The World Serious

It’s World Series time, and I’m watching it with a plastic container of Chex Mix within arm’s reach. Why? Because that’s what my family does when it’s World Series time.

Why?

In the words of that famous baseball sage, Tevye, “tradition.”

Somewhere beginning in the early 1970s, watching the World Series with Chex Mix became a religion in our house. My brother and I would race home from school for an afternoon game and sit with our salty fingers, entranced by Rollie Fingers’ mustache or Joe Morgan’s “chicken wing.” I’m pretty sure this is when I first took notice of Johnny Bench, since it seemed like the Reds were always in the World Series. My Johnny Bench crush was real. Is real. If you can’t quote Johnny Bench’s one line of dialogue from that episode of The Partridge Family, then you are not a real fan. One day, maybe I’ll blog about The Johnny Bench Incident, when I met my baseball hero in person as an adult. It was simultaneously exhilarating and humiliating, as most of my celebrity encounters are.

Our mom was a Pete Rose fan. She sent him a birthday card one year. We knew from our mom that “Reggie Jackson bought his mother a Cadillac,” so we knew where the bar was when it came to gifts. Periodically, she reminds of this even now. Why?

It’s tradition.

This World Series of Chex Mix Eating has made me think about family traditions. What I concluded is that, not surprisingly, my family’s are funny. My family is funny. We think we are the funniest people on the planet. We think we are so funny that we are collecting sitcom material based on our family, and we have our Emmy acceptance speech nearly finished. So, we’re funny -- and overly confident. And a bit delusional.

If you ask someone in my family, what’s for dinner, they will say, “Bushes.” It’s hilarious.

If you say “Oops,” someone will immediately ask, “What’d you say?”

(Do you want to know how many Cosby albums were passed down in my family? Answer: all of them.)

Seeing a digital clock turn from 5:59 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. and being the one to say “I saw the clock turn to six” is a badge of honor. You don’t even want to know how we’ve each set ourselves up over the years to 1) see the clock and 2) prevent others from seeing you see the clock. These kinds of traditions take work.

Is it really Thanksgiving if there’s no green bean casserole on the table? You know the one I’m talking about. Not only do we have it every year, but we have it in the same dish. Speaking of Thanksgiving, if your brothers complain about lumps in the mashed potatoes every year, is it tradition or bullying? Now I purposely leave lumps in there - for spite. I mean for tradition. 

Can you create a family tradition deliberately? (Pinterest users and that awful Elf on a Shelf would say yes.) Or do they happen and eventually you notice they happen all the time? Traditions, by definition, require some intentionality. Some say they define us, providing a source of identity for a family. They create a deeper family bond, psychologists say. (I would hate to hear some psychologist ruminate on the Horrigan family traditions.) I can say with absolute certainty that we did not set out deliberately to tell each other bushes were on the dinner menu. Traditions are generally passed down from one generation to the next. In my family, I hope not. It would be too hard to explain.

Sure, we found toothbrushes in our Easter baskets and pajamas under the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, but was my mom creating a tradition or just being practical? When we set out to create “family pyramids” for photos, were we just trying to see where the breaking point was? I don’t recall it being that deliberate. It just was.

Other people’s traditions seem so weird, and ours seem so normal. When I first visited my in-laws and discovered they all ate breakfast together and not in their pajamas with the newspaper in front of them, I thought that was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen. He, on the other hand, thought it was bizarre that breakfast time at my family’s house was “whenever you get up.”

When my nieces were little, for some reason we took a photo with me sitting with my back against the kitchen cabinet with little Katie perched between my outstretched legs and baby Colleen in her lap. How many times have we recreated that pose in the last 27+ years? Dozens at least. Some in the kitchen, others not, but in that same order. Is it OCD or tradition that makes us assume the position and find it hilarious every time?

I’ll bet there are families that hold hands around a perfectly decorated Martha Stewart Christmas tree and sing Silent Night on Christmas Eve. That’s not my family. For my money, that’s the best tradition of all.

Now, who wants the peanuts I picked out of the Chex Mix because that’s tradition, too.

Houdini's Last Trick

You know how sometimes you have a decision to make and you mull over the pros and cons and then in a split second, you just go for it?

That’s what I did. The Mystery of Houdini has been bugging me. A couple of days ago I was filling up the neglected birdbath at my mom’s house. I figured by now the birds were probably dehydrated and on bird IVs somewhere. Maybe Houdini would hear the splash of water and come running around the corner of the house. I looked over at his yard and noticed his food and water dishes were in the exact same spot, so that gave me hope he was coming home. (Truthfully, he might be in the backyard, but it hasn’t been mowed in I don’t know how long, and he’s not that tall.)

