in fact, praying.

3. Learn to whisper.

3a. Steal anything you like, paying special attention to essentials like a mermaid necklace or a red short-sleeved shirt that you think would “look real nice on” you. However, waste all bottled water on yourself by pouring the whole thing over your head because it’ll probably be hot that day.

4. Remember those walkie-talkies you got for your eighth birthday? Better find them. You’re gonna need them. (Steal some batteries while you’re at it).

5. Zombies tend to favor back seats. Unless they’re in a truck. Also, as a season progresses, they get a lot faster.

6. When all else fails, just have a good cry. Just find a rock, a stump, a tree limb, the back of an RV, and just sit right on down and cry awhile

7. Don’t forget to practice that whispering.

 8. Don’t drive at night in the middle of a storm when there are zombies everywhere. Or, if you absolutely have to because, say, your husband insists, to the point of ridicule, on being the good guy especially to a wayward pastor-veterinarian whose turned to drinking again at the local watering hole, then don’t get pregnant. (See #1).

 9. He who carries the gun carries the show. The problem, though, is when everyone pitches a fit because they don’t have a gun to carry, no one’s got the show.

 10. Stay the hell out of Georgia.

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Of course, I find very little to dislike with any show BBC originates, especially in Downton Abbey, not to be confused with Downtown Abbey which is not even a real place; everything about the show works, and I don’t know why – even the opening theme music creates appropriate anxiety.

Or maybe I just think that highly of myself.

Sadly, now we have to wait until next year to see the next season of Downton Abbey, but in the meantime, we can take a few moments to discuss what we’ve been taught from this British export of high drama.

Below are the lessons I’ve learned from watching.

Read carefully. There’ll be a test later.

Ten Things I’ve Learned From Watching Downton Abbey Most Of Which I’m Sure Are Historically Accurate

1.  There is no such thing as a middle class. There are only super wealthy people and then some others who look like people but are really servants.

2. Each meal must have at least eighteen different bottles of wine to accompany it. You will not ever drink more than a sip each, as a member of the elite, but you should nonetheless decant every bottle because servants like to decant bottles of wine in their spare time.

3. In a house with over 100 rooms, you will still never need to use more than the following four: a bedroom, a parlor/dining room, a library, and a kitchen, but, if you’re one of the wealthy, you will never need to go into the kitchen unless you need to scold someone, namely servants.

4. If you have to be anyone, be the Countess.

5. To say the butler did it is mostly erroneous. There seem to be only footmen, ladies’ maids, valets, a housekeeper, a cook, and Daisy. There is also a shifty Irish chauffeur whose only mission is to deflower the weakest daughter, like most Irishmen.

6. There is no point in ever owning a dog.

7. Servants.

8. The second most disgraceful thing that could ever happen to you, if you’re nobility, is that a maid should ever, ever be seen serving a meal in the parlor/dining room, even if it’s only because there’s “a war on.” She should, if anything, be left with kindling and starting a fire in every one of the other 96 rooms. The first most disgraceful thing is a tie between the alleged ease with which one would marry a first cousin and borrowing a footmen from a lesser house because he’ll drink the wine and get drunk.

9. Always make sure when you’re dealing on the black market in various hard-to-come-by-because-there’s-a-war-on comestibles in some inane attempt to swindle the upper classes out of their inherited fortunes, that you’re actually getting sugar and flour, not sawdust.

10. Trust no one named Thomas. Or Edyth, for that matter. And also don’t hire a single mother as a servant, just to be safe. Because, you know, there’s a war on.  

10a. As a lord, lady, earl, and whatnot, you will spend 80% of your time on this earth being dressed and undressed by servants. The remaining 20% will be spent telling people what not to do, or that one afternoon you spent in court on behalf of Bates.

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He wasn’t baiting me; he was honestly asking.

Granted, the context had been a Valentine’s Day activity of the sort that seems so obligatory in elementary school where everyone gets a card, even the mean kids, but humiliation is reserved for those who are a little too self-aware.

That, sadly, is a family trait we unwillingly share.

I countered by asking him if someone had been mean to him?

No, he replied. But, to tell the truth, he went on, I don’t think I like everybody anyway.

They grow up so fast, don’t they?

Because that is a very adult thing to say.

In my family, we try very hard not to baby-talk any child over the age of two. So, I was rather uncomfortably confronted with how best to respond to his question. I decided to do what an uncle gets to do: tell the truth and let the parents deal with the aftermath.

I told him, quite honestly, that it was OK to not like everybody, but that wasn’t the same as not being nice to everybody.

And just like that we had a teachable moment.

