The World According to Chuck

The first day of summer brought me a haircut, a compliment, and a rejection letter. Also a sore back, and while none of this is news it sure feels like subtlety on the part of somebody. Change is in the air; don’t tell anyone else.

Rejection letter? Meh. Part of the process, although that “Not a good fit for us at this time” is getting a little old.

Now the haircut was special, considering those are rarer than seasons for me. I’ve never quite figured it out, but getting my hair cut is like flossing: I know I should, I plan to, I feel better after I do it, and still I just use Listerine and hope for the best (in this case, Listerine would correlate with stuffing my hair into a baseball cap and hoping no one notices, but the analogy starts to crumble a little).

The lady who cut my hair is a tiny thing, a woman who had gastric bypass surgery and lost 150-plus pounds and seems grateful for that. She works out of her home, a beautiful garden-y place, and she looked at eight months of growth and had me out of there in 20 minutes, very charming.

“You look 10 years younger,” she noted, “and I’m not just saying that,” but unless there was a secret ventriloquist around that I didn’t know about she certainly was saying it and of course it’s possible I looked 65 when I walked in, in which case I still lose, but I took it as a compliment.

So summer is here. Julie’s papers are all graded, John is pretty much on vacation schedule, and I still haven’t figured out what I want to be when I grow up.

This is temporary retirement, I know, a little break in a life that had become just too chaotic, but I’m getting a little restless. I invent little projects, which mostly consist of moving something somewhere else, and I look at the lawn sort of wistfully, wondering when I can mow again because it’s exercise and takes an hour, and there you have it in a nutshell: I’m watching grass grow.

So something will have to change, but in the meantime at least the kitchen stays clean, and peace reigns in this household as much as possible. I make cookies sometimes. We bought John a bed we found on Craig’s List, something that holds his 6′3 frame, and he’s happy. Julie gets to sleep late and peruse her beloved blogs over coffee, clucking and talking to herself about Dick Cheney.

And I have a haircut. And clean teeth. And a sore back, which is directly related to my teeth, since I spent over two hours in the chair at my dentist’s office while she dealt with teeth emergencies. Fortunately I brought a book from the waiting area, a Far Side collection, and so while people with real pain sought relief in the other rooms, I sat there, mouth all numbed up nice, laughing out loud at animal cartoons all by myself, thinking myself fortunate to have, for the time being, nothing better to do.

I want to note for the record that my lovely wife with her discriminating palate says that my chocolate-caramel creations do not, in fact, taste like Tootsie-Rolls, since she would not eat Tootsie Rolls on a bet. She actually said that they tasted like Frangos, which I question since as far as I know (and it’s been a while since I ate one) Frangos don’t have caramel. At any rate, Julie loved them and already is making Christmas gift plans, so I accept this as affirmation and we’ll leave it there.

Maybe my problem is that I don’t eat much candy. I can, for sure, and at times I have, but it’s the sort of calorie equation that somehow resonates with me. I could eat a fair amount of lots of foods, in other words, for the nutritional price of a Snickers bar.

So maybe I didn’t appreciate my own candy-making prowess. And I admit they really don’t taste like Tootsie Rolls; just sort of reminiscent. Actually, they’re soft, chewy but not sticky, and they sort of gleam.

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John and I did a little demolition yesterday. There’s been a swing set in my backyard for 18 years (of course there has), unswung for at least 8 of those. It was one of those jobs that seems more daunting every year; the bolts were bound to be rusty if not weather welded to the frame, and I just kept putting it off.

On Saturday, though, I had another attack of inertia. I finished clearing the last of the blackberries from the side of the house, and on walking back to the garage I passed the swing set and thought, huh. It took a miraculous three minutes or so to find the right size socket, and lo and behold the first few nuts slid off without a whole lot of effort.

And as I lifted one side off its support (I’m sure there are appropriate technical swing set terms here, but in layman language I disconnected the horizontal crossing thing from the vertical support thing) and let it rest on the grass, the weight pulled the other side, cement anchors and all, partway out of the ground.

Well. That’s an excellent start. So I had John help me, and within 20 minutes we had the whole ancient relic of the 80’s disassembled into four or five components and neatly stacked behind the plum tree, leaving us a nice big area of back lawn. And considering I mostly supervised while John provided the muscle, I had a nice sense of accomplishment. Now all I have to do is undo the rest of the bolts and haul it off, which I’m sure I’ll finish before I’m dead, but maybe not that soon.

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Finally…for complicated if thoroughly understandable reasons, starting in July I’m going to be without dental insurance for a couple of months, so I took advantage and had a cleaning today. Dr. K. was a little busy with broken teeth emergencies, so I had a chance to talk with my favorite dental office manager/receptionist/insurance biller/hand holder, Mary Lynne.

Somehow we got to talking about Garrison Keillor, and Mary Lynne told me about meeting him after one of his appearances in Seattle. This was years ago, right before his most recent marriage, and Mary Lynne’s friend had a book she wanted him to sign. Mary Lynne went along to the stage door for moral support, and as Keillor took the book her friend, nervous, said, “So, I hear you’re getting married soon!”

Garrison Keillor raised an eyebrow, nodded, continued to sign, and said, “As if it’s any of your business.”

Which is what I said to Dr. K. when she asked me if I’d been flossing, but I figure you should steal from the best…