Kate Calls Grandad's Bluff on Claw Machines

The old journalist grandad offers a word lesson today for all the grandkids: You can’t tell a word by its cover, and words sometimes don’t provide adequate cover.

I’m not addressing the old homonym conundrum that afflicts most people, who often write rein when they mean reign, or threw when they mean through (if you think that doesn’t happen, you’re wrong; I’ve seen it dozens of times) .

Rather, I’m passing on the heritage of knowledge that words sometimes are spelled the same but have different meanings. Take the word train, for instance.

Vincent once was obsessed with trains, although I believe now he’s more into planes. That brings up an editing diversion. Fix this sentence: The rein in Spain falls mainly on the plane, where the raining king looked out the window pain and saw caballeros below trying to reign in the horses.

Back to the serious lesson: Lest you think Vincent ever considered changing his name to Vincenzo and preparing his own clothing line for fashion week, I must clarify that he didn’t sit around as a toddler sketching wedding dresses and their trains. Nope, he was into the manly pursuit of railroad trains, and I’ve chronicled before how he would awaken me in the middle of the night when he heard a train whistle and we would scoot out the door in our jammies to run to the tracks. His accumulation of toy trains and his body of knowledge about railroading are legion.

Take another word: bluff. One meaning carries an air of deception, especially in cards, where one can bluff about one’s hand to throw opponents off of their own games. Although bluffing, in that sense, can lead to a precipitous decline in winnings, it is not related to another precipitous meaning of bluff. In that sense, bluff can mean peak, or mountain, or cliff, or even promontory.

Now, if a person, such as a grandad, has a certified illness, such as an addiction to claw machines, his family often intervenes and gets him into rehab to cure the malady.

Skip and Melissa tried to discourage me because the claw machine booty I rained on the Four Horsemen (especially after I found a claw machine that coughed up toys like a baby does broccoli, and I won something like 17 stuffed St. Patrick's Day toys in 20 tries, most of which I dumped on that Italian family). But I kept getting sucked back in, not unlike Michael Corleone. The Grandfather Clause was a victim of the Godfather Claws.

  

The real intervention began when Kate opted for tough love to wean me from my magnetic attraction to claw machines, often cuffing me about the head and warning: “Step away from the claw machine” when I would veer toward one.

I’m largely cured, and I try to be adult about it, although I have to acknowledge that sometimes I’m bluffing when I return from the store and tell her I walked right on by the claw machine with nary a glance. And I fall to the temptation, which is why she got a red bear for Valentine’s Day.

So, I should be forgiven for the fact that I just couldn’t bluff when an octopus beckoned from a claw machine the other day. You see, Avery was visiting with his parents, and I learned that he likes octopi.

I glanced around to make sure that nobody was looking — especially to check whether Kate had tailed me to the store — and set about to get the octopus. First, I had to invest a dollar to grab the toy that was atop the octopus so I would have a clear shot. (Those of us addicted to the machines know when it’s worth the effort, and the odds of success, for such an advanced move, and mine worked.)

Then I went home, clinging to the octopus, preparing my bluff to avoid Kate’s taking me to the woodshed. Avery and his parents were just returning from a grocery store, so I thrust the octopus into his hands and said to Kate, with amazement: “Lookit what Avery found at the store!”

                      Avery delights in his new octopus.

No dummy is Kate, whose anti-claw campaign to put me on the straight and narrow can outstretch any octopus, who scolded: “Michael Joseph Tighe! You were at the claw machine. AGAIN.”

So, since my bluff failed to provide ground cover for me, I skedaddled to another sense of the word bluff, a scenic overlook in La Crosse called Grandad Bluff. The promontory towers 590 feet over the city, and 1,183 feet above sea level.

And wouldn’t ya know it: There aren’t any claw machines up there, 1,183 above sea level. So maybe Kate will call this grandad’s bluff and banish him to the bluff.

On the other hand, Grandad's Bluff was ONE place where I could have used a claw, after Avery tossed his binky over the fence. No way was I going to climb over to retrieve it. I'm more skeert of heights than I am of being punished when a claw machine grabs me and I have to claw my way out.

                    Avery and grandad take refuge on Granddad's Bluff, high above La Crosse, WI.

It Was Here Yesterday, but Not Hair Today, or Tomorrow

I can’t fathom why bad haircuts happen to good people, especially when this good people has a daughter who is one of the best hairstylists in the nation, if not the WORLD.

