Wherefore Art Thou Appreciation of Me?

Now that finals are finally over, I’ve decided that I hate Shakespeare.

I know, Mom. You’ve told me a hundred times. The Plain White T’s have told me a hundred more. Hate is a strong word. But you know what? At the moment I really, really, really don’t like him.

Saying something so bold might be the kiss of death for a writer, but I’m going to throw it out there anyway because the guy has consumed so much of my life the last several weeks that I can never get back. Ever.

I get that Shakespeare is in many ways the Holy Grail of wordsmiths. I understand that drama as we know it is what it is largely in part to Shakespeare. Simply put though, I don’t enjoy reading his work, which kills me because Shakespeare in Love was such a great movie. But there are too many glaring holes in his work that I just can’t get past. I can think of three off the top of my head. Check it:

1)      With Othello, Shakespeare pretty much created the first stereotypical black male literary and stage character. Othello snatched up the hottest white woman in all the land, gave her a good smack down in front of his peeps, and then *SPOILER ALERT* killed her. Where is Al Sharpton when you need him? Or Jesse Jackson? Spike Lee?

2)      How many times does a grown man need to utter the phrase “how now?” More importantly, why is it that every time I read said phrase my mind was overtaken with the uncontrollable urge to finish with “brown cow?” That’s not very conducive to learning.

3)      Rambling on and on is not okay nor does it make for fun reading, even if you create super-duper cool names for it like “soliloquy” or “aside.” At the end of the day, you’re still just the guy that stands at other peoples’ cubicles and wears out his welcome by talking too much.

Perhaps this sudden revelation of mine stems from having been forced to spend so much time reading, rereading, listening to the play on Netflix (which was nothing short of genius I might add) just to keep me focused as I re-reread, and then having to analyze the thing to death. Whatever happened to something simply being what it is? Why do we constantly find ourselves looking for deeper meaning in places where it’s entirely possible that none may exist? Two words: Face. Value.

But just because I don’t enjoy reading Shakespeare doesn’t mean that the stories behind the words aren’t incredible. It’s just that the words on paper just don’t jive for me. On film? Most definitely, which provides the epiphany that Kacie’s Shakespearean education should instead come in the form of Hollywood adaptations of some of his more popular plays. It’s a brilliant idea, really. Probably one of my best ever, after the Netflix thing of course.

As I look at the long list of options, I see that some selections hold true to the entire concept of what Shakespeare was originally writing about. Others will only embody certain aspects of the work. All in all it’s a good mix. I’m thinking we’ll go with:

1)      O – (Julia Stiles, Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett) Tim Blake Nelson’s rendition of “Othello”

2)      10 Things I Hate About You – (Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger) Gil Junger’s remake of “Taming of the Shrew”

3)      Hamlet – (Ethan Hawke, Julia Stiles) Michael Almereyda’s modern day spin on Hamlet

4)      Romeo+Juliet – (Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes) Baz Luhrmann’s take which actually includes the original dialogue

5)      Much Ado About Nothing – (Denzel Washington, Keanu Reeves, Kate Beckinsale) Kenneth Branagh’s version of the play by the same name

After watching, I’m sure Kacie will make some witty comment about my having a crush on Julia Stiles because she’s in three of the five movies that will be part of her Shakespearean experience. While true, it’s purely coincidental. But hopefully after we’ve watched these different interpretations of Shakespeare’s work, she might have the desire to read the originals and be able to not only accomplish but actually enjoy something that her old man just wasn’t able to.

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Note to Self: If You're Going to be a Superhero, Wear Shoes...

My wife and I were awoken just after 3AM Sunday morning to screams coming from the parking lot of our apartment complex. We live in a really nice community, so the disturbance got our attention rather easily. Peering through the anonymity of two-inch window blinds in our third floor domain, we speculated as to the nature of what in the wide, wide world of domestic violence was going on out there.

At first we thought we heard a child crying, which brought about an immediate call to action for both of us. Traci dialed 911 while I continued to spy from the safety of our living room a hundred yards away.  While on the phone with the dispatcher, a light came on in the car, allowing us to faintly make out two people – neither of which to our relief were children – who looked to be hitting each other. The then driver appeared to climb on top of the passenger as the light turned back off. That’s when the worst case scenario hit us. What if this girl was being raped?

I grabbed a pair of jeans from the bedroom floor while Traci was on the phone again, telling the dispatcher of our suspicions and that the police needed to speed things up. A young blonde woman got out of the passenger side of the car and began to run from the car as the driver’s door opened. Even in the darkness, I could read the expression on Traci’s face telling me to hurry.

The frigidness of the cement delivered one forceful blow after another with each collision of my bare feet against the hardened sidewalk. My feet were growing numb, and pain began shooting through my bad left ankle. I remember trying to not think about it and wondered as I ran when it was that summer had officially left us and the night had gotten so cold. I was freezing and regretted not putting on tennis shoes or a jacket. That’s when I saw her, wandering around the grassy knoll where resident dog owners let their canines go poo and neglect to dispose of it.

