Billy Joel Must Have Been Talking About This River... er... Creek of Dreams

This is the excitement that is my life. Like Snickers with the peanuts and the nougat, my weekly routine is just chock full of adventure. For example, just the other day, I drove over to my
sister's house. I know what you're thinking, WOW, all the way to your sister's house. Now bear in mind that this was on a whim, no planning, no mapping, just pick and go. That's not something just any ole person can handle, that's only for experienced adventurers like myself.

Okay, to the lay person, a Sunday drive to a relatives may not seem terribly exciting, but let me tell you about this is no simple trip across town, if I recount the things I underwent it will probably remind you of that old Atari version of Pitfall, with the vine swinging and the alligator hopping and the falling into giant scorpion pits. We are not talking about smooth sailing here. The trip starts out with one of those treacherous and nerve-wracking red left turn arrow intersections. Sometimes I have to wait a long time. Waiting for just the right moment is not easy, you get the shakes, you get anxious, you nearly jump the gun. This obstacle requires the patience of a... well, the patience of someone who is really really patient. Later, there's a slight curve in the road that takes the coordination of a fighter pilot to navigate, which is followed way too closely for none but the highly trained by a left hand turn - INTO TRAFFIC. And, as if all that wasn't enough, there's a four way stop that no one but the finest of drivers can coordinate, one false move can lead to tragedy. Then, right when you think you've hit the home stretch,
there's a hill. This is no ordinary hill, this one goes up AND down. Only the most alert and highly trained drivers should even attempt this portion of the trip. Most people would be better off pulling over and walking the rest of the way, but not me. I'm brave. I make this trip, believe it or not, almost every week. I am an adventurer.

Alright, so maybe I'm no Allen Quartermain and my sister's den isn't the crypt of the ancient pharaoh of death, but I am an adventurer.

Really I am. I'll prove it.

Each time I drive to my sister's house, which really isn't all that exciting, I have to drive through the neighborhood I grew up in. You see, my sister and her husband live in one of those new subdivisions that was built on what used to be some one's corn right behind the street I lived on as a kid.

Back when I was a lad, the whole area that my sister's neighborhood now sits on was corn fields, woods, and a few dirt roads. What is now one hundred and thirteen prefab houses was tree forts and snowball fights and dirt clod wars and sledding and being chased by the farmer's dog for getting to close to the house and a really weird and slightly creepy area in the middle of the woods with discarded rusted out cars from the forties and fifties and... well, tetanus shots.
Most of my early childhood memories took place in what is now Mrs. Denver's petunias, some young couple's half bath, or the two car garage down the street. Each time I make that drive, there's a little bit of me, deep down in there all mixed in with the guts and the innards, that's kinda sad.

The worst part of it all, the hardest thing for me to deal with, is the destruction of the creek. They rerouted part of it. Some of it was filled in. Other bits just went and dried up. Whatever it was, when that little stream disappeared some of the happiest times of my youth were washed away with it.

That creek was the center of my universe for a good decade. Frog hunting, spy games, fantastic hides and incredible seeks, rock skipping, wading, when the rains had come - swimming, incredible GI Joe nautical battles, crawling through the drain pipes to follow it to the other side of the road, ice skating, speed sledding, really narrow hockey games, and the best winter time sport ever - smashing ice with big huge rocks. That creek was everything, to all us kids. Now it's gone.

The best creek adventure took place the summer of my eleventh year. My sciencey minded friend Jerry spent the entire long winter designing a raft. Finally, after all these years, a vessel with which we can explore portions of the creek further than our tired peddling legs could bike us or our aching little feet could hike us.

The design called for a large piece of wood that we could sit on and something underneath that would trap pockets of air. Jerry, being one of those genius type kids that you either really want to be friends with or beat up, had a perfect plan within weeks. The problem would be gathering the necessary materials. Seeing as how Home Depot doesn't extend a line of credit to most prepubescents, we had a scavenger hunt ahead of us.

My job was to find wood. Construction site dumpster diving became my forte. Soon I not only had a four foot by four foot section of plywood. It was quite a sight, but I dragged all the way home.

While I was playing cat burglar in the construction zone, Jer was testing scale model rafts in his bathtub. His initial design called for several dozen air filled Ziploc freezer bags taped to the bottom of the board. They didn't support the weight.

