by Kathy Brasby | Oct 22, 2013 | Stories
Great ideas and I do this dance which sometimes is as smooth as a three-step waltz and sometimes as clunky as mashing your partner’s toes with barn boots.
The problem of how to light the candles may have sparked a clunky dance but see what you think.
I was a small-town newspaper editor in need of a special photo for our Christmas issue. This was way before you could buy photos online and way before I had a budget to buy stock photos.
I found some elegant Christmas candles and placed them in a classic formation with a draped fabric behind. Then I set up my camera on a tripod and worked out all the angles.
Everything was going great until it was time to light the candles for the shoot.
I was at the office at 8 pm in a town where all the stores closed at 6 pm. And I didn’t want to drive clear across town to my house to get some matches.
There had to be another solution.
My car was parked 10 steps from my office door. And it had a cigarette lighter in it. I had plenty of paper in a newspaper office.
Time for a great idea.
I settled myself in the front seat of the car, pushed in the lighter, and started rolling a sheet of newspaper into a long tube which ought to ignite when the lighter was glowing red. I mean, that lit cigarettes, didn’t it?
With the tube burning, I could light the extra candle in my pocket, take it back inside, and we were ready to do this Christmas spread.
See what I mean about great ideas?
I had never used the lighter before and I had no idea how long to wait for it to pop out. It did pop out, right?
I leaned down closer to be sure things were cooking around the lighter. At that moment, the plug didn’t just pooch out of its socket, it flew into the back seat.
It zinged past my ear and bounced off the upholstery. For a crazy second, I wondered if I could just light the candle from the little fire that might ignite in the back seat.
But by the time I found the lighter, the red tip had cooled to black.
I held the lighter in one hand, my rolled piece of paper in the other, studying the situation and waiting for another great idea.
It came.
I drove home to get some matches.
by Kathy Brasby | Sep 16, 2013 | Humor, Stories
I am a careful reader and I did read that poster before I jumped in.
Free cats. On the wild side. The photos on the poster were of three lovely orange and gray cats. My son and I were running errands when I found this treasure.
We needed cats for our barn, which was constantly under attack from a squadron of field mice. I didn’t care that these cats were a little on the wild side. Better to hunt mice.
I found the girl with the cats. “Do you still have them?” I asked.
Her face should have clued me in. Body language says raised eyebrows, wide eyes and an open mouth mean surprise. “Do you want them?”
“Yes.”
“Great! I’ll tell my dad.” She scampered away and I turned to my son.
“I’ll finish up here and you go with them. We can put the cats in the car and go home.”
He followed the girl and I finished my work. When I walked into the parking lot toward our car, I spotted Son at the edge of a small group, a large cardboard box in the center.
The girl’s father snugged the last piece of shipping tape over the flaps on the top of the box as a bystander said, “If they can’t get air in there, they might die.”
The father stepped back from the box, which was tap dancing a bit, and brushed his hands together. “That wouldn’t be the end of the world.”
My son turned to me. “He had welding gloves on when he put the cats in the box.” Welding gloves are long leather armor against welding sparks. And apparently against cat weapons as well.
By now, I was near enough to hear scratching inside the box. A lot of scratching. The sort of demonic scratching that threatens to claw through trees and steel walls.
“A little wild?” I asked him.
Son shrugged. He likes cats and he hoisted the box into the back of the car. “It’ll be OK.” I watched the box shimmering with cat rebellion and muted yowls.
“What if they get through the cardboard?”
“I guess we open the doors and bail out ’til they escape.”
That was comforting.
As I turned back to the family that had advertised the cats, they were nowhere to be seen. What a shock.
And so we drove home. My kids as toddlers usually dozed off as soon as I put the car in drive – and so, apparently, did this cat trio. No sounds until we got to our barn.
We laid the box on its side in the middle of the building so the top faced away from us. We were fools but not that bad.
I peeled off the tape while my son stood guard. I’m not sure what his plan was if the cats did a u-turn. Well, maybe we were that bad of fools…
I had donned my own leather gloves and goggles before I lifted the flap. There was a pause before an explosion of orange and gray fur burst into our barn, across the floor, and out the back door. Followed by heavenly silence.
Son and I looked at each other and I brushed off my hands. “Well, that wasn’t the end of the world.”
But I do read a little more carefully these days.
by Kathy Brasby | Aug 27, 2013 | Stories
My younger brother was a high school wrestler, which made for an interesting lesson in the folly of letting siblings mature.
