My Life As A Hobby

  “ You ought to write a book ,” is something I’ve heard most of my adult life.  It seems like at every get-together when someone hears one of the stories I’ve told for years, that suggestion eventually pops up.  And it’s something I’ve considered, as I began writing slices of my life which I posted on line, in newspapers and magazines.  And now, a few years later, I hit “print” and our printer came to life.  Within seconds it whirred,  churned, and flashed, then began slurping up blank sheets the way a kid eats spaghetti. Soon, printed pages began stacking in the tray. In 20 minutes, I had a complete manuscript of my first book - nearly 200 pages long.  I took it off the machine and tapped it repeatedly on the kitchen table to square the stack. It felt heavy, substantial - after all, it was almost half a ream of 8 1/2” x 11” paper . Each sheet, every single one, was full of…me - musings that came out of my brain, traveled into my fingers, and o...

On the morning of my second thyroid cancer surgery, the surgeon pulled back the curtain and said, “Hey, how are you doing?” From where I was lying, I felt the question really should’ve been directed the other way. “Actually, Doc,” I said, “how are you doing?” Without missing a beat, he held up his hands and began shaking them as if he had Parkinson’s. “Other than this, fine.” We both laughed. “Cut away,” I said. “I’m glad you finally get me.” And now - after two surgeries and a round of radiation - I’ve been declared cancer-free. Obviously, I tried to keep my sense of humor through the whole ordeal, as scary and frustrating as it was. Jokes have always been my way of coping. I even gave my tumor a name: Tyrone. I figured if something was going to live inside me uninvited, it at least needed proper identification. My friends, of course, did not allow me the luxury of self-pity. Snide, snarky remarks were their version of compassion. Or maybe it was just cruelty - with these guys it’s on...

  “Hey, I got a good ideer! Instead of going to Sunday school, let’s sneak behind the church and smoke cigarettes.” Eventually, grandparents come to understand that entertaining the grandkids isn’t optional - it’s mandatory. Somewhere between their first juice box and their first chicken finger, you either become interesting… or you become invisible. That’s why I invented Nipper. Nipper is a character birthed from my fertile imagination - an irritating hand puppet without a puppet. No felt. No googly eyes. Just my hand moving in sync with a raspy, overconfident voice.  He spews aggravating, arrogant commentary and consistently makes terrible decisions. Looking back, he was undoubtedly influenced by those old skits I saw on  The Soupy Sales Show . I come by this honestly. My father, with all his flaws, had an incredible imagination. As a teenager, he’d call me to his bed almost every night and spin improvised, hilarious, R-rated stories about the Red Roach and the Pu...

  As if by magic, he pulled a folded one-hundred-dollar bill out of a pile of gray lint. “Look what I found,” he said, waving it in the air with a flourish. My wife and I stared at him the same way we did when David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear. You know the look - mouth slightly open, eyes fixed, brain scrambling to processes what the eyes have just seen.  Talk about money laundering.  It’s a rare day indeed when an appliance repairman comes to make a service call and hands me money before he leaves, but that’s exactly what happened. My wife Carol had called an appliance repair company, and at the appointed time, Gabe the repairman, came to look at our dryer, which had  begun producing an annoying, high-pitched wail. The sound was somewhere between a smoke alarm with an attitude and a teakettle experiencing emotional distress. It was so bad that the last time we dried a load of clothes, about two dozen howling dogs showed up on our front porch. O...