I thought I was the hero of the summer when I stumbled across a giant piece of Styrofoam, about the same size as the wood, but about four inches thick that I figured would add to the floatiness. Jer agreed, although he used the term buoyancy. I like floatiness. It did a good
job of raising the wood portion of the raft out of the water, but still not enough to support our bodies.

Like that guy in prison who can get you whatever you want, like a dime bag or a tuba or an emu or maybe a Backstreet Boys poster to hang up there in the cell, Jerry seemed to magically get the materials he wanted. So his dad had nothing to take his lunch in, so his brother's paint supplies got all dried out, so his mom (probably to this day) wondered why her meatloaf was suddenly bare and freezer-burned up there in the icebox, none of that mattered, beacuse one day when I came over, he suddenly he had several hundred air filled Ziploc freezer bags filling his bedroom. Busy meticulously hot glue gunning them together in neat little rows, Jer was jittering like a crack fiend. I had no idea how he'd done so much work since the day before,
but he quickly taught me a valuable dietary lesson that came in quite handy in the subsequent college years. Jer had drank four liters of Mountain Dew to keep himself up all night to get work done.

"Ifitwasn'tfortheinsanelyfrequentpottybreaks," he explained, his hands shaking and his eyes twitching, "Iwouldhavebeendonebeforeyouevengothere. Gimmethatglassofpopovertherewouldyou?"

Jer made a bed of baggies and instructed me to lay down on them to test their strength. A loud pop let us know a plan B might be a good way to go.

Subsequent highly caffeinated nights "sleeping" over at Jer's house testing models and new theories accomplished two things. One, we found that Ziploc doesn't make a product that holds up to well against twigs, rocks, and other snagging agents in the creek. Two, we added
immensely to Jer's growing collection of empty two liter pop bottles.


Cartoon light bulbs dinged.

The pop bottles. I knew they were floaty. Jer knew they were buoyant. We had dozens of them and they were much stronger than plastic bags. Within minutes we were arranging the two liters in nice neat columns. Jer busted out a new hot glue cartridge and we were underway.

Soon we realized that we only had enough pop bottles to line about a quarter of the raft. We'd need more. A lot more. Spring was rapidly approaching. The wet season, when the creek would be highest, and our adventure best, was almost upon us. We had to hurry.

Fast forward to one of those movie musical montage scenes, some upbeat peppy pop song cranking in the foreground like "I Want Candy" or "MmmmBop." The film cuts between shots of two little kids going door to door asking for empty pop bottles, chugging massive amounts of soda
outside the local convenience store, pulling a wagon loaded with recyclable plastics around the neighborhood, raiding garbage cans, scavenging their own fridges and dumping into the sink partially filled bottles of sweet carbonated nectar, even a highly intense moment during which a caffeine withdrawn Jerry screamed at a neighbor for offering us the stupid one liter bottles.

Jerry had done some high falutin' calculations and determined that we'd need one hundred and thirteen bottles to safely support us on the raft. I never even thought to question his figures. He was good at math; I used calculators to spell words out upside-down.

The first big rains arrived just as Jer and me were finishing up the raft. Just over a hundred beverage containers glued to a big piece of polystyrene with a large hunk of plywood on top. Damn the Wright Brothers. Screw that Arch thing down in St. Louis. To hell with John
Titanic, or whoever it was that built that big boat. This. This, ladies and gents, this was a marvel of modern engineering. Like Huck Finn with petroleum products. We were adventurers.

Now to test it. The raft made debut in Jer's backyard. It floated just fine in the pool, yeah, I fell off into the barely melted, algae filled (isn't chlorine supposed to take care of that) swamp Jer's
family called a pool, but the raft was successful.

Next, the maiden voyage. The creek was thawed. The water was rushing. It rained and rained hard for nearly a week. We were afraid we'd be swept to far down stream. We were afraid the raft (I actually somehow just typed fart) would be pulled away before we could even jump on board.

Adventurers don't delay though. This raft had to launch. The show had to go on. The captain had going down to do (get your mind out of the gutter). The ship had to set sail. The fat lady, well, I guess that doesn't fit, so the fat lady can take a break and have a Twinkie.

Justifying our next decision with the claim that Jer and I both had to remain on land, each on one side of the creek, with safety ropes to keep the raft under control, we went on a mission to kidnap my sister. She'd be Laika, the Russian dog that was the first Earth creature in space. She'd be Lewis, or maybe Clark. She'd be Neil Armstrong, Columbus, Jackie Robinson. A pioneer. A legend. A living representation of the American adventurer's spirit. She'd tell Mom.