Later that afternoon, I happened to be outside as the kid next door was coming home from school. (When did he get back from Arkansas? Did he even go to Arkansas? And where’s my dog?) So I was debating whether to ask about Houdini. What if he said he left him in Arkansas? What if he didn’t know where he was? What if he was hit by a car? Was I going to like what I heard? How weird was this encounter going to be for both me and the kid?

Talk to him. Don’t talk to him. Talk to him. Don’t talk to him. Okay, now it’s getting weird. He’s going in the house and you’ll lose your opportunity. Let it go; the mystery of Houdini is in the not knowing.

And so in a split second, I did it. “Hey, where’s your dog been? I haven’t seen him around the yard.”

And in a split second, it happened. “We lost him.”

Lost him? How do you lose a dog that never leaves home? I had visions of him wandering off at some roadside rest stop on the way to Arkansas. (Seriously, I have got to let the Arkansas thing go.)

Deeper in I waded. “Oh no! What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. He just left and never came back.”

In that moment, I had to be the grown-up and pull it together. I told the kid I was sorry to hear that and that he was a good dog. He said “thanks” in a way that was not sad enough to soothe me. But then again, he’s had a lot more time to get over this loss. I wanted to scream, “Why didn’t you have a collar and tags on him? Then he wouldn’t be lost!” But it’s not my dog or my kid or my responsibility.

Growing up, I had a cat named Lyndon. (Texas. In the ‘60s.) I think there may have been other cats pre-Lyndon, but they all met the same fate. My dad would take them “to the yard.” He took them to run around and catch mice at the construction company where he worked. I like to think the cats lived a life of bliss, catching mice and enjoying the love and belly rubs of burly men who operated heavy machinery for a living. In our house, though (even now), “taking it to the yard” is a euphemism for crossing into The Great Unknown.

I have questions. Houdini wouldn’t run away. Hell, he never went farther than our yard. He never chased cars. Occasionally, he’d trot behind the mailman, but only for one house and then he came galloping back. The only time he crossed the street was to follow me to the pool. Plus, the kid didn’t say he got hit by a car. He didn’t say he ran off. “We lost him.” Houdini was the type of dog who would probably jump into the first car that offered him a ride, but it’s not like he was a champion show dog, so I can’t really imagine someone driving by to dognap him. Had the kid’s mom taken Houdini to The Yard?

We lost him.

Houdini is lost.

When I heard the news, I immediately ran into the house and fired up my computer to the Facebook page for lost dogs in the area. He’s been missing for awhile now, so I knew it was unlikely he’d be there, and if someone had found him, he’d be at the pound by now. I quickly scrolled, stopping at every black dog I saw. (BTW, a lot of pit bulls get loose in my mom’s neighborhood. This does not make me want to do long training walks around here.) I stopped myself after a couple of minutes because this isn’t my dog to find. And what if I did find him? Was I going to run next door and say, “Hey, I ran inside to scour Facebook and I found our dog!”?

So I stopped. Because “we lost him.”

The kid said a few weeks back that Houdini (well, I think he called him Spider at the time) was such a homebody that if they left him in Arkansas, he’d just find his way back here.

Is that true?

When a magician dies, there is something called a “broken-wand ceremony,” where the magician’s wand is broken to signify the end of the magic.

I suppose I could hold the Houdini equivalent of a broken-wand ceremony. I could take down the barriers from my mom’s side of the fence. I could remove the yellow Post-It from the back door (which looks all the more strange given that there’s no dog there).

I guess Houdini’s last, and perhaps most impressive trick, is that he turned me into a dog person.

The Dog I Never Had is Missing

I originally started writing a blog post called “Who Let the Dog Out?” that began like this:

I have a dog now. I’ve never owned a dog before. Actually, I don’t own a dog now; one owns me. Sort of. There’s a dog that lives next door to my mom, and the dog has decided it would like to live at our house.

I started tweeting about his escapes one day, not knowing I was about to begin chronicling our growing relationship. It began with an observation when he seemed to always be in our backyard despite me locking him in his own yard.

@kbutler333 No matter how great a wall Donald Trump builds, my mom’s neighbor’s dog will find a way to tunnel under it. ‪#Houdini

The neighbors placed various obstacles along the chain-link fence in a weird combination of attempts to keep him contained. Part of the fence has what looks to be an oven rack zip-tied so he can’t get to the fence. There are some fence stakes placed strategically and even what appears to be chicken wire zip-tied tightly. It was mystifying how he could get out – and how quickly he could get out. He was like some weird canine escape artist.

