I recently played a few songs at an event.  I played the guitar and sang back up while my uncle sang.  It went well…at least I think it went well.  We did three songs and by the third one we had people clapping in unison and cheering. It was nice.  I was very nervous because I hadn’t played in front of anyone in a couple of years and I wasn’t expecting the crowd to be as big as it was.  Once we fired up though it was no problem.  Well it was no problem until after our little set when we mingled among the crowd.
Let me just preface all this by saying I am forty-three years old.  I am very happily married to a very wonderful woman and I intend to stay happily married to her until I die or she boots me out, whichever comes first.  Also, I am not a ladies man.  I never know what women are thinking.  What comes out of their mouths is always shocking and mysterious to me.  I fully admit to not understanding them one bit.  So much so that as a single man I made most, if not all, mad at me anytime I tried to have a conversation with one.  I understand that this is my shortcoming not theirs, but it’s the truth however one wants to take it.  I’ve met one woman in my life that can put up with me and I’m hanging on to her for dear life.  So, I’ve said what I needed to say.  I’ve learned through these last seventeen years of marriage that you cover all bases before speaking.  If you don’t, bad things will ensue.  Especially when you are naturally ignorant and know it.
Okay, so I played music and mingled.  I’m just mingling away and people are telling me how good we had done.  This was nice and I understand that no one is going to walk up and say “hey, you guys really sucked.”  Then a young woman, who had sung before us and sang very well I might add, came up to me.  She said she sings at coffee shops and wants to know if I would be interested in playing for her.  I am flattered of course.  Anytime a young woman says anything to me I’m flattered.  It can be anything like “would you please move your car” or “you’re standing on my foot” and I’m flattered.  Have I said I was flattered?   Well I was.  I hemmed and hawed around a little bit and tell her that I know a young man her age that would be very interested and that I could get in touch with him for her.  She says thank you and we shake hands.  I’m thinking a normal hand shake is the perfect ending to this discussion. Well, it wasn’t normal.
A hand shake ends when two people have shaken the correct amount of time and then administers a clean break.  Both hands leave at the same time.  That’s the way you do it.  She did not.  I’m going for the clean break and she will not let me.  She drags her fingers along the length of my hand, a slow soft drag to the tips of my fingers.  I’m not  flattered anymore.  I’m speechless.  I’m standing there looking like she just stripped naked in front of me.  I’m sure my mouth was open.  I may have been drooling.  I don’t know.  She walked away like nothing out of the ordinary happened.  I’m standing there with my hand stuck out into thin air looking like I just saw Jimi Hendrix walk up on stage.  I have questions now.  I want answers.  Is this the way she shakes?  It could be.  I guess.  Was her hand itching and she needed my hand as a scratching board?  That’s a possibility.  Here is the biggy.  The grand question.  The one that immediately occured to me.  Does she want my body?  That’s the question that doesn’t need to be answered.  I’m going to assume yes and leave it at that.  As I’ve said before, I never know what women are thinking.  I’ll assume I know the answer.  I demonstrated the shake to my  wife.  She said the young woman had just wiped her nose and was leaving me the remanants.  I couldn’t disagree more  with that assessment.

My avatar looks good if I must say so myself.  I’ve spoken of him before.  He looks like a young Carry Grant.  He is smooth and confident.  He has immaculate hair and wash board abs.  I’m tired of looking at him and then looking in the mirror.  I look in the mirror and Carry is not staring back.  I’m not sure I even have abs anymore.  I guess they’re there somewhere hidden or they fell off sometime in my thirties.  I don’t know.  I’ve been watching my avatar and how confident he is and I’ve decided it’s time to do something drastic.  I’ve been working out.
Getting into shape used to be easy.  I would eat less of the bad stuff, and presto chango, I’d lose weight no problem.  My avatar doesn’t eat so he’s doing  just fine.  I, unlike my avatar, love to eat.  I love food.  Always have.  In my younger days I would eat so much that breathing became a chore.  I would be in so much pain after a big meal at my grandmother Newton’s house that simple things like walking or bending over couldn’t be accomplished for a little while.  It wasn’t all my fault.  My grandmother could really cook and I was always really hungry.  A deadly combination.  I remember cat-head biscuits and  chocolate gravy with fried eggs and mounds of bacon.  Squirrel and dumplings.   Battered and deep friend catfish or crappie with fried potatoes and brown beans and wampum bread.  She also did piles of mustard and turnip greens, lambs quarters or polk salad.   Other than dirt, rocks, and cow droppings I don’t know of anything else she didn’t cook to perfection.  I ate and stayed thin.  It was nirvana until my mid thirties.  I still ate like a hog but the staying thin wasn’t happening so easily.  There were a few years there were I thought of just giving up.  The numbers telling me what size pants  I wore became inverted.  I was getting wider than I was long.  Something had to give.  Luckily something did.
