"Who's In Charge Here?"

I originally called this “Who’s The Boss?” but I changed it, fearing disappointing Tony Danza fans when they discovered that it wasn’t about the show.

A recently discovered new wrinkle in our special toilet seat…

Aw, Man?

Come on!  One toilet seat story.                                                                

You already told one.

It’s a follow-up.  Cut me some slack here, will ya?  It’s not like it’s “One of a Series.” 

Unless you think of more of them.

I won’t.

I know you.  Your imagination’s like popcorn.  One idea “pop-pop-pops”, and then suddenly there are a hundred variations.  A whole toilet seat anthology.  And you wonder why you’re not more popular.

Let’s just do this, okay?

Fine.  I just want it on the record that, for me – and I cannot believe I speak only for myself – one “toilet seat” story is enough.  You may now proceed without further interruption.

Thank you.

A little over a year ago, after experiencing its wonders in a luxury hotel in Hawaii, we purchased, and had installed in our Master Bathroom a multi-faceted Toto toilet seat that does certain things automatically, and other things with the push of a button.  (Specifically several “push-button” cleansing services, which, for politeness sake, I will not go into.) 

Clarifying Note:  Although our house includes three bathrooms, we only purchased one of these pampering toilet seats, “A” of all, because they’re expensive, and “B”, because I was embarrassed by the extravagance, hence its installation in the “Off Limits To Visitors” Master Bathroom.  We are the only ones who know we have it.  Other than you.)

Okay so recently, I became aware of an additional Toto toilet seat function of which, to that point, I was entirely the dark. 

This part I already knew.  When you step up to the toilet, the lid automatically goes up.  When you’re done and walk away, after a prescribed period of time, the lid automatically lowers back down.  Twenty seconds, thirty seconds – I really don’t know for sure, I have better things to do than stand around timing toilet lid descensions, it could be forty seconds, I have honesty no idea…okay, now I’m curious.  I’ll be right back.

………………………

It’s a minute and a half.  Although it may have been specifically set to that time when it was originally installed.  Though I do not recall the installer asking me,

“How long do you want the lid to stay up before it automatically comes down?”

And I usually remember questions like that.  Maybe they asked my wife.  Though I doubt if she’d have said, “A minute and a half.”  She is generally more impatient than that.

Okay so the “New Wrinkle.” 

I discovered this by accident one day while I was, well, engaged in an activity one performs involving toilets...

You are so Victorian!

I know…  And I was completing my business when the phone rang, and I raced out to answer it, and, in my haste, I neglected to flush.  (Some Totos have an “automatic flushing” capacity.  Ours, resulting from our-toilet-Toto-toilet-seat incompatibility, does not.)

Some time later, when I returned to the bathroom, it came to my attention that the lid (and the accompanying seat, I am a guy after all) of the toilet was still up.  This surprised me, as it had been at least an hour since I had availed myself of its services.

It was then I realized that if, for some reason, you had forgotten to flush, the Toto toilet seat lid (and the accompanying seat) would refrain from automatically coming down, until you did. 

That was the “New Wrinkle.”  The apparatus had been programmed to forgotten flushing, causing the equipment to remain up there, standing aloft, like some vertical rebuke. 

It occurred to me that my Toto toilet apparatus was mocking me, because I had forgotten to flush.  (The phone rang, for heaven’s sake!)  And I was certain it was tattling on me, spreading word of my humiliation to our other “facilities”, via some inexplicable form of “Mental Toilepathy.”

I was bound and determined to set things straight.  No toilet seat would show me up in my own house.  Making me a laughingstock to all of my plumbing.

Determined to regain the upper hand, I ingeniously devised my retribution. 

With the high-tech apparatus resting unaware, I deliberated stepped up to the bowl.  And the lid automatically went up.  I walked away, and it dutifully came down.  I came back, it went up.  I walked away, it went down.  Having – ha-hahhhh – absolutely no say in the matter whatsoever.

Rubbing it in, I repeated the process, again and again.  Step up – it went up.  Walk away, it went down.  Up – again, up.  Away – again, down.  I just kept doing it, seeming crazily unable to get enough.

I was unquestionably in control.  The equipment was the hapless recruit, doing push-ups.  And I was the implacable Drill Sergeant, saying how many.

Order has been restored the universe.  And there is contentment in my heart.

I’ve got you, Toto toilet seat.  I just step up in front of you…

And you’re mine.

"How Can Somebody Not LIke Vin Scully?"

And if they can, what chance have I got?

(Which, of course, is really the point.)