@kbutler333 Pretty sure my mom’s neighbor’s dog helped El Chapo escape. The heavy concrete block barely slowed his 3rd escape today. #Houdini

@kbutler333 At this point, the only thing stopping my mom’s neighbor’s dog is some kryptonite.

I would put him in his yard, lock the gate and by the time I walked back to the front yard, he’d come running up to me. Houdini seemed like a good name. A few times I saw him wriggle under the chain-link fence in a maneuver I didn’t think animals with backbones were capable of. Eventually, I gave up and learned to embrace the company. A couple of times, I just let him out of his yard because he seemed so unhappy there.

He’s a pretty smart, but clearly lonely, dog. His owners appear to be gone most of the day, so he spends days on my mom’s shady back porch and occasionally on the front porch nestled among the bushes. He sometimes sits and looks in the back door when we’re watching baseball on TV; I think maybe he’s an Astros fan.

Often, he zooms along our back fence and then around the house for no reason I can discern other than the joy of zooming. He’s a four-legged welcoming committee to anyone who comes over, and it’s pretty easy to think he belongs to us. This is an interesting development, because my family is not what you would call “pet-centric.” I even put a sticky note on the back door so people would know not to let him in, despite the fact that he looked right at home.

Admittedly, Houdini is kind of funny looking. He’s got a wiry black coat, a goofily curly tail and big pointy ears. He’s long in the torso with short legs that point out and has a wide chest and snout. (I found out later he’s a corgi/pit mix and that his name is Spider, but I refuse to call him that because it’s a stupid name, and as my niece pointed out, “Spider? That’s a prison name.”)

I introduced him as Houdini. I addressed him as Houdini. He responded to Houdini. We had moments together in the front yard. I learned to sidestep his prodigious poop, which for some reason, ended up not in his own damn yard. I started photographing him. I tried to video him zooming toward me with the slow-mo function. I became one of "those" people and posted photos of him on Facebook. I caught him bellying up to drink out of the birdbath and started making sure it was full and clean each day. I worried about him when it thunderstormed. Sometimes I made him go back into his yard where his food and water were. Like any serious relationship, the day he kissed me on the lips, everything changed. We bonded.

There was talk of a children’s book chronicling the adventures of a dog named Houdini. I read a book on how to write a children’s book. I researched if Houdini was a trademark. I created a Twitter account for him @TheDogHoudini. He got very involved in trying to get George Springer into the All-Star Game. He got some halfway decent analytics from those tweets.

@TheDogHoudini I spend a lot of time running around on grass, so of course I’m going to #VoteSpringer. Belly rub wouldn’t hurt either.

@TheDogHoudini I meant he would rub MY belly, just to be clear. #VoteSpringer #rubme #petme #scratchme

@TheDogHoudini I like how George Springer slides in the dirt. It reminds me of someone… #FanDog #VoteSpringer

@TheDogHoudini We both smile, run on grass, slide in the dirt & crash into fences. OMG! Am **I** George Springer?? #VoteSpringer
@TheDogHoudini OH. MY. DOG!! We both have short black hair! This is getting creepy. #Vote Springer #brotherfromadifferentmother

And then… he was gone.

Earlier this summer, I talked to the kid who lives with Houdini (which is how I learned some of his vitals). I told him that I thought it was funny that even though he escaped with the entire neighborhood at his disposal, he never went farther than our yard. The kid said, “Yeah, I know. He likes it here. I told my mom, ‘We can take him to Arkansas and leave him there and he’ll just find his way back here.’”

Wait. What? Arkansas?

That kid took my dog that doesn’t belong to me to Arkansas. I didn’t panic because it was early August, and I figured they’d be back for the beginning of the school year. The kid and my dog, Houdini not Spider. I had a whole list of funny Olympic tweets for @TheDogHoudini to post. I was just waiting to see him come zooming across the yard, delighted to see me again.

But they haven’t come back. Not the mom. Not the kid. Not Houdini. School started two weeks ago. I had a dream the other night that he was back and he was biting my hand in our playful reunion embrace. But then I woke up and realized I was lying on my hand and that’s why it hurt.

I don’t think he’s coming back. The yard is poop-free and the squirrels are back to roaming their territory free of canine interference, so I guess there’s an up side. But these non-dog-owning feelings are foreign and upsetting. Houdini wasn’t my dog. But now he’s gone, and I don’t like it.

