No Sale



“I just don’t understand why you want to sell it,” my son pleaded with me. He was talking about my Jeep, and it sounded like he was going to cry. “It’s still in good shape and it runs good. I just don’t understand why you want to sell it.”

Since the day I bought that Jeep I’ve been regretting it. It’s terrible on gas mileage, it’s so rough that my wife all but refuses to ride in it, and above all else I can’t stand the color. Why in the world I picked bright yellow, I’ll never know. My brother-in-law says I look like a big M&M coming down the road.

I can’t even tell you exactly why I bought the Jeep in the first place. I just woke up one day a couple of years ago, found myself to be 30-something years old, and decided I needed a Jeep. I call it my mid-life crisis vehicle. I needed to do something drastic, and it was buy this Jeep or get a girlfriend. The Jeep was cheaper and got me in less trouble.

Well, a little less trouble, anyway. When I told my wife how much I was spending for the tires and the lift kit she didn’t exactly throw me a party.

But even though I’ve regretted buying it, I never really thought about selling the Jeep until a couple of weeks ago. A buddy of mine that I work with came to me with a nice offer that got my wheels to spinning. It was enough to pay off what I owe on the Jeep and leave me with a few thousand more.

My kids weren’t as happy about it as I was. “It’s so fun to ride in dad!” said one. “My friends think it’s cool that my dad drives a cool Jeep,” said another. “What about all the memories? I just don’t understand why you want to sell it,” they cried.

So I told them that’s what life is about, making a profit. Never let emotion get in the way of life decisions. Houses, cars, whatever you have. If someone offers you more that it’s worth, you take the money and put it in the bank. Everything can be replaced, and everything is for sale- even memories.

So I went down to a friend’s car lot, “Jimmie’s Deals”, to look for something to drive after I sold this one. While I looked for my next vehicle, Jimmie told me he could get way more for my Jeep than I had been offered. He took a gazillion pictures, slapped them on the internet, and I was fielding calls within hours. I’m telling you folks, this guy is good. If you want one, or need to get rid of one, come see this cat. He knows what he’s doing.

Sure enough, some guy calls me from Oklahoma and offers me way more than my buddy at work did. He sent a friend to test drive it and everything. We made a deal over the phone, and I started spending the money in my head. New dining room floor, here I come!

I sat down to call the bank for the title and stared out the back door at my Jeep while I dialed. And then it happened. As I started to dial, I looked out and saw all three kids sitting in that Jeep, laughing, hollering, whooping it up, and waving me over. The damn dog was even in there, with his paws on the dash and wagging his tail.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, because I know it sounds silly. I don’t believe in ghosts, spirits, and junk like that either. But there they were in that Jeep, plain as day. It was like the scene from Lonesome Dove, when the spirit of Deets led Pea Eye to safety.

Then I started remembering stuff. Like going through the automated car wash with my nephew, laughing and scared to death because we didn’t know if the soft top would hold up to the pressure of the water or dryer. And going mudding for the first time at Lake Somerville with my wife’s cousin- one of my favorite people to hang out with. I remembered taking my father-in-law for a ride not long before he died. We found a little mud that day too, and I had never seen him laugh so hard or have so much fun.

I remembered driving down a dirt road with the top down, and my kids standing on the back seat leaning over the roll cage, with their arms stretched high and letting the wind hit them like they were flying. And I remembered one Sunday afternoon when my wife and I went on a three-hour ride down every country rode in the county, just talking and listening to Texas country music. It was so quiet, and so peaceful, and we weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere.

All of these memories hit me in a thirty second span, and I pressed the “End Call” button on my phone. I knew I wouldn’t sell it. I couldn’t.

It turns out my son was right. Sometimes memories- even in this house- just aren’t for sale.

I still hate that damn yellow though.

You say tomato…



It’s funny how as you get older, your tastes in everything changes. Well, I don’t know if “changes” is the right word, but maybe you just notice things that you didn’t notice before.

For instance, the older I get the more I like farm fresh tomatoes, documentaries, and Bob Seger music. Good God, just reading that sentence back to myself makes me want to go put on a pair of khaki slacks and pull them up to my chest like old men do. But it’s true.

I was eating at a restaurant the other day (can’t even remember where) and they served a couple of slices of tomato on the side of the plate, almost like a garnish.

I sprinkled a little salt and pepper on them, and they were so good I made a comment to the waitress about them. She told me that the owner of the restaurant gets most of the vegetables from a Farmer’s Market or something like that, to make sure that everything is fresh and chemical free. I couldn’t get over how good that damn tomato was. I’m pretty sure that if she brought the whole thing out, I would have eaten it like an apple.

Documentaries are the same way to me now- I can’t get enough of them. When I was younger I thought they were too slow and boring. Now that I’m 3-, I mean, 29 years old, they seem more interesting to me.

Maybe the film makers are just getting better, I don’t know. But lately I’ve watched documentaries on everything from the breakdown of companies like Enron, to young soldiers in Afghanistan trying to cope with what they are going through, to a hillbilly family in West Virginia that will leave you feeling better about your own family.

And Bob Seger? That was an unexpected gem. Don’t get me wrong, I grew up in a bar so I’ve always known about Bob Seger. It’s just that I had forgotten how much I liked him. Or maybe never really listened to the words of his songs. It could just be that I’m at the age where the words of his songs are more relevant.

All I know is that I can’t listen to “Night Moves” without getting misty-eyed and remembering my youth, which happens to be slipping away at the speed of light lately.

Every now and then I have a little down time at work. When I do, I’ll pull out my phone and either watch a movie on Netflix or listen to Pandora radio, where I came across my new –found love for Seger music.

