My Life As A Hobby

  “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...