I used to stay reasonably thin by working hard.  I worked for a friend of mine roofing houses and  that kept my width close to my length.  This friend of mine was also a fireman.  I was visiting him at the fire station one day when I discovered something amazing.  These firemen were eating mounds of sausage, piles of bacon and eggs.  They were digesting whole herds of cows, whole flocks of chickens, and hogs by the dozens.  I was amazed.  I asked my buddy what was going on and he said they were trying to lose weight.  I thought this was the craziest thing I’d ever heard and dismissed it entirely.  However, I went back and seen those firemen again in a few weeks and they were thinner and still eating like a pack of coyotes.  I couldn’t believe it.  I inquired about this diet and discovered it was the Atkins diet.  Much to my wifes horror, I began immediately.  She was worried I was killing myself but the pounds flew off of me.  She became less worried about my health after a few weeks when my clothes no longer fit and I could see that “come hither” look in her eyes.  She immediately tried it and the pounds flew off of her too.  It was amazing.  Life was good.
She has been a devout Atkins dieter ever since and I’ve waffled on and off.  Then I hit my forties and had to get serious again.  I was just rocking along thinking I was doing good.  Yes I wasn’t heavy any more but soft comes to mind.  Everythng changed when I started parousing the virtual world and saw how good my avatar  looked.  He has ripped muscles and six pack abs.  It was hard to go from virtual world to real world.  You’re bound to cross a mirrors path at some point.  What stared back from the mirror didn’t quite exactly resemble my avatar.  Those damn mirrors.  Now me and a buddy of mine work out almost every day.  I still don’t look like my avatar but things are starting to look like they’re supposed to again.  I don’t have six pack abs, but I am now longer than  I am wide.  That’s a start.  I don’t know if I’m ever going to be Carry Grant, but at least I’ve left Larry the Cable guy in the dust.

I’ve had really good Mexican food the last few days feasting on chile rellenos and tacos de carne asada with all the corresponding salsa and guacamole, rice and beans.  Mexican food is a true love of mine.  As a born and bred American— I was born in Muskogee Oklahoma for god’s sake— when I think of American food I don’t think of apple pie or cheese burgers, I think of tacos.  I have no latin heritage.  I can find no branch on my family tree that ever hung over Mexican or Spanish soil (except for my Texas relatives, but does that really count?  They are crackers to the bone).  Yet I’ve been eating Mexican food all my life.
It all started when I was really young and my parents took me to my first fast food Mexican Restaurant.  The food was very different and I loved it.  I think the place was called taco tico or something.  I’m sure it would taste terrible today if I could go back in time.  It was, however, an experience for a kid.  My family graduated from  that experience to actually buying tortillas and mexican seasoning for hamburger meat to make our own tacos.  Of course we had to have shredded cheese, sour cream,and salsa.  Oh yes, salsa.  I’ve loved salsa since I first tasted it.  Yes it was cheap grocery store salsa more like ketchup than the real stuff, but it was my favorite thing.  Oh, and those cheap frozen grocery store buritos.  Man I used heat a pile of them up and melt sliced cheese over them.  Add some sour cream and pour salsa over the top and presto my young pallet was in gastronomical heaven.  At the time I didn’t know what tastes lay  ahead.  I didn’t know that Mexican food would drive me to extremes.
I ate mexican dishes all the time in my youth.  After church on sunday some friends of mine would invite me over  to have chicken fajitas.  I would eat until I lost the ability to chew.  Anytime I smelled Mexican food I would salivate like a dog.  There were times when my love for Mexican food got me into trouble.  I was a rodeo cowboy as a young man.  We would be driving from one rodeo to another and the truck stop diner was our primary source of sustenance.  Sometimes truck stop diners are not the best place to order the mexican platter.  It’s on the menu in most of them, but trust me, it’s not good.  I’m not even sure if it’s food.  Those truck stop Mexican platters had cheese on them, that’s the only part I could distinguish as an actual food source.  But I digress, there were times when we would run onto a real Mexican restaurant in some small town in South Texas or Arizona and all those bad platters and microwave burritos would fade from memory.  When I quit rodeoing I enrolled in college.  It was college that pushed me over the edge for Mexican food.