This sudden disappearance just makes me believe in my heart that Houdini was the right name for that dog after all. 
Abracadabra.

It's January 1 except on the calendar

My favorite part of the new year has always been the traditional changing of the calendar. Screw the black-eyed peas; give me a blank calendar and some colored Sharpies and my New Year’s Day is complete (assuming the Rose Parade is over).

Since prehistoric times, humans have devised methods to mark time. Moon phases and months and holy days and weeks all sort of mixed and matched over centuries. (How cool would it have been to “invent” a month?) Say what you will about Julius Caesar (love your salad), but he’s the guy who woke up one day in 45 BC and declared, “Hey, let’s make 365 days into one year.” I think shortly after that Julius Hallmark said, “Cool. We’ll make calendars with puppies and kittens and beach scenes, and we’ll all be rich.”

And the Aztecs? Forget it. How would you ever know when to throw a cinco de mayo party with that complicated system? No wonder they died out.

The system used pretty much since the 14^th century, the Gregorian calendar, is the result of a bunch of math that makes my head hurt. Leap years, except if the year is divisible by 100 unless it’s also divisible by 400, equinoxes, the square root of a hypotenuse and who knows what else. Like most mathematical equations, I don’t need to understand why. Just tell me the answer.

I have a system for “calendaring” (even though I hate this used as a verb). All good calendar freaks do. First, I go through with one color Sharpie (usually blue) and write in everyone’s birthday or anniversary. I put a B in a circle or an A in a circle and the name. Occasionally I write in a number, if I need to remember a significant one. Then I go through with another color (generally green) and write in book group every first Wednesday. Then, I write in events I know are happening, like Girl Weekend or 3-Day Walks and map out the days.

Once all the fun stuff is out the way, I take a yellow highlighter and mark off holidays. “Real” holidays are colored in and floating holidays like Presidents Day are marked with a slash through the days.

Everything else is written in Blue Bic medium stick pen, the greatest pen in the world.

A system is critical. If you think any of this sounds weird, you are not a calendar freak. Some of you are rolling your eyes at the absurdity of this. Others are you are weeping knowingly.

Sure, I could keep track of this on phone or computer, and I do. Actually, I have two separate calendar programs on my phone. The iOS is quicker, but Calendar+ is prettier. I’m probably the last person in America who prefers the Outlook calendar to Google calendars.

Recently, I decided I needed to keep a more instantly visual calendar that I could keep open on my workspace, so imagine my thrill when I discovered a 17-month desk planner with big spaces to write in. Not only could I use it immediately, but I could put all of July’s tasks in it and cross them off. It’s a dream come true.

Here it is August, and I’m organizing my 2017 calendar. I’ve got the Sharpies spread out and four calendars open to sync everything up. (Look, I’m not saying it’s a perfect system.) But it feels like my world is becoming more orderly because I’m writing it on paper. Why is that? Is there something about seeing it in print that makes it real? Why does it feel different than seeing it on the screen? Psychologists have suggested that picking up a pen forces your mind to think differently than tapping a keyboard. I’d argue that’s true for me. Apparently, turning pages triggers the passage of a time in a way that scrolling doesn’t.

I don’t have to open an app or do any scrolling or hope my fat fingers land on the right letter or appropriate time zone. But I don’t have infinite room to add details. (Unless I add Post-Its to the mix…. and that’s a blog post all on its own. You should see the new sticky notes changing my life!) On the other hand, my printed calendar isn’t going to remind me 24 hours in advance to check in for a flight or tell me I have two hours to find a quiet spot to take a conference call. But I don’t have to remember a password to see my schedule, and it doesn’t use up my battery.

I’m not a complete Luddite. I tore out the address book pages for my “contacts” and laughed as I recycled the pages specifically designed for me to write down all my URLs and their associated passwords. Like I said, it’s not a perfect system.

According to my calendar, I have some free time on January 1, and I’m not certain how I feel about that.

Welcome to Dorkville. Population: Me

Well, ouch. It seems like yesterday, but in fact it was 37 years ago this month that I packed my bags and headed off to San Marcos, Texas and Retama Hall to begin my college years at Southwest Texas State University, whose new name I do not recognize and refuse to use.

Apparently, my freshman English class assignment was to write

some sort of “commentary” piece, and like any good pack rat with dreams of a Pulitzer, I saved it. It’s typed on that off-white copy paper that I’d obviously purloined from the newsroom. Oh dear lord, it’s painful. I only hope it wasn’t published anywhere with my name on it. It reads like an episode of Happy Days Goes to College.

