Month: March 2017

When your server asks you to pull forward at a fast food restaurant, don’t do it. Tell them they can either give you your order or your money back. If they argue with you, tell them you’d like to talk to their manager. Because they aren’t supposed to do that.

They ask you to pull forward because there is a sensor that measures how long the car at the window has been waiting for their order. If you pull forward, the sensor reports that you have been served. This gives them an artificially high service rating, particularly considering that they are probably doing below average if they are resorting to asking you to do that in the first place.

The fast food chains should publicly denounce this behavior and tell you that they don’t condone it but the truth is that they are embarrassed by it. They also don’t want it widely known that they are demanding unreasonable service rates.

I have sympathy for the people stuck working at places like that but not enough to participate in their ruse. I feel gullible that I’ve put up with it for as long as I have. Behavior like this will only change if we refuse to put up with it.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

We are all time travelers. The catch is, we can only travel in one direction through time and at one speed. Oh there are those that say we can adjust the speed of our time travel by accelerating ourselves to near the speed of light. But that takes so much energy as to be practically impossible.

My Maltipoo puppy says that time moves slower when she’s waiting for daddy to come home from work. But that’s just her perception. How would you know if the speed that time passed changed from moment to moment? Time seems to move faster as we get older but that is just because we measure time relative to the length of time that we’ve been alive. The longer you’ve been alive, the shorter a minute seems.

Right now, it seems like it is taking me way too long to get to the point. My bed calls me. The change to daylight savings time looms. I wish we’d stay on the same time year round. I don’t understand why people can’t just get up earlier if they want to take advantage of more daylight. There’s really no excuse to make the rest of us suffer.

I think the American Indians had the right idea. The got up when the woke up. They went to bed when they were tired. They did everything on a relaxed schedule. Things took however long they took. There was no sense in worrying about being late. What difference would a few minutes more or less matter in the grand scheme of things.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

The river felt like wet green velvet. It was just a little cooler than her skin. Her long blond hair billowed on the surface as she floated on her back. She held her legs rigidly straight and you launched her like a torpedo upstream.

The wind rustled the leaves in the trees. The scent of honey suckle wafted across the water from somewhere upwind. She drifted past you and you grabbed her arm. She grabbed your arm and her body swung in a wide arc around you. You felt butterflies in your stomach. You braced yourself and launched her upstream once again.

The dappled pattern of the sun through the leaves overhead glistened off of her wet, black, one piece bathing suit. You found yourself wishing she wasn’t dating your friend. She stirred up feelings you still didn’t know how to deal with. You took deep breaths and tried not to stare at her erect nipples.

Even though her eyes were closed, you knew that she knew that you were staring at her lustfully. You blushed as you imagined her, opening her eyes and challenging you. She knew you had a crush on her and teased you mercilessly about it. But there was deep affection there, trust, like the trust she had in her big brother. You would do nothing to betray that trust.

She tired of your human torpedo game and swam around you just a tad more than arm’s length away. You stood flat footed on the bottom of the river and spun around to face her as she orbited you.

In a year she would be engaged to someone else, someone other than your friend. In eighteen months, she and her new husband would be off to Minnesota to teach in a rural public school system. She would teach Art. Her husband would teach English. And you? You would be on to other adventures.

When you got back from Europe three years later, you would meet a guy with the same last name as them. It would turn out that he was the husband’s first cousin. It is a small world. And your crush had long since faded. But the memory of that hot summer day in the cool, green river will haunt you for the rest of your life.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

The library is the holy place of the writer. It is here that we find the books that fuel our love for words. It is here that we find a quiet spot where we can concentrate on the thoughts that have been accumulating in our head in our noisy busy day. It is here that we find kindred souls of similar values with which to strike up the occasional conversation.

Occasional but not too often. That would impinge on the sanctity and solitude that characterizes the experience. I have many good memories of libraries. I got a library card as soon as I was old enough. I remember the weekly pilgrimages to the library with my mother or sometimes my father. It seems they rarely found time to both go to the library at the same time but that was more a function of how busy they were raising me and my brother and both holding full time jobs as teachers.

I had my first introduction to science fiction at the library. It was a book entitled The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron. Before I knew it I was on to read Andre Norton’s juvenile science fiction and fantasy. I remembered loving The Time Traders series. I also loved Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books and Robert Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars.