One I hope that sticks because children these days are in a sad shape. They’re not learning what they should be learning in school which I find shocking, if for no other reason than I’d spent most of my life looking at education as having one goal: teaching basics like reading, writing, etc. But, my god, it’s so much more than that, and you probably already knew, right?

We need more than just math teachers and science teachers. We need character teachers; etiquette teachers. Where are they?

Because let’s face it: they’re not getting all they need at home. Children spend the majority of their active, formative years in rooms with strangers: peers and adults. The guidance they receive often comes down to little more than a fifty-minute period, seven days a week, seven times a day where the pressure is on grades as an indicator of success.

And that’s true to a point. However, interestingly enough, I read an AP article yesterday on Obama’s visit with the leader-in-waiting of China—Xi Jinping takes the reigns in 2013—and a large portion of the article was dedicated to manners and political etiquette. Obviously, how we act in front of others still matters. A lot. Being nice to others is, it seems, still a big deal.

That’s not to say every child will be president—that’s not even possible—but what’s wrong with aiming for it? What’s wrong with looking to every day as a way to make the best impression to the greatest number of people.

The world is smaller now. It would serve us well as citizens of the best country on earth to show that we’re more than just Americans. We’re good, nice people who pay attention. Who know how to behave.

I think it’s through this kind of moral development that we learn how to be “in the world, but not of it.” I know that’s a tenet of Christianity, but even putting that aside, think of the point: being of the world is too narrow-minded, too segregationist, too problematic as a dictum of daily life. But being in the world gives you a clearer sight of those who are in the world with you. Those who live alongside you, pay taxes, make laws, and yes…even break them.

But compassion has made just as many headlines as wars have: Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, to name a few. Compassion was their weapon.

And learning how to wield starts in kindergarten.

Compassion grants us the freedom, allows us the freedom to let people get married, to let people worship who and how they want, without losing ourselves in the process. Compassion lets us be fully involved in the lives we’ve been given, not the lives other people have been given, and this is, in the end, all that matters.

To be fully involved. To make a difference by being the difference. That’s what Compassion gives us. Nobody wants to drink vinegar, not even Jesus. Maybe that’s why we have honey.

Aristotle said it best, that a life unexamined is not worth living. But it’s how we examine it, how we teach our children to look at themselves, that makes it a Life.

That’s why God created Compassion. That’s why He has it Himself. What’s the harm in having a little ourselves?

That’s what we ought to be teaching our children. If you have a child, a niece, a cousin, go on and assign them a little extra homework tonight; start with a hug.

Then, see what happens…

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I’m not really the first at anything when it comes to cats.

Especially not with the cat I have now. Her name is Lazarus, and the first person she bit was not me; it was Amanda, who then required a shot. The first person she scratched? Nope, again, it was Amanda. And lucky for Lazarus, Amanda isn’t one to hold a grudge, as the option the vet gave us that long-ago day she bit Amanda was to remove the cat’s head and test it for rabies.

They really need to find a better way to test for rabies.

Aside from having her, the cat I mean, constantly underfoot, I mostly get to sit back and watch her. And let me tell you, she’s weird. She is a strange, beautiful, biting, napping, purring, sweet, devil of a cat – I think it’s because she came back from the dead.

I mean, not technically. But Max, the dog, attacked her when she was hardly the size of soup can, and bit through her, but she survived, wormed her way into our hearts and house, and now she is bent on world domination.

Because it sure as hell won’t be a dog taking the reins of power. They’re too, I hate to say it but I will, dumb. Cats, though, keep you guessing.

Like most current world leaders.

I’ve only ever had two cats – three, technically, but by the time I entered Sugar’s life, she was preparing to leave it behind – but I feel safe in saying that of the two I’ve had, I’ve been taught a lot about kitty behavior.

Though, honestly, Lazarus is a textbook unto herself. She’s all the fun of a regular cat with the attitude of a wolf, the patience of a warthog, and the misguided belief that she’s the offspring of both, and also can fly.

She is 100%, whatever mood she’s in, when she’s in it. Max wants a belly rub, a head scratch, and he’s good to go. Lazarus, I’m afraid, wants you to figure out her mood. No hints. Just a wily stare that makes me feel like she’s thinking I could’ve gotten a better price had I gone to Fred’s.

I stay suspicious of her.

I wonder constantly what goes on in her mind. What is she thinking? Like, what is she thinking at 4:00 AM when she literally goes balls-to-the-wall wild and begins hissing and tearing through the house as if she’s realized a) she’s just a cat, after all, and it’s not going to change, and b) there are ghosts everywhere.