Somehow we talked her into coming with us to the creek. Somehow we talked her into stepping onto the raft. She actually seemed excited to be included and kind of asked for us to shove the raft off. Everything looked good. She held onto the safety line and started to float gently down stream. On one side of the creek, I shouted encouragements and had a death grip on the rope. On the other side, Jer held on tight while he did some more calculatin'. At about the same time, Jerry realized that the raft was much lighter than any of his previous figurin' had figured for, and that raft really started to get moving, fast. Before long, we had to jog to keep up with it.

Heavier rains than we had accounted for had that little boat cruising. Jer, possibly because all that brain power made him slightly top-heavy, slipped, fell, and lost his end of the safety rope. When he tells the story, he recounts a version in which, holding on for dear life, he was dragged nearly fifty feet by the raft, but he's a liar, he fell down, went boom, and my sister (along with any hope I had of seeing outside this coming summer) was floating away.

I held on to my end of the rope and ran as fast as my little legs would carry me. My thighs were burning, my feet were pounding, my tiny little heart was pumping so fast I thought it'd burst right there in my chest. I willed it not to though; I had to save my sister. Not only was I an adventurer, I was a hero. Indiana Jones always saved the girl. Even if it was a bratty little sister with severe tattle issues, he'd come to her rescue.

The raft was moving so quick that we got to the point where we were both holding on to the very ends of the rope. It was taut. I stopped and dug in like a tug of war anchor, but it wasn't enough. Her little hands couldn't hold on any longer and the line slipped from her fingers.

I tossed the useless line aside and resumed sprinting after her. losing ground when she went through a viaduct under the road and I had to climb the embankment, and some more during the barbed wire fence - hole in an unpleasant part of my shorts - I'd rather not talk about it
incident. Pretty soon, with all the twists and turns and curves of the creek and all the slipping and sliding and falling I was doing running on the muddy bank, she was out of sight.

Before long, Jer had caught up to me on his bike, panting and breathing hard. He jumped off at full speed, handing the Schwinn with the banana seat off to me. I was far more athletic and even in my current state much more able to catch the raft before it reached the real river a few miles away.

Panic took a little more of me over with each turn of the pedals. The longer I went with out finding her, the more scared I got. Every curve of the stream led to a new sense of hope that I'd spot her as I came around the bend, each one a heart crushing disappointment.

Finally, I could hear the sound of the river in the distance. Just having that sound hit my ears filled me with dread. I knew that hearing it meant I was way too close and my little sister was probably way too far. Then, as I came over a hill, the river now in my sight, I saw her. She was lying face down in the mud by the river, the raft, fully intact, but overturned, was up in the weeds beside her. I dropped the bike and sprinted down the hill. Boy Scout CPR/Heimlich
Maneuver/all sorts of first aid gobbledy gook training rushed through my brain.

She was dead. I'd killed my sister. I was convinced of it.

Then, as I got closer, I could see her back slowly rising and falling. The steady rhythm of breathing. A new jolt of adrenaline took me the rest of the way at ThunderCats Cheetara like speed. As I approached I could hear a whimpering sound, no, it wasn't whimpering, it was... it
was... singing.

My sister was lying in the mud, perfectly okay, perfectly happy, serenading a frog with the chorus of "I Feel Pretty, oh so pretty...." When I finally got to her she sat up, smiled, and asked if we could do it again. "Next time tell your stupid friend to hold onto the rope though," she added.

As much fun as she had and as much as she promised while we hiked home not to tell Mom and Dad, within seconds of walking through the door, she'd spilled the beans about her adventure on the mighty rapids. The parents were quite unhappy, phone calls were made, like number
Johnny-5 -- rafts were disassembled, and the recycling guy wondered how much pop one family could drink in a week the next trash day.

Like the Titanic, that good ole raft's maiden voyage was it's last.

Every time I drive by where the creek used to be, on the way to tattletale's house, I think about the good times. I miss it. I wish it was still there. My sister, she has kids, she's probably glad it's gone. No rafting adventures for her youngest. Then again, none of them will get to sing West Side Story songs to amphibians either.

I told you I was an adventurer.

Vote for this adventurer for Humor Blogger of the Year over at HumorBloggers.com, or just check out the other funny blogs in the running.

