I was looking forward to flying with my son to New York for my daughter’s baby shower on Labor Day weekend. All my son-in-law’s relatives were to be there, and they are a lot of fun. We’d fly up on Friday, help them with the preparations on Saturday, enjoy the party on Sunday and fly back on Monday. What could be easier than that? My only problem was that I wasn’t paying attention to the weather.
Yes, we were having late afternoon rain but that’s sort of a Florida tradition, isn’t it?
The sun was shining when we arrived at the airport. We checked in, got checked out by security and settled in by our gate to wait for our departure. Then the afternoon clouds formed. Darn, I was hoping to take off before the rain began. With lightning and thunder.
What had not registered with my mind was that there was a low pressure trough lingering off Tampa Bay up to Apalachicola. It was now a tropical storm and wasn’t going away anytime soon. Someone came over the loud speaker to announce all flights had been delayed because of the lightning. Thirty minutes. That wasn’t too bad.
At the end of the thirty minutes lightning was still popping over the airport so the departure was delayed again. At the end of that thirty minutes the loud speaker person said the flight was now on schedule but they were looking for a pilot.
Well, that caught my attention. I thought getting a pilot was at the top of the check list for scheduling a flight, not a last minute afterthought.
By this time the clock was approaching 8 p.m. The storm had abated but evidently still no pilot. The announcer came back on and said the flight was canceled because of turbulent weather and that passengers would have to go to the gate counter to get a card with the emergency number to call to reschedule.
This is why I like traveling with my son. He took care of things like for me now that I am a senior citizen. The newest aggravation was that when the person on the other end of the phone was about to give him important information the loud speaker blared out instructions for passengers at other gates. The best we could do was go back home, an hour’s drive away, and take off the next morning.
The airline offered to make reservations for us at a nearby hotel, but it wasn’t going to pay for it. If the official reason for the cancellation had been no pilot, then it would have been the airline’s fault; but, since the reason was bad weather, it wasn’t anybody’s fault. No thanks, we went home.
The nice thing about the flight the next day was that there was only an hour’s layover in Atlanta which was a nice convenient amount of time to walk from one gate to another. On the transfer plane I knew we were landing in White Plains because I saw a lot of Gucci bags walking down the aisle. (I’d take time to explain that joke but I’m still too tired from the trip.)

For my son’s 44th birthday he wanted something different than our usual dinner and a movie. I’m always up for an adventure, but I didn’t realize I was going to enter the mind-warping world of virtual reality.
It was a place called Void at Disney Springs in Orlando. Forty years ago they called the lakeside shopping center Disney Marketplace. Then they updated and expanded it under the name Disney Village. Now it’s been tripled in size and added a giant parking garage so it needed the new moniker.
This was not our first encounter with Disney Springs. Two Christmas Eves ago my son and I went over for a different holiday experience. We ate at this expensive steak restaurant and within half an hour I was puking my guts out. As much as the meal cost, it should have come with sick bags.
Luckily this time we were more interested in the live occurrence than the food. My son bought tickets for a specific time online so we didn’t have to wait too long, although we did have to fill forms clearing them of any responsibility if the virtual reality show made us sick. The restaurant could have used those warnings.
The situation was this: we were the good guys who had stolen Storm Trooper uniforms and we were on a mission to save the princess or steal plans for the Death Star or something else just as dangerous. We put on a power pack, got a rifle and a helmet. When the helmet’s visor lowered we were in complete darkness until the show began.
This was one of those exercises in trust where you were led into a room, totally without vision. Then when the switch was flipped we were in a science fiction world worthy of the George Lucas name. We weren’t really moving but somehow walked down this dark hallway when Storm Troopers started jumping out at us, and we had to shoot them. I actually felt the impact of their blasters, and when I looked down I saw singed dents in my virtual uniform.
At some point our guides directed us into another room which was no more than three steps away but felt further than that. After all, it was virtual reality. In front of me was an opening in the fortress tower and below was a river of lava. We had to cross an iron grid bridge with no handrails.