I knew immediately that this African-American girl in her early twenties was definitely not the blonde girl that we’d seen get out of the car; she must have been the driver. I could tell from her clumsy steps and slurred words as she called out to me that she was was totally faced.

There was an overwhelming urge to say something witty about dodging poo land mines, but I let it go. Once the girl was close enough for me to conclude that she was physically okay, part of me wished she’d fall face first into a nice fresh one. I was no longer a concerned father. I was just a man who had been woken up in the middle of the night because two irresponsible girls had decided to take advantage of the loophole allowing bars to stay open an extra hour due to the time change and weren't man enough to handle their liquor.

I tried my best to find solace in knowing that our worst fears were just products of overactive imaginations, but it didn’t keep me from lying awake on the couch the next couple of hours in a state of pissedoffidness.

As Sunday managed to drag on, it brought a certain clarity that helped lead me to following conclusions: If you're going to be a superhero, wear shoes. I also needed to work on a new manifesto as a father.

It’s not good enough just to try and teach my kids to go all Spike Lee and do the right thing, to make friends who won’t take them down the path of unrighteousness, or more importantly, to not eat the last two Oreos in the package that I purposefully hid behind the boxes of cereal in the pantry. I decided that everything Kacie will ever need she can have from the confinement of our home. Check it:

1.   School? She can go virtual and attend online. The only good things about school itself when I was growing up were Pizza Fridays and when the final bell of the day rang. Let’s face it – the pizza wasn’t that great.

2.   Interaction with friends? She’ll go old school and reinvent letter writing for a generation that’s forgotten that words and phrases don’t always need to be abbreviated and how punctuation marks are for more than just creating different smiley faces. And she can have three sleepovers a month. Maybe. We should probably just start with two. Or one. Yeah, let’s start with one for now and see how that goes.

3.   Exercise? Wii Fit.

4.   Sports? Wii Sports.

5.   College? Again, online. Between that and ESPN U she can get a higher education and still follow her university’s athletic programs. Go, team!

6.   Dating? Yeah right.

7.   Career? We have stay-at-home moms. There’s even the urban legend of the stay-at-home dad (a.k.a the aspiring writer). Why not the stay-at-home daughter?

8.   Marriage? Does the phrase “over my dead body” ring a bell?

When Traci got home that evening, I shared with her my newfound enlightenment. She laughed and said “good job, honey.” She may as well have patted me on the head and fed me a treat after neglecting to bag my poo from the grassy knoll. But I got it. I understood what she was thinking, and as much as I didn’t want to admit it, Traci was right.

Regrettably, I can’t lock Kacie in her room for the rest of her life, not because it’s cruel and unusual, but because she deserves the right to make stupid choices that trip her up in life, causing her to land face first into a fresh one of her own making. I just have to teach her that sometimes the best part of falling down comes in knowing that you’re able to get back up.

Sounds easy enough, right?

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Thanks for Everything, Saturday

Saturdays aren’t supposed to suck. Saturdays are supposed to be awesome. They’re supposed to be the day you get to sleep in, They’re supposed to be the day that you transfer from the bed to the couch where you lounge until Saturday morning cartoons are over and then flip to TNT or TBS with hopes of finding a classic 1980’s movie to watch until you’ve formulated some semblance of a plan in your mind for how the rest of the day is going to shake out. Saturday is not supposed to be a day for life lessons.

This morning I informed my 12U softball team that after four years of coaching them, I was walking away. I tried my best to make sure that they understood I wasn’t walking away from them but that I was saying goodbye to the game and my role in it. My words were meant to simply say this: Thank you for letting me be a part of your lives, even if for some of you it was only for a short time.

I cried. I knew I would. I’m the reason people like Nicholas Sparks and Nora Ephron have jobs. I tried my best to get through it unscathed, but as I delivered my speech - which was really nothing more than a silent prayer to whoever was listening to please get me through the next few minutes with my dignity intact - I swear I heard a women walk up behind me and say “Look honey, some poor guy dropped his man-card. We should probably turn it in to the Lost and Found.”

Telling the girls goodbye was hard. I knew it would be, but I was ready for it. I thought I was ready for it. I’d performed a trial run the night before by telling Kacie and her cousin Camille when we got home from practice. I’m not sure Camille knew what to make of it, but Kacie did. She barely looked at me the rest of the night.

The game itself isn’t something that I really remember much of. I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that I was snapping photos of the girls every opportunity I got, but in that single game I relived the highlight reel from every other game I’d been a part of over the course of the last nine seasons. I remembered all the girls that had come and gone and wondered how they were spending their Saturday mornings. Were they sleeping in? Watching cartoons? Still playing softball?

When our final inning to play defense arrived, Kacie was forced to sit bench rather than play shortsop as I originally penciled her in for because of some bonehead snafu I’d made in the defensive positioning. I found her standing against the dugout fence, ready to cheer her teammates on, just as I’d preached to the team every game since they were eight. Kacie had always been a loyal soldier. A faithful soldier. But at that moment, she was a crying soldier.