I envy her ability to fall instantly asleep, too. And in any position. Head under butt, tail around neck, upside down, half on/half off the bookshelf, it doesn’t matter. It looks uncomfortable to me, but she snores regardless.  I swear once she fell asleep in midair, as she crashed onto the couch, having for whatever reason decided she could not stand the idea of being on the mantle for even one second more.

She makes split decisions, like that, a lot. One thing we have in common.

She’s also an intensely coquettish cat, as cats go. She’s fully aware of how to get what she wants, except that she never gets it because I’m not a dog. I’m pretty smart. Oh, but she arches that back and swishes her tail and uses her sweetest inside purr, which in her mind, I’m sure, is the equivalent of an “I’m Sorry.”  It doesn’t work for more than, like, a few minutes, but that’s long enough for her to stab a paw through a French fry.

Though we have since discovered that she’s actually less interested in your food, say a hamburger from McDonald’s; she wants only one thing: the straw.

Amanda and I indulge her in this. We bought her an entire package of straws because, much like children, pets don’t want what TV tells you pets want. Buy her a feather-bell-stick-wand-thing for $5, and she’ll dig out an old chopstick from the garbage instead. She loves chopsticks and straws. I bundled a stash together, with a chopstick in the middle for support, and she will play with it for hours…at all hours. (Which actually says a lot more about me, as I’m obviously wasting those hours watching her play with straws and chopsticks).

We pretend she’s practicing for the Olympics, the Straw Olympics, because if we didn’t give her some purpose for the racket she makes when she’s “working on her dismount,” (you have a dismount in Straw Olympics), I’d probably have to throw the whole thing away, cat included.

She’s a sharp one. All on her own, she has figured out the reason for doorknobs. Lockable and otherwise. I found her a few nights ago, in my bathroom cabinet, which she’d opened with the use of one hypodermic claw – I watched her do it – and crawl inside, up to the top shelf, where she enjoyed a roll of toilet paper. (I didn’t see that part happen because I wouldn’t have stood there and let her rip it to shreds. I don’t think).

Amanda is worse about that kind of thing, than I am. She, in my opinion, doesn’t scold Lazarus enough.

I’m all down for the Squirt Bottle Technique – I used it once on my nephews – but Amanda, bless her heart, will give up after half of an attempt of a hand swipe and buckle under the cuteness factor. Oh look, she’ll say, Look how cute it is when she jumps up on the counter and knocks the fruit tray on the floor, or, I didn’t like those curtains, anyway, or, Oh, Kris, it’s one pair of shoes. You can buy another. And now you know not to leave them out.

As if I’m the one who needs to learn.

Which brings me back to my original point: cats will rule the world. Because, in the end, we are the ones who learn; they are the ones who teach. We coo when they purr; we curl up with them when they decide to crawl up into our arms. They’re really good at training us because they know how selfish we are as creatures of our kind.

 A little attention and we melt.

Of course, we better just get happy about it, and be thankful of the one blessing that really matters the most – that they still choose to use the litter box.

Though I fear that day is coming.

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Which is hard to believe considering the bladder problems I’ve always had.

It wouldn’t have mattered, either way; my family doesn’t talk about such personal things, choosing instead to overlook them with polite parentheticals. Should an uncomfortable topic arise in conversation, we are likely to smile and pass it off with an “Is that so?”, but not in an encouraging way.

Inflection is key in asking a question without looking for an answer.

It’s an art form, actually.

Likely, had it been an issue, they simply would have spent a fortune on new sheets and bed spreads, and I would never have been the wiser…except—that awful guilty feeling you have waking up in your own, you know, pee.

Or urine, if you prefer. But, let’s be honest, there’s no way to talk about this without using one of those two words, so buck up.

I do, however, recall one incident in which I did wet the bed.

A family member had died, as they tend to do on occasion, and we had a house full of company, and not just random-hitchhiker company, either. This was strange-relative company which, as you know, is far, far worse because they come spending the night with a sense of entitlement.

I had given up my room to some random cousin-couple (read that as you wish), and was crammed in the front guest bedroom, where no one, not even Day or Night, or Guests, ever went. I have never understood the convention of giving up your own room for company. Is it because it’s a noticeable sacrifice that you hope makes your company feel, at least, a little bad? Or, Is it because you know you never clean the guestrooms and instead, they become extended closets, and so you’d be embarrassed to have other people see it?

I guess we’ll never know.

I was uncomfortable all night long, and when I woke up, it was of little surprise to see that I’d wet the bed but good. A change of sleep patterns is indicative of increasing bedwetting chances. If nothing else, this room would get cleaned now.

