by Kathy Brasby | Oct 7, 2019 | Family, Humor, Stories
This all started because I wanted to find a simple parking spot before the baseball game.
My son had invited me to attend a Colorado Rockies game.
Panorama by Timothy Brasby
With the baseball field in downtown Denver, parking can be a challenge. So I got online and found a deal so that we weren’t hassled by parking drama. He’d found great seats so surely I could find great parking.
We wound our way through the narrow streets in the downtown area and, finally, thanks to Apple Maps, found the spot. We parked in a relatively empty parking garage. That was a clue.
“Is this a residential area?” my son asked. Well, yeah, maybe so. Where was Coors Field anyway? Neither of us knew.
The online site had offered a 9-minute walk to the stadium for only $4. Since track and field has conquered the 4-minute mile, obviously a parking spot a mile away would take only 9 minutes to travel.
The online ad claimed a short .3 mile stroll. Apple Maps insisted it was a mile. Apple Maps knew.
My son was a good sport. We had strong legs, and the weather was beautiful. Away we went.
We crossed the street near a bar blasting music that would incite riots or serial killings. Yep, residential neighborhood for sure.
And then we saw a banner across an alley, warning “No Alchohol Past This Point.” Why would you keep alcohol out of the alley?
We found out shortly. First, we noticed that a Budweiser semi and a Busch semi were parked head to head on the street. The Busch truck had an open stage at the back end with some guys in delivery uniforms hammering on electric guitars and head-banging the lyrics. The Busch band?
Then a gaggle of guys wearing lederhosen and toting tankard filled the street before us. Being a polite baseball fan, I came to a complete halt before I ran into the groups heading for a booth.
There was a line of booths. I did not know there were so many kinds of beer. Booths for the well-knowns and booths for craft beers. And, of course, stalls for Wienerschnitzel and pretzels.
We had stumbled onto Oktoberfest in downtown Denver.
The Rockies’ mascot, Digger, came by.
Baseball memories were being made in the stadium and we were not there.
I wondered if Apple Maps had miscalculated. Maybe she sent us to Austria.
We had kept a 12-minute-mile pace before, but now we were sidestepping whole packs of people. We could see Coors Field in the distance now, like a mountain peak rising out of the mist.
This wasn’t the first time I was glad my son was 6’1” and lifted weights. Not to protect me but to plow a path through the crowd. People weren’t rowdy, but there were a lot of them. An ocean of people milled between Coors Field and us.
Three blocks later, we broke free, hustling into the open street where Coors Field rose majestically before us. It was almost as good as topping a 14,000-footer in the Rocky Mountains. Well, better since it’s really, really hard to conquer a 14-er, and we had accomplished this.
We could hear cheering. We were a little late, but we had made it. We stretched out our walk toward the main gate, ready to cheer on our baseball team.
“Did you notice?” my son said as we left the Oktoberfest crowd behind.
I glanced back at the Wiener schnitzel swarm. “What?”
“The Rockies are playing the Brewers tonight.”
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by Kathy Brasby | Sep 23, 2019 | Family, Humor
I found our one and only pool table at a yard sale. Bargain time! Only $25 and I got the table, the balls, cue sticks, even chalk. The people at the yard sale were willing to deliver it. That should have alerted me.
My patient husband hauled the pool table home for me and didn’t make snide remarks. We had room in our basement, and I knew this would be fun for our family.
And we played pool for at least a month before everyone lost interest. 
An ignored the pool table morphs into other things. It became a perfect place to throw outgrown clothes and appliances that quit working. There were at least two fried toasters in the pile. And why would you toss used batteries and used cereal boxes there? Imagine how this once-proud pool table had become a flat trash can. We were cruel to its heritage.
One day I had enough. I listed the pool table for sale. Finding all the balls was a challenge, but we found the last two under a workbench by the cat hair.
I asked $35 for the pool table even though I paid $25 at a yard sale. It was a slate top pool table, and I hoped that would help get it sold.