It’s ironic to me that something so new and high-tech as the iPhone 4 could be so helpful in making you appreciate something as “old-school” as documentaries and music from the ‘70s and ‘80s. I can even watch a baseball game on there, which is something else I love more and more now that I’m old.

Now if I could just get it to grow tomatoes for me.



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Newspaper Man, What’shisface



I’m terrible with names, I always have been. About half of the time I can recall a face, but 90% of the time I can’t put a name to it. When I’m telling a story, for the most part I have to say “What’shisname” or “What’sherface”.

My wife says it’s because I’m old and forgetful, but that’s not true because I’ve been that way forever.

I think I forget names and faces because I’m a very self-absorbed person- no sense in lying about that. The simple fact is that if something doesn’t affect me directly, I’m usually not very interested in it. Most people that I meet don’t affect me directly, therefore I’m not very interested in them.

I’ve made a vow to try and be better about remembering names, though. And the reason is, now I know how it feels have your name forgotten.

A buddy of mine sent me a text the other day and asked a favor of me. He delivers newspapers every night for a living, and wanted to take a night off. I spent years doing paper routes of my own, and he knew this, so naturally he figured I’d be a good fill-in.

I told my wife that I agreed to do his route for him Saturday night, and she started laughing. “Have you forgotten how much you hated waking up in the middle of the night?” she asked. “Have you forgotten how much I hate waking up so I can wake you up?”

I told her I remembered all of that, but it was just one night. Plus it was an extra couple hundred bucks. And more importantly, a buddy had asked a favor of me.

I went to high school with this guy, known him for years, even played ball with him. We both dropped gallons of sweat like pigs in two-a-days, busted our butts to get through it, and leaned on each other when the going got tough. Because I had done so many paper routes myself, I knew how hard it was to find someone to fill in for a night.

“No,” I told her. “My buddy has asked me for a favor, and I’m not going to let him down.”

One trick that I learned back when I did routes was to keep a tape of my route. You can have someone ride with you for four or five nights to memorize all the stops (and they will probably still forget a few), or you can make a tape of the route and someone can do it right the first night.

So my buddy picked me up the day before and we rode over his route while I made a tape of it. It was about four hours long, so we had plenty of time to talk and catch up.

We talked about old times, old coaches, old girlfriends, etc. We wondered to each other where this person is now, where that person is now, have you seen how big this person has gotten?

And so you can imagine how much it stung when three and a half hours into the route my buddy- the guy who I was doing all of this for, the guy who asked me to wake up at 1:30 in the morning, in the cold, and do his paper route for him with my own $20 a gallon gas, the guy who I talk to on the sideline of every football game that I cover- looked at me and said “Man, I keep forgetting your name.”

What the? Are you serious? I couldn’t believe it. I asked him how in the Hell he sent me a text in the first place if he didn’t know my name. What was my number saved under in his phone?

“Newspaper Man,” he said.

Newspaper Man. Wow.

Well, I guess that beats the heck out of What’shisname.



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Words with S-c-h-o-l-a-r-s



There are, roughly, about 250,000 words in the English language. Some people say even more, depending on what you count as a word. Evidently, I know about 17 of them.

I have this very addicting game on my phone called Words with Friends. Now, it’s really just Scrabble. J’s are still worth 10 points, M’s are still worth 3, etc. And there are still double-word squares and triple-word squares and everything else that Scrabble has. My guess is they have to call it Words with Friends to keep from giving the folks at Scrabble tons of money.

Anyway, the cool thing about this game is that you can play it against complete strangers or against friends and family if they have it downloaded onto their phones. Some folks check and update it once a day, others are checking and updating it every three minutes. I’m a three minute guy.

Up until this week, I hadn’t been playing anyone that I knew. It was all random people that the game had set me up against. But this week my aunt out in California sent me a message on Facebook that she wanted to play against me.

Now listen. I love my aunt, and she has always impressed me as a very educated, intelligent, well rounded woman. But I just knew I was going to take her down here. Hello? I’m a writer, remember? The English language is what I do.

Luckily I didn’t say any of that to her, because she proceeded to beat me like a drum. At one point she held a 70 point lead, using words like “firth”, “fane” and “dilly”. What the Hell is a “firth”? And the only “dilly” I know is a “Dilly Bar”, that awesome good ice cream thing that you get at Dairy Queen.

It reminded me of the time that my buddy’s wife beat me in seven straight games of checkers. I was devastated, and haven’t played a game of checkers since.

And it wasn’t all just four and five letter words with my aunt, either. Oh, she pulled some humdingers out of the bag. Some of them were six and even seven letters long. Sometimes she would build on two or three other words at a time, stacking them like bricks and scoring three or four different ways.

Me? Let’s just say I was limited. I’m more of a “hat”, “cat” “bat” kind of guy. Every now and then I’d get lucky and draw an “S”, so I could turn “hat” into “hats” and use the same word twice. You give me a “Q” or a “J” and I’m stuck with that joker the whole game. And unless I already have an “O” to make “ox”, then “X” is no good to me either.

Here are some other words I’ve seen on there- “chao”, “sox”, “tine”, “gilt”, “el” and “qi”. How do these people know these words? When they used the word “qi”, did they know it meant “energy flow”, or were they just guessing?

One friend that I’m playing against used the word “droit”, and admitted she hadn’t heard of it either. Turns out that “droit” is some kind of French law or constitutional right or something like that.

One thing is for sure. You lucky people will be reading a much smarter column in no time if I keep playing this game.



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