The Sweat Life.

I glance down at myself as I walk out the door into the crisp morning. It’s been forty minutes since I climbed off the elliptical, yet irregular swatches of perspiration speckle my t-shirt where skin touches fabric, mostly through the midriff. Obviously, the shower didn’t take—again—so I think dry thoughts to stop my carcass from steaming like a doughy hum bow.

I’m a sweater; always have been. I love fall for so many reasons—football, the beautiful local foliage, shopping early for the best deals on Halloween produce and razor blades—but when you’re as prolific a perspirer as I am, the frosty weather soothes those prickly pores like Mother Nature’s Speedstick. 

But whether it’s due to an unusually hot summer or the deepening tick head of manopause, I fear my exterior hydration issue is getting worse. 

Last Thursday was my birthday, so the family and I planned to meet up at our favorite Italian place in downtown Seattle. Coincidentally, earlier that afternoon my employer threw a nice little summer bash down at the waterfront aquarium. Having cake and eating it too was the order of the day, so, after enjoying the company of my co-workers and a few refreshing beverages, I took my leave to climb the hill toward the restaurant on Second Avenue. 

I was first to arrive, and while not having reached the dew point, I was a bit frothy around the dorsal fins. The only available outdoor table sat directly across from the accordion player but what the hell, I thought. I knew a certain family member didn’t enjoy dining al fresco among the traffic, but hey, someone had turned fifty-two years old that day and it wasn’t her.

I won’t rat her out, but when she arrived with the other two, she immediately voiced her contempt for my seat selection. Always one to keep the peace, I acquiesced and agreed to go inside. We followed the host to a pleasant corner table.

Less than thirty seconds after immersing myself in this sweltering, garlic-infused corner, I had already transformed into a human Yellowstone National Park, geysers of murky saline dripping down my neck and filling my ear hoops with appealing liquid color prisms. 

My robust napkin served as my only ally as the people who most loved me glared like I’d just eaten their phones. “Why don’t you go to the bathroom and freshen up?” one of them quipped. “We’ll wait to order.”

I splashed water on my face and neck and returned to the table. By the time the waiter arrived, I was again basting in my own yields. As the young man took our orders, his eyes darted in my direction while my napkin inched one dab at a time toward terminal saturation. “Excuse me. I’ll be right back,” said the waiter. He disappeared around the corner.

The rest of the family, tugged between embarrassment and empathy, stayed cool and dry, as if they’d just emerged from baby powder showers. Bastards. Just as I feared the final life-affirming electrolytes had soaked into my t-shirt, the waiter returned. He carried a very large fan.

Erupting in laughter, my beloved wife and offspring watched as the guy stood it up about three feet away and pointed right at my face. “I always get really hot working back here. This should help both of us,” he offered. For all I cared, he could have told me that I was making the other customers vomit their bruschetta, as long as that fan stayed blowing on my sweaty noggin. “Bless you,” was all I could think of to say in my weakened state.

My birthday dinner progressed nicely from that moment forward. The looks of humor and disgust gradually evaporated from my family’s faces, and by the time the tiramisu arrived, I was dry enough to open presents safely. The accordion player shuffled over to accompany the waiters in an Italian-accented rendition of “Happy Birthday” and the evening ended on a pleasant note.

As I rose from the table and peeled the sticky denim from my hamstrings, my younger daughter put her arm on my shoulder. “Happy birthday, Dad. Eew, you’re still sweaty.”

Get Over Yourself, Ponytail Boy.

My older daughter turned nineteen yesterday.

It was her first birthday away from home and the beginning of her last year as a teenager. 

Holy shit.

Lately I’ve been trying to hoard my “holy shit”s a little…

…but since this is about me and not her—holy shit, next year, a twenty-year-old will call me Dad. 

But you know, not the same way Johnny Depp’s twenty-year-old does.

Last night, we Facetimed as she rode back from dinner. Her face, illuminated in the iLight, glowed in the darkness as she and a friend sped up I-5 back to campus. Gazing at us were those beautiful, big brown eyes she inherited from her mom.

My wife spoke first. "Hi Honey. Happy birthday! How was Olive Garden?”

“Great, like always. But we missed the exit so the next one wasn’t until Tullalip.”