I went to console her – something I’d never really done in all our time together on the diamond – and apologized for my miscue. She shook her head and simply said, “It’s the last inning.” Tears were welling up in her eyes.

Like most kids who play sports, she never wanted to sit out, but she also understood that sometimes she had to because like hitting and fielding, it too was part of the game. Today I wanted her to be on the field as much as she wanted to be on the field. I wanted to watch her, not as her coach, but as her father. For one inning out of all of the innings that had added up over time, I just wanted to be dad.

“I know,” I said.

I hugged her. She resisted. I hugged her again. She resisted again.

“No, daddy. It’s the last inning.” She could barely catch her breath. Her tears were making a jailbreak from the confines of their imprisonment. “Our last inning,” she finished.

I hadn’t prepared myself for that. I had no words to make things better. All I had were my own tears to keep hers from becoming lonely. Kacie and I stood side by side and watched the fruits of all the previous seasons together unfold on the field in front of us. We were two heavy hearts whose worlds, it seemed, were coming to an end.

As I write this, I’m desperately resisting the urge to send an email to the team with a subject line that reads: Sike! The email would disclose that I was only teasing and that I of course will be back to coach the girls in the spring. Perhaps that would be the easier solution to a decision that has me feeling like crap on a Saturday. But I know that no matter how hard letting go might be today, it’ll only be harder tomorrow, and even harder the day after that.

What I was unaware of when I woke up this morning, was that this particular Saturday had a plan for me that didn’t involve Scooby Doo, a bowl of Frootloops, and the last hour of Sixteen Candles. You see, I thought that Kacie and I restoring the Mustang together was just my last ditch effort to fill in the missing pages of time that I lost out on spending with her because I’d let a hundred-and-one other things get in the way. In some ways it is, but now I understand that this rebuilding process is, in its own way, also preparing both of us for how to eventually let go.

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Dear Tom Hanks: You Were Wrong

Last night, like any 34-year-old man about to start his period, I was an emotional train wreck. I’d had a long day at work, Kacie’s 12U softball team was playing a make-up game that I wasn’t able to coach due to school commitments, the Texas Rangers were fighting to make franchise history after what looked like a guaranteed trip to the ALCS just five days before, and I was stuck in an Interpretation and Analysis class helplessly interpreting and analyzing “A&P” by John Updike while my thoughts were completely consumed with what was happening between the lines both in Frisco, Texas and St. Petersburg, Florida.

The plan was for my wife to update me by text every half inning on how the girls were doing. Like most instructors, my English professor had a strict no texting policy in class, so this was going to require a certain degree of secrecy. While understandable on the surface, texting is no more of a distraction than the guy in the back corner of the class who gets up every thirty minutes to go outside and smoke a cig. The way I see it, those texting in class are really only distracting themselves – Chain Smoking Guy is a distraction to everyone. Alas, I’m getting off track….

Her first series of texts noted that our girls had jumped out to a 4-0 lead after one inning, but because the team was short three players they started the second inning with an out since we didn’t have a number nine hitter. One run was all they could muster in the top half of the second, so our pitcher had to take the circle again hoping to duplicate a phenomenal 1-2-3 first inning.

Chain Smoking Guy was in the middle of one of his “I’m smarter than you” speeches. I was in serious need of an update to drown his voice from my head. It’d been thirty-three minutes since the last one. Had she forgotten about me? I’d somehow managed to allow myself to become part of the classroom conversation when the little green indicator light on my phone started blinking. I stopped talking and covertly opened the text.

“OMG! Dropped 3^rd strike…brianna took the runner from 3^rd OUT at home.”

I have no clue what this meant. I didn’t even know if my wife knew what it was she was trying to convey to me, but nevertheless I was right there with her in spirit. But then came eight long minutes of radio silence. From 7:10PM to 7:18PM I got nothing. The break in communication was worse than the previous, even longer one. I’d begun to think that maybe the offense had kicked back in and the girls are going to put the game out of reach.

“Started 4^th with 2 minutes left, we went 3 up, 3 down…now we have to hold them 5-8,” she texted.

My nerves weren’t in any shape to handle the stress of a game like this. Even though I don’t smoke, I thought about bumming a cigarette from Chain Smoking Guy; I wanted a plausible reason to leave class and call Traci. I desperately needed to know what was happening.

A few anxious minutes later her final text came through noting the girls held on to win 8-6. I started to cry. Here the class had moved on to stating and restating each other’s thoughts on something by William Faulkner and I was choking back tears – not because I was sad to have missed the game, but because I was happy for the eight girls who showed up and fought through being short-handed to win the game. I was proud of our pitcher who at times has felt like she’s had to unfairly carry the weight of the team on her shoulders. I was emotional that our team was finally starting to turn things around.