A young man showed up with his buddy. He examined the table and did a fist pump. “Slate! I can sell this table anywhere for $200.”
I smiled. I just wanted it out of my basement and wouldn’t mind getting my $25 back.
“Would you take $30 for it?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Well, I need to come back with a pickup. Could you hold it for me?”
“If you pay today.”
He studied the table and his buddy. Perhaps the $200 dream loomed before him. “I wonder if we can get it home now.”
They bustled around like a hen with newly hatched chicks. Their eyes lit up when they counted all the cue balls, even the hairy ones.The little boxes of chalk were a special bonus, I could tell.
Then they grabbed an end of the table and began pushing. The air was blue with words I didn’t want the kids to hear and the guys sweating before they and the table emerged from the basement.
I almost felt guilty that I didn’t help.
Grunting and groaning like a mama pig in labor, they hoisted the pool table onto the top of their car. The table legs stuck in the air like a dead bug.
“We’re good now,” the new buyer assured me.
They tied the table onto the top of the car, running the ropes through the open windows, and then stood for a long moment admiring their work.
At least I thought they were admiring their work. I quickly realized that they had tied their doors closed. After some discussion, the guys decided to worm their way around the ropes and through the open window.
Soon they drove away with their car windows tied open and the pool table jutting into the sky.
They had a plan for big bucks but, after watching their first steps, I think my $30 sale was safer than their $200 dream.
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by Kathy Brasby | Sep 16, 2019 | Family, Humor, Stories
In those carefree BK (Before Kids) days, I imagined baking cute birthday cakes for future kids. My mom used to make little train cakes with gumdrop windows. The train cars perched on licorice rails with a green coconut base. So cute. I knew it was in my blood.
I bought a puppy cake mold before I had kids. My first cake using that mold was a pile of crumbs that I shaped like the foothills of Colorado. Drizzling icing on top was supposed to mimic snow. I hoped nobody would notice because I didn’t have time to bake another cake.
One first-birthday cake was supposed to be a bright soccer ball but looked more like an egg that had fallen from the second floor.
Before Pinterest Fails were a thing, my cakes were trailblazing the way.
As some of the kids got older, they didn’t ask me for cake decorating advice. They invested time in 4-H cake decorating units. Kids can be wise sometimes.
One daughter learned how to decorate a one-layer cake for her first project.
She baked her show cake the afternoon before it had to be entered at the county fair. When the edge of the cake wouldn’t release from the pan, she solved the problem by cutting away the perimeter.
Most of the entered cakes were 8” round, but hers was more of a 5” lumpy. She slathered on icing, but it was like trying to hide Mount Everest under an ice cream cone. No champion ribbon that year.
Another daughter was the creative sort who felt stifled by the rules for the unit. When she was required to form a mat of frosting stars, she didn’t understand why the cake couldn’t show through. It would be like hiding the tuba in the marching band.
No blue ribbon that year, either.
Our son, at age 10, signed up to learn cake decorating and even went to a workshop where he and 25 girls learned the fine art of placing dots of frosting on waxed paper. This, of course, made no sense to him until he licked clean the frosting after the workshop.
We found out later that he signed up so that he could be in charge of the family birthday cakes. He figured if he’d finished cake decorating, I’d let him make the cakes.
Maybe to up his game with the frosting. Many family birthday cakes had a finger lick on the side before we got to the candles.
I never caught him in the act, but I suspect this had been a goal for his life since he was four.
His show cake came together on a hot summer day with frosting that needed a lot more sugar than he put in the bowl. Imagine a lava flow sliding across his design.
The lava-icing flow continued until he got the cake to the fairgrounds. His frosting border was supposed to be a circle but resembled the outline of Texas.
No blue ribbon that time either.
But his father bought back the cake, took it home, and served it to our family. Oh, yeah, everybody ate a piece.
We haven’t had any cute train cakes in our house, but one good thing has come from all this cake-decorating training: along as there is plenty of frosting, our family is content with a pile of cake crumbs.
