A Boy Called Bud

Ralph and Nannie Underwood had five children. My father - Ralph Jr. - and his sister - Margie - are gone. Three brothers - Robert, Jack, Harry - remain.

At the annual Underwood family reunion, after everyone has eaten, one of the brothers calls for everyone's attention so that someone from each of the families can fill in everyone else on the happenings in that branch during the past year.

Uncle Robert and his wife - who is also named Margie - celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary a little while back. So, at this year's reunion, after the reports from family members,Uncle Harry invited everyone to tell stories about Robert and Margie.

Harry told one connected to Robert's service as a tail gunner on a B-17 during World War II. With others adding embellishments, my mother told the one about the time that Robert dealt with some rock throwers who got smart with him after he asked them to stop by going off to buy the rental house they were living in and coming back to inform them that he was their new landlord.

Their son, Bob, elicited a collective "ooohhhh" from family members when he said that he had a story about when his mother was going through "the change."

One day, he said, he opened to the front door of his parents' house and heard cabinet doors banging in the kitchen. Uh-oh, he thought. As he backed down the hallway, he realized that he was about to enter a bedroom from which there would be no escape. So he scooted down into the basement.

There, sitting in a dark corner, he saw someone. It was hard to make out for sure who it was so he said, "Dad, is that you?"

"Yes, Bud, it's me."

"What are you doing down here?"

"I've been down here a month," Robert said.

Bob might say that his story was much funnier when he told it, and he would be right. Bob is a first-rate storyteller, and his inflections, quick-laugh asides and impeccable pacing cannot be captured in print.

Listening to him and the others tell their stories made me think about the gifts that come down to us.My grandfather was a fine storyteller. He passed a love for telling stories and the skills needed to do it on to his children, and they, in turn, passed them on to their children.

The nickname "Bud" also caught my attention. When I was growing up, my father would sometimes call me Bud. For some reason, the way he said it always made me feel good. Without thinking about it, I picked up the habit of calling His Dogness Bud sometimes. And, after Doobins came into my life, I started calling him Bud when I'm feeling particularly warm toward him.

I had never really thought about where my father might have picked up the nickname. But discovering that Robert sometimes calls his son, Bud, made me think that perhaps it came from their father and that my father passed it on because it made him feel good, too.

I could, of course, ask Robert, Harry or Jack and find out the real answer. But why take a chance of wrecking it? For the moment, I prefer to hold on to the image of a little packet of tender feeling called Bud traveling down through time.

I Didn't Expect to See You Here

Sparkle Girl and Doobins have named each of the playgrounds in our world. The Rainbow Playground has no dominant color - a little red, a little green, a little yellow, a little blue.

At the Yellow Playround, what is not beige is yellow. It's not as visually stimulating as the Rainbow Playground but it has significantly better drainage, an important factor to consider after a solid rain.

The other day, I offered Sparkle Girl and Doobins a choice of playgrounds. "The Yellow Playground," said Doobins. That was fine with Sparkle Girl, so we were off. We parked and began walking past the tennis courts to the playground. I had Doobins' hand in mine. Sparkle Girl had already run ahead.

"I don't want to go to the Yellow Playground," Doobins grumbled.

"Bud," I said, "the only reason we're going to the Yellow Playground is that you said that's where you wanted to go."

"Oh, yeah, I forgot," he said.

He smiled, dropped my hand and ran off to catch up with Sparkle Girl.

A few days later, it was playground time again. None of the playrounds on our play list had any appeal to me at the moment. As I tried to think of some way to add a little freshness to the experience, I remembered the playground at Triad Park. It had, hands down, the best playground I had seen in the area, and, ever since I had been there for a bird walk, I had wanted to take the kids there.

But it was at least 20 minutes away, which requires a certain momentum, and I hadn't gotten around to it yet. On this particular day, we had plenty of time.

"In the car, kids," I said.

On the drive out, Doobins said, "What color is it?"

As I do when I don't grasp his point, I asked Sparkle Girl what he meant. She had no idea either. "What color is it? What color is it?" he kept asking.

It dawned on each of us at the same time. Of course. He wanted to know what color the playground was. He could decide for himself once we arrived, I said.

On the interstate, both of them nodded off. Doobins has reached the place in his life at which he no longer takes a nap every day. When he does, care must be taken. If he sleeps too long, he may be still raring to go at midnight. On the other hand, he can be mighty cranky if you wake him up. So taking that step requires a willingness to put up with some huffing and puffing.

When we arrived at the playground, I cut Sparkle Girl loose and sat on a bench with the sleeping Doobins in my arms. It truly is a grand playground. It has three green slides that are taller than any others that I know and two more green slides that are parallel to each other so that kids can slide down side by side. It also has a climbing wall and a faux mountain that kids can climb to reach the upper level.

Sparkle Girl immediately hit it off with another girl and was zip, zip, zipping around.

After a while, the time came to wake up Doobins. Holding him under his arms at the shoulders, I turned him around so that he faced the playground. With his feet dangling, I lowered him until his feet touched.

As I gradually let them absorb more and more of his weight, I hoped for the best.

He came to.

I held my breath. Would he blow?

Not at all. As he took in the vision before him, his eyes grew bigger and bigger.

He had been transported to heaven. That was the only possible explanation.

Well, except for the fact that I was there. As my friend John thoughtfully pointed out when I recounted the story a couple of days later, Doobins must have said to himself, "I didn't expect to see you here."

And then Doobins was off.