How on earth did this pass safety regulations? One false step, and I would fall into the lava. That wouldn’t be good. Then I remembered I was in a virtual reality. I was walking on durable commercial-grade carpet. One step either way wouldn’t make any difference. But I had trouble convincing myself of that. I actually felt dizzy like I was going to fall down.
That’s when I virtually slapped my face and told me to get a grip. I didn’t want to really fall down and embarrass my son. Although at the time I didn’t exactly where he was. We were in a small group of virtual warriors and all the Storm Troopers looked alike.
So I bucked up and crossed the bridge only to find myself confronted by a giant dragon rising from the lava. We all focused our fire on him and he soon melted away. I did have lingering doubts about how a dragon that lived in lava could be done in by a few laser shots.
But there was no time to waste. We had to find the princess/the Death Star plans/whatever. In the fourth and final room we saw what we came for, but, of course, you-know-who was standing in the way—Darth Vader himself. Well, I lost it and unloaded my blaster into him. After all he was the one who killed Obi Wan Kenobe.
We didn’t kill him, but a voice did come through our headsets telling us we had recovered the object we came for and we could now escape the empire fortress. On the way out we had our pictures taken. I tried to look like Sylvester Stallone in Rambo shooting his rifle and screaming at the same time. Instead I looked like some demented old man who needed to be taken back to the Home immediately.
For lunch we ate at a huge fast food place across the plaza from the Void. It wasn’t fancy or expensive, but at least it didn’t make me throw up. All in all it was a fun day. I didn’t embarrass my son too much. That was the least I could do considering it was his birthday.

I’m in the massive task of downsizing 44 years of living so I can move into an apartment. Actually, it’s more than the years I was married but an additional 40 years of memories from my mother-in-law. My wife and I adopted them like they were orphans.
These orphans are 78 vinyl records. For years we rationalized storing them in closets because they were going to be some magical source of retirement income. We even had one extra-thick record from the Thomas Edison Company. No, not the one of him reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb, but some kind of music. I looked it up on eBay, and it was worth only a buck fifty. A lot of Bing Crosby too, but he was so popular his records are worth less than Edison’s.
If you wanted to get any cash out of this stack they had to be by someone no one ever heard of before. Well, not just any nobody. It had to be somebody whose talent was been discovered after the artist died with only one or two albums made. And those album covers had to be in pristine shape. Vinyl with no cover was only worth molding into salad bowls.
Believe it or not, my wife Janet and I found a few records that fit that criteria. We thought we’d at least put them on display in our living room bookcase. Like a conversation item. Then we let this woman sleep in our living room because she had left her husband and her parents wouldn’t let her bring her pet dogs into their house. The doggies just loved the glue used on those record covers so there went the conversation value of those.
Since Janet died I kept them thinking I might want to listen to them myself. That way, they’d have some value, even if it were just for me. Recently I tried to play them but they didn’t sound right. Then I realized my player only had speeds of 45 and 33 1/3. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to find an old Victrola to play them. And if I did find one, it would cost too much. I’m old. I’m trying to save money, not spend more of it.
My deadline of clearing out the house is coming up after the first of the year, and it looks more and more like I’m just going to make several trips to the local dump ground. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I won’t make any money from them. I’ve never been able to sell anything so why would I want to ruin my perfect record. And there’s no real sentimental value to them, since they had been bought and listened to by my in-laws when they were youngin’s themselves.
My only regret is that I won’t get to listen to them even one time. These were the songs played in the thirties and forties when radio was just catching on and television was some cock-eyed invention in the future. There’s Guy Lombardo waltz tunes, the Ink Spots, Mills Brothers, Perry Como and some group called the Blind Coal Miners of Virginia.
I guess I’ll have to rely on imagination, like I depend on it to visit the Eiffel tower, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China and Machu Picchu. At least in my mind, the records won’t have any scratches on them.

I cannot properly express my chagrin when I turned on the television yesterday to discover that summer was already over. School started.
