Bring on the Acorns

Each year, it seems as if a different tree wins my Best Tree of the Fall Award. There's a gingko in Home Moravian Church's God's Acre that's a strong contender on the years that I remember to go look at the right time and happen to catch it just right.

Often, I don't.

Most years the winner ends up being some maple tree that catches my attention repeatedly over a period of days as I go about my life. One year it was a maple behind the Tavern in Old Salem that His Dogness and I walked by every day. Another year, it was a maple on Broad Street in the Washington Park neighborhood that I drove by on the way to work.

This year, the winner, unless some tree I have yet to notice wows the judges, will be a small maple planted along the sidewalk near where I park my car at work. The reds and yellows of its leaves have been particularly vivid, and its spiky branches stick out every which way like the hair on some rambunctious 4-year-old boy. It looks like it's happy, and, for a moment at least, that makes me happy.

I don't mind the touch of sadness that fall brings early on. I just don't like what follows. The coming of cold means that, sooner or later, my toes are going to start complaining about being cold. And, when my toes are cranky, the rest of me follows.

Also the coming of the cold means that I won't see Mr. Whitfield so much. It's true that I can go knock on his door anytime, and sometimes I do. But much of the richness of the friendship comes from seeing him out on his porch as His Dogness and I come and go and saying hello or going over for a little visit.Come winter, I might go a day or two without seeing him. One of the pleasures of spring is finding him out on his porch regularly again.

Whenever we go over to say hello, Mr. Whitfield disappears for a minute and returns with a treat for His Dogness.I don't recall His Dogness ever turning down one of Mr. Whitfield's treats. I cannot say the same of the food that I offer him. This can be particularly maddening when special treats, such as leftover pot roast, are on the menu.

Some summers back - back in the days before I had air conditioning - I once threw out some meat that he had snubbed under the oak tree out back because I didn't want it rotting in the trash can. I discovered then that once something is in the dirt, His Dogness considers it a delicacy.

So now, if he turns down meat a couple of times, I go ahead and toss it under the oak tree. Sure enough, when he discovers it, he considers it a four-star find. If his attention is elsewhere as we pass by the tree, he may not notice it right away. So, now that we can count on going out at least once during the night, I sometimes find my groggy self wondering what on earth has caught his attention at 4:30 in the morning.

And then it will come to me. Oh, yes, pork loin au terre.

Mr. Whitfield and I agree that, this year, the oak tree has produced more acorns than it ever has while we have been around. And they sure are coming down. When, there is no wind, it sounds like sniper fire. I hear a pop and then the sound of the acorn whistling through the leaves. When the wind is blowing hard, as it was last week, it can sound like a machine gun.

I keep waiting to be bonked on the head with an acorn. As I'm standing there waiting for His Dogness to eat his pork au terre, I sometimes wonder whether standing in one place increases or descrease my chances for being bonked.

You may be wondering where this is all going. As far as I know it's not going anywhere. When I started out, I was hoping that it would all come together. But that doesn't seem to be happening.

That happens with me sometimes with the bedtime stories that I make up as I go along for Sparkle Girl and Doobins. I just start out with Frank the gorilla that doesn't like bananas or Jerome the giraffe that likes to go driving in the countryside with the top down on his convertible and see what comes next.

Sometimes, to my amazement and delight, it all works out quite splendidly. Sometimes, I find myself scrambling to get out of trouble, such as the time that I had to enlist the help of some beavers to build a dam to save a depressed mountain from being washed out to sea. Other times, we get to the end and not much in particular has happened, and there's really nothing to be done about it.

So I just say "The End," and we wait to see what happens the next time.

The End.

Little White Pumpkins

So Sparkle Girl and I were riding down Acadia Street when she announced from the back seat that she wanted some more of the miniature white pumpkins like the ones she had last fall.

Those were the best, she said.

Last year, we bought pumpkins at a church down the street. The people there had laid out hundreds of pumpkins in the grass by the playground. Off to one side was a cluster of little white pumpkins that were just the right size to fit in little palms. The people at the church hadn't put out pumpkins this year, so going there again wasn't an option.

We rode along a little more as I thought about where we might go.

"Oooh! Oooh!" I said. "I know!" (All those exclamation points are to let you know that I was speaking with great enthusiasm.)

Excited by the possibilities that my enthusiasm seemed to promise, Sparkle Girl leaned forward in her seat.

"What?!?!" she said.

"We can go see if that church on Reynolda Road has little white pumpkins."

She sighed and leaned back into her car seat.

"For a minute there," Sparkle Girl said, "I thought you were going to say something interesting."

I Think I Can See China

At the Fat Cat gallery in Madison, Garnet and I met a woman in - I'm guessing - her 70s. Back in the spring, she was crossing the street when a pickup truck hit her.

This would seem like a bad thing. And it was. Her injuries included a cracked skull.

But it turns out that it was also a good thing. While they were scanning her to determine the extent of her injuries, they found - uh-oh - a spot on one of her kidneys.

Further testing showed that it was the sort of thing that could kill you if left to do its work. But they had found it early enough that the prognosis was more benign. They removed it by surgery, and, as far as they know, she is going to be OK. Her injuries are healing as well. The trip to the Fat Cat was her second excursion out into the world for fun since the accident.