I had been going to classes at the University of Oklahoma for about two weeks.  One day I was riding my bike down this side street and I saw this sign for a Mexican restaurant.  I decided to try it out.  I walked in and had some pork tacos with rice and beans and some salsa verde.  I had a religious experience as I ate.  I had never had such good food.  The people who owned and ran the restaurant were from Acapulco and they could cook.  I began going every chance I could get.  I was soon running out of money.  I just couldn’t’ go to my apartment and eat raman noodles when I knew the restaurant was just down the street.  I was getting desperate.  One day while on my bike I happened upon a place that pays you for your plasma.  It was only about three blocks from the restaurant.  I went in and inquired about it.  In a matter of minutes I was hooked up to a machine that sucked my blood out of me, took the plasma out, and pumped what was left back in.  They gave me juice, a cookie, and fifteen dollars.  FIFTEEN DOLLARS!  I could eat the lunch special three times for that if i ordered water for my drink.  I could also sell twice a week.  That meant I could eat six days a week there.  Yes!  This went on for a long time.  Young nurses in training would gouge my veins missing over and over and I got to eat this food.  Finally one day I got one very incompetent nurse who stuck me so much I was bleeding all over everything.  My arm was so sore I couldn’t bend it for a while.  I had to quit selling my plasma and go back to eating there every once in a while when I had the money.  It was either that or die of anemia with blown out veins in my arms.  Do you  think I would have done that for apple pie or a cheese burger?  I don’t think so.  God bless Mexican food eaten in America.  You can have the apple pie.  I’m ordering flan.

Ted Rodgers was my grandfather.  He passed away this week.  I wanted to tell you a slightly condensed version of who my grandfather was,  how he lived and how he effected my life.
Ted was funny.  He was funny in the strangest way I’ve ever seen.  I learned everything I know about humor from Ted.  He had an easy way of making people laugh and then he seemed surprised by it.  It didn’t matter in what setting or situation, Ted was going to get a laugh.  It never failed.  He was king of the miss-hear.  He would always miss-hear what you said in order to say what he wanted.  It was always funny and sometimes a little dirty.  If you asked Ted anything you would get a good story.  For instance,  as teenagers, we grandkids asked him how he met our grandmother.  The story he told us differed greatly from grandmother’s story but here it is nevertheless.
As a young man just back from the war, he and a partner ran a speak easy out in the country just east of the town Ted lived in.  The place was called The Log Cabin.  One of Ted’s jobs was to supply the liquor.  One of his suppliers for moonshine was in a small town about fifteen miles from the bar.  Ted would use dirt roads to remain undetected from the law.  He was making a moonshine run driving along in the morning sun admiring this cotton field just whistling as he drove.  As he looked over the field he saw this butt sticking out above the cotton plants.  He said it was the most perfect butt he had ever seen.  He decided at that moment that he would marry that butt.  He didn’t care what else was attached to it.  It was a good thing that my grandmother was what was attached.
Ted told us he was known by the ladies around his home town when he was a young bachelor as Ready Teddy.  One of the things you could count on Ready Teddy to do if you brought a girlfriend around him was to snuggle up to her and tell her stories.  It didn’t take him long to have your girlfriend laughing and giggling and sometimes blushing.  He did these things effortlessly.  He made people comfortable around him with his charm and easy going style.  I’ve always believed he was really called Ready Teddy.  I’ve witnessed him work his groove in line at the grocery store, at Walmart, at the bait shop.  It didn’t matter.   He was going to get a laugh and a smile and leave that person feeling a little better about things.  He was forever faithful and committed to  my grandmother until the day he died but he could never resist turning on the charm when the opportunity presented itself.  That’s who he was.  He never deviated.
Another one of Ted’s personaes was being the guy that didn’t understand the simplest things, or the guy that couldn’t see or hear very well.  I’ve personally saw this so many times it makes me laugh just typing it.  An example of this would be when we spent two weeks camping and fishing on lake Eufaula in the spring or hunting in Kansas in the winter, or just about any holiday where we got together and played poker.  Ted would adjust his glasses and misunderstand the rules.  He always acted like he didn’t know what hand would beat another.  He didn’t know what he had.  He couldn’t see what suit he was holding.  He didn’t hear the bet.  He would keep this up until you realized that he had all your money in his stack.  It was always great fun to play with a new player that didn’t know Ted’s tricks.  They never knew what hit them until they dug into their wallet for the third or fourth time and it was Ted who was breaking their big bills for them.  I loved it when they would realize that Ted was changing their big bills with the smaller bills they had lost to him.  All of them had the same look.  The look of a guy who has been abused and has laughed about it the whole time without knowing it.  Priceless.
Ted was my grandfather and he’s gone now.  I’m not.  I employ many of Ted’s mannerisms and machinations every day of my life.  I strive to be the guy he was.  I watched him closely during his life.  A lot of us did.  I want to be like Ted.  I want to be a guy totally comfortable with who he is.  A guy who can get a laugh.  A guy who you want to tell you a story.  A guy who makes life long friends at the drop of a hat.  One of the true good guys.  Yes he’s gone.  As long as I breathe he will not be forgotten.