At this point, my wife asked the question so obvious to everyone in the world except her and apparently, her friend: “Why didn’t you turn around?” 

“I don’t know. Dad, I tried to call you today. Russell Wilson is getting a divorce.”

“Yeah, I heard.” 

“Best birthday present ever.”

Nice. Her infatuation the Seahawk quarterback is about as subtle as a ball peen to the shin bone. She’s got a couple of “Russ” posters up in her dorm room, plus a phone case and “Hustle like Russell” t-shirt. 

“You don’t need to be happy when someone gets divorced,” said my wife.

“I’m not happy for his wife at all, but I’m happy for me.” Touching. 

Her head whipped back. “Oh, no.”

“What?” we both said. 

“I left my keys at Olive Garden. Aaagh! And we’re almost back at school.”

“How long have you been driving?” I asked her.

“I don’t know, about an hour.”

Silence. My wife and I looked at each other, our faces tilted at similar "not my problem" angles.

“You should call Olive Garden to make sure they’ve got them,” said  my wife.

“Yeah, I guess so. Okay, well, bye, I guess.”

“Happy birthday!” we said. “We love you.”

“I love you too. Bye.”

You know, you can only do so much to supply the tools. When she was an infant, due to earthquake risk, we avoided driving on the rickety Alaska Way Viaduct to and from her daycare. During the forty-five-minute trip, only classical music soothed the confines of our ’95 Kia. I’d read that classical scales stimulate the synapses in a baby’s rapidly forming brain, thereby enhancing math and musical prowess. 

Hey, for all I knew, the future inventor of corn dog trees sat back there, her damp fingers grinding goldfish into the stained seat of her Fisher Price.

Yeah, get over yourself, ponytail boy.

Nineteen years later, It’s a little painful to watch others pay the price for her miscues. Last year, we would have accompanied her on the two-hour detour back to Olive Garden. Fortunately at least, kids tend to suffer one another’s discombobulation with a socialist bent.

And definitely some money for gas.

We Both Like the Same Band from Iceland.

She’s fourteen today. 

My baby is fourteen. How did this happen? It seems like a few days ago she was asking me when she had to give her shoes back because they were “Mary Jane’s.” 

It feels like yesterday that a wigged, wacky Hannah Montana ruled the house, Billy Ray cracking wise in his soul patch and hair helmet. Did you see the one where a smoothie got spilled on his head? It stuck to his face but it was like his hair had been treated with Rainex. Rolled raught oufff.

Can my younger kid be a little mouthy? Does she provide a daily, unsolicited “state-of-Dad’s-eyebrows” briefing? Can she get a little frosty when I cop a couple of her Lindt chocolates? 

I don't know, does Bruce Jenner have a special closet for his Jimmy Choos?

Sometimes it’s like she’s the coach and we’re the refs and we’re T’ing her up continuously for insolent remarks to the officials. And in this game, the coach doesn’t get ejected after the second technical—she loses her phone. 

The rest of the time, she’s kind, funny, creative and…let’s just say she inherited her dad’s OCDNA. Most evenings, while I stand in the kitchen making dinner, she sits at the computer doing her homework and listening to music and watching videos and texting and talking to me, in that order. She’ll call out a song if she thinks I might like it. Not a lot of conversation but a nice daily appointment nonetheless.

She had a bowling party and sleep(?)over Saturday with nine of her friends and one of these satanic cakes from Costco:

They ate half at the bowling alley and the remainder sometime between one and two in the morning. I'll tell you, nothing pushes control alt delete on a party like that fudgy prince of dark chocolateness. I’m not proud to admit that the next morning I scraped clean the cardboard plate it came on, like a buzzard pecking the bleached pelvis of a wildebeest.

Anyway, I’m not going to blather on. I love this girl.

Beer, Biscuits and Bastards.

Ah, Portland—a town of big beards and bike riders, of blazers and Blazers.

Portland, Oregon—best frenemies forever with her bitchy but fun cousin, Seattle, two hours to the north.

And this past weekend, it's where my bride chose to celebrate a substantial milestone of which one of the following is true:

1. It's the anniversary of the first time we talked about getting a cat.
2. She turned fifty.
3. It was the day in 1988 we unknowingly received identical perms, thus at last realizing our shared destiny.