His first practice of the season came shortly before my visit home from college. We hadn’t seen each other in a little while and he wanted to get me caught up on things. I could tell he was jazzed about wrestling. And I wanted to re-connect, too.
“Here’s a new move I learned,” he said. We were standing in the middle of the living room with a new carpet on the floor, a good thing as it turned out. “Watch.”
Watch wasn’t really the right term. Stand still and do nothing was a better term because he put one hand behind my neck, one behind my knee, and, whoosh, had me flat on my back.
“Pinned! Just like that. And it’s really easy,” he said. He had enough maturity, at least, to help me get back on my feet without first pressing his knee into my clavicle.
I wasn’t a wimp in the athletic department. I played basketball, softball, tennis, and flag football. I rode horses and faced thundering cattle. I was no fragile piece of china. But I hadn’t ever learned a wrestling move.
There are times when a polite retreat is wise. But I was a college student. Wisdom was like a tree in the mist. Sometimes I saw it, sometimes I didn’t.
I did want to be an attentive sister so I hung in there. “It worked pretty well.” I rubbed my shoulder where I had landed.
He grinned and I wondered when my tow-headed little brother had turned into this six-foot tower of muscle. “I’ll show you how easy.”
“Um, OK.” Remember the part about wise? Not so here.
He shook out his shoulders. “Easy to do. First you grab my neck.”
Yeah, OK, I got that. I had done that a few other times in his young life. Well, maybe not the back side of his neck, though. I tried to do it his way this time. We had matured, of course.
“Then you grab my knee,” he said.
I leaned down to replicate his move. Suddenly the walls of the room swirled around me and, with a thump, I was on my back again.
He grinned, dusting his hands off. “That is how you counteract it!
by Kathy Brasby | Jul 10, 2013 | Stories
In the days before I had much money, I got myself a poor person’s cruise control on my car. In those days, I drove a 5-speed VW Rabbit and so I sweet-talked my brother, the mechanic, into installing a throttle lock.
What the system consisted of was a gadget attached to the gas pedal and another line attached somehow to the brake. When you engaged the system, the gas pedal was locked into place. Pressing the brake released the lock.
This sounds like the sort of thing a person whose brain has not fully developed yet might try out. And that was the case.
Because the area where I generally drove was flat, the system worked adequately. I’d reach the right speed, lock in the throttle, and relax. My speed would shift with any ups and downs in the road but not much.
I was now in league with those fancy-schmancy cruise controls.
So one day my sister and I took off for Denver in my Rabbit. I don’t remember why she was driving but I do remember that we had a good-sized hill to clear on the route.
When I drove, I kicked off my throttle lock when I got to the hill.
My sister didn’t.
So up the hill we climbed. Gravity being what it is, our speed dropped. And dropped.
Cars passed us. Lots of cars passed us.
We chugged our way to the top like the little engine that could.
And then we started down. We zoomed down the hill, flying past cars that had passed us like we were tortoises. Now we were the hare.
“Those people think I’m crazy!” my sister wailed.
Perhaps they did. But we got so far ahead of that pack we didn’t see any of them all the way to Denver. So it really didn’t matter.
by Kathy Brasby | Jul 4, 2013 | Stories
Jeff Goins has a great blog post on the Revolutionary Power of Words. Appropriate for Americans on Independence Day!
by Kathy Brasby | Jul 1, 2013 | Stories
In the movie Up, a dog with teeth bared moving in for the win could be distracted by the call, “Squirrel!” The dog’s head instantly rotated in search of the new prey.
That problem isn’t just with dogs. My sister and I have been struggling with the same issue.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
I recently had a couple of errands to run before visiting my mother, who is currently living in a nursing home. From the bank, I headed downtown for errand #2 – picking up a part from an appliance store. One block before I arrived at the store, I instead turned right onto Main Street and drove back across town to the nursing home.
Two hours later, I realized I hadn’t snagged the part I needed.
Squirrel!
A few days ago, my teenage son and I headed out on a day-long trip. Before we walked out of the house, I reminded him, “You ought to take a water bottle with you.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said and filled a stainless steel bottle pulled from the cupboard.
Then we got into the car and I buckled in. “Oh,” I said. “I forgot my water bottle.”
I got out of the car, headed back toward the house, and he rolled down his window. “Would you grab mine while you’re in there?”
Squirrel!
My sister is working with an essential oil that is supposed to help with distractedness. I’m calling it squirrel oil and, if it helps her, I may mainline the stuff.