The blond kid to my left stared at me. He saw that I was crying. Too late to check myself – I’d already wrecked myself. Oh well.

By some miracle of either Hell freezing over or donkeys learning to fly, class let out twenty minutes later – a full hour early. I raced to my car which was strategically parked only six blocks away. I got in and searched for the Rangers game on the radio. I could easily have gone to one of the many bars around campus and watched the game on TV, but I needed something familiar at that exact moment. I needed Eric Nadel's calming voice to come over the radio and tell me that everything was going to be okay in St. Petersburg just as my wife had done in Frisco.

I’d pretty much watched all of the previous four games on the radio, so I settled in for the car ride home knowing that my trusted friend would call the game in a way that allowed me to vividly see it in my head, just as he’s done every summer since my family moved to Texas in 1983. I had front row seats to the most important game in Texas Rangers history from the driver’s seat of my car.

My forty-seven minute trek home was over in thirty-one, and that’s after stopping at the gas station to get Kacie a newspaper for some class assignment that I had no knowledge of. I sprinted upstairs, threw my backpack on the floor, plopped myself on the couch, and flipped on the TV, just like any anxious child does when getting home from school. My wife and kids gathered in the living room to see what the commotion was about. After seeing the game on the TV, they too knew that something special was happening.

Our family togetherness lasted all of an inning – Brady opted to watch PBS Kids in our room where he immediately fell asleep in our bed. Kacie fell asleep on the living room floor before the 8^th inning. Neither one of them got to witness our team’s baseball history or their father cry for the second time that night.

Traci didn’t make fun of me for crying like she had fourteen years earlier when the Rangers lost to the Yankees in their first playoff appearance. She understood after all these years that I loved the Texas Rangers long before I loved her. She got that I loved the game of baseball – and now softball – for reasons I’ll never fully be able to explain.

“Look,” she said, pointing to the television. “Even Nolan Ryan is crying.”

I looked. There he was – one of the greatest legends in Texas Rangers baseball history - on my TV standing next to his wife, fighting to control his own tears. I guess sometimes there really is crying in baseball.

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Can't Stand Sitting

I know a lot of four-letter words. My wife thinks I know too many. There are some I tend to be very liberal with depending on the circumstance, and there are a few I don’t use nearly enough. Hope is one of those four-letter words that falls somewhere in the middle.

For me, the word gets thrown out there like a catch-all. I hope my wife knows just how much I love her. As I wrote in my last post, I hope that my kids will grow up to make good decisions when I’m not able to make those decisions for them. I also hope to one day not have to work a 9 to 5 job and instead am able to provide for my family as a writer. But I fall into the same trap that many well-intentioned people do when it comes to hope. I simply just hope.

Life for me is a constant battle of remembering that Traci will never know just how much I love her if I don’t make time to say the words, or more importantly, show her. My kids run the risk of becoming someone they shouldn’t if I’m not part of the steady diet of what influences them. The world will never be able to judge me as a writer if I don’t make a conscious effort to write every day and submit something to it to be judged by. Without being proactive, hope is no more powerful than any other word in the English language. It becomes just another four-letter word that gets thrown around at a time of convenience. At some point we all have to realize that for hope to work, we have to do something. We can’t stand sitting.

A year ago our family lost a good friend to pancreatic cancer. Even though Mark had been diagnosed fifteen months prior, it didn’t make the reality of his death any less devastating to my wife and her family. Upon his diagnosis, Mark’s doctors initially gave him a few months to live; they said he’d be dead by summer’s end. The Weitzenhoffer family hoped the doctors were wrong, but they continued to live their lives by becoming advocates for finding a cure rather than waiting for a miracle to happen. The Weitzenhoffers had hope that Mark would get just a little more time to spend with his family and friends, perhaps not to say goodbye, but to say thank you to those that let him share in their lives. And Mark hoped, even at a time when most people would feel like hope itself had abandoned them, that one day a cure would be found and no other family would have to endure what his was.

The American Cancer Society estimates that nearly 37,000 people in the United States will fall prey in 2010 to a disease that seems to get little air time when talking about the ruthlessness of cancer. Both breast and prostate cancer awareness have increased tremendously in the last five years and even receive invaluable support from major sporting leagues and associations. But pancreatic cancer has yet to see support on that kind of level - still it’s the fourth leading cause of cancer deaths, and according to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network has the highest mortality rate of all the cancers. This is also where I tell you that pancreatic cancer research receives only 2% of federally funded cancer research money.

Pancreatic cancer is a different monster altogether; it knows no gender boundaries. It doesn’t care that in 1989 you played the part of a bad ass bouncer at the meanest bar on the outskirts of town in Road House, or that you taught eighth grade science for thirty years at the middle school up the street, or that you worked for the FAA like Mark had. Pancreatic cancer is an equal opportunity grim reaper; it’s only content as long as it’s taking someone’s life. This monster has to be stopped.