Hall of Fame broadcaster Vin Scully, 85, the play-by-play announcer for first, the Brooklyn Dodgers and then, the Los Angeles Dodgers since 1950, is revered because of the unique set of talents he brings to calling the game – a companionable voice, an uncluttered reportage, he’s unbiased (uncharacteristic in a home team announcer), eminently knowledgeable, a bottomless fount of fascinating anecdotes, he’s an uncanny lip-reader, allowing him to eavesdrop on our behalf on those heated disputes with the umpires, and he possesses an innate humility, allowing him to let the game be the star, and not the announcer.  In 1955, for example, when the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series for the first time ever, Scully captured that milestone moment by announcing, simply yet comprehensively,

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world!”

I erroneously left “poetic” off the list, which, for me, is the most formidable tool in his announcorial arsenal.  When a camera caught a young boy sitting in the stands wearing an oversized baseball cap, Scully spontaneously described him of as a kid “waiting for his dreams to grow into his hat.”

Since I’ve lived in Los Angeles, I have been fortunate to experience two legendary sports announcers.  One was Scully, who’s not a “was”, because he’s still doing it at 85, with no discernable letdown.  The other was the Lakers announcer Chick Hearn, whose phrase-coining, carnival-barker patter, demonstrated most dazzlingly on the radio, brought his “word’s eye view” to the hyperstimulated ears of millions of listeners.  This post could just as easily be about him.  But it isn’t, because I picked the other guy instead.  And here’s why.

Vin Scully has been showered with honors, canonized by the fans and won the worshipful admiration of all of his colleagues.  Everyone loves Vin Scully. 

Or so I thought.

Then, in a conversation with a guy from Chicago, in the context of I no longer remember what, I heaped praise on Scully’s incomparable abilities, only to be scalded by four words I thought I would never hear in my life:

“I hate Vin Scully!”

The guy said he was boring. 

At that head-spinning moment, it came to me – though in retrospect, it is not much of an insight – that even someone who is universally adored, is still not adored by everybody (which makes me think I have misused the word “universally.”)  At least one guy hates Vin Scully.  And, imaginably – not to me, but in the context of mathematical probability – there are others.

It is simply the way it is.  Some people have more fans than others.  Nobody has no fans.  (I generally steer clear of “Hitler” territory, but, even today, the guy probably has a few admirers.  Hopefully not too many, because the recent lull in anti-Semitism has been really enjoyable.)

But, returning to the point, nobody, not even the iconic Mr. Vin Scully, pleases everybody.  A guy from Chicago greatly prefers (the late Cubs and White Sox announcer) Jack Brickhouse.  Though I could not possibly tell you why.  (Except that he’s from Chicago.  And what kind of reason is that!)

This is the reasonable paragraph, followed immediately by my insanity.  If the greatest practitioner in his field has people who don’t like him, it is realistically unimaginable that everyone will unilaterally approve of the efforts that, in their own arena, do not rise anywhere close to Scullian standards, such as, pulling an example randomly out of the air, what I do.

The bizarre thing is, I still want them to.  And I get conspicuously snappish when they don’t.

I mean, fine.  They disparage the greatest baseball announcer ever.  But me?

What is wrong with those people?

"Summer Times - My Proudest Moment"

I wrote and performed in shows.  I served on the Campers’ Council.  I was editor of the camp yearbook.  I got up on water skis after falling forty-seven times (actually, it was forty-two times but somehow forty-seven times sounds funnier and not that far from the actual number, which is embarrassing enough, although exhilarating in the fact that I ultimately got up.  Though I did almost crash into the boathouse shortly thereafter.  But that’s another story, I believe one I have already told, though that is unlikely to stop me from telling it again.)

Each of the foregoing – and others I will think of too late to include – was a shining moment in my extended – thirteen seasons – summer camp experience.  But one other accomplishment topped them all, one singular achievement so startlingly unexpected – even more than my getting up on water skis after forty-two ignominious kerplunks that’s how out-of-the-ordinarily impressive it was – stands at the pinnacle of all my achievements.  It’s the one I am, far and away, the most proud of. 

What exactly did I do?

I was really, really brave.  

I know.  That doesn’t sound like anybody who’s been writing this blog.  Making you fully justified in your suspicions that there’s been some hacking going on, wherein a courageous person had suddenly done whatever you have to do to infiltrate a blog and had coopted the writing from the pleasant but ineffectual dufus you are used to.

“A story about being brave?  This guy?  I don’t think so.”

Yeah, well, that’s what makes it so special.

Once I was brave. 

(As I write this, I am kvelling (basking in visceral satisfaction) in my orthopedic desk chair that does nothing to help my back and probably makes things worse.)