U.L. took it all in stride, though. (Which is the “up” side to being raised by the Last Great Victorian – confrontation of any kind is to be avoided). But, he was also a wonderful surrogate father. He was gentle and compassionate. And I think, I like to assume, that because he didn’t scold or embarrass or implicate me in those delicate mishaps, that it helped me overcome them—be it bedwetting or something I suffered with far worse in my early days: stuttering.

I still felt awful about it. He reassured me, certainly, but he was concerned. And though it wasn’t perhaps meant, what I eventually began to take away from these bedwetting moments, even as few and far between as they were, was the fear of one question: What would people think?

And that, I’m afraid, is what cemented in my young brain.

Case in point: last night’s dream.

I’m at a school, preparing for class, that I was suddenly told I had to teach. The room is quickly filling up with eager college students; I’m a nervous wreck. The room is crowded, and noisy. I decide that if we all take our shoes and watches off that it will settle us. So, everyone does. I have chosen to show the entire third season of Roseanne and have everyone write haiku about the plot. A student hands me a Thums Up, also known as the Coke of national choice in India; it goes straight through me. My bladder is literally about to explode.

I don’t know what to do. I’m in the middle of class. So, I call former TV-star Jay Thomas, by pressing a button on the wall by my podium—he was obviously a popular person at this school—he steps into relieve me for a few moments. I run down the hall and find the bathroom, but it’s entirely full. There are no available stalls and I can’t use the urinals because I sit down when I pee, we all do in my family as it’s impolite to be heard using the restroom.

I’d even warrant that we’d rather just die of kidney failure than to use one. (After this dream, perhaps that will change).

I wait and wait and wait. A stall finally opens. I rush in and turn to close the door, except it won’t shut. I’m nearing desperation. I try everything. Finally, I kick the hell out of it and it catches the latch.

Whew.

I begin to unbutton my pants when I realize that even though the door is latched, it doesn’t meet the wall of the stalls. There is an inches-wide crack all around the door. I can see everything; everything can see me.

I simply cannot pee in these conditions.

So, I do the next best thing. I wake up. At first, confused—I’m not really a Jay Thomas fan—and then it dawns on me: I really have to go to the bathroom.  My brain was trying to both tell me and not allow me to abandon my Victorian ideals, not even for a wayward second. It woke me up, instead.

It wove a dream involving two of my worst fears:  sudden teaching (the educator’s actor’s nightmare), and having to pee when I don’t have the time to. Don’t laugh; I secretly think that’s everyone’s fear.

The point is, it woke me up, first.

And when I crawled back into bed, I did so amazed at the lengths the human mind will go to steer you in the direction of your upbringing.  I was grateful, and then mad about it.

I couldn’t get back to sleep for admiring how smart my own brain was.

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And let me tell you something. When you give a lot of money to a cause, it is no longer a fad.

It is a fact, i.e. We now have bicycle lanes.

The thing is, it’s catching on. I went downtown, before Christmas to buy a book for my brother-in-law, a book I swore I’d never look at it, let alone, pick up—Dubya’s Decision Points—and I swore for a moment that I’d taken a wrong turn off Lafayette St. and ended up in a suburb of Tokyo. I was shocked to see how many people were pedaling.

I was pleased.

So pleased, in fact, that I asked for a bicycle for Christmas, and got one.

And now we’re entering Day 15 of The Stand-Off.

To be sure, I wanted to ride it. And, honestly, I did. Just down the road to the church on the corner and back, which very nearly killed me on both sides. My legs had no trouble, but the rest of me did. To put it lightly, I didn’t pedal with a happy heart. I was angry at the bike, at myself, at the fools who put a church at the bottom of a hill, in the first place. Even a small hill.

And then, I got in trouble. Casually mentioning how brave I was in getting on a bicycle after mgmhm years, I was stopped, mid-sentence, and scolded: Did you have helmet on?

“No.”

“You can’t ride your bike without helmet.”

“Ok, sorry.”

“I’m serious. You need a helmet. And you probably ought to get knee pads, and maybe elbow pads, too.”

Which is why I don’t usually cash in on a fad. There’s no end to what you need to buy. A helmet, I understand, but by the time I’ve put on the rest of that garb, I’m be too tired to even look at the bike.

But, this is the great marriage: Going Green means Safety. And I couldn’t argue with that.

And, this is the great Adulteress to that marriage: Vanity. Because I wasn’t sure I wanted to look like a half-breed Pod person, just for the sake of getting some outdoor exercise on my bicycle.

Until I remembered the alternative.

