My Life As A Hobby

  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...

                            Every boy needs a hero. And if he doesn’t, he should. Heroes prove that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. They show what strength and courage look like. Whether real or fictional, a hero gives every boy something essential. Growing up, my hero was the same as thousands of other kids in the South: Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant . Bryant was almost as much myth as man. One of his players once said, “This is what God must look like.” And he wasn’t wrong. Standing 6 foot 4 inches, he commanded every room he entered. He got his nickname because he once wrestled a bear. His teams at the University of Alabama terrorized college football like a coyote in a henhouse . I devoured every story I could find about him in newspapers and magazines, feeding my obsession. I will never forget the one time I met him. Like so many of his players, he nearly scared me to death. In March...

  I walked about seventy-five yards from the visitor center, stepped to the railing, looked both ways, and I gawked. I’m not a big gawker. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I gawked. But the Grand Canyon will do that to you. It isn’t something you merely see. It’s something you behold. It is truly awesome. Which got me thinking about the word awesome. It may be the most abused word in the English language. It applies to the Grand Canyon and the Golden Gate Bridge. It does not apply to a waitress who got your order right at Cracker Barrel. That isn’t awesome. That’s being competent. Later that day, I climbed into my rental car, started the engine, and programmed Google Maps to take me back to Phoenix. As I pulled onto the highway, I began to wonder what else in our lives deserves the kind of awe we reserve for natural wonders and tall buildings.  We live in an age of awesomeness and we barely notice it. We carry in our pockets a slab of glass that can summon the w...

      There’s a specific time of year when I don’t need a calendar to know what day it is. All I have to do is pull into the YMCA parking lot and take a look around. Almost every space is filled. Just a week earlier, I could have parked anywhere I wanted, diagonal, sideways, maybe even backing in a space if I was feeling frisky. Now I’m circling like a buzzard over roadkill, hoping someone finishes their workout before I finish my patience.     Once inside, the evidence becomes overwhelming. The locker room is full of people I’ve never seen before. Not just one or two strangers, an entire convention of them. I had to wait in line for a shower, which at the YMCA feels unnatural. The steam room was packed, the whirlpool was overflowing with humanity, and, this one really stung, someone had taken my favorite locker. I don’t know how to explain this to non-YMCA people, but lockers are territorial. You don’t just take another man’s locker. That’s how turf wars start....