Reading For the Fun of It

If given a choice, which would you rather do: sit down and read a good book or sit down and watch a TV show? I’m not going to say that the book is a national bestseller and the TV show is one of the worst there is, or that the TV show is the top rated show and the book was found in the take-me-I’m-free pile. Let’s just say that both the book and the TV show are excellent. Which would you rather do?

I go to the library every four weeks and check out a book or two, depending on how long they are. For the most part, I finish both of them before they are due back, though I have had to renew one of them a couple of times. I guess you could say I like to read. I read books, a magazine, other blogs and some online news. I love to find a book by someone I never heard of that sounds interesting and then find out I can barely put it down. It’s even better when I get another book by that author and find out they weren’t a one shot deal.

Part of the reason I’m bringing this up is because in a discussion at work a few people thought it was it was weird that I read books…from the library! I know that many people use electronic readers; my wife has a Kindle Fire and she absolutely loves it. She loves being able to have a virtual pile of books in one small place. I don’t know if I’d like it or not, I haven’t tried one yet. However, the point is that a few of the people thought it was strange that I read books for entertainment or fun, and not for a class I’m taking. It seems that a lot of people just don’t read books anymore, whether they are physical or virtual. To me, that is sad.

When I was a kid, I would go to the library with my Mom regularly. While she was browsing for books in the upstairs section for grownups, I was allowed to look for two books in the kids’ section. I don’t know if Mom made me do this, but I usually got one sports related book and one regular book. It was thrilling to me to pick out a couple of books and then take them home and read them. Books were an escape for me. When I read about a great football player like Jim Brown or a one-armed baseball player who made it to the major leagues, I was there on that field seeing it all happen. It also made me think that maybe someday I could be a professional athlete instead of just a regular guy. If not, then maybe I could write about sports, whether it was for a newspaper, magazine or books.

The non-sports books were also great for me. I read about the Civil War, cowboys, astronauts, inventors and people who overcame huge odds to do something important or great. Sometimes I thought that if those people could do something cool or great, then I could, too. It not only stirred my imagination, it helped it to grow. It got me thinking and wondering and exploring. For the most part, TV just doesn’t do that any more. Many of the shows are dumbed down or predictable, with no imagination necessary.

Reading has been a life long practice for me. I may need glasses to see the words these days, but I still like to read the printed word. Words, and your own imagination, can take you places a TV show can’t. I guess you know what I’d rather do.     

Spring Already?

I know it’s only mid-March, but spring is in the air. It’s not just because Spring Training for baseball is up and running, or because the NHL regular season is coming to an end, or because there’s about 20,000 birds in my yard and its surroundings every morning. It’s mostly due to the mild winter we’ve had. It really already feels like spring.

I’ve enjoyed this winter. I haven’t used the snow blower once this season and I’ve only had to shovel snow twice, and that was more like pushing the light, fluffy snow off the driveway. It hasn’t been very cold either, with only a few days where the temperatures have been below 20 degrees. If this is the effect of global warming, then bring it on! I could handle ten more just like this one. Of course, this is from my perspective as a middle-aged man. As a kid I would have absolutely hated this winter.

The ponds near my house never even froze this winter. Well, maybe they got a thin layer of ice on the top, but they never froze enough for any winter activities. There was no ice fishing this winter, no snowmobiles racing across the ice and snow, and most importantly, no ice skating. Hockey on the frozen ponds was one of the major things that got me through winter as kid. We’d race home from school, dump the books, get our gear and get an hour or two in before it was too dark to see in front of you. On weekends we’d be at the pond from 9am until it was dark, with a quick break for lunch around noon. I don’t think there was ever a winter we didn’t get in a lot of pond hockey from November to March. That would have been unthinkable.