My first bicycle was electric blue, weighed more than I did, and the handle bars were literally a part of the bike. They weren’t adjustable. They rose so high from the neck that had I been smarter, faster, and more coordinated, I could have hooked a blade to the bottom of my bike and cut my neighbor’s yards while trimming those pesky low-lying tree limbs that hung too close to dangerous power lines.

But, nobody has legs that strong. And even my freakishly long, Abe Lincoln arms couldn’t reach higher than the flimsy crepe myrtle branches.

Which factors prominently in my story.

Because, ever the curious child, I trained myself to pedal without holding onto the handle bars up to a certain speed, for the sole purpose of trying, with all my eleven-year-old might, to pull off the small, miniscule bulbs from the lower branches of the crepe myrtle trees down by the start of the driveway.

Then, I would pretend they were magic beans and I’d have to—you know what, never mind, that isn’t important to the story.

Now, you must understand, I grew up out in the woods. Not raised by coyotes, necessarily, though they did what they could to the chickens. So, they were more like those neighbors. My point is, what’s a helmet to a kid who, on occasion, had to round up stray, discontented cattle?

 I’d made my mind up, this particular Saturday morning, and I was going to start all the way over in Nana’s yard, get going at my fastest speed, and in one quick fell swoop, would let go of the handle bars and grab every single bulb on both trees, at one time.

I’d never done that before; I’d just soft-pedaled my way around the crepe myrtles up by the house. And so, I wasn’t thinking of how I’d then have to re-grab the handle bars, once I’d succceeded. I wasn’t one for thinking things through.

As U.L. put it, I “wasn’t but book smart.”

Do you know anything about crepe myrtle trees, by the by?

They’re a smooth bark, with a thick base off which spring whiplike little branches that make the world’s best switches, or so I’ve been told. They’re flimsy and flexible; they don’t have any trouble at all, going with the wind, wherever it may go. And they’re sturdy and can leave a right smart slap to your skin.

That is something I learned that day about crepe myrtles.

I never made it past the first tree. My handle bars got caught in the first branch, the bike fishtailed, I went flying off the banana seat, leaving my Members Only jacket in the top part of the tree, somehow. I fell hard onto the gravel driveway, face-first, and slid a few inches more into the dirty culvert, in the ditch by the second crepe myrtle.

The best part, though, wasn’t the myriad gashes and cuts I suffered. The best part was how the tree and the bike, in collusion, mocked me. Looking back, my bicycle looked as if it had simply been parked by the tree. Wheels on the ground, handle bars locked in a loving embrace with the branches.

Only I looked a fool. And as my bruises and cuts began to heal, I also looked like a poor, neglected child, much to U.L.’s dismay.

 In short, I’m going to buy a helmet this weekend.

 And I thought you should know why. It’s not because of any fad.

 It’s because of my face.

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They were replaying, in conversation, a blow-by-blow of what they’d done earlier that morning: sledding. It doesn’t snow here the way it does “up north.” The threat of a half-inch closes down most businesses and schools.  We’d gotten several inches, actually.

And they had gone sledding.

And they were talking about it.

One guy said, “Yeah, I hit you pretty hard.”

Another guy said, “Yeah, you did.”

They laughed at that. Then, said the exact same thing again, using different words, and laughed again.

From where I sat, they seemed to be having a really good time talking about nothing. Or rather, the same thing.

It prompted me to say to Thomas, who was with me, that I wondered exactly what it is we talk about. Do I ever say anything worth talking about? Not just between me and Thomas, but between me and you, me and the world, me and everything.

I really couldn’t answer.

And Thomas, being a good friend, wasn’t going to a) encourage me in the irony of talking about whether or not I have anything worth talking about, and/or b) tell me the truth.

But, he understood.

Maybe there’s not even really a problem, here. Maybe it isn’t about what you say when you’re with your friends as much as it’s about being with your friends.  Still, it takes a few brave people to hang out, and then say nothing the whole time, wouldn’t you say?

On the other hand, everything you say can’t be a pearl of wisdom.

The issue, then, is striking a balance.

I’ve noticed in myself—because this hypersensitivity to blabbering didn’t just raise its head yesterday—that I do talk about myself a lot. I do. In almost every conversation I enter into I find that I try at almost every moment to correlate whatever it is we may be talking about to myself.

I do this for several reasons: equal disclosure, familiarizing myself with subject matter, using myself as a safe example. That’s what I tell myself, at least.

I’m sure the people on the other end of the conversation don’t see it that way, per se.

And yes, OK, OK, sometimes I bring the subject back to myself to maintain a modicum of interest in conversations, especially those I find boring.

But, then, don’t we all do this? Who can pay attention forever? Not me.

Perhaps, we should take a moment and dissect a conversation, though.  