The answer, of course, is that Allison lives and works in St. Paul, MN, while I live in La Crosse, WI. It’s a more convenient arrangement than when I lived in Florida, and I could benefit from her digital dexterity in unlocking the charms of my thinning locks only occasionally, when she went South or I visited North.

Now, we’re just a few hours apart. But once in awhile, our schedules still don’t mesh of her coming here, or me, there, so I have to go elsewhere when my mane looks like a pain.

Well, it really turned out to be a pain this time, as I had eschewed Kate’s usual (and repeated) advice to go to a real stylist. My excuse is lame: I don’t like to keep track of appointments, so I opt for places with friendly window signs proclaiming: “Walk-ins welcome.”

I try to choose where I walk in carefully, though, because I had discovered during previous follicular forays that you can’t always predict quality. Thus, when a shop’s name starts with “Great,” you can’t guarantee the clip. (Quite the contrary.) I wanted “Fantastic,” so I tried a place with that in the name, as I had had some success there before.

I suppose I should take part of the rap and acknowledge that it could have been missed communication. When I told her I wanted it short on the sides, around a half-inch, I didn’t imagine that she’d keep right on buzzing across the top of my dome. When she did, my gaping maw filled with so much hair that I couldn’t mouth a protest.

By then, the sheep was shorn, to this ridiculous extent:

I panicked for a couple of reasons:

*        I knew Kate would be tempted to skin me alive, especially since the process already had started.

*        I just landed a new job, and I have to report in just a few days, and I’m afraid the fella who interviewed me won’t remember me. I can just imagine him saying to HR: “I have NO idea who this guy is; show him the door."

So I chose the obvious solution: I dawdled and fiddle-farted around before going home, hoping my hair would grow a bit. Actually, I was hoping that all of the hairs would grow, but I would have been satisfied with a tiny bit.

My solution failed, so I went home, with my tail between my legs. (The slasher had spared my tail.)

And here I sit, with a haircut that hasn’t been this short since I was in first grade.

Kate was too stunned to kill me, but suffice to say that she’s having great fun at my expense, asking repeatedly who the stranger is. And she has pointed out several times that my mustache is longer than the hair on my noggin.

I can’t quite figure out her reaction, because she’s a Wisconsin native and green-and-yellow-blooded Packers fan who has a huge crush on World Champion wide receiver Donald Driver. And he’s got a shaved head, too.

           

So what’s he got that I don’t? Well, there IS his smile, but I’ve got a nice smile, too, I’ve been told. (Well, OK, I don’t have the teeth, but that’s only part of a smile, right.)

         

So I checked him out on “Dancing With the Stars” to see what I was up against.

          Oh, NOW I see. It’s the abs. And the guns. And the tats. And the moves. I guess my hairdo gone bad wouldn’t matter if I had other attributes to distract folks.

         

I’ve got the last laugh, though, because Kate did buy me a share in the Packers so, in a way, I own a piece of The Donald. And I mean The Athletic Donald, of course.

I’m also toying with another solution when I head to my first day on the new job. How’s this look for a fixer-upper?

How Do I Get the Boat Out of the Basement, Jethro?

I feel a bit like Mark Harmon’s persona as Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs. Oh, not because I actually look like Harmon, although I did try to force my hair into his bowl-cut, center-part iteration for awhile.

          I looked nothing like him, in more ways than one. And my hair just wouldn’t behave like his (much like it wouldn’t behave like Colin Farrell’s during that phase of my spiky-haired-wannabe-ness).

On the other hand, I echoed Gibbs with the boat-in-the-basement dilemma that was a pivotal point in “NCIS.” My boat was like his hair, in that my inflatable model looks NOTHING like his finely wood-crafted model, just like my hair wouldn’t hew to his style.

          On the upside, I didn’t have all of the sawdust to contend with that Gibbs did during his meticulous fashioning of the wonderful wooden hulls for boats in his basement. I think he built four. The prevailing question on the show was why did he build the boats; the running joke was how did he get them out of the basement.

That’s my dilemma now: How do I get my boat out of my basement? Kate got it for me for Valentine’s Day, and I recently inflated it. It appears seaworthy or, in my case, river-worthy, IF I can just get it out the door.

The look on Jazzy's face indicates that she appreciates my dilemma. (If I could read her mind, methinks it would be saying, "What was he THINKING?")