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by Kathy Brasby | Sep 9, 2019 | Family, Humor, Travel
This story is true. I know this because the person who told it to me heard it from somebody who might have been part of the story. Or not. You know how that goes.
But it’s a good tale so it ought to be true. This is the influence of the internet on our lives, by the way.
This account took place in the early 1970s when polyester pantsuits were becoming the rage.
A pastoral conference was held on the border between Texas and Mexico. Three pastors from Iowa took their wives to the seminar. The men went to the day’s meetings, and their wives went shopping in the border town of Mexico.
In those days, beautiful leather goods and silver jewelry could be purchased even in a pastor’s salary. The women wandered from booth to booth on the downtown streets.
While shopping, the wives found themselves along with several other women swept up by police and thrown into the local jail.
It seems that prostitutes in the early 1970s in this little town had also embraced polyester pantsuits, which was, of course, what the Iowa wives were wearing. Looking stylish and all that.
So the pastors’ wives looked like the local prostitutes.
The police were doing a routine roundup. The prostitutes went through this often. They all had their license for their business and soon were all released with a small fine.
And there sat the Iowa women with no prostitute licenses. If you’ve ever bathed a cat, you have an idea what their mood was. Fangs could have been bared, but the police were playing cards in the other room.
No license, no release.
So the women cooled their heels in the Mexican jail all day.
When their husbands finally got out of the day’s conference, they had to do some searching to figure out where their wives were. But they eventually traveled into the little border town.
“Get us out of here!” their wives said, all nice like that cat with soap in its eyes.
So the pastors went to talk to the police chief. He was firm: no license, no release.
There was probably help through the US Embassy or some other US agency, but it was already night.
“We can’t stay in this jail all night,” the wives said. Their narrow eyes warned the husbands of dire future repercussions. The men needed no imagination to understand.
The husbands agreed. This jail was no place for their stylish wives. Offers of money to the police chief were spurned. He was a law-abiding police chief. No bribes allowed.
So the husbands huddled. Surely their conference had strengthened their problem-solving abilities. Three heads ought to be able to figure out a solution. They brainstormed frantically above the growls coming from the jail cell.
The men came to a solution and made a pact: no one could know, especially their wives.
And that’s how three pastors from Iowa bought Mexican prostitution licenses for their stylish pantsuit-wearing wives.
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by Kathy Brasby | Aug 12, 2019 | Family, Humor, Stories
In the days before I had much money or sense – OK, I was still in my 20’s, and that’s the best explanation I have – I got myself a poor person’s cruise control for my car.
This was back in the days when you could drive a dinosaur or, in my case, a Volkswagen Rabbit.
My Rabbit had a red racing stripe down the sides, but it was no sports car. You’d think a Rabbit would be fast, but this one was a hatchback. Not fast.
And who names a car Rabbit anyway? Volkswagen, obviously.
My brother is a mechanic, and so I sweet-talked him into installing a throttle lock. Cost me some chocolate chip cookies, as I recall.
The system had a gadget attached to the gas pedal and another line attached somehow to the brake. When you engaged the button, the gas pedal was locked into place. Pressing the brake released the lock.
It seemed safe to me. All I cared about was if it worked. And it did. My brother was good.
I don’t think you can buy them today. They might be a tad bit perilous now.
I thought I was brilliant at the time. Because the area where I generally drove was flat, the system worked adequately. I’d reach cruising speed, lock in the throttle, and relax. My pace would change with any slight rises or drops in the road but not much.
I was now in league with those fancy-schmancy cruise controls at a fraction of the cost. Cost of the throttle lock plus chocolate chip cookies was less than $100. Sweet deal. What could go wrong?
So, one day, my sister and I took off for Denver in my Rabbit. I don’t remember why she was driving, but we had a good-sized hill to clear on the route.
Those of you who know Wiggins hill on I-76 can visualize our trip.
Whenever I drove, I disengaged the throttle lock when I got to a long incline.
My sister didn’t.
