My Life As A Hobby

  A week or so ago I went to a local bar and ordered a shot of whiskey. Once the bartender sat it in front of me, I thoughtfully stared into the glass, swirled the brown liquid, raised my glass to the sky, and toasted a lost friend.   Predictably, my thoughts drifted back to a few weeks ago when I finally got the phone call that I knew was coming. I had been expecting it - but it still came like a thunderbolt. Frazier, a good friend of 45 years, finally succumbed to Parkinson’s disease after a long year fight.   In the course of my life, I have had very few people who were business associates that became personal friends. Frazier was one of them. I first met him in a grocery store. Both of us were kids not long out of college. He was in charge of stocking the non-food items in a number of grocery stores in the Birmingham area. My job back then was insure that my company’s products were in every grocery store in Alabama, so naturally someone like Frazier could be of help to me. Almo

Hey, JoeHobby! How are you doing, JoeHobby? JoeHobby, can you come here for a minute? It’s a funny thing about my name. So many people use my first and last name together when talking to or about me. I don’t get “Joe”, or “Hobby” as much as I get “JoeHobby.” One of my creative fraternity brothers even switched the order and called me “HobbyJoe.”  Apparently, I have a  combination of two names that somehow sounds like one.   Believe it or not, I’ve given this a lot of thought. Maybe it’s the sing-song cadence of saying both names that makes so many people do it, including my own wife. During a recent trip to the doctor she was asked who her emergency contact was. When she responded, “JoeHobby.” The receptionist looked at her strangely and paused. Then she said,”Ohh, that’s his full name. At first, I thought you were saying one word.” She was.  What’s worse, the word “Hobby” can rhyme with most anything, so I’ve been called Slobby, Nobby, and Blobby. I just got a text from an old college

  There are a lot of things guys forget: anniversaries, birthdays, doctor’s appointments, prepping for a colonoscopy, even picking up wives from the airport. However, no matter what old men may not remember, there is one thing they can recall with crystal clarity: their very first car.   My first automobile was a beat up 1960 Plymouth Belvedere - gifted to me by my grandfather. It was a quirky car, right down to the push button automatic transmission. Light blue with a white top, it  immediately became known among my friends as the Blue Marauder. This vehicle looked like the first cousin of Christine.  If you painted it black, Batman could’ve used it to drive around Gotham City.  That’s because like the Batmobile, the Belvedere had fins. Of course, lots of cars had them back then. Inspired by the space race and fighter jets, these automotive appendages began as nubs in the early fifties, and flourished into magnificent wings just a few years later. Cadillac was the undisputed fin