But in the spirit of education for all those little freshmen heading off to college, here are some things I learned along the way. Just for good measure, I spiced it up with a little commentary.

Please don’t judge me.

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If I’d only known, a year ago, if I’d only known what I know now. Well, I probably wouldn’t have believed it if anyone tried to tell me. I believe it now, for I have survived my freshman year at college, unless something happens to me in the next three weeks and three days.

Had someone said to me, “You’ll learn to sleep with the lights on and the stereo playing,” I would have had my doubts. [This is clearly hyperbole. We had those gigantic headphones, so if my roommate had music playing, I would never have heard it. I won’t call her out by name here since she's probably reading it, but my roommate used to air-conduct with headphones on.]

No one told me that I’d eventually get used to my next-door neighbors’ stereo when when it’s turned up all the way – at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning. [9 a.m. in the morning. Nice.]

Why didn’t someone tell me I’d be making meals out of peanut butter and crackers? Or did they? [No one tells you that this will be true 35 years later, by the way. Ditto popcorn.]

If I’d only known that the cafeteria would serve mashed potatoes with burritos and french fries with lasagna. [This isn’t even a complete sentence!]

I had no idea I’d spend all night at Sambo’s studying for a philosophy final. [Sambo’s – not just a restaurant, but a racial slur!]

Nor did I ever imagine 11 people would fit into my room just to watch All My Children on my television. [In all fairness, Billy Clyde Tuggle was a pretty big draw.]

In my wildest dreams, I never thought I would be so bored that I’d roller skate through the halls of my dorm. [No recollection of this. None.]

I hadn’t planned on a 28-mile trip back to the dorm taking 90 minutes. (I had a sick friend who called for frequent stops.) [This I do remember. I won’t call her out by name either, but I’m pretty sure she remembers it, too.]

Seventy-eight steps to a class? I didn’t count on that! [Tennis courts to Old Main – daily dose of cardio]

I never thought I’d go to a disco dressed in a chicken suit, either, but I did. [Went in a Lone Star longneck outfit the following year. Note to my air-conducting roommate -- I didn't post the picture of both of us in our chicken suits. You're welcome.]

I even spent a Friday night engrossed in the Wizard of Oz when it came on television. [This does not seem at all weird to me.]

And I never knew long-distance telephone calls could be so expensive. [Kids today would be horrified if they ever had to pay $40 for calls to their boyfriends.]

I always thought people were kidding when they said 150 was a normal number of students in a classroom.

Never, ever did I think I’d find goldfish being kept in a toilet (their bowl broke). Their watery end came when a maintenance man accidentally flushed after fixing a clog.

I hadn’t expected to find my bed short-sheeted or see my neighbors sunbathing on the roof of our dorm.

I found out there is no feeling worse than grabbing your doorknob, only to find it greased with Crisco. [We had Crisco in the dorm? I know this sounds like something dirty, but it wasn't.]

Wait, there is one worse feeling – it’s being in the shower and having cold water thrown on you. But even worse than that is looking for your towel afterward, only to find it gone, the work of the cold-water conspirators. [Seriously? That happened? What were we thinking? This must have been before our new RA taught us to sprinkle laundry detergent in someone’s bed. You know who you are.]

And I couldn’t believe the university expects two people to live in a room the size of my closet at home, but they do. And we did.

Boy, I never knew 8 a.m. classes were so early. It never bothered me in high school.

I wasn’t prepared to go through four hours of registration on nine different floors without an elevator and having to pay $900 for doing it! [Yes, a whopping $900 for 15 hours.]

Nor was I prepared for a library that had nine floors of books. [And looked like an IBM punch card. H/T to those of you who know what that is.]

I forgot that I’d be sharing a bathroom with 15 other girls.

I didn’t know I’d be able to watch M*A*S*H three times a day and four times on Monday, on three different channels. [It’s possible I was “experiencing college life” differently than others.]

I wasn’t aware that I’d be dealing with washing machines that eat socks (only one of a pair) and spit grease on my clothes.

I wasn’t prepared to need 11 books for five classes and find out that amounted to $132. [Resist making ageist comment here, please.]

I never thought I’d remember the names of the 36 girls on my hall, much less their hometowns and majors. [Or that half of them would be Facebook pals decades later.]

The best thing, though, is knowing that I made it through freshman English. When do grades come out? [You should see the line I scratched out for this one. It was one giant eye roll.]

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I know what you're thinking. No, there isn't a grade on it. But the good news, there's probably more of this stuff around if I keep looking, so my humiliation lives on!