Of course, I should not have been surprised. For the last few weeks the stores have been advertising school supplies on sale, and television has been scaring children into believing if they don’t buy their new jeans and shirts with the proper brand labels they were doomed to being the “unpopular” kids for the next nine months.
Half a century ago when I was young…pausing to let that phrase sink into my head…school began after Labor Day and ended before Memorial Day. I had three whole months to run barefoot on the hot asphalt street of my small Texas hometown and get callouses on my toes. It was one glorious sun-drenched day after another. I could forget my embarrassment of being chosen last for every game played during recess.
Except for that one year—was it between fourth and fifth grade or between fifth and sixth? It didn’t make any difference; it was the middle of childhood—when my brother decided it would be fun to ruin my period of freedom. I suppose I brought it upon myself. I had begun the countdown to Memorial Day right after Easter. My ecstasy was too much for him to bear.
By the end of the first week of June, he began, “Isn’t it wonderful? Only eleven weeks to school!”
After a couple of weeks he started adding in that this would be the year I would learn another level of arithmetic and have to learn harder spelling words. My teacher would probably be the same one who absolutely hated him and my other brother so she would certainly hate me too.
I couldn’t enjoy my hot dogs and watermelon on Fourth of July without his clapping of hands as he announced that now school was only eight weeks away.
Our mother told him not to count down the days like that. He was ruining my summer. I did detect her tone of voice was not as severe as when he had not finished a certain chore as quickly as she had hoped. If her withering condemnation about something really important like not sweeping the back porch did not make him move faster, her soft-edged admonition to be kind to me certainly would have no effect on him.
By the time the middle of August rolled around, he was crowing about only two weeks left to buy school supplies. If you don’t have the right school supplies on the very first day, he warned me, that mean teacher would probably spank me.
Looking back on that horrible summer, I still cannot find the humor in my brother’s campaign to remove the last traces of joy in my juvenile heart. Though I now can understand it better. He spent most of his adult life in and out of the state mental hospital, which helped me to forgive him. Poor thing couldn’t help himself.

I always looked forward to hurricanes that were headed our way.
Usually my best girlfriend Louise would come over to spend the night. Her parents thought our house was better built than theirs, and they wanted their little girl to be in the safest place possible. On the other hand, they always stayed at their house because if a hurricane did hit they wanted to be there to protect their personal property.
We spent the whole night in front of the television set watching the weather updates. I sat on Daddy’s lap as the weatherman told us that the storm had made landfall south of Miami and was turning northwest, right toward our town.
A few times I got scared, but Daddy just put his arms around me and told me everything was going to be all right. “And if it does hit our house, all that means is that we’ll have to move to another house, and we’ve done that many times. You’re used to that. And if we do get killed in the hurricane, well, we won’t have to be worried about them anymore, will we?”
By the time the hurricane reached out town it was a tropical storm, and just rained a lot, which made Louise and me very sleepy and we went on to bed. When we thought Daddy and Mommy were good and asleep we’d sneak out of my bedroom and get the ice cream out of the freezer, grab two spoons and go back to bed, eating ice cream. In the morning Louise’s mom picked her up. We could tell she had been crying all night, worrying that she would never see her little girl again. She was certain they would lose everything they owned and they’d never have anything ever again for the rest of their lives.
For a moment, I thought I should tell Louise’s mom what Daddy told me, but decided she didn’t really want any advice from an eleven-year-old girl. I never told my parents how I felt about hurricanes, but I suspected they knew, the same way they knew we had raided the freezer and ate ice cream.
One day when I was planning the next adventure for Louise and me, Daddy said in a casual way, “You know, I had a best friend when I was your age. He was about two years older than me, just like Louise is two years older than you. So he became a teen-ager before I did and things changed. It’s not like we weren’t friends any more, but we were becoming different people.”
Sure enough, in a couple of years Louise became a teen-ager and our friendship was never the same as it was when she would come over and watch the hurricane news on television.
We’re both grown-up now, and I miss the late night weather watches. Not so much about Louise but—I miss sitting on Daddy’s lap, having his arms around me, hearing him whispering in my ear, “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.”