We also got a lot more snow than we do now. If the ponds were buried beneath a pile of snow, we’d shovel it off or use sheets of plywood and push it out of the way to make an area big enough for a decent game. Snow really didn’t stop us, unless there was just too much to move and then we’d wait a few days or a week and then move the snow. While we were waiting, we’d be sledding, building snow forts for snowball fights or playing street hockey when the road was clear. If we missed a day or two of school, even better! That left us more time to be doing fun stuff. At least it was fun then; now, not so much. 

I just can’t imagine going through the whole winter as a kid and not being able to go sledding, have snowball fights or play ice hockey. Street hockey wasn’t a bad short-term solution, but it was nowhere near as good as ice hockey. If you’ve ever been hit by one of those orange street hockey balls or pucks when it is cold outside, you know what pain is. Maybe that's why we used tennis balls that had lost their bounce. Somehow, getting hit with a puck while playing ice hockey never seemed as bad as getting hit with one of those street hockey balls. Sledding down our own Mount Everest was always fun, as was the hot chocolate and roaring fire when we were done. Those were the carefree days of childhood.

But as the temperature outside climbs into the 60’s and there’s not even a hint of any snow around my area, I just have to smile. There’s no sadness here on my part. I don’t skate on the ponds anymore, I haven’t gone sledding since the kids were little and the last time I had a mini snowball fight my shoulder hurt for two days. Honestly, I’d rather be sitting on the back deck in the warm sunshine than be sitting in a cold pile of snow after slipping and falling. These are the not-so-carefree days of adulthood. Call it the year without a winter or just an early spring, it makes no difference. Spring is in the (warm) air.   

Take All You Want, But Eat All You Take

First in an occasional series on Famous Family Sayings

I’ve noticed lately that I don’t each as much as I used to. Maybe it’s because I subconsciously hear some of the words from the Pink Floyd song “Dogs”: And it's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around. Or maybe it’s because things just don’t taste the same to me anymore. A lot of food just tastes bland to me. Can you lose taste buds as you get older? I don’t know, but it seems like I am. The other night we had something with dinner and my wife and son both said it tasted very salty. However, to me it didn’t taste salty at all. Not a bit, which is kind of scary.

Or maybe it’s because as a kid I had it drilled into my head to “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” That was a phrase we heard a lot at my house growing up. My parents hated to waste food. Heck, when you’re paying as much as they did for food every week for nine kids, you don’t want to be throwing it away. So they had a rule: you can take as much food as you wanted, but you had to eat it all. If you asked how much spaghetti you could take, the answer was “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” If you asked if you could have two burgers, the answer was “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” If you asked how many cookies you could have, the answer was “Three.” As much as we tried, the cookie answer was never “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” Nor was it for M&M’s, brownies or ice cream. It was for liver and onions, but we never took Mom and Dad up on that one. 

Seems pretty simple, but in the competitive world of dinner time in a large family it wasn’t as cut and dry as you’d think. If you took only a small amount of food to make sure you could eat it all, when you went back for more there might not be any left. Mom usually made enough for everyone plus a little more, but there were times there was just enough for everybody. If you went conservative, someone else could take the rest of what you should have taken the first time. If you took a large portion to make sure you got your share and couldn’t finish it, somehow Dad always knew. Even if you tried to cover it up or rush past him to get the dishes to the sink, he knew. On those occasions you’d get the corollary to “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” That is, “Your eyes were bigger than your stomach.”

When one of my parents said it, I would always picture my face with these huge eyes that took up my whole face, alien like. Knowing my younger self, I probably went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, just to make sure I didn’t have crazy eyes. We didn’t get punished for taking too much; Dad just let us know that it was not alright. There was something about disappointing him that made me not take too much. Which is why if “Your eyes were bigger than your stomach.” was a sarcastic comment from one of my siblings, it was like rubbing salt in the wound. I not only felt like I disappointed my parents, I had to take a ribbing on top of it.

As for eating today I take all I want, but I do eat all I take. Like my parents, I don’t like to waste food either. Food costs way too much today to throw it away. Besides, every time I look in the mirror these days, I can see that there’s absolutely no possible way that my eyes could be bigger than my stomach.