Sparkle Girl played so hard that her cheeks turned pink. As a bonus, Doobins found that he could drink at the water fountain. He is still short enough that, at most water fountains, even the lower one is an uncomfortable stretch. And heaven forbid that I pick him up so that he can drink. This fountain had a faucet that he could operate himself.

"This water is delicious," he said.

On the way home, we saw a string of freight cars. Sparkle Girl said it was the longest train that she had ever seen.

We named the playground the Green Playground and vowed to return there soon.

Could I Get My Bolt on the Side?

Some years ago, there was a group of us at work that routinely went to lunch together. A particularly entertaining member of the group was a woman named Karen.

Pick a topic - any topic - stick with it long enough and she would reveal some habit, opinion or quick that was unique to her universe. One day, the topic at hand was personal food idiosyncrasies, such as buttering the bread before applying peanut butter. Oh, no, no, she said, she had no unusual food preferences.

A few minutes later, she said, "Well, I do like to eat Crisco with sugar."

Yes!

Although we all freely admitted that the filling of such sandwich cookies as Oreos is probably the equivalent of Crisco and sugar, it had crossed no one else's mind to re-create the filling in our kitchens at home.

Karen was quite fastidious. Letting her fingers touch a sugar dispenser that had been touched by Who Knows Who? was out of the question. Before picking up one, she would take a fresh paper napkin and wrap it around the dispenser so that her fingers touched the napkin rather than the glass.

One day, a half dozen of us were eating lunch at a cafeteria up by the airport. Karen was eating her macaroni-and-cheese when her fork hit something. She cleared away the macaroni-and-cheese to reveal a stainless-steel bolt perhaps two inches long.

The rest of us were aghast. Finding a bolt in your macaroni-and-cheese would disturb anyone. But Karen finding a bolt in her macaroni and cheese... Although no one said anything, I'm sure we were all wondering whether she was going to explode.

Not at all. She took her plate to the cashier. The cashier was suitably apologetic and offered to refund Karen's money. No, no need. Free dessert? No, thank you.

Karen was fine. Clearly, I had not been thinking of her in quite the right way.

A few minutes later, a man wearing the kind of white jacket that men who work in kitchens sometimes wear came up to our table.

He had the parts of an electric, stainless-steel cheese grater in his hands and a story to tell. One of his jobs was to grate all the cheese for the macaroni-and-cheese. A couple of days ago, the bolt that held together the machine had disappeared. Ever since, he had been grating all the cheese by hand.

This was a busy cafeteria, and macaroni-and-cheese was a popular item. Losing that bolt would have been a disaster.

The bolt that Karen had found was the lost bolt, the man said. He had come out to thank her personally. He was so excited that he had brought along the machine so that he could also show her just how the fit in and held everything together.

It's not every day that you can make someone that happy. That day was Karen's.

Doobins and the Tortilla Chips

Every now and then, you get a bag of perfect chips.

That happened to me this week. At the grocery store, I picked that particular bag of tortilla chips because, through the clear part of the bag, it looked as if all the chips were intact.

We all know, though, how unreliable the clear part of the package is an indicator. You examine the clear section on the back on several packages of bacon, pick the one that looks best, take it home and open it only to feel like a chump.

But what else are you going to do?

And sometimes you do luck out. As I did this time. One chip after another came out of the bag round and whole. This came in handy when I had Doobins. Left to his own devices, Doobins would happily live on milk. In his mind, there are two types of milk - "Ovaltine milk" and "white milk."

Ovaltine milk usually gets the first vote. But white milk is a satisfactory fallback option if his mother says no to that. Some days, getting him to eat regular food can be a challenge. I keep track of any regular food that he eats under my watch and report back. Positive news on the food front bucks her up.

With one whole tortilla after another coming out of the bag, I would be able to be quite precise - "He ate eight tortilla chips on the way over to the video store."

Doobins and I had gone to the video story to pick up "The Wizard of Oz" for Sparkle Girl. It had been a good while since she had seen it. She was ready for a refresher. In the Family/Kids section, it came to Doobins that a Thomas the Tank Engine video would be in order as well.

He picked up the illustrated box that the video had originally come in but that now served only for display. I picked up the plain box behind it that actually had the video in it. A discussion ensued. He could not understand why on earth I was insisting on getting the "clearly of no interest" plain box when the "look, there's Thomas right there on the cover" box was ours for the taking.

At the checkout, I said to the young man helping us, "He doesn't believe that I'm really getting the Thomas video."

Doobins crossed his arms and turned away from us. The young man took out the security strip that prevented the box from being opened and opened it to reveal Thomas right there on the DVD.

"Look, here's Thomas," the young man said.

Doobins refused to look.

"Thomas," the young man said.

Doobins peeked over this shoulders. His eyes grew wide. How about that!

"For a minute there, I didn't think he was going to look," the young man said.

Back in the car, there was a delay. No way was Doobins going to climb back into a child seat peppered with tortilla-chip crumbs. Doobins is quite fastidious. When he falls, it's usually not injuries that trouble him but any dirt that may have attached itself to him. Dust him off, and he's ready to go.

We cleaned out all the crumbs, including a few that I wouldn't have noticed on my own, and he climbed in.

On the way to his house, I thought about the video boxes. If I hadn't known better, I, too, would have thought that the colorfully illustrated one was the way to go. It made me think about the challenges that humans present to God.

God: "I'm telling you, this box has something of substance for you in it."

Human: "Surely, You jest. This other box has so many bright colors. I think I'll pick that one."

When I reported back to Doobins' mother that he had eaten eight tortilla chips, she said that he had eaten well all day.

So, when he said, "I want Ovaltine milk," he didn't have to settle for white milk.