Gimme a Hand for My Invention

A granddaughter gave me a hand today. Oh, I don’t mean applause, which I wasn’t looking for anyway.
But I also wasn’t looking for a Christmas present that would shoot me back to Mrs. Findley’s kindergarten back in the 20th century.
Technically, Amelia didn’t give me the hand, although she can make some mean paddy cakes at the age of 5 months. Rather, the granddaughter's mom, my daughter Annie, gave me Amelia's hand. Not her hand, really, but the impression of the tyke’s paw.
BAM! It time-traveled me immediately to Mrs. Findley’s classroom in the bowels of a public school on the northeast edge of Nebraska in the mid-’50s. It was before the nuke scares set in, so there were no desks to hide under when the inevitable attack came from the Commies.
Actually, we didn’t have desks, anyway. After all, it was kindergarten; as memory serves, we had tables, and, of course, nap mats.
Come Mother’s Day, Mrs. Findley set us about one of the time-honored traditions: making our hand imprints in clay. Of course, I couldn’t make one for my mom, because she had died when I was 2 (that always made Mother’s Day presents awkward), so I made one for my grandmother, with whom we lived.
So you can imagine how Amelia’s hand stirred my memory banks.
But more importantly, it ka-POWED me with an idea for an invention. I don’t know why nobody has thought of it before, but I stand to make a bazillion dollars.
I’m going to form a company to make kits so grandparents can make plaster casts of their hands for posterity. After all, the point of the kindergarten hands is so we can remember the kids after they are grown, until the time we forget whoinHELL they are as they change our diapers.
And the point of grandparent hand casts will be so the grandkids can remember us when we’re gone. Dead. Caput. Pushing up daisies. Turning to dust so future generations will have something to make clay out of so they can make handcasts.
It’s a marvel to see how teensy-tiny Amelia’s hand is, about as wide from thumb tip to pinkie tip as my pointer finger. Some day, we’ll sit around telling her how small her hands were, and what a miracle it is that she’s grown.
“See how SMALL your hands were,” we’ll say.
Considering the day we’re celebrating, that prompts me to acknowledge Somebody who started out soooooooooooooo small that his hands was as tiny as Amelia’s are now. And before it was all over, the child reached the point where He holds the whole world in his hands. Amazing, eh?
As for those of us who haven’t been around since the beginning of time, some day, when I reach the end of my time, and I’m gone, the grandkids will sit around and look at my handprint and say with amazement: “JEEZ, Papa Mike’s hands were SMALL.”
Because they are, my hands, small. Girlie, in fact (no offense to girls).
I suspect that my hand size is one reason I never became a basketball star everybody might have called just Mike. I coulda been been a contenda so good I’d have needed just the one name, like Michael. But I prefer the shortened version because the nuns insisted I use Michael; kind of a rebellion once I slipped the surly bonds of Catholic school.
Alas, basketball stardom was not to be, although there was one time, the game when I was the hero who won the contest with brilliant play and two last-second free throws that won the game by 1 point. But I don’t want to brag, so I won’t go into the time I beat the Indians (no offense to Native Americans, either, as the team really was made up of Indians back in my native Nebraska) and my teammates carried me off the floor on their shoulders.
I figure I can sell the kits on TV, between the “Clap Hands for lights commercials” and the “I’ve fallen down and I can’t get up” come-ons.
Genius, eh? The closest thing to my invention would be the cement boots mobsters use when they send people to swim with the fishes. Even if they have patented that process, I’m sure patent’s still open for grandparent hands, which I think I’ll call GrandHands.
Like I said, I’ll make a bazillion bucks, because everybody would want to buy one — if not grandparents, then their own children, to preserve their heritage for their kids.
Well, everybody would buy one except me. I have this thing, you see, that I don’t like to get my hands dirty unless absolutely necessary. Oh, I’ve done my share of planting in the dirt and even concrete mixing, but I don’t like it (don’t even like to go barefoot on the beach because I don’t like sand in my shoes).
I've got enough Monk in me not to want to encrust my hands in plaster. I'd have to use more wipes than a theater full of wimmin watching "Beaches" would use sheets of cleenex (or ONE guy watching "Brian's Song").
Nope, I wouldn’t do it for anybody or anything. Not nobody, nohow. Not even for history. But maybe, just maybe, for grandkids.
We’ll see. Keep an eye out for GrandHands, on a late-night TV commercial near you. (Maybe I’ll call ’em GrandHands-WOW, and affiliate with Sham-WOW.)
Have a great Christmas weekend and peaceful and joyful New Year.
And enjoy my Christmas collage.



Two babies from two families, Allison and Amelia.
















Brendan and Erica and the Bun in the Oven. (In first photo, Erica's on the left, and Brendan's on the right, clowning around. Or is it vice versa?)





The Four Horsemen (gotta LOVE that shot with the wifebeater shirts, no?)



Anthony, the stud muffin football star.







Annie in her first life, clowning around backstage as drama queen in high school.