To aid in the local fundraising cause, The Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research will be sponsoring the 2^nd Annual Margaret Wilson Memorial Walk for Pancreatic Cancer Research on Saturday, October 23^rd at The Katy Trail at Reverchon Park in Dallas, Texas. For more information on how you can sign up and participate in this event, please visit the Pancreatic Cancer Research Walk website.

If you’d like to help make hope more than just another four-letter word and support Her Living Room Hero in the fight against pancreatic cancer by making a donation, you can do so by visiting Weitzenhoffer's Walkers for Hope and selecting my name. Please don’t prevent yourself from donating because you think something as small as a couple of dollars won’t help. It will. Every penny counts and lets your voice be heard. Those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer are dying for your voice to be heard.

- Brad

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I hate growing up. It's made me fat.

I’ve learned some very important things the last few days. I can’t say exactly what it is that makes most of these findings any more life changing or profound than my previous discoveries. I guess it’s just that at this moment, the randomness of it all means that these conclusions carry a bit more weight with where I’m at in my life.

I've written them down and submit for your amusement. They are, in no real particular order:

NASCAR racing and country dancing are pretty much the same thing.

-    In both you navigate your way through a nightmare of a traffic jam only to continually turn left for several hours without really going anywhere at all. If someone gets bumped or rubbed the wrong way, there’s a good chance punches will be thrown.

Be nice to your friends’ younger sisters. Law of Averages says they’re most likely going to grow up to be hot. Really, really hot.

-     Facebook has taught me this. Think I’m wrong? Friend request an old buddy you haven’t seen in 15-20 years and tell me I’m mistaken.

Every guy on “Wheel of Fortune” wants to say hi to his 'beautiful wife' at home.

-     Really? Beautiful? Every single one of them? Not “incredible” or “brilliant” or “love of my life” or anything that doesn’t rhyme with beautiful or start with “bee” and end with “you-tee-full?” This drives me absolutely bananas. Hasn't anyone heard of truth in advertising? I’d definitely come up with something much better if I were put on the spot to describe my wife.

I hate growing up. It’s made me fat.

-     My wife says it’s the Oreos, chocolate chip cookies and milk, and steady diet of pizza that I insist on eating. She thinks I should consider healthier alternatives. I tell her she’s wrong – Oreos and I have been friends for a long time, and they wouldn’t betray me like that. “And the pizza?” she asks. I've yet to tell her that I'm the 5th Ninja Turtle. 

As I go down the list, I make a mental note that since I don't like country music, dancing, or NASCAR I'm no worse for wear. It's nothing more than a casual observation. As for my friend's sisters, well, this is where I give a gratuitous shout-out to my beautiful wife and say, "But you got the ring...." And the growing up? I could really go for a mulligan about now. Or a time machine.

Somewhere in the middle of that last one I have my epiphany: What kind of impression did I make on the world as a teenager? Was I a good friend?

As I make “friends” with people on Facebook that I used to be friends with in middle and high school, I wonder why it was we ever lost touch in the first place. I get that people grow apart and go their separate ways. I’m not naïve to the science that life just happens and sometimes simply demands of us that we choose sides and betray one friend for another.

It’s the choosing sides thing that I struggle with – the how and why of it that we stopped being friends. I ask myself if I treated them fairly. Was I a good friend when they needed one? Was I willing to listen more than I talked? Was I unafraid to be seen with them when no one else wanted to be? Was I willing to accept them as they were and find qualities that no one else cared to?

I wish I had a good answer to all of those questions. Hell, I wish I had a good answer to one of them. Truth is, I was just a kid. I didn’t know that as different as someone might seem, they were really dying on the inside for the same love, attention, and acceptance that I was. Growing up, nothing was expected of me in the friends department other than to choose good ones. I fell victim to the “kids will be kids” mantra of society.

Being a parent, I look at Kacie and try to figure out which category of a friend she fits into and what actions I can take to prevent her from becoming the person society nurtures us to be. How can I keep my daughter from making the same mistakes that I did? How can I show her that friendship is more than just a word?

It doesn’t take but a moment before those questions quickly abandon my thoughts as I realize Kacie embodies every single one of those qualities I couldn’t exhibit, not just a little bit, but instead with every ounce of who she is. It’s not an act. It’s not for show. It’s just who she’s decided at a young age to be. Without knowing it, Kacie’s become a reflection of her mom. I’m good with that. It means there’s hope. Hope is all any father still growing up himself can ask for.

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What in the Hex Wrong with You?

The Mustang is hexed. I think. Perhaps not. But maybe.

Frankly, I’m not sure what to believe anymore. All I know is that something’s seriously up with this car because the radiator has a leak, the ignition lock catches and refuses to give with any degree of ease, and it has no brakes.

My wife says there’s no such thing as a hex. I told her that there used to be no such things as vampires either, but try telling that to any teenage girl - or thirty-something man for that matter - sporting their choice of Team Edward T-shirt at the gym.