Join me on this retrospective journey to a fragment in time when I turned out, to the surprise of all but no one more than myself, not to be made entirely out of Jell-o.

I am twelve years old, and we are out on a trail ride.

The stables housed eight to ten horses.  We are not talking thoroughbreds here.  Besides, the riding instructor’s personal horse, which was average, the rest of the remuda were identifiably stamped “Camp for Poor Riders” or “Glue.”  If there’s an equine heaven, I am certain its “Glue”-designated inhabitants looked down in dismay, thinking,

“They’re alive and I’m not?  Is there no justice in this world for horses?”

We are a long way from “snortin’ mustang here.”  Four legs and a tail, old, tired, overweight, with seriously concave backs – that’s what we rode.  Horses with names like “Vicki” rather than “Thunderbolt”, which might have, I suppose, been a possibility, but only as ironic commentary.

We head out on the trail, the riding instructor leading the way, his assistant riding “drag”, eyes peeled for stragglers, one of whom was inevitably me.

I liked riding at the back.  It was fifty percent more insulated – there was no contemporary behind me, razzing me for mishandling my mount.  Which to me wasn’t mishandling; it was just me being thoughtful.

When I fell behind, I would never kick my horse in the sides.  Or anywhere else for that matter.  Didn’t it have enough trouble, forced out of a shaded, hay-rich stall, saddled, bridled and tightly cinched, and sent out on a sweltering afternoon, a two-legged burden sitting unbidden on its back?  And then, on top of all that, you kick him?  Where’s the empathy?  Where’s the compassion?

We had a deal.

“You don’t buck me off.  I won’t kick you in the sides.”

It was a mutually beneficial arrangement.  I had no inclination to renege.  (For fear of equinistical reprisals.)

I walked my horse at the back of the pack, entertaining myself, singing the theme songs from TV westerns.  Maverick, Wyatt Earp, Rawhide, Have Gun, Will Travel, throwing in some syndicated esoterica, like Tombstone Territory and 26 Men to impress…who?  Nobody.  Nobody was listening.  And if they were, they would yell at me to stop.

So I’m breaking into the chorus of Yancey Derringer, not noticing that the cayuse in front of me has slowed, and is now considerably less than the mandatory one horse-length distance between itself and the horse behind it, which is mine. 

The gap between the two horses is rapidly closing.  I mean, they are virtually nose-to-tail.  Though I was entirely unaware of it.  I was in a world of my own, warbling those Cole Porter-like lyrics:

Yancey, Yancey Derringer

Yancey, Yancey Derringer

In every tale of derring-do

They tell of Yancey D. 

And that’s when it happened.  The horse in front of me, kicked up its rear legs, one of which nailed me ferociously in the right shin. 

The natural silence of the trail ride was shattered by a sound that unmistakably spelled trouble – the shuddering clank of horseshoe against bone.

“OW!” I cried out, in agony, mixed with surprise.

The ride immediately stopped, the riding instructor dismounting and racing to my assistance, thoughts of concern and legal liability racing through his mind. 

I was helped to dismount, looping my afflicted right leg over the saddle, and easing myself gingerly to the ground.  My leg hurt like blazes, but for some reason – perhaps buoyed by “Yancey Derringer” intrepitude – I was not crying. 

Instead, my response was gritty and grumpy, a simulation of a cowboy in distress.

We were maybe twenty minutes out from the stables at the time of the mishap.  There was talk of immediately going back.  But I would have none of it.  Though my shin throbbed like a son-of-a-gun, I insisted on being assisted back onto my horse, and finishing the ride. 

So that’s what we did – we completed the ride.  And every minute it proceeded, the respect level I received incrementally increased.  Here was a guy with probably a broken leg, pluckily insisting on going on.  My antagonistic cabinmates, who normally rolled their eyes watching me helplessly circle under a “pop up”, only to have in fall ten feet in front of me or fly twenty feet over my head, were suddenly looking at me like I was the bravest person they had ever known. 

And I took full advantage, morphing from a sniveling weenie-bean into a grizzled casualty, barking out orders he expected to be obeyed.

“Move that horse up, will ya?  A horse’s length distance, damn it!  What’s the matter with you?  Wake up!”

It turned out, the horse kick left a croquet-ball sized lump, a temporary limp and a gigantic bruise on my leg.  But no fracture.  Still, I had not known that at the time.  And I had acted like a hero.

Sometimes, males – I guess females too, now with women in combat – wonder how they’ll behave in a crisis situation, when the chips are unavoidably down.  I had always thought one thing.  But having been kicked by a horse and having responded as I did, there was the seed of a hope that perhaps I’d been selling myself just the tiniest bit short.