Allison and Gammon

Mr. Monk Used My Noodle on THIS Investigation

My favorite TV series, “Monk,” may have ended with one of the best series finales EVER the other night, but the spirit of Monk will live on whenever and wherever a mystery arises. (Or a picture frame is crooked, or a napkin is out of place.)
Or when there’s potential for a fraud case to crack, such as Campbell’s claim that every single can of its chicken noodle soup has 32 feet of noodles. Not just every 10th can, or every 100th, but every single one.
I couldn’t believe it when I saw the commercial touting such a patently outrageous figure, and neither could anybody else I told. After all, we all know how small the can is: The fact that 32 feet of anything could be in such a tiny cylinder is preposterous! Patently ridiculous. Defiant of the imagination.
Indeed, such a claim demands to be challenged. To be discovered for the flat-out lie it is and exposed to the American public. No, not just the American public, but the entire world, and perhaps, the universe.
So I asked myself WWMD: What Would Monk Do? Why, of course, he’d investigate. So, armed with a case of wipes and with assistants at my elbows, I embarked on an experiment to expose the Campbell’s Kids as the lying little rugrats they are.
Here’s what happened:
The cast:
* I was Monk, of course, as I’ve got a few OCD tendencies of my own.

* 8-year-old Vincent played Lt. Randy Disher (Vincent doesn’t have enough of a cookie duster to be Capt. Leland Stottlemeyer).
* Kate portrayed the dutiful assistant, initially cast as Sharona on “Monk,” later replaced with Natalie. She handed me wipes when my fingers got too chicken-juicy and chronicled the event for the camera, from the placement of the first noodle to the last.
I had to spurn her advice, as Monk was wont to do with Sharona and Natalie, because, well, because she either just doesn’t have enough OCD tendencies herself or she’s scientifically challenged or she’s just a lousy damn investigator.
How could I be so harsh? Well, get aload of THIS: After I mentioned that each noodle appeared to be 2 inches long, and I had laboriously placed about 2 feet of noodles in the street gutter that served as my petri dish, she piped up: “Uh, Mr. Monk, I mean, MIKE, just count the noodles in the 2 feet and count the noodles in the can and multiply … ”
“No,” I replied, not kindly. “I can’t take a shortcut when I’m challenging a conglomerate like Campbell’s. This isn’t rocket science, but it demands a scientific approach, and I won’t allow Campbell’s to write me off as another Chicken Little global warmer.”
(By the way, speaking of global warming, how about that snow in Texas this past weekend? An inconvenient snowfall, Mr. Gore?)

Not that I wasn’t tempted, mind you: After I had aligned 12 feet of noodles, my back ached from bending over and my knees nearly bled because I had spurned Sharona’s, uh, Natalie’s, uh, Kate’s advice to put jeans on instead of shorts as I knelt on the asphalt.
(After all, unlike Monk, I’d worn these shorts for two weeks without washing them, and I wasn’t about to shed my uniform for comfort.)
At 24 feet, with my back screaming and knees barking, I nearly relented, but I rejected the temptation, saying, “MM-mmm, good(ness NO).”
At 28 feet of noodling, another thing besides my aching, aging bones started to waver: my faith. It appeared that this was going to be a close contest, that Campbell’s might, indeed, be telling the truth instead of dishing out a bunch of bull, uh, I mean, bouillon.
At 30 feet, I realized I might have to eat some crow, if not noodles.
I dodged a bullet, though, when the final measurement came in: The noodles stretched a mere 31 feet 10 inches!
I was vindicated, and Campbell’s had been exposed as the lying conglomerate it is: and to kids yet, WITH kids. Kids lying to kids for the almighty buck.
I felt a surge of excitement about the opportunity to drag the money-grubbing, international conglomerate into court and, before it was over, I would have owned Campbell’s. I started running around like a chicken with its head cut off.
However, before I had a chance to gloat, and certainly before I had the opportunity to call my attorney (it was Sunday, after all), Monk’s Trudy appeared before me, as if in a vision, and played the role of conscience.
And none other than Monk himself whispered in my ear: “She’s RIGHT, Sherlock. There’s more to the story, as there are in so many cases.”
I needn’t ask WWMD in this case. I knew what I had to do.

Here’s what happened THEN: I looked at my noodle trail, as it stretched nearly to the horizon, fading in the distance like a railroad track’s steel bars joining each other before disappearing on the prairie.
My noodle tracks occasionally veered off center and frequently curled instead of remaining straight. That obviously would affect the measurement. I concluded that, if I had been able to straighten them all out, the final measurement easily would have passed the 32 feet.
So I bend a bloody knee to Campbell’s and acknowledge the truth of its commercial.
Lest you ask why I didn’t count another can, I’ll point out that I had intended to and had even bought two cans. Well, Monk and I are OCD, but we’re not total FOOLS: I was tired of people driving by and wondering what I was doing.
Noodle mystery: solved.
I can’t help but wonder, though, how many chickens died for that can of soup. Or, for that matter, how many tomatoes are in a can of tomato soup. And how many mushrooms get creamed for a can of sauce to cover my pork chops. (Care to compute, Campbell’s?)

P.S.: Obviously, I can’t claim that no noodles were injured in this experiment, but I can state categorically that none was wasted. We enlisted two cockapoos to clean up the mess: Dewey slurped up 28 feet of the noodles (I don’t expect him to deposit a 28-footer, if you know what I mean, but you never know), and his sister, Jazzy, ate the nearly 4 feet remaining. And, of course, I ate the chicken chunks and drank the fowl bouillon.