A conversation is two or more people engaged in a point of interest with either corresponding  or opposing views. (I threw that “opposing” in there, although technically that’s called an argument). In general, one person offers a statement; the others then add to it or redirect by offering a separate statement, right?

Am I close on this?

In Speech, I used to teach the old formula that Communication (which is, in its most basic form, a simple conversation) = a Speaker  (Information) + a Medium + a Receiver– as little Noise/Interference as possible.

In that formula, I’m afraid I’m the Noise/Interference, much more often than I’m the Receiver. Because people in general bring a lot of “noise” with them: cell phones, distractions, menus, time constraints, make-up, it’s an endless list dependent only on the environment in which the conversation is being held.

I, at least, recognize that I’m responsible for a lot of my own “noise.”

First, it’s hard for me to concentrate, even with big ears. I say I listen too hard, but maybe that’s a plain, good, old-fashioned lie.  I do listen for too many things. And so, sometimes, I pick up the wrong indicators, and respond to a minor point, or no point at all, in a conversation.

I often miss cues.

The other day I was at the theatre, helping build the set for our upcoming production of The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee; I play Panch, who doesn’t sing because I don’t sing during the cold months if I can help it; the temperature is too hard, too thick on my vocal cords.

We cycled through several topic-strings, one in particular involved my recent trip to Orlando and the E.T. ride at Universal, which led to technological advancements in amusement park attractions, which then jumped to The Goonies and Martha Plimpton and Stand By Me and the fate of those boys in the movie both literal and cinematic and then here’s what happened:

Paul, the director, was in heaven stabilizing a platform for the pianist; heaven is what we call the upstairs part of our stage. He said, “I wonder what the significance of the M&M’s is.”

I had the perfect, made-up response, and said, “It’s all marketing. E.T. had Reese’s Pieces, so The Goonies took on M&M’s.”

I was wrong on a lot of accounts. I knew for instance The Goonies had successfully secured a coup with the Baby Ruth, and assumed I’d just forgotten the scene with the M&M’s. (I hadn’t. There are no M&M’s in the movie); I also incorrectly thought that the movies had come out in the same year. (Again, no. E.T. – 1982; The Goonies – 1985). I also thought we were still talking about E.T. and The Goonies. (But, we were not).

Paul was referencing a scene in the musical.

They were gracious enough to not call me out on it, but I think it’s because I’m already considered a wild card in conversations, as in, God only knows what Kris will say, just keep talking. He’s a few sandwiches short of a picnic, but he’ll laugh at anything, so roll with it.

So, I rebounded by laughing, naturally, as if I’d made a joke so funny and of such wit and internalized reference that to explain it would render us all fools for not having caught it in the first place. (That rarely works, by the way; instead, I just come across as weird and eccentric, but not the cool, fun kind).

Yet, when I think through the many conversations that I’ve had, I’m not sure I’d change anything, really. Maybe I didn’t always understand everything being talking about; maybe I faked it; maybe I meant it; maybe I gave good advice, or talked about myself the whole time. Maybe I’m just a conversational hazard.

I don’t know. I can’t remember every conversation.

But, what I do recall is that I was there, with you or him or her or us or y’all. I listened, you listened, we listened. We shared; we disagreed; we agreed.  We gossiped; we stood up for ourselves; we sympathized; we misheard, whatever.

When the dust settles in the years to come, all we’ll really remember is that we went sledding, we went to lunch that one time, we worked on the set, we talked about movies, etcetera.

We’ll just remember that we were together.

Period. 

And really, that’s all that’s worth talking about…

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 It seems that Santa has a very thin line of discussability (today’s word du jour). Either you are six, or thereabout, and Santa conjures up images so explosively potent that you have to lock yourself in a bathroom until the feeling passes, and though the whole messy Santa business only lasts for about twelve total hours on the night of his imminent arrival, you still swear to heaven and everywhere else that you will do anything, anything!, if he just brings you what you asked for; or, you’re in your thirties and all you remember about Santa, in retrospect, is how he was nothing but a figment of some adult’s imagination manipulated into a vehicle for behavior modification, and the only thing your parents ever agreed on…and all for an evening’s worth of peace and quiet. (For those children who could even go to sleep Christmas Eve).

And for us, that evening, it seemed that learning the Truth of Santa was pretty much the definitive moment in which we stopped being kids and turned our faces toward that uphill climb to adulthood.

 So, with that in mind, I’d like to turn back and look at a brief timeline of a few moments in my own life, through the eyes of what Santa (as well as Christmas) Has Done To Me, childhood to manhood, or whatever it is I’m supposed to call what I’m doing nowadays. Perhaps I can show that Santa’s not the only “bad guy,” or bad idea, when it comes to Christmas.