They told her that the thing on her kidney was the sort of thing that often goes undetected until it's too late because it doesn't produce symptoms in its early stages. So being struck by a pickup truck may have saved her life.

"There are no accidents" is one of those sayings that you hear from time to time. And, in this instance, that would appear to be a distinct possibility. The accident served a purpose.

It would have been nice, though, if she hadn't had to pay such a high price for the life-saving information. It's too bad that angels in charge of delivering such messages can't just send a card with a nice illustration and a brief message inside. "You might want to go get your kidneys checked. Signed, Gabriel."

A lot of times, though, you not only don't get a card, you also don't get any discernable sign that a higher purpose is being served. The accident just seems like an accident.

Recently, I was standing on the sidewalk by the parking lot at work talking to my friend Betty. When it was time to go, I looked left. No cars there. I looked right. No cars there.

I stepped into the street. I should have looked down, too, because I failed to see a pothole. I stepped directly into it, twisted my left ankle and went sprawling. Cracked my left knee on the asphalt. It hurt. A lot.

Vying with the pain for my attention was embarassment. Aieee! I had just fallen down in public. I got to my feet as quickly as possible. A guy on a motorcycle pulled over to make sure I was OK. I'm fine, I said and hobbled across the street.

Other people I didn't know asked after my health.

The truth didn't make for much of a story so, after the first few times, I took to telling people that Betty had pushed me.

Hearing about the Madison woman's accident brought my accident to mind. When I told Gwenn Lance, who owns the Fat Cat, about it, she said that she had once fallen down five times within a period of days. One thing about it, she said, she had gotten much better at falling down.

Who knows? Maybe getting better at falling had saved her from being seriously injured in one of the later falls. And maybe stepping into the pothole on that particular day kept me from stepping into it on another day when I was pressing my luck with traffic. Maybe, on that day, I would have fallen directly into the path of a oncoming car.

Betty would have really had a story then, eh?

Doobins Goes to the Fair

Sparkle Girl loves the decorated vegetables, the cotton candy, the giant pumpkins, the giant slide, the carrousel. So we had no question about whether she was going to have fun as we headed out to the Dixie Classic Fair.

I had to stop by the bank for cash so we ended up approaching the fair from a different angle than we had last year. This led Sparkle Girl to worry that I might be toying with her and that we might not really be going to the fair.

“This isn’t the way we drove out last time. Are you sure this is the way to the fair?” she said more than once.

“Yes. I’m sure,” I said more than once.

Doobins we didn’t know about. When he is sweet, he is very sweet. But when he is a pill, he is a big pill. And, last year, he decided shortly after he arrived that he did not care for the fair. No, he did not. This was an opinion that he shared with us more than once.

The first sign that this year might be different – aside from the fact that he didn’t start crabbing right away – was his ready acceptance of Sparkle Girl’s offer to have some of her cotton candy.

Doobins can be quite stubborn in his unwillingness to try new foods, and our assurances that he will like something carry zero weight with him. So we didn’t even bother to try to sell him on the cotton candy by saying that Sparkle Girl was offering him virtually 100 percent sugar.

She made the offer. He tried it. He liked it. He asked for more.

My. My.

As we walked around taking in the fair, he pointed out a friend of his from preschool – something that he had never before done out and about in the world.

When we went to look at the decorated cakes and cupcakes – one of my favorite things to do at the fair – he zipped from display case to display case, calling to Sparkle Girl to come see this wonder and that – a cake shaped like a butterfly, a cake decorated to look like a table-cloth covered table set for dinner.

Before, whenever he has had the opportunity to ride a carrousel or other ride, he had declined, not always graciously. At Kiddieland, he said that he would like to ride the miniature train with Sparkle Girl. He smiled the whole time as it circled the track three times.

When it was time to eat more substantial fare, he split a hot dog with Sparkle Girl and returned again and again to our basket of fries for a ketchup-dipped fry. Whatever it is about the fair that makes people want to eat and eat had infected even Doobins.

The smile that had appeared on his mother’s face at the earlier wonders grew even grander.

Doobins wasn’t ready to try the Ferris Wheel so he and I found a spot to wait and watch nearby. Because of the line and the loading process, a noticeable amount of time passed before we saw them rise into the sky. He remained engaged in the bright world around him. And, when we moved on to the racing pigs, he waited patiently for the races to start.

Until that night, I would have told you that never would I buy a toy from one of those booths at a fair because you get so little for so much.

But when Doobins mentioned – not for the first time – that he really wanted a plastic trumpet, I gave the man $3 and was happy to do so. No doubt the day will come when the squeaky bleat of that will make me go mad but it was a joy to hear from the backseat as we drove home.

There in the backseat, he single-handedly squished a spider that crawled on him. Sparkle Girl was most impressed. When I announced that it was a red-letter day, indeed, for Mr. Doobins, Sparkle Girl suggested that we make it a yellow-letter day because she likes yellow better.

Back at the house, Doobins decided that the day had come to put on his pajamas all by himself for the first time. The pants went on without a hitch. With the top, he made a tactical error and tried to put his arms in through the neck hole. When we tired to offer suggestions, he said, "No! No!" and stopped off in a huff.

Thank goodness. He had been such a delight for so long that I was starting to worry.