Soon I was starting to plunder my father’s science fiction shelf. I learned the dry sarcasm of Robert Sheckley and the exciting adventures of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark. My own collection started growing as well. It was a proud day when my dad judged me grown up enough to read Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.

I’m not sure when I decided I wanted to write fiction. I think it started out as a desire to write plays and movies. By the time I graduated from high school I was putting in a half hour here and a half hour there. I struggled thinking of things that I wanted to write about. I was so enamored of the process and the tools that I couldn’t concentrate on the substance.

As time went by, I got distracted. By raising a family, by having a career, by the various and sundry activities that consume the days of our lives. Until about ten years ago. I found myself yearning to write. I discovered Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I found the 750Words web site. I have written almost every day since.

So, now I find myself back in the library again. This time it is as a member of a writers critique group. It feels like coming home.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Being a child actor is one of the greatest things that can happen to a kid. I should know. It happened to me. When I was eight years old my father and mother and I were members of the cast and crew of the outdoor play, Stars in My Crown. My mother was cast in one of the major supporting roles, I was an extra, and my father was the property master.

The reason I think it is so great is that the child gets to play pretend with a bunch of adults. It has a remarkably positive effect on the kid’s self image. It also teaches them to be confident in front of a large crowd of strangers.

I suspect that there are similar benefits to being a child actor in films but I don’t have any personal experience in that regard. I have made some short films for You Tube with the children of some of my friends but I somehow think that was a bit different from them having a role in a major commercial movie.

I’ve said it before in this venue but I miss performing on stage. When I feel the urge become strong enough I suspect I’ll do something about it. In the mean time I have a lot of interesting memories to write about.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

I was complaining to my wife that I didn’t have enough time in the day for all the things I wanted to do. In the process I said, I have to spend eight hours a day working with rockets. She laughed and asked what my sixteen year old self would have to say about that. It was a good question.

When I was sixteen years old we were in the middle of the golden age of moon missions at NASA. My best friend and I had followed the space program with avid interest. When something had gone wrong we were poring over our books that we had accumulated on the space craft to try to figure out what they were talking about. It was as if by focusing our attention on figuring out what was wrong and how to fix it we were doing something to help the crowd in Florida and Houston solve the problem.

Looking back, it was pretty miraculous. We sent those intrepid souls up in little tin cans strapped on top of massive ordinance. The flight computer in the Apollo was huge and expensive, both in terms of price and in terms of weight which related directly to the cost of launching it out of Earth’s gravity well. And yet it had less computing power than a programmable calculator that an eighth grader might use in math class today.

I actually date myself there. Eighth graders don’t use calculators any more except maybe to take tests where the concern might be to prevent them from cheating by “asking a friend”. They use their cell phones the rest of the time.

And now that I’ve mentioned it, as a result of the advances in miniaturization that were largely driven by the requirements of the space program, cell phones have become the ubiquitous, universal appliances that science fiction writers postulated in my youth. The Dick Tracy wrist television is reality. The Jetson’s flying car is still struggling along in the development laboratory. We’ll get there eventually. Whatever we can imagine we can usually figure out how to build given enough time and money.

Yes, my sixteen year old self would be flabbergasted by how much for granted I take my job and the technology that I own and use daily. When I was sixteen I was already interested in computers. They were still big cabinets that lived in special air-conditioned rooms with access to them restricted to elite operators. This would soon change as computers got smaller and cheaper. Soon academic science and mathematic departments in state institutes of higher education could afford desktop computers that cost a fraction of what their mainframe big brothers did.

By the time I had spent a couple of years in college, the age of the personal computer was dawning. The last trip to the moon, Apollo 17, was several years in the rear view mirror. The Space Shuttle flight was almost a decade in the future. NASA had lost some of it’s luster, if only temporarily. The hard core space fanatics of my generation were still following every development with relish but the typical American of the time had their mind on other issues.

I joined the Army because I needed a job to support my growing family. I knew one thing when I talked to the recruiter. I wanted as much computer training as I could get. I asked for the longest school that involved computers. I was steered toward a job repairing the computer systems in the Pershing Missile system. It was a turning point in my life. Instead of becoming a Film Maker or a Musician I became a Computer Programmer.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.