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Tag: true stories

Let’s Hear It for the Gecko Supergirl

September 29, 2009 • • 1 Comment

I was out on my run this afternoon when I saw a car stop in the middle of the road. The woman behind the wheel jumped out, frantically looking at the pavement under her car. I slowed and turned to make sure she was okay and saw that she was shooing a small gecko away from her car and toward the sidewalk.

Another car sped past, bearing down on the gecko. The woman screamed and jumped back, but the gecko managed to run clear. After taking a deep breath she began trying to catch the gecko again. At this point I had to help. I jogged over and bent down in the road to try to catch it myself. “Is this a pet lizard or something?” I asked, trying to make sense of the situation.

“I just don’t want it to die,” she said.

We couldn’t catch the lizard, but we were able to herd him across the road, over the curb and into the grass beyond the sidewalk without anyone getting hit by any cars. She grinned and said, “We did it!” before high-fiving me and hurrying back to her car.

I’ve stopped in many a road to help a turtle amble across without getting hit, but never a gecko. I’m not even sure how she knew it was there, but I have to say I was impressed. One could debate the wisdom of slamming on brakes and stopping in the middle of a busy road to help a 1-inch lizard scurry across to safety, risking not just car but life and limb.

But I won’t.

I’ll just say, let’s hear it for the Gecko Supergirl.

And, Gecko Supergirl (whoever you are), thanks for the reminder that all us creatures deserve safe passage across the highways.

At Thundercloud

January 13, 2009 • • 3 Comments

I watched the guy behind the counter make my sandwich. His head bobbed up and down to the rhythm of some obscure punk tune recorded fifteen years ago. It doesn’t matter the year, Thundercloud always just seems like fifteen years earlier.

He glanced up. “Mayo?”

I nodded. “A little.”

He squirted the mayo on the sandwich, wrapped it and said, “Chips and soda?”

“Yeah.”

“Seven fifty, bud.”

I handed him a credit card and watched him ring up the order. He came back holding up the receipt. “You need this?”

“Nope.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re probably not going to have to prove you bought a sandwich,” he said, laughing at his joke as he started to drop the receipt in the trash.

I smiled too, trying to imagine the absurdity of such a situation.

“Unless,” he said, stopping his movement and looking again at the receipt, “you need an alibi.”

I looked from him to the receipt in his hand.

“You never know,” he said offering the receipt.

“Maybe I should take it.”

He nodded as he handed me my sandwich. “I’m just saying. You never know, y’know?”

The Texas Capitol

January 31, 2008 • • Leave a comment

I took this shot of the Texas Capitol about a year ago while walking around downtown with my camera on a clear and lovely February day.

Things come to mind…

When I worked downtown, I used to eat lunch on the lawn surrounded by statues and trees, statutes and lawmakers.

One week back in the early ’90s, word had gotten out that Willie was going to play a free show on the south steps. It was a Sunday afternoon, I think, and I decided to check him out. I rode my bike down to the capitol and waited with the small crowd. Finally, Willie came out and stood in front of the single microphone. He had no band; it was just him and Trigger, all beat up and full of holes.

He played a solo acoustic set that included many of his most famous tunes. I remember the weather was beautiful, the crowd was happy, and Willie seemed so pleased to just be making music for a small group of fans in his home city. Afterwards, he stayed up on stage while people passed him boots, belts, LPs, guitars, and posters to sign. He joked with the audience and didn’t leave until he’d signed everything that anybody wanted signed.

In college a budy of mine and I used to rollerblade in there at night, gliding through the silent halls.

Spinning under the dome is kind of cool too.

And I think of Star Wars: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” (I’m not talking about that Willie show either…)

Curiosity Blew Up the Town

December 6, 2007 • • Leave a comment

When I was teaching at a junior high, I once had a kid ask, “What does e=mc2 mean?” Clearly, whatever point of sentence construction I was elaborating on wasn’t sinking in with this kid.

“Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared,” I said as I underlined a predicate.

He squinted his eyes a bit, probably wondering whether or not he could trust an English teacher on this, but then nodded and jotted something down in his notebook. He looked up again. “Okay, what’s the speed of light?”

I stopped and looked at him. “186,000 miles per second.”