She thinks I’m bonkers for even entertaining the notion. Maybe she's right. I’m going to let you to decide for yourself. Like the Honorable Judge Lance Ito to my Johnny Cochran, I know that you’ll need indisputable evidence, so below I’ve provided the not-so-accurate script of events that transpired the day the brakes, well…died.

FADE IN:

EXT – PARKING LOT – DAY

BRAD, early thirties, way handsome and not a pound overweight, is showing off his (daughter’s) newly purchased 1966 Mustang to MATT, early thirties, almost equally handsome. Almost. Matt struggles to find the hood release latch.

                                          BRAD
                         Supposedly it’s in the center, under the grill.
                         Right above the bumper.

Matt continues feeling around the car’s front end with no success.

                                          MATT
                         You sure?

                                          BRAD
                         That’s what Google says.

Getting out of the Mustang, Brad goes to the front of the car and peers into the grill. Matt continues feeling for the latch.

                                          FEMALE VOICE (O.C.)
                         If you guys are having this much trouble with a simple
                         hood latch, I’d hate to have seen you trying to
                         work your magic on prom night.

They both turn around to find Brad’s MOTHER-IN-LAW walking up behind them. She looks great for her age, somewhere in the middle of Seventies super-model meets Fifties TV housewife.

                                          BRAD
                         You do remember that I went to prom with your daughter.

                                          MOTHER-IN-LAW
                         Yes. And now I feel much more at ease about that night.

The Mother-in-law rubs her fingers over the open door, tracing its angles.

                                          MOTHER-IN-LAW (CONT'D)
                                    (almost mocking)
                         Nice car. Take me for a ride?

Matt moves to the passenger side, distancing himself from the Mother-in-law. He shoots Brad an ‘It’s a trap!’ look. Brad doesn’t catch it.

                                          BRAD
                         How about I let you drive it once the brakes are fixed?

                                          MATT
                         Dude!

                                          BRAD
                         What?

                                          MOTHER-IN-LAW
                                     (cackling)
                         Sounds devilishly fun. Until then…

A black stretch limo stops in front of the Mustang. The rear door opens from the inside.

                                          MATT
                                     (whispering)
                         I was giving you the sign!

                                          BRAD
                         What sign?

                                          MATT
                         THE sign. Not to say anything stupid.

                                          BRAD
                         How was I supposed to know?

The skies darken. Lighting flashes. Thunder crackles. Rain pours down.

                                          MATT
                         You coach 12U softball. You should know a sign 
                         by now when somebody’s giving you one!

Brad spins in the direction of Mother-in-law to retract his statement, but the limo’s gone.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           FADE OUT

Look, I said not-so-accurate script, not God’s honest, whole truth and nothing but the, that’s the truth, Ruth, truth. But I really did tell my mother-in-law that she could drive the Mustang once the brakes are fixed. The irony is not lost on me that ten minutes after I made the remark, the brakes no longer functioned.

Does that mean someone's sitting in a candlelit room with chicken feet scattered on the floor amidst markings written in blood, using a Hot Wheels version of a Midnight Blue 1966 Mustang and poking it with some crazy big needle while chanting Voo-doo hoo-doo? Probably not. I sure as hex hope not. But if that is the case, then perhaps it’s possible the car will work sporadically like the dead guy on Weekend at Bernie’s, which gives me a glimmer of hope while I wait with anticipation for Andrew McCarthy or Jonathan Silverman to accept my friend request on Facebook so they can help walk me through this mess.

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OFF TOPIC: Um, Did He Say...Douche?

Yesterday my friend Christy sent me an email asking if I knew the song “Higher Love.”

"Um, yeah. It was only a number one hit for Steve Winwood in 1986 from his album Back in the High Life. Doesn’t everyone know that?” I wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead I opted for, “By Steve Winwood.” Taking the moral high road blows and is much less rewarding than giving someone a hard time.

I hit reply and waited for her response. I’m thinking she’s going to tell me that she just heard the song at lunch and really likes it, or that it’s going to be featured on season two of Glee (premiering Tuesday, September 21 at 8/7C on FOX).

“You know, up until yesterday when I saw the name of the song on my Sirius Radio,” she emailed back, “I thought it said ‘make me a pie of love.’”

Talk about coming way out of left field. She must have been tailgating.

But it got me thinking about music and how each of us has a song or two that leaves us swearing the singer is crooning one thing only to learn later in life (sometimes much, much later) that it’s really another. Interestingly enough, that song was one and the same for Kacie and I. If you’ve ever heard “Blinded by the Light” by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, you probably know what I’m talking about.

Over the summer, Kacie and I were driving around town doing whatever it was we were doing when “Blinded by the Light” came over the FM airways. I’m jamming out playing drums on the steering wheel. She’s jamming by doing whatever Guitar Hero moves she knows. And then the chorus hits, and she freezes. Her body is literally motionless as she faces forward – but she’s trying to peek at me through the corner of her eye to see if I caught it too. She's looking to me for a sign that everything's okay. I did no such thing. Instead, I fought not to look at her because laughing hysterically would have only made things worse.

