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?")

When They Drive — Don't Look Back

Well, it’s obvious that Kate and I should start saving up for Amelia’s first car. Back in 2010, when Avery wasn’t even standing yet and Amelia hadn’t been walking all that long, I fell into the usual grandfather trap of deciding to buy them kid-sized, battery-powered cars.

I can’t explain why I felt compelled to get them wheels at such young ages. Heck, I didn’t get Vincent and Jack their first car until Vincent was 5, maybe 6, and Jack was a year younger — lo, those many years ago. I got a heckuva deal on the bright yellow, two-seat Corvette, and their beaming faces during their first spin around the block would have been worth the price of a full-sized, full-fledged, full-priced ’Vette. When Luke was 3, maybe 4, I snagged him a single-seat, battery-powered golf cart. Too bad I ran out of juice before Patrick started knocking around, because I think the only power thing I’ve ever given him was a power nap. (Not that there aren’t enough such vehicles in the Four Horsemen’s garage, with batteries in various stages of charge, and discharge.)

I didn’t even ask Brendan and Erica whether it was OK to get for their son, because, well, I didn’t want them to say no. So we got Avery the “Cars” car. But I did check with Annie and Kevin about the California terrain their daughter might encounter, as well as whether Amelia might want the “Cars” model or the pink option with girlie designs and flowers.

Amelia may look pretty in pink, but I didn’t want to force a stereotype on her. Speaking of pretty in pink, I’m reminded of a great movie from her mom’s teen years. And, since “Pretty in Pink” featured my FAVORITE song from the ’80s, OMD’s “If You Leave,” I share:




OK, now where was I, before I left my mind? Oh, yeah, well, Annie responded that their neighborhood really wasn’t conducive to Amelia Andrettis careening around and suggested a pedal-power mode of transportation. So she opted for a pedal-powered trike.

As it turned out, the “gas” pedal in Avery’s battery-powered car presented a challenge, as he couldn’t even reach the dadgum thing at the beginning. Eventually, after lengthy tutoring and stretching his leg, he was able to reach it. And he eventually mastered the idea that pushing it makes the car go.

That was then, this is now, when I get this picture from Annie: “Amelia enjoying the tricycles . . . on her day off . . . ”



Now, that sure looks like a driving course, complete with cones, to me. Next thing you know, she’ll be angling for a car, just to keep up with the grandsons. So maybe, around Christmas, or maybe, even at that July birthday ...

Well, at least the training might keep her from crashing into trees, like Avery occasionally is wont to do:



.
Like I mentioned above, I don’t know why I feel the need for all of them to have cars. Heck, I was 19 or 20 before I got my first one, and I had to pay for that ’63 Volkswagen Beetle myself.

Maybe I’m caught in a ’50s time warp, back to when granddad was a lad, and there was a car for every garage. On the other hand, most garages those days were for just one car — unlike these days, when even simple folk in the suburbs have two-, three-, and four-car garages.

Oddly enough, despite the proliferation of garages, many folks STILL park their cars in their driveways because their garages are too full of toys such as boats and totes and mowers, etc., etc.

And, I can attest, some are a little crowded with battery-powered cars that over-indulgent grandparents have thrust upon their kids’ households.

We Teach Flat Stanley to Man Up to Wisconsin Winter

Flat Stanley was perplexed, petulant and, well, positively pouty when Kate and I unfolded him in a letter from Jack.

Stanley squinted his eyes at the blast of sunlight after being cooped up in the envelope during his three-day mail journey from Florida. Dazed, he gazed around and shivered as he spit out this greeting: “D-d-d-dadG-G-G-GUMMIT it’s c-c-c-c-cold here. W-w-w-w-why would J-j-j-jack send me all the way from t-t-t-the S-s-s-s-s-sunshine S-t-t-t-state to this t-t-t-t-t-tundra?”

If you’ve never seen a Flat Stanley, or heard the drill, here’s a thumbnail explanation: Stan the man is a school project in which students send paper outlines — paper dolls of Stanley, after a fashion — across the land, and sometimes around the world, to experience the contrasting aspects of varying cultures. (Eg: Jack’s Stanley learned that we make cheese in Wisconsin, compared with one of the favorite pastimes the Four Horsemen and I have about cutting cheese.)

Stanley wasn’t ALWAYS flat, as is recounted in children’s book titled, appropriately, “Flat Stanley.” Rather, the story goes, a bulletin board fell on a youngster named Stanley, who was smashed “as flat as a pancake.” Stanley survived, albeit flat. Jeff Brown’s book chronicles Stanley’s discoveries of times when being flat has its advantages.

In this case, I suppose, the advantage was being able to be stuffed into an envelope without further smashing in a postage machine. And that’s how Stanley came to us: flatter than a pancake, and shivering like an Eggo waffle right out of the freezer. After I sat Stanley by the fire, he thawed enough to speak fluent flatulence (must be the official language of Flat Stanleyland), so I told him to switch to English as his second language because it’s the only one I understand.