The Legend of Eddie Bubble Gum

There are a handful of moments every now and again that trigger some deep, long forgotten sense memory in me. Once in a while, when the wind is just right, a neighbor will light up his barbeque and just a whiff of the coals will transport me back to a summer evening cooking out on the grill in our backyard. Just the right smell of just the right kind of leather sparks visions of long hours spent patrolling the little league outfield with my glove to my face to smell the greatest smell on Earth – leather and baseball dirt. Music can do it too. The opening chords of Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong has me longing for my days in the college dorms, and while I’ve probably only heard it two or three times in the last fifteen years, just a note or two of Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam’s Lost in Emotion instantly sends me back to 1987, so much so that I’d swear that I can smell the fresh paint my dad and I spent that entire summer coating our new house with. A nice rain, and the smell of worms, helps me recall family fishing trips. Overripe tomatoes, for some reason, give me mental images of these big fat green hairless caterpillars that roamed the fields around my neighborhood – we must have found them on backyard tomato plants at some point, because cutting into an even slightly mushy tomato makes me wince, as a picture of these alieny green bugs that emitted some sort of funky stank from their heads while little red antennae popped out. While these images that stem from smells and sounds are strong, nothing triggers sense memory for me quite like food.

When I start to think of specific foods from my childhood, memories flood my brain. Just the mention of Fun Dip has me salivating, and even though it’s been two decades since I’ve had any, I could just about taste the poof of candy powder that erupts from the pouch when you tear into a packet of Fun Dip as I typed those words. I can smell the artificial grape and strawberry chemical compounds that made Fun Dip so darn fun, and I can feel the grainy white stick slide across my tongue right now. What a disgusting concept that product was. While thoughts of Fun Dip have me planning a lunch hour trip to the local 7-11 to search for my old friend (or at the very least, snatch up a few packets of Smarties and Sweet Tarts that I can pound the crap out of with my stapler until I have my own homemade Fun Dip), that’s not even the food that conjures up the strongest memories. For some reason, the top of my list is cluttered with a variety of tube shaped foods – hot dogs, the Super Rope licorice, Freeze Pops, Cow Tails, and beef jerky all hold a special place in the pantry of my mind, but the Grandpappy of edible memory triggers is Big Daddy Bubble Gum.

I honestly don’t know if they make this anymore. I don’t know if it was ever even widely available. I don’t know if it came from a crazed bubblegum fanatic who had a mini-gum factory in his basement hidden somewhere in the maze of cul de sacs that is suburbia. The only place I ever saw Big Daddy Bubble Gum for sale was the concession stands of the little league baseball fields in my neighborhood.

For the uninitiated, Big Daddy Bubble Gum was indeed the big daddy of all bubblegum, not a stick like Big Red, or a hunk like Bubblicious, or a brick like Bazooka Joe, or a ball like you might chip your tooth on, or shredded like Big League Chew, or a nugget o’ gum like a Chicklet – Big Daddy was a rod of gum. As pornographic as this entire paragraph is going to come across, we’re talking about a nine inch gum pipe. I don’t remember which is a diameter and which is a circumference and what you multiply pi by to get the body mass index of a Big Daddy, but I’d have to guess that it was about as big around as one of those fatty pencils that they make you use in kindergarten, only it was about twice as long. Packaged in a slick plastic sheath that you had to tear open with your teeth, Big Daddy was coated in a strange white powder that was more flour than sugar, but may just have been cocaine’s little brother for all the addictive properties a rod o’ Big Daddy had. I don’t recall all the flavors they made, only that my preferred Big Daddy came in a bright blue wrapping that gets me excited just thinking about it.

I can distinctly recall sprinting to the concessions after a hard fought little league battle just to get my little mitts on another Big Daddy. Sitting here right now, twenty-five years after the fact, I can feel the smooth plastic, the soft gum inside, and the struggle I always had to tear into the wrapper. I can smell the chemically enhanced fruity flavors burst out of the plastic. I can just about feel the weird white powder on my fingers and the not-quite-as-soft-as-it-looks gum in my mouth. I can taste the grapey, bubble gummy, and mystery fruit flavored goodness right now. It makes my jaw hurt, my jaw which is probably twice the size as it was back in the day, just to think about the massive entire-pack-of-Bubble-Yum sized wad of goo I’d chomp on for seven innings at a time. Then I start to remember my neighbor and teammate Eddie Mayer. At one game little Eddie shoved an entire log of Big Daddy into his yap before taking the mound. He pitched great, prompted Coach Lakaitis to dub him “Eddie Bubble Gum.” Eddie liked the nickname so much, that despite the possibility of lockjaw (or, considering the Eddie to gum mass ratio, an entire locked head) he began a pregame ritual during which he would shove three or four Big Daddy Bubble Gums into his mouth.