Manfred tried his best to keep the party going, but a silence had started to build that brought with it a certain awkwardness. Changing the station would have been easy. Telling Kacie what he really said would have been easier. But that’s not me. I spent over twenty years thinking I knew what the lyrics were to that song until I looked them up on Google earlier this year. It’s only fair - she needed to figure it out for herself. That’s when she surprised me.

“Um, did he say…douche?” she asked, her voice full of trepidation. Kacie said the word “douche” as if she thought she’d immediately be kicked out of the car for uttering such vulgarity. I loved it.

The parent in me understood that it was not the time for shtick. I wanted her to like the music that was such a big part of my growing up. “No, babe, he didn’t. He said deuce,” I clarified. “Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night.”

Relieved, she sunk into the passenger seat. Her face began to regain its color. “Good. I really like that song – but not if it says…you know.” She changed the radio station.

Funny. I liked the song better when I thought it did say douche.

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I Brake for…NO ONE!

Sometimes we become so focused on reaching a particular destination that we lose sight of one very important aspect of the trip: you have to be able to stop when you get there.

We’ve all seen television shows (80’s detective shows in particular) or movies where someone was barreling down a winding road, repeatedly stepping on the brake pedal only to have the car keep going. After near misses with oncoming traffic and narrow escapes from skidding off the road at the edges of hairpin curves, the driver somehow has the presence of mind to maneuver the car up the first embankment that conveniently comes along and then jerk the steering wheel hard in one direction or the other, causing the car to spin out and settle in a cloud of dust.

The same thing happened to me this weekend…minus the high rate of speed, winding road, driving up the dirt embankment to stop the car, and Magnum P.I. (man-crush – as noted in my Jibber Jabber section) to tell me the brake line had been cut in an attempt to keep me from being able to testify against the island’s most notorious drug kingpin.

Okay, fine. So I was only on a two-lane road with no oncoming traffic and going less than fifteen miles-per-hour, but the brakes really did fail in a similar manner causing me to repeatedly mash the pedal to the floor. Nevertheless, it scared the crap out of me – especially since I had three twelve-year-old girls in the car, who by all accounts, think I'm pretty awesome. I would have hated to have driven the car into a row of bushes, thus causing them to rethink their position. Thankfully I am in fact awesome and had the situation on lockdown. And because the streets were desolate and we weren’t going very fast, the situation was never out of control. But that didn’t keep my mind from playing a lightning round of ‘what if’ against itself.

Deciding not to push our luck any further, I ditched the Mustang in the first vacant spot I could find where she’d be safe from the public and we’d be safe from her. I phoned my wife to inform her that the four of us were going to need a ride home. Like, preferably sooner rather than later.

The realization that we’d have to fit six people in a Nissan Xtera that barely had room for five posed a slight problem, but after doing some simple math and choosing of straws, I closed the rear hatch on my wife as she was contorting her body to fit in the space currently occupied by a tricycle, a bag of clothes to be taken to Goodwill, and whatever odds and ends that managed to find their way into the vehicle but never out of it.

“Girls,” she said as I climbed into the driver’s seat, “who’s going to do this when you get your drivers’ licenses?” Probably not the best thing to ask when trying to deter three preteens from doing the same thing at some point down the road.

“Not me,” they replied in unison. Liars.

“Good. It’s not safe. I shouldn’t even be doing it,” my wife finished. Her speech delivery lacked a little something in the convincing department. It's a wonder our children aren't delinquents.

“Well I won’t be able to,” Kacie quipped. “My Mustang has a trunk.” Crap, I might have spoken too soon.

On the drive home I contemplated my next move. Having the brakes worked on was already at the top of our to-do-list, but we’d hoped that a simple bleed or adjustment would suffice until the time came when we could convert the front drums to disc brakes. With the recent developments, I knew that major surgery was probably going to have to be performed because whatever caused the brakes to bail on us was more than just bad shoes or drums. From what I’d read online during my pre-purchase research, the Mustang was either going to need a new master cylinder, brake lines, or all of the above.

We made several calls to some local automotive shops to see if we could bring the car in for a diagnosis so that I could order parts, but with the holiday weekend, they were either closed or busy and wouldn’t be able to get to us until Tuesday.

Knowing that we couldn’t leave the car abandoned at its current location, we made arrangements to have her towed back to our apartment. Spencer from Spencer’s Towing (no relation) in The Colony took special care in getting our jalopy up on his flatbed, calming any fears that we had about having it towed.

Fast forward two days to a gorgeous Labor Day where the weather is absolutely perfect for driving a classic car around town with the windows down. This is the type of day these cars were made for. Trust me, they were. I read so on Wikipedia.

But are we? Nope.

Do we want to be? Yep.

Can we? Negatory.