Of course the answer is number two. Number one didn't happen until March 11 and number three was a body wave, not a perm. 

So yeah, to celebrate my wife's 600-month birthday, she found a place on the southwest hill of Portland. Getting to the bottom floor of the three-story house nestled into the mossy hillside was like the beginning of Get Smart, requiring a key code to open a garage door, followed by an elevator ride to the rental unit. 

To repeat, these people put an elevator in their freaking house—just for the guests. I expected to see Mitt Romney out trimming the hedge in his mom jeans and red bandana.

Hanging from the high ceilings were reclaimed lights; the interior walls were huge windows of leaded glass. Paintings, sculptures and art supplies filled the Livingstone area. Very cool.

March is"Dining Month" in downtown Portland, where tons of restaurants offer three-course meals for $29. Although neither of us owns a smart phone and our Australian-voiced GPS "Stanley" is permanently down under, we nevertheless found a restaurant. 

Channeling the poorly bathed spirits of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, we utilized crude but effective navigational methods—iPad screen captures, yellow pages*—I even briefly wrote some stuff down with a pen.

*For those under twenty, the yellow pages is a large book** with addresses and phone numbers on yellow pages.

**For those under twenty, a book is a stack of printed pages attached together and protected by a sturdy cover.

Still a couple of hours early for our dinner reservation, we decided to walk the two-mile distance to the restaurant. The weather was moist and misty, my jacket slowly trapping enough heat to steam a paper pouch of hum bows. I fantasized of peeling off my coat and wearing only the hood, the rest of the jacket swinging like Batman's cape during recess. By the time we hit the city, I looked like Gosling at the end of The Notebook, but without his face, hair, body or carpentry skills.

After slogging through puddles for half an hour. the legs of my outdated boot cut jeans had stubbornly pasted themselves to my heels. We ducked into the Westin Hotel lounge, a pleasing lobby bar with comfortable chairs and disturbing paintings of sad people with babies. 

The area teemed with well dressed young men—dudes for days—yet my bride courageously clung to the moisture-stretched arm of my cable knit sweater. I mumbled a silent prayer of gratitude for her as she gingerly knitted back into place my renegade eyebrow fibers. Bless her heart.

Two pints and some good conversation later, I excused myself to use the men's room, one floor up. Exiting on the second floor, I noticed yet another well-dressed young man sitting in one of those chairs by the elevator that no one ever sits in. 

"The restroom is over there," he said. He mumbled something else, but when a 51-year-old guy is hellbent on using the commode, idle banter is discouraged.

He was still there when I returned. A woman stood already waiting for the elevator, and his eyes zig-zagged over her. "Are you from L.A.?" he asked.

"No, but I love L.A.," she said. 

"Well, honey, I love how you work that outfit to cover your lower half," he offered.

"Um, thanks," she replied.

Then he looked at me again, his finger on a swivel. "Are you with him?"

She glanced at me nicely. "Nope."

He scowled at me and scanned my sodden jeans and soaked PF Flyers."Where are you from?" 

"Seattle." 

"I can tell." 

That's when my FU Meter blew its alarm, and the two pints I'd just knocked back helped hack up the words of my inner Don Rickles: "Does the hotel pay you to sit by the elevator and judge people, or do you do that for free?" 

The woman barked out a quick laugh, then swallowed.

He looked a little startled. "No." 

Good comeback, you skinny-jeaned halfwit. Thankfully, the elevator arrived and as the doors closed the woman and I looked at each other and proclaimed in unison, "Wow."

"He's an idiot," she said. "You look good."

"Thanks," I said, feeling grateful for her kindness, yet pissed at the preemptive attack on my personal appearance.

I won't burden you with each detail of our Portland trip, but I do want to show you one more thing. This is what I had for breakfast Sunday. It's called a Reggie:

It's a homemade biscuit containing fried chicken, bacon and cheese, and topped with gravy. Next time you're in Portland, stop by Pine State Biscuits—you might not see Jesus but you could at least bump into Mary Magdalene or Doubting Thomas mawing some fried green tomatoes—it's nearly that religious.