Unbelievably, it helped. Eddie went from the worst player on the team to our top pitcher in the course of one foot long gum branch. His fastball had more pop. His curveball was suddenly wicked. He change-up changed so much that it changed, went back to being what it was initially, then changed again. It was like the bubble gum had empowered his arm to make the ball miss bats. Eddie Bubble Gum became a folk hero of sorts after he threw three straight no-hitters. There was an article about him in the local paper. There were kids asking for his autograph. There was a teammate who wrote an Eddie Bubble Gum song that helped the legend grow. Kids on other teams would breathe a sigh of relief on Eddie’s off days. Coaches would resign themselves to a loss. Opponents would see striking out against Bubble Gum as a badge of honor – something they would tell their grandkids about the day Eddie Bubble Gum was elected to the Hall of Fame.

Eddie’s new found success was part luck and part the power of positive thinking and part a psychological advantage – at first. Soon though, it inspired him, motivated him, pushed him. In no time Eddie Bubble Gum was watching major leaguers, studying their pitching delivery. He was reading books, trying to find any tips he could. And, he was practicing, practicing, practicing. He threw each and every day. Being his next door neighbor, I was suddenly elected catcher, so that I could work with him at home before and after practice. It was inspiring to see his dedication, but disgusting to see the little pink sugar crusties form on the corners of his mouth and the bubble gum juice erupt from his cheeks as he grunted with each fastball he threw.

Soon his nice white uniform was streaked with spitty, fruity globs of pink, blue, and green. This lasted most of a season, until Eddie’s mom made it to a game. You see, she’d been home most of this time looking after a newborn baby brother (who several coaches had already called dibs on), then it stopped real quick. The legend of Eddie Bubble Gum died because Mrs. Bubble had finally figured out what her son was doing that was making laundry day such a chore. No more gum, that was the decree from above. At first Eddie resisted, sneaking smaller wads (Jupiter would have been a smaller wad) into his cheek before gametime, but mom found him out. Eddie Bubble Gum was no more.

Opponents, sure that the gum was the source of Eddie’s dominance, were suddenly confident that they could hit him. Teammates began to question his ability. Coaches grumbled about banning mom from the ballpark. Eddie doubted himself.

The first game he started after the bubble gum ban was imposed was a disaster. He hit the first batter, walked two more, gave up a three run triple, and felt a little pop in his shoulder. Coach pulled him. He pitched again a few days later and was back to domination, striking out the first ten kids he faced. He kept it up, pitching great time after time all the way through high school and into college, but it wasn’t the same. He was just Eddie, and later just Ed. He wasn’t a legend anymore. He wasn’t a folk hero. He wasn’t Eddie Bubble Gum. In fact, it wasn’t long before kids went back to calling him by his old nickname – an unfortunate label inflicted upon him due to a strange set of allergies that left him with a runny nose all year round – Eddie Bubble Gum went back to being known as “Booger Ed.”

Until something triggered the memory of that gum, I’d forgotten about Eddie. I moved out of that neighborhood a few years after that baseball season and over time we fell out of touch. What a fun summer that was. What a fantastic baseball season. What a fastball. What a memory. What a bubble gum.

To get Eddie Bubblegum into the Hall of Fame, vote here.

The Remote Control of Life

Tivo has changed the way that I look at the universe. I am a Tivoholic. I admit it. I can no longer live without it. I go to other people's houses to watch the game or a show and I can barely tolerate it. I find myself absently going for the remote to fast forward through commercials, to rewind something I missed, or to pause and get a snack. What do you mean I have to wait til the commercials for a pee break?

I'm so used to my Tivo controller that in normal, everyday social situations, if someone says something funny, and I miss it, my reflex is to move my remoting thumb to where the rewind button would be. On more than one occasion I've walked back into a room and missed huge chunks of a conversations. My immediate mental response is to curse myself for not pausing them before I got up. Heck, there's even been boring car rides, long lines, or phone conversations with my mother that just scream out for a fast forward button.

Last night I utilized that pause function in the middle of a show to answer the phone. It was my sister. "Guess who I just ran into at Wal-Mart?" she asked.

"John Laraquette?" I guessed.