He did so (embarrassing to me that a piece of paper is multi-lingual, while I’m not) and laboriously lamented his plight, whining about the weather.

Well, I can see where a Florida-born Stanley’s blood might be too thin for the Badger State, but Kate and I kind of like the seasonal changes, and the bluffs around La Crosse are beautiful year-round, whether busting with blossoms in the spring, or tighe-dyed in green during the summer, or ablaze with a multicolored palette in the fall, or dusted with snow come winter.

Another reason I don’t blame the lad is that he arrived here without a stitch of clothing on, on a frosty day with snow in the forecast. Maybe there oughtta be a law against shipping nekkid Flat Stanleys in the mail.

So I needed to get the little feller some appropriate clothing. Packers. Partly to tweak Jack’s dad, Skip, a Buffalo Bills fan.

OK, OK, truth be told maybe I did make Stanley shovel first thing, but I loaned the little feller a boot.



OK, OK, maybe the shovel was a tad big for the lad.



So, it’s not like I made him weather a storm in some desolate place right out of the movie "Fargo." He was dawdling in his shoveling toward the end, making snow angels (I KNEW he’d like it once he got out there), so I hollered out the door: “Hey, Stan, done yet? Want some hot chocolate?”

And then, he embraced The North with his Fargo moment, saying, “Yah!”



As he wiped the froth from his lip and played with the swimming marshmallows, I said, “Do ya like dat hot choklit, son?”

“Oh,” he said with a grin, “YAH!”

He also warmed to the Badger State, and took a road trip south with us into the warmer climes of Illinois for the Christmas weekend. While here, he snowballed, toured Christmas displays, saw real reindeer, rode Santa’s sleigh and also rode around the house on the dogs’ backs. I tried to teach him how to do armpit farts, but alas, he can’t bend his arms.

He got quite a kick out of my ice fishin’ joke, though, when we tiptoed down the steps — lookout for the ICE on the ramp — to our dock to watch ice fishermen.

“Hey Stanley,” I said. “Do ya know how to ice fish?”

“Nope,” he said, with a look of puzzlement.

“Well, you take a can of peas (frozen peas will work, too), and saw a hole in the ice. Then you open the peas and place them around the hole.”

Leaning forward with excitement and to rebuff a gust of wind that nearly knocked him over, Flat Stanley said, “Not worms? You don’t use worms? Or minnows? And THEN what?”

“Nope, not worms, or minnows,” I replied. “Just peas. You see, when the fish comes up to take a pea, you kick him in the icehole.”

He continued to look puzzled for a moment, then caught the word play and doubled up in laughter.

And thus Flat Stanley evolved from a fainthearted Floridian into a weatherized Wisconsinite in just a few short days.

We finally sent Flat Stanley packing back to the humidity of Florida, so he could take his place on a bulletin board not unlike the one that smashed him in the first place.

But we’re betting that that the little guy will be cheering the Packers in the Super Bowl. Speaking of Packers, Santa Kate gave me a SWELL Christmas gift: my own share in Packers stock. And thus, I’ve joined the sparse ranks of NFL team owners.

Although I’m sure Aaron Rodgers and his teammates will make me a proud shareholder all the way to the Super Bowl, consider this fair warning, from a shareholder: If you falter, Flat Stanley is on the sidelines, waiting to waive you goodbye.

P.S.: The whole experience gave me an idea. We'd like Jack to visit, too, instead of just his Flat Stanley, but airline tickets are sooooooooooo expensive that that's prohibitive. Maybe Melissa and Skip would just fold up their second born and stick him in an envelope. Then we could host Flat Jack. If it worked out, we could entertain his brothers as well: Flat Vincent, Flat Luke, and Flat Patrick.

What do you think, Flat Jack? Are you game, if your folks make sure nobody folds, staples or mutilates the envelope? Gimme a YAH, and a YAY!

I Saw Avery Kissing Santa Claus ...

Soooooooooo, Avery pitched a bit of a fit when he had a chance to meet the real Santa Claus a couple of weeks back, but my youngest grandchild recovered enough to get cozy during a visit to our place this weekend for an early Christmas.

OK, so maybe Snoopy isn't the same as the real McCoy, but little steps for little fellers who are a few months shy of their second birthdays, eh? This time next year, his cousins Amelia and the Four Horsemen will have him trained to seal his letter to Santa with a kiss just like they do.

I know you're all used to columns that go on, and on, and on, but you're in luck today: I'm just wrapping up a 9.5-hour shift at work in my home office, with barely a potty break, and I'm too tired to wax eloquently. Plus, I'm out of words.

And, anyway, like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Patrick Sticks a Lego Where the Sun Don't Shine, and Nurses Stick It To Vincent

Patrick certainly put a different spin on the old ad adage, “Leggo my Eggo,” when he rushed to Melissa and implored: “Mommy, get it OUT!”

He pointed frantically to his nose, and she couldn’t imagine why he raised such a clatter — until she rushed to the window of his nostrils to see what was the matter. To her surprise, and chagrin, she discovered that a Lego had become lodged deep in the darkness of one of his wind tunnels.