He nodded and scribbled the equation in his spiral, his number two pencil working madly. “Whoooaa,” he said, looking up.

“What?”

“That’s a lot of energy. Even if the mass is just 1.”

I nodded. “Yes, it is.”

He stared at his notebook, trying to make sense of the enormity of those numbers. “I mean, you could probably blow up a whole city with that kind of energy, right?”

I think the next few sentences we analyzed were about nuclear bombs.

Red River

November 20, 2007 • • 5 Comments

A few months ago, my wife and I were on our way to a party her company was hosting at a downtown club. We had had dinner and had some time to kill so we stopped for a pint at Bull McCabe’s on Red River. We sat at a rickety table on the porch, enjoying the springtime weather and watched people walk up and down the street, drifting from club to club.

The homeless shelter is right around the corner so along with music lovers, there tends to be an abundance of homeless people mingling about the area, often indistinguishable from the music fans until they ask for a handout.

One guy, probably in his mid-thirties, came shuffling onto the porch. He wore a few extra sweaters under a grimy red coat out of which a white cable grew like a vine that terminated in his ears. I wondered if he actually had an ipod under there somewhere.

“Hey,” he said, walking up to our table. “You got any cash?”

My wife and I shook our heads. “Sorry, no.”

He stared at our beers and looked back at us. “What about them?”

I shrugged. “No cash.”

“Can you charge me a beer then?”

“No.”

“Aw, come on, man, you can just get me a beer. I won’t bother you. You can afford another one.”

I didn’t say, yes, I could afford more, and had he asked, I might have bought him a burger, but he just stared at us, clearly annoyed, small muscles ticking beneath his face. “What do you do for a living?” he asked, his voice challenging, likely trying to prove to us that we made enough to buy him a beer.

“I’m a teacher,” I said.

His body language changed with that last word. He relaxed, making me realize for the first time just how wound up and intense he was under all those used-up old clothes. He took a polite step back. “Aw, man, I’m sorry. I won’t bother you. You have a good night. You’re good people.”

He backed out of the bar and smiled at us again as he shuffled down the street, leaving us to wonder what teacher he had had that made such an impression on him that he refused to bother a teacher. I also wondered what would have happened had I been an investment banker.

Old Photo Friday

April 27, 2007 • • 4 Comments

I got this shot of Honolulu, looking out towards Diamond Head in July of ’79. During that summer, we moved from Washington, DC to Subic Bay Naval Base in The Philippines, but the journey was as exciting as the destination since we had a three-day layover in Hawaii.

I was between 2nd and 3rd grade, but all through 2nd grade we had studied Hawaii. I learned all about the various islands, King Kamehameha, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the humu­humu­nuku­nuku­āpuaʻa, and had even tried poi. We were in Arizona visting my grandparents when we found out that we were going to get to go to Hawaii.

I was very young, but I remember it all very clearly. I think it was the combination of spending a year studying it before actually getting to go that had the effect of searing it all into my mind. Unfortunately, I was recovering from chicken pox and had some kind of infection on my foor that prevented me from getting to go to the beach, but we saw quite a bit of Oahu anyway.

And If They Ban Me from Their Gym

January 25, 2007 • • 1 Comment

Just plodding along on the treadmill at the gym listening to the ipod go through the big shuffle, something happened when “Sailin’ On” by Bad Brains came screaming through the headphones. Perhaps it was the speed-of-light intensity of Dr Know’s guitar racing to the end of the world against HR’s vocals, but suddenly, I wasn’t moving.

When the song finished, I reprogrammed the ‘pod to play Rock for Light and immediately I was thrown into that chaotic world of early eighties hard core punk where no band seemed to ever play faster or with more passion than Bad Brains whose punk fueled Rasta love was the hardest, most searing music I’d ever heard. I kept speeding up the treadmill, and extending the time. The music kept me moving, a big takeover, and when I looked down my feet looked like they weren’t even moving so extreme was the disconnect between sound and light in that strange return to Heaven.

Not until I ran out of songs did I want to stop, but I ran much longer and much faster than usual. Good thing I don’t have the whole album on the ‘pod. I could see myself speeding the treadmill beyond all reason and flying off into the ski machines behind me. That would have been so punk rock stage diving cool in a suburban thirtysomething kind of way, but then they might have banned me from their club.