I know it wasn't a very good guess, and the odds were against my sister running into Mr. Dan Fielding himself in a discount retail store. But, I hate that "guess who" game. Of all the people in all the world, how in the heck am I supposed to randomly guess who you saw buying cough suppressant and paper towels?

"No," she replied.

"Markie Post?"

"Come on, really guess."

"Richard Moll?"

"It's not anyone from Night Court."

"Oooooo. A clue. John Ratzenberger?"

"You're an idiot."

"Who did you run into?"

"Mitchell Bournik."

"Really?" Mitch Bournik was a good friend of mine when I was a little kid. One of my best friends. There were several years there that we were pretty much inseparable. The playground, the ball field, the ole climbin' tree, the big dirt hill, the creek. It didn't matter where,if you found one of us, you usually found the other.

That all changed when we were about ten or eleven. His dad got transferred to Massachusetts, and I'd never heard from him again. I'd always wondered what became of him, sometimes catching myself looking at people in the mall that look like he might look if I could push the ultimate fast forward button and use that cool age progression software the police and FBI have.
I got lost for a minute in old memories of me and Mitch. Football in the back yard. Epic games of ghost in the graveyard. His goofy no-tooth smile. The crazy trick paper airplanes he made...
When I tuned back into reality, my sister caught me up with Mitch's life. I was glad to hear that she'd given him my phone number. Wow,little Mitch. I hadn't seen him in almost twenty years.
Not two minutes after we hung up, the phone rang again. It was him.

We chatted for almost an hour. He was different. Of course he was different, twenty years had passed. We'd both grown up. We'd grownup different though.

He's a lawyer. A litigation lawyer. He's married. He has a house.A nice car. A good life. A family. A little baby girl. He was kinda snobby. Kinda rude. More than just a little bit arrogant.
This was more shocking than when I found out my former college roommate had furniture in his apartment that didn't belong in the lawn or have a valve stem to blow it up with.

This was monumental. A wife? A kid? A mortgage? Not little Mitch.He's eight years old. He has a boogery nose. Constantly. He laughs hysterically when the "gophter" (yeah, that's how he said it), in Caddyshack, does his little gophtery dance. He's the one next to meat the baseball games, actually tossing his little plastic glove into the White Sox dugout once at Old Comiskey Park. He doesn't care if it's the middle of the game, he figures they have to give him an autograph. He runs up and rolls down the big dirt hill by my house.He wades in the creek to catch "tabapoles." He's the little kid that got lost going to the bus stop. The bus stop that's half a block from his house. The bus stop that you can see from his front door. He also forgot to get off the bus in the afternoon. Twice. He races his bike down our street, jams on the breaks as hard as he can, and measures to see which of us can leave the longest skid mark. He lays on the kitchen floor to play Crossbows and Catapults. He falls out of the tree, plays Star Wars and hide & seek, and sneaks around in the bushes with us to spy on the neighborhood girls. He is the worst wiffle baller in the history of wiffle ball. He's been hit in the face by a fourteen mile an hour wiffle curve ball. Twice. He's my friend. My best friend.

Old Comiskey park was torn down more than a decade ago. That dirt hill we rode our bikes up and down is now the site of town homes. The memory of that dancing gophter was forever tainted by Caddyshack 2.The creek was filled in for a strip mall, tabapoles forever replaced by ninety-nine cent shirt cleaning, Chinese take-out, and four dollar convenience store jars of mayonnaise. That old climbing tree was chopped down. They even pulled the stump. Our long forgotten time capsule probably gone with it.

Everything comes to an end, even childhood memories. In a moment he went from my childhood best friend, he never grew up in my mind, he was always little Mitchy, to some thirty year old guy. From boogery nosed tabapole hunter to dad. From kid who couldn't pronounce gopher to litigation lawyer. From a wide eyed little boy that'd eat any bug you could find for just a dollar to kind of a pompous jerk. All in an instant. Twenty years for me, twenty years for him, but one split second for us.

It altered my world. Next thing you know, people are going to tell me Jay Wilson and Eddie Mayer and Aaron Blum are all grown up too. I don't care if it's been two decades, those people need to stay kids.

When I hung up with him, making vague plans to get together for lunch, I needed my Tivo remote. I needed to stop. I needed to hit record and save things the way they were. I needed to go backwards somehow.OK, maybe rewind and pause are a little ambitious, but this is all going way too fast, would someone please at least invent a slo-mo button?

Old friends who stayed like you remember them would vote at Humor-Blogs.com.