And it wasn’t just resting in there, like a booger about to be freed from its entrapment in his teensy-tiny nose hairs and waft into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a square peg in a round hole, which might have been easier to dislodge with a tweezers in a practiced hand. Rather, it was a round piece that had worked its way farther up the lad’s nostril as he had tried to retrieve it.

I couldn’t help but regret, as Melissa told me the story over the phone, that I had neglected to tell Patrick never to put anything in his nose except a finger on a mining expedition, or, perhaps, his elbow. (I know that echoes the advice never to put anything in your ear bigger than your elbow, so call me orifice retentive; you just shouldn’t put stuff where it doesn’t belong.)

No, this isn't Patrick with the Lego up his nose, because nobody had a teeny-tiny camera to send on a journey to the center of his nostril. As you may recall, this was his Target Secret moment when he went bra hopping. He just has this HABIT of putting things where they don't belong. (SMILE)


God only knows how or why Patrick stuck the Lego where the sun don’t shine, and Melissa probably figured that only God would know how to get it out.


As Patrick Michael flailed and railed, Mommy tried to remain calm. She urged him to blow air out of his nostril, as if he were blowing his nose. Of course, we all know that a 3-year-old hasn’t mastered such basic bodily functions, among others — especially when he’s got a Lego lodged in his snotlocker.

So the lad was inhaling instead of propelling the Lego from his hangar into orbit. It really sucked.

Melissa sent Skip to the computer so he could Google a magic solution to avoid having to traipse to the E.R., sitting there for hours, and having to fork over hundreds for an insurance co-pay. One website that proffers fixes for children’s mishaps suggested pepper, cinnamon, or something else to induce a sneeze.

As Mom lined up those options, she called a nurse friend for a second opinion. Laura cautioned against being too creative because, if the tricks didn’t work and they had to go to the E.R., staffers would have to report it as an “incident,” which could lead to reports and, well, you know the drill. It’s better not to try it at home.

Another option was using air to force out the plastic intruder. Being a gentle mom, Melissa wouldn’t have considered using a shop vac, no matter how gently, as a wag would suggest to her later.

Instead, she told her youngest that she was going to kiss him and blow into his mouth at the same time. This she did, becoming a human jaws of life of sorts, blowing gently while she closed off the free nostril.

Ka-BLAM, the Lego shot across the room like an RPG, she reported to me with relief.

Patrick was shocked and awed, startled, and stunned. Shocked and awed that he could breathe, and startled and stunned that the Lego piece was orange.

“MOMMY!” he exclaimed. “I thought it was a red piece!”

And that’s the way it is with kids, recovering with a practical observation after courting disaster.

I suppose it’s important to note that no Legos were harmed in this incident.

The tale segues to another medical emergency, and one that ended up being more perilous. It involved Vincent, just a day or two after Patrick’s Lego moment, that showed the 10-year-old’s indomitably optimistic approach to life.

He had been feeling poorly for a day or so. You know the scenario: sick enough to suggest staying home from school, but not sick enough to miss flag football. (Well, to be perfectly honest, Vincent normally wouldn’t lobby to stay home from school. He’s the type whose hair would have to be on fire before he would even consider skipping school — and even then he’d try to put on a hat to snuff the flames and then head to school. So the fact that he even suggested it this time indicates he was really sick, although he did want to go to flag football, and he did.)

So Skip and Melissa did the usual doctoring that parents can do, but Vincent took a turn for the worse around 11 p.m. His lips ballooned so big that they would have made a Snoopy balloon in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade look like a stocking stuffer.

She called a doctor’s service, who told her to high-tail it to E.R. Once there, the nurses hopped to it, sticking in an IV and fitting him with an oxygen mask.

Even though it took three sticks to connect the IV to a vein (driving Melissa NUTS — as every mom [and many dads] knows, it’s hard to watch your own child be a pin cushion even when the needle hits the target the first time), Vincent took everything not only in stride but also with an optimism that would make Pollyanna look like a pessimistic, prickly porcupine.

Looking around the room as Melissa stood watch, he observed, “This isn’t too bad. The bed is comfortable, and we’re getting to spend time together.”

Ah, good times. Well, those good times stretched to nearly five hours as docs and nurses tried to figure out what might have sparked the apparent allergic reaction and to treat it.

Even at this point, serving as a pin cushion and surrounded by hospital paraphernalia, Vincent tries to put on a happy face. But he said to Melissa after she took the photo: "Sorry if my smile is not so good. It's kind of hard to smile now." I bet Melissa teared up at that show of courage under needles. Recalling the exchange, she says: "He is amazing!"

On way home, at 4:30 a.m., Melissa noted that they probably should grab some breakfast before trying to get some shuteye.

So Mom and her firstborn pulled into Dunkin’ Donuts for a little more quality time.

Ahhh, good times. But I can’t help but wonder: If Patrick puts 2 and 2 together and realizes Vincent snagged some doughnut holes for his emergency, while all he got was an orange snot rocket out of his deal, he just might give another Lego a wedgie into his nostril.