1. Age 5 – The whole family should have seen trouble on the horizon, when I knelt lovingly beside the tree and approached, with due caution, an enormous box wrapped in themed paper. This gift would single-handedly set a precedent within my own life that I was destined to meet, time and again. I was a gentle child, one who didn’t rip into gifts, like my other rude cousins. And after the dust of gold bows and the Frosty-and-Rudolph-playing-in-the-snow wrapping paper had settled (FYI: Frosty and Rudolph never played together in the snow. They never even met), there sat a brand-new Easy Bake Oven. Within the hour, I’d burnt my first batch of miniature sheet cakes. But they all ate them without saying a word.
2. Age 8 – We got out of school early; 60% day. U.L. dropped me off at Nana’s; she wasn’t expecting me yet. Uncle Moon was outside, chopping wood (remember how we used to have to chop wood?), told me the door was open, to go on in. I did, and there in the hallway closet was Nana, carefully placing presents on the top shelf. We had an awkward stand-off, and then in true family fashion, she looked me squarely in the face and said, “These are your gifts from Santa. So…just, leave them in here.” I was confused. She mistook that for realization, and continued, “You’ll still be surprised. It’s not like you know what we got.”
3. Age 10 – A time-worn tradition in my family has been to let the children help make the candies, munchies, etc. a week before the Big Day that will adorn all the tables at Nana’s and U.L.’s houses during Christmas week. Typically, these foods have included haystacks, thumbprint cookies, bacon-wrapped parmesan breadsticks, but above all else, divinity. Our family’s secret recipe for divinity actually belonged to Uncle Moon; I can’t remember much of it, sadly. It involved boiling water, a greased serving spoon, and a lot of patience; that much I do recall because patience is something I didn’t have much of, back then. Things that fell under the category of Little To No Patience included, but were not limited to: playing Risk with my cousin Carrie, participating in the annual family Christmas play (I was always Joseph), and divinity. You couldn’t drop but a few white clumps in the water at any given time because they “each needed breathing room.” I found the idea of breathing room a waste of time. Add to this that I preferred divinity to most of the people in my family, and what you have on your hands is a child that should not be in the kitchen making divinity. The only child, as a matter of fact. Everyone else had gone on an Easter egg hunt. That’s right: an Easter egg hunt. I’d actually hidden eggs in the yard to lure them away from the pending divinity. My plan only partly worked. The other children were gone, but then, I dumped all the remaining ingredients into the boiling water which elicited two responses: a) a sheer and immediate reaction not altogether pleasing from Uncle Moon, and b) no divinity for anyone, at all.
4. Age  12 – I never asked for anything, really, for Christmas, ever. It wasn’t out of some bizarre sense of selflessness, or an act of charity. I just never really could figure out what I wanted in time. This led, naturally, to a series of Christmases of random, uncharacteristic gifts from my family, desperate that I should have something beneath the tree both from them and from that pipe dream of a man called Santa. It started at the with the Easy Bake, I guess.  And then, age 12, I woke to find a full drum set, glossily painted red, already set up, waiting for me to do nothing more than summon up my best John Bonham impression and take to the tom-tom. (This soon proved to be a huge mistake, and the cymbals and drumsticks disappeared. The remaining pieces of the drum kit I turned into planters for asparagus ferns). Other gifts , in no particular order, were an early-form, prototype BeDazzler; all the Nancy Drew mysteries in hardback; an Ewok village with whole families of Ewoks; Laurel and Hardy ventriloquist dolls (I actually liked these); and, my personal favorite—a microscope with hundreds of slides, as well as a frog in formaldehyde that, according to the instructions, I was all but expected to dissect.
5. Present Day –I just turned 34, and though it may seem silly to say, there’s one more tradition that continues, even though I’m as old as I am. Despite the treacherous history many my age have had with Santa, I still get a gift from him. U.L. never fails to put a gift (or two) under the tree, a small card attached that reads, “To: Kris, From: Santa.”  It’s just that now I help wrap it the night before; it’s become a ritual. U.L. and I sit up Christmas Eve, we drink some Red Hot (a quick little cider recipe Nana made up), he pulls out the package(s)—they’re pre-sealed, at least—and we wrap them together, sip on the cider, and remember how important Family is. Last year, he handed the wrapped gift to me and asked if I wanted to actually fill out the card, but I said, “No. I’ll let Santa do that.” With a twinkle in his eye, U.L. said, “Fine, but remember, I can’t drink milk, so just put out a Sprite.” With that, I put some tea cake cookies on a plate, grabbed a Sprite, set them both on the hearth,  and went to bed.