So up the rise we climbed. Gravity being what it is, our speed dropped.
Cars overtook us. Semi-trailers whipped by. Snails pulled ahead. Sloths waved as they left us behind.
We chugged our way to the top like the little engine that could.
We took a long breath at the summit, like a mountain climber surveying the ridges after an arduous climb.
And then we started down. Gravity being what it is, the Rabbit transformed. Once progressing at a turtle pace, the Rabbit turned into a rocket.
We zoomed down the hill, shooting past the sloths. Racing by the snails. Whizzing past the semi-trailers. Cars were quickly a blur in the rearview window.
“Those people think I’m crazy!” my sister wailed.
It didn’t really matter because we never saw any of that fleet again on our trip.
I’ve been thinking about that car, though. It could be faster than a speeding bullet and more sluggish than a lumbering sloth. Volkswagen called it the Rabbit but maybe a better name would have been the VW Chameleon.
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by Kathy Brasby | Jul 22, 2019 | Family, Humor
You know how these projects get started. It’s like If You Give a Moose a Muffin. First, you want a muffin and the next thing you know, you’re buying pool noodles.
Mine got started when I opened a kitchen cupboard to notice a two-quart bottle holding about two inches of gray powder. Like this bottle had beamed in from my neighbor’s house or something. Why hadn’t I noticed this waste of space before?
Worse than one useless bottle was the other jars also holding minuscule amounts of things. Pasta. Petrified cranberries. Old keys. Green lumps.
You get the idea.
Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash
I dumped contents I couldn’t identify and found jars that actually matched. The cupboard shelves look marvelous now. All labeled and sweet.
New problem: the big empty jars loitering on the counter. I didn’t have room to bake, so I did consider making the loiter zone permanent. But that’d never fly with my cookie boys.
I have a closet of sorts where I put extra jars. Because I would rather write about it than do it, I have ignored this closet for years. There are quart, pint, and half-pint jars perched on shelves with more laying on top of jars. Quit cringing.
I have my first baseman glove close by when I open this closet.
It was a Saturday morning, and I really had lots of exciting things scheduled, like watching a movie, reading a few chapters, eating fudge – important stuff like that.
But maybe I should find a place for all those jars hogging space on my countertop. I got the softball glove and eased open the door. Landfills were more organized than this closet.
I started unloading shelves. That would save a lot of glacier sliding.
Going for the sympathy angle here, I have to tell you that I had a lot of jars. I’m talking innumerable. Countless. Profuse. Multitudinous. I’m closing the thesaurus now.
Buried at the back of one shelf was an instruction manual for a landline phone from 2004. We haven’t had a landline in eight years. There is history in that manual. I’ll bet the kids remembered that phone and would want the manual as a nostalgic reminder.
I uncovered a little fountain with a plug-in pump. It didn’t work, but I think it was a birthday gift from one of our kids. Maybe Mother’s day. More sweet memories.
I found notes for the dishwasher we installed in 2006. A memoir of our early years in our house.
There were six pint jars labeled, “Peach. ’09.” I remembered the box of peaches that I’d turned into peach jam. Apparently, I hadn’t remembered long enough to serve any of it.
You know the cans of cranberry sauce you can buy for Thanksgiving dinner? You slide the can-shaped sauce onto a plate and slice it. Well, ten-year-old peach jelly looks just the same. Slice and serve.
I now have two different cupboards organized. But I reminisced over the items hiding at the back of the shelves.
So I called one of the kids. She’s married now, a responsible adult, but maybe I could still trick, er, influence her.
“Hey, I’ve started a time capsule for you. I found the most amazing gems in the closet,” I told her.
“Really?” She sounded more like I had called to tell her the grass needed to be mowed.
“I think you should scoop them up to preserve all those memories.”
“If I come over, Mom, it would be to scoop those things into a trash can. And I think you can handle that yourself.”
Kids. You teach them to think independently, and what do they do? Not collect vintage peach jam, that’s for sure.
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