Just don't let the guy by the elevator see you eating the stuff.

On Turning Fifty and a Special Message to Jon Stewart.

I've got a few friends who don't like to acknowledge their birthdays, especially those that end with zeroes.

Maybe it represents another year of dreams unrealized or jeans unwearable. Perhaps it's just the notion that some of us have scampered substantially past life's fifty yard line, the end zone looms ahead and we're just not quite ready to spike the pigskin and kick off.

Yeah, well screw it. Tomorrow's my fiftieth birthday and I'm going to wear it like a freaking halter top.

Fifty years old. Seems like a long time when you consider that John  F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X still had beating hearts and passionate aims when my mother awoke with a raging spinal headache and a gooey little meatloaf named Tim swaddled up next to her.

Oh, but there were others who broke onto the scene in 1962. Wal-Mart, K-Mart and Target all got held upside down by the ankles and whacked on the arse that year, ushering in the era of retail box stores.

Had to have been a C-section. Ouch.

Coincidentally, 1962 was also the year that eight-year-old Chinese kids learned to weave horse hair into Barbie Doll heads while assembling Etch-a- Sketches with their toes and elbows.

I also felt compelled to google celebrities born in that Year of the Tiger, and  I must admit, we've got an impressive smattering of crazy among the ranks.

Demi Moore and Paula Abdul are fellow fifty-year-olds. While I wouldn't exactly say they're insane, I also wouldn't ask them to babysit my pain meds while I run to the Circle K for some Corn Nuts.

Then there's the Scientology contingent: Kelly Preston and the man himself, Maverick, the king of shiny-faced weirdness, Tom Cruise. Those two do look fantastic—too fantastic in fact. It's hard to tell if their youthful complexions are the fruits of having arduously attained an operationally clear thetan state...or...you know, Botox.

Add Travolta to the mix and you've got yourself a nice steamy stew of creepy.

Also turning fifty this year is a Puget Sound institution where they're not called Tater Tots, doggone it. They're freaking Mexi Fries and I'm referring, of course, to Taco Time.

Back in 1972, my mom and I established a tradition of hitting Taco Time for a taco salad following Weight Watchers meetings. If I'd lost weight that week, I usually went for the sour cream ranch dressing. Otherwise, just hot sauce. Since then, I've consumed so many of their forearm-sized burritos I can actually enter the restaurant and order a number seventeen without speaking.

Really.

But since this blog is all about reflections and since I've made more mistakes than Mitt Romney trying to figure out a washing machine, here are a few anecdotes which, if given the hypothetical opportunity, I'd pass along to younger versions of myself:

To eleven-year-old Tim: Dude, seriously, just because you watched that movie of the week about that girl who was kidnapped, buried alive and left to breathe out of a straw until her parents scraped up the ransom—it doesn't mean it's going to happen to you. Calm the hell down and turn off the light. It's three in the morning.

To twenty-five-year-old Tim: Dude, seriously, you may think that mullet looks good, but it doesn't, especially in a pony tail. Get rid of it and tell your twenty-seven-year-old self that by no means should he get a mullet perm prior to his trip to Europe.

To thirty-two-year-old Tim: Dude, seriously, I know you haven't had any coffee yet, it's super early and your ten-month old wants you to read "Busy Bear" to her for the fifth time. Just do it and enjoy it. She's going to be a high school senior some day and you'll miss your baby girl.

To forty-nine-year-old Tim: Dude, seriously, try to be a little nicer, a bit kinder to everyone you encounter. You're always talking about how our behavior produces Doppler waves of karma. Practice what you preach. And eat more vegetables.

Oh, yeah, and before I forget. Jon Stewart turns fifty later this year, so whether you know him or actually are him, I thought I'd pass along this birthday nugget to Mr. Stewart:

Yes, Jon, its true. I'm finally willing to write for your show.

A Great Guy I Happen to Know.

My Dad turned seventy-nine yesterday.

Hopefully, he won't mind my sharing that number, because hey, that slide rule is already out of its slip-cover! (that's an homage to old school computing technology, which he can appreciate).

He's had quite a stint on this planet. It seems like he's been around a long time, yet as the son of a man who wasn't yet thirty when I was born, I'm startled at how an innocent string of tomorrows and next weeks has transformed into decades and generations.