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I’m not sure how, but I think it’s probably very important that we ask ourselves this and learn how knowing what type of finger-pointer we are unconsciously dictates our lives.

I was first brought to the attention of the power of the finger not, as you might imagine, by a rude driver showing me his emotional state caused by my “granddaddy” style of driving along our nation’s roadways. No, I was first trained in Finger under the generous auspices of the good people at Walt Disney World. I worked there through the College Program back in 1997.

The good people at Disney wasted practically no time in alerting us to the dangers of single-finger usage.

In other words, Don’t point. It’s, like, the rudest gesture on the planet. Like, everybody everywhere gets mad about being pointed at. Those may not have been Penny’s actual words—Penny was the name of my Disney Coach and it has been a few years back—but the gist is the same. It’s universally rude to point. And with the exception of offering the hand signal for “A-OK” in front of Brazilians, you’re pretty much safe to never, never point using only one finger.

Instead, we were strongly encouraged to double up on the fingers. There were those, naturally, who cared more than I did, and opted for loftier heights by using their entire hands to point guests toward bathrooms, popcorn kiosks, and the ubiquitously unfortunate length of most every queue in the park.

I needed variety, however, and so I never used the same hand-stance twice, unless I was caught off-guard like that time that insufferable little eight-year-old girl wouldn’t, would not, stop asking me How many nails are in Cinderella’s castle? How do you know? Have you counted all of them? So, you can’t really know how many? (I mean, on and on and on).

I came dangerously close to using what we secretly referred to (and prayed to God would eventually become acceptable) as the Half-Hand gesture, or, in layman’s terms, a Fist.

I left Disney knowing perfectly well the meaning of fingers and what they said (or didn’t) in daily conversation. For a short while, I became obsessed with observing how people used their hands, which I think subconsciously took deep root in my own physical behavior. (Nana, of course, thinks excessive hand usage a weakness in men; I, now, of course, cannot stop using my hands in excessive ways).

I hadn’t really thought about it, recently, though, until I was in Piggly Wiggly on a very real, very serious search for turnip greens. Which you’d think were just laying around in the aisles in a southern grocery store. (They were not, and I was both grateful and frustrated about that).

I got sidetracked, as I’m wont to do in a grocery store (one of my favorite places to visit), though, and found myself on the aisle dedicated mostly to dry cereals and marshmallows; sometimes, I can’t help it, but I just keep buying cereal. There were three people also on this aisle and for some reason, I noticed how they were searching the shelves: the old woman was all but frenching hers, (but then, old people have trouble with holding their tongues in), and with her left hand, she was softly spirit-fingering the items, as if she might magically cause the items she wanted to disappear from the shelves.

The young, college-age guy was closer to me, face-to-face with a box of what I consider to be grossly misleading “delicious” cereal bars. His method of pointing involved the rarely seen two-handed framing technique where you hold your arms up, bent at the elbow and create a sort of movable box between your opposing index fingers. It was hard to look away from him.

At the other end of the aisle was a woman, a buggy, and a child that preferred not to be quiet. She held one hand aloft, all fingers curled beneath the palm except the index and middle fingers and bounced them item to item. Your guess is as good as mine as to why.

I couldn’t help but wonder: what kind of finger-pointer am I? Is it something I do every day, or only when I’m besotted with so many variations on a theme, i.e. fifteen brands of cornflakes, that I’m unable to pull out of a drunken stupor, standing before item after item. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism. I have no idea. And I didn’t have time to think it through because suddenly, everyone had a use for fingers: sifting, fiddling, choosing, and I wasn’t sure I fit in.

I thought I shouldn’t be here, so I had to convince myself that turnip greens could wait, what I really needed was a sheep ricotta in case I made lasagna accidentally. I honed right in on the international cheese section, despite it’s being hidden in the back over by the frozen fish, and before I knew it there beside me was a middle-aged, middle-stressed woman, searching over the very same cheeses.

She picked up cheese after cheese, looked at the ingredients, tapped the product with her whole hand of bejeweled fingers as if that might rearrange the calories per serving, and then replaced the cheese. It was distracting, but in true gentlemanly fashion, I fought fire with fire. Having not yet settled on my own Personalized Finger Profile, I was forced to combine the three I’d previously seen and gave the cheese a spirit-finger-two-hand-framing-bouncing once over.

It worked and then, it didn’t. The woman left, perhaps wondering if I’d had a small seizure when faced with so much cheese, and in her hand, the last of the sheep ricotta.

I didn’t like that one bit.

(I gave her another finger for that, though).

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