My Life As A Hobby

  My wife gave recently gave me an unusual gift for our anniversary. A bag hammock.  Why she thought an old guy like me needed one of these, I’m not sure. I think it’s another one of her plans to keep me out of the house as much as possible.   Bag hammocks are quite popular with campers. It isn’t one of those giant numbers that fits on a metal frame; instead, it’s thin,strong material that is stuffed in a tiny bag along with two nylon ropes which attach to a couple of trees. This means that to use this device, I will need to be in the back yard, far away from our home. Now do you understand what she’s trying to do?  Of course, I had no intention of even trying to use this thing until it cooled off.  Look, fending off mosquitoes and the fear of being pelted by bird poop is bad enough - I didn’t need to add searing heat to my  hammock experience.  So last week, with the heat of Alabama summer beginning to give way to moderate autumn temperatures, I...

  I’ll tell you one thing I don’t see much of anymore - kids playing army. Wait - maybe I should change that statement to, “I don’t see kids playing army outside anymore.” If you want to see kids playing army now ,you’ll have to look in their bedroom where they are probably playing “Call Of Duty”, a very popular military video game. To be honest, I’ve seen the game, and it is quite realistic. From the explosions, the weapons, to the dead folks, to the bombed-out houses, it does make quite an impression.  But the sad thing is that the children’s interaction is limited to exercising their fingers and looking at a video screen - indoors. There are no toy plastic rifles, plastic helmets, canteens, or fake hand grenades like we used, because we played army outside.  Of course, the fact of the matter is that most of us began playing army indoors.  When I was about 5 years old, it involved hundreds of those little molded green army men. You could get a whole bag of them ...

  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 he...

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 ...

  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. Cadilla...