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.