He was born in Aberdeen, Washington, on June 4, 1933. It was the height of the Great Depression, the onset of Hitler's tyranny in Europe and still five years before the debuts of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz.

Shirley Temple was still, you know, Shirley Temple.

He graduated from Sumner High School in 1951 and enrolled at Central Washington College of Education where he met and quickly married my mom. About thirty seconds later, my brother arrived.

That's the two of them, just before my dad deployed to an Air Force radar site in Alaska which was so remote, the locals considered Wasilla an urban center of liberal elites.

These days, our government is capable of gathering enemy intelligence with any number of high tech methods, from spying with cool remote-controlled model airplanes to waterboarding, but back in the 1950s, things were slightly different.

With the Cold War at its apex and Soviet-American relations more precarious than Mitt Romney's negotiations with his dog prior to a Yosemite road trip, my dad's charge was to perform Paul Revere-like duties when and if the Russians decided to squat in American airspace and kick off World War III.

His and his colleagues' singular task was so very simple: scramble American interceptors and alert the mainland prior to being rendered into salty, pink vapor by a Soviet nuclear candygram.

Stressful? Maybe a little.

Obviously, he survived that hell hole and returned home to build his own personal Dream Team.

Check it out:

A quick quiz: which son in this image would later vote twice for George W. Bush and which one would pursue a career in the fashion industry?

I included this picture of me because my parents didn't take many of their third and final child. It could be because I looked a lot like my brother and what's the use of doubling the work?








It's okay, I'm not bitter that they even chose to photograph my brother next to a tire. What compelling composition.

That's me again:

Like I said, some Civil War-era horses got their pictures taken more frequently, so I'm going to overcompensate a smidge. By the way, I don't remember asking for a train wreck cake. I must have been obsessed with something I'd seen on the news.






And I'm not sure how this one got in here. It's an angst-riddled portrait of me during the grunge era.

Oh, hang on, I'm sorry. That's my sister around '75 or '76. She was obviously totally stoked for America's impending bicentennial.









I didn't include many pictures of my dad in this piece because he was in even fewer than I; you see, he took the pictures. Every birthday, every holiday, every sporting event:

 
What the hell? How did a tennis-playing Jimmy Osmond get next to our raspberry bush?

My dad's a survivor. He grabbed prostate cancer by the throat and threw it out of his life. He endured the pain and emptiness of losing our mom, his wife of forty-three years, without conceding his existence as well.

The man would give his life for me, but I'm really glad it didn't come to that, and instead he gave me that huge plasma screen TV after he upgraded.


Happy birthday, Lionel Haywood. You deserve it.

You Ain't Nothing But a Major Tom.

I've got a strange taste in my mouth today.

Each time I post a piece to this profound journal of the mundane, I'm left with a residual feeling, a taste, if you will.

After expounding about my children's exploits, the leftover flavor can be a bitter sweet bouquet of guilt, shame and liberation from allowing others to nestle in next to me on the parental roller coaster.

Occasionally I'll write about an event in which my own actions have led to personal embarrassment and humiliation. The taste opens with acridity, yet finishes with a velvety sweetness—that familiar peace one feels when confessing sins, but sans the presence of a clergyman, bartender or cross dressing prostitute.

But the most confusing sensation on my grizzled pallet surfaces after I've blurted out remarks judging moral behavior—especially vis a vis America's politicians. Oh, how easy it is for Mr. High and Mighty to spew his vitriol from behind his iMac while snacking on Sunshine Cheez-It®, proud sponsor of Reflections of a Shallow Pond.

Who am I to judge, yes?

And that's why I was so relieved to learn of two birthdays this morning, both of which were for gentlemen who stated loudly and proudly, "I'm freaky, I'm weird and I'm questioning you. If you don't agree, I've got two words for you: Look how many chicks I'm getting.

Elvis Aaron Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi on this day in 1935. Elvis embodied rock "n' roll, even for kids my age who were a generation removed and didn't really listen to his stuff because he'd become a bloated caricature of himself.

Before all the pills and the guns and the bacon and forgotten lyrics, this dude rocked. Forget his incredible singing ability and good looks, have you ever tried moving your hips like that?