Why is that, you ask? Because apparently our classic car has a mind of its own and has seemingly turned into the overbearing boss of an Indonesian shoe factory/sweatshop. “Keep going! No stopping unless I say so! You want a what? I don’t care what you want. There are NO BREAKS!” Or brakes in our case…

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The What, Why, Who, and How of it...

Cars are a lot like people. They may look like they’ve got it all together on the outside, but there are often deeper seeded issues going on that aren’t visible from the exterior. To quote one of the great intellectual minds of the 80's, Bruce Hornsby, "That's just the way it is." We're all a little messed up in our own right.

When my wife and I first discussed purchasing a classic Mustang to function as a secondary car, people around us encouraged the dream, perhaps because the notion that someone they knew owning a vintage Pony was pretty rad. I suppose there was also the hope of getting to ride in it or possibly even drive it.

They reminisced about having a muscle car of their own back in the day, or pondered aloud how they wished they'd had the money to buy the classic car of their dreams and fix it up. But when the time came to actually purchase the vehicle, those same people questioned if we’d lost our minds. “It’s so old,” more than one person said. “What if it breaks down?” I have to say, the men's jockstrap my mom mistakenly bought me to wear in Little League was more supportive.

We weren’t blind to the fact that whatever used car we bought was going to need some work. All the nostalgia in the world can’t replace the simple truth that something is going to go wrong on a car this old. In fact, A LOT of somethings are going to go wrong.

As you can see from the photo, the car looks great…but she’s a ten-footer, meaning that she may look great from ten feet away, but the closer you get, you can tell that she lied on her dating.com profile.

I know what you're thinking, that some people are just incorrigible. If you're not thinking it, you should be. I am. But back to my story...

“What about a new car?” we were asked. “They come with warranties.” Sure, but a new car also comes with a hefty monthly payment leaving the owner paying more for the car than it is actually worth. We didn’t want to do that. We couldn’t afford to do that. Dave Ramsey wouldn’t want us to do that. My wife and I needed a cheap(ish) used car that would get me from home to work, back to home, and then to the University of North Texas in Denton two to three nights a week.

More importantly, the reason behind purchasing a 1966 Mustang, and the reason I’m writing a blog, is this: I’m going to spend the next four years restoring it for my daughter’s 16th birthday, and I’m going to use Google to tell me how to do it.

Stop laughing. I’m being serious. If you’re not laughing, you probably think that I’m barking mad. It’s okay – I’ve considered it myself over the last several days.

You see, I know next to nothing about cars or restoring them. I’m able to put gas in the tank and air in the tires, and I have a working knowledge of where certain integral pieces of the engine are located. My first car was a 1969 Chevrolet heavy-half pickup. It was a disaster on wheels and looked like crap, but it’s where I gained my basic knowledge of cars. Other than that, I’m pretty much Average Joe who takes the family car to the local tire store to get the oil changed. Actually, that’s not true. My wife takes the car in to get the oil changed. I stay at home and watch football and play video games from the comforts of my living room.

So in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention now I won’t be restoring every aspect of the car myself as there are just some things I don’t have the time, patience, or capability to work on, but everything outside of paint and body, major engine, and transmission work I will try to do myself or with the help of friends or family (Shane, I will be calling you, so don’t dodge my calls. You either, Matt).

Oh, and my 12-year-old daughter, Kacie, will be helping me. Did I mention that yet? I don’t think I did.

We want Kacie to be part of the process from beginning to end. She should have a say in what kind of tires, wheels, interior options, and paint this car will have. After all, it’s going to be hers in less than four years, provided she maintains an acceptable grade point average and doesn’t get into trouble with the law. (Who am I kidding? She can still get into trouble with the law just as long as her GPA is good. A criminal record might keep her out of an Ivy League school, but there’s always community college.)

You see, I’m writing this blog (that you’re hopefully bookmarking and planning to check regularly, whatever that is) because I want to document this experience in a way that my daughter and I will be able to share during our adventure (or debacle, for you pessimists) without keeping a diary and losing points on my man-card - which I've been told is in danger of happening due to long time mancrushes on Tom Selleck and John Cusack.

For those of you hardcore restoration enthusiasts, I apologize in advance. We won’t be doing a total strip down and rebuild. This process is more about a daddy getting to spend time with his baby girl than anything else, while giving her the one material possession she’s never wavered from wanting. She’s had to sacrifice a lot as a child for my mistakes as a parent, so I want this experience to be a good one for her.

We can only fix things on the car when we have the spare cash, so the process may seem painstakingly slow at times. Perhaps you’ll be entertained by my incredible writing skills and superb wit. If that doesn't work for you, then consider this a fantastic way to kill time on the company clock - provided you can get past big brother. I’ll also try and post pictures when the opportunity presents itself and links to sites where I pull my directions/info on the particular project we’re working on at the time in case anyone wants to "try this at home."

Hopefully you enjoy this experience as much as we hope to. Now, I’m off to get a box or seven of bandages to keep by the keyboard. I have a feeling that this will be my one and only post without skinned knuckles…

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