Old Photo Friday

January 5, 2007 • • 2 Comments

This sunrise was taken from the summit of Mt. Monadnock, New Hampshire during the summer of 1988, just before we moved to Texas.

It was the last thing I did as a Boy Scout and it was probably the coolest. We started hiking to the summit around 3am and arrived just before dawn. All around we could see the tops of other mountains poking out of a sea of clouds.

It’s the best sunrise I’ve ever seen.

How Wonder Woman Taught Me About Santa Claus

December 23, 2006 • • 1 Comment

Last year’s Christmas posts about the various holiday traditions still stand whether it’s decorations, Christmas music, movies and TV, or food and drink. We even packed up the pups again and drove to Orange for a few days with my in-laws, though we’ll be back in Austin tomorrow for Christmas with my family.

Perhaps I’ll post a picture of this year’s tree, which relies on a far different decorating strategy than last year, though it’s still the same artificial tree.

Until then, the tale of how I learned that Santa was really my parents…

One day in the mid-70’s, seemingly months before Christmas, but possibly only a few days I snuck into my parents’ closet looking for a place to hide from whichever kid had been designated as ‘It.’ I crawled across piles of shoes and boxes and as I neared the back, I discovered some paper bags.

‘It’ was getting closer and things were happening fast, but I noticed a Wonder Woman action figure in one of the paper bags. I thought it odd that my parents had a Wonder Woman action figure, but I wasn’t going to lose a game of hide-and-seek worrying about it.

I forgot about the whole thing until Christmas morning when I saw that Santa had brought a Wonder Woman action figure to my little sister. Odd, I thought, but I filed it away until I could investigate further.

Days must have passed in which I tried to avoid the truth, but eventually I had to know. I entered the closet and snuck to the back. Naturally, there was nothing but open space. No paper bags. No Wonder Woman. No more Santa.

When I brought this up to my parents, they let me join the conspiracy and asked me not to tell my younger siblings. It only took a few minutes after that to figure out the truth about the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, and the Great Pumpkin.

Let’s Watch a Carl

December 20, 2006 • • 4 Comments

Note: This post is part of the Carl Sagan Memorial Blog-a-Thon in honor of the tenth anniversary of Sagan’s death.

When I was a kid in DC, I used to love visiting the Air & Space Museum. I collected everything I could get from NASA and thrilled to the images that came back from the Vikings, Pioneers, and Voyagers. I also watched Cosmos even though I didn’t understand half of what Dr. Sagan was talking about.

What I did understand, what came through loud and clear, was that sense of wonder. That awareness that there were whole worlds happening out there. Here was a man who was humbled and in awe of this grand universe of which we’re only a small part. But here, too, was a man who wanted to know all the mysteries of the universe, who seemed to be seeking knowledge for its own sake and yet possessed of a desire to share that knowledge as if in sharing it he could fill us all with the kind of wonder that makes one recognize the preciousness of life.

I gained much from joining Carl on the deck of the Ship of the Imagination over the years. I found a love for knowing, not to be a know-it-all or to amuse friends with an impressive command of trivia, but for the kind of knowledge that fills the soul, fires the imagination, and makes us whole.

As an adult, I read Cosmos and Billions & Billions and was struck by not just his passion for scientific discovery but by his compassion for his fellow beings. One thing he said or wrote (I can’t remember) that has always stayed with me was something to the effect of “if we find life on Mars, then we must leave and not go back because then Mars would belong to the Martians.” It’s this desire for knowledge, this thrill of exploration tempered by a profound respect for and love of life that I most admired about Carl Sagan.

There’s another Carl connection in my life. When I was first getting to know the woman I would later marry, we found ourselves in a video store uninspired by the shelves of recent releases. Finally, she said, “Let’s watch a Carl.”

“A Carl?”

“You know. Cosmos. I love that stuff.”

I couldn’t believe it. Something in me knew that I’d found the person I wanted to share my life with. Here was someone who was as moved by the vastness and wonder of the universe as me. Someone who had gained at least a part of that from Carl Sagan.

I hadn’t seen Cosmos in years, but we rented “Blues for a Red Planet” and fell in love cruising with Carl on the Ship of the Imagination.

Thanks, Carl.