I did, once. I was around thirteen, and jeans were super tight back then. Let's just say, after about seven gyrations I learned something new and wonderful about myself that afternoon in my room back in 1976.

Today's other rock 'n' roll birthday belongs to David Bowie,  born David Robert Jones on January 8, 1947. Right around the time I was learning about the benefits of denim-inspired friction, David Bowie introduced me to the universe of androgynous glam rock.

Before the ever-morphing personas of Lady Gaga or Madonna or Prince, there was David Bowie.

When you're a kid whose only musical exposure has been to groups like Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Bee Gees, you get pretty inspired seeing this odd-looking and -sounding dude who sings some superior pop songs.

David Bowie was one of the first people who said to a young Tim, "Go ahead, say it. You'll be okay."

Happy birthday, Elvis and David. Thanks for absolving me of my sins.

Forty-nine years old? What the...

Today, I'm a forty-nine year old. What the hell?

That's twenty-three years older than LeBron James. All I can say is, just wait until your prostate is bigger than your ego, LeBron. Okay, that's not gonna happen.

That's twenty-four years older than Lady Gaga. And to think that I had such a huge head start and still failed to predict America's voracious demand for crotchless pantaloons made of calf tripe.

That's thirty-two years older than Justin Bieber, and I've only recently discovered the foxily imperative comb-forward.

I know it's really not that old, right? That's what everyone says, anyway. All I can tell you is that when I turned one, I was three percent of my dad's age, and now I'm sixty-three percent of his age. It won't be long before we share a two-for-one shower escalator Groupon.

Okay, enough of the self-pity. I'm breathing, my heart's beating and, doggonnit, my wrists are as good as ever (That's a typing reference).

A few Negative Nellys have commented on their hatred for lists, especially of the top ten variety. Well, it's my birthday, so what's a nice way to put this? How about this—screw you, haters.

I've had so many great birthday happenings over the years, I'm going to head in the other direction this time. Here's a list of my top five worst birthday experiences over nearly half a century of polluting Mother Earth's lower lumbar with my Converse Chuck Taylor carbon footprint:

5) August 28, 1971—I was already crabby because we were camping on my birthday and therefore couldn't go to Shakey's, but decided all would be well if I could crack open some brand new Puma soccer shoes on birthday morn. But they weren't Pumas; they were called "Mr. Pro" and I was pissed. Sorry, Dad.

4) August 28, 1978—During high school, we always had two football practices per day, which really sucked. This was back when coaches wouldn't allow water because they thought it contained estrogen or something, so by the end of practice, we looked like fruit leather. And on this particular day, I broke my finger and witnessed a motorcycle wreck, to boot.

3) August 28, 1965—For my third birthday, I had requested olives on the cake, thinking they would taste like cherries. My mom acquiesced, I ate an olive and have loathed them ever since.

2) August 28, 2002—Another camping birthday, but this time it was my fortieth, and it was in a yurt. The camping part was okay, but when we decided to have dinner at the local golf course, the waitress volunteered a free golf cart to tour the greens for my birthday.

Our family, plus one other kid, packed into a single cart and tentatively navigated the course, trying not to interrupt anyone's golf swing. We looked like a made-for-TV movie, "The Beverly Hillbillies Go a' Golfin'." After receiving scores of nasty glares, we ditched the cart at the earliest opportunity; the Clampetts headed back to their yurt, and Jed, the birthday boy, had aged at least another year.

1)  August 28, 1985—My clinically crazed girlfriend, after repeated warnings that I really, really didn't want a surprise party, threw me a surprise party. On the way up my apartment stairs to said event, she informed me of it, so I had to act simultaneously surprised and not highly annoyed with her within fifteen seconds.

You may think, "What a jerk. She was just trying to be nice," and that's fine. It also means that you don't understand the mind of a sociopath.

Enough with the negative shtick. I've had so many fabulous birthday presents and happenings—the green stingray on my sixth birthday, the trip to Tahoe on my twenty-fifth (good surprise), the bungee jumping on my thirtieth.

And, of course, all of those trips to Shakey's. Good thing I didn't ask for pizza on my cake for that third birthday.