Welcome to Wednesday… here’s the skinny on the streets: No fog, no rain, no rocks, no wind, no cold, no snow (although, rumor has it that there MIGHT be a possibility of it next week… we’ll be closely following this story). As with the past few days, descending the mountain will drop you down in to sort of an overcast—undercast… bottomcast… lowercast?— grey, from about the 2,000 foot elevation and below. No precipitation with it, and no impact on visibility of any consequence… it’s just that it seems a little gloomy down in the flat parts, a reminder that it’s better on the mountain.
Geez… we lost Dr. Bailey, then Doris Day. Now Tim Conway… damn. I was a fan of Tim’s. And while I never met the guy, all I have ever heard is that he was a genuinely nice guy. He was one of a rare breed of Hollywood funnymen who made a point to be funny without relying on the shock value of vulgarity and adult jokes that the vast majority of comedic actors use, sometimes as a crutch, to “fire up” otherwise mediocre stuff. Tim kept it “family friendly,” which is quite a feat. I also hear that he was generous, even to random strangers: One person I heard yesterday, just a random guy calling in to a radio show, said that in the checkout line at the grocery store a few years ago, he’d come up a couple of bucks short… Tim happened to be standing in line behind him, and simply offered to pay for the whole thing… just because.
I loved watching him as a kid (me as the kid, Tim as the very funny guy on TV, to be clear). And, today, we still have Tim Conway Jr. to keep us laughing, and to remind us of Senior and his legacy.
Okay, I still have more words required to fill up this column… so let’s just go with random storytime, kids! We haven’t done this in a while… but please know that random storytime is just that… no reason, no rhyme, no crime, no lime, no dime. Okay, so it DOES sometimes have rhyme… but never slime. Or grime. Or a mime. Not this time.
I was standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona… such a fine sight to see. No, dang it, wait… that was another time. I was standing on a corner in Nurnberg (aka Nuremberg), Germany waiting to cross the street at a very busy intersection. This particular intersection not only intersected cars, but trains as well… a lot of tracks crisscrossed the meeting of multiple boulevards.
My friends had already successfully crossed over. No, they weren’t dead… I mean that they were on the other side of the street. I was the straggler, but I noticed as I waited that they had become very excited, and were waving their arms wildly, pointing towards me, as if to signal me to something. I could not decipher their ginormous gesticulation. The best I could do was to look quizzical, and cup my hand behind my ear, the international sign for “I can’t hear you,” even though there was not even a remote possibility of hearing them over the din of traffic and trains. Trains? TRAINS!!!
I leaped out of the way of a metro train cruising through the intersection. I’d been standing on the tracks, looking for my “walk” signal, utterly oblivious to peripheral dangers.
After deftly leaping out of the path of the train, surely one carrying an engineer who now had a pantload, I marveled at my brush with death, and using the very clever technique of facial expressions and body language, signaled to my friends that I sure hoped that they had just witnessed my amazing cheating of death itself! “Holy crap, did you see THAT!” I gesticulated, using other international signs. Yet, as I stood there marveling and ensuring that they had seen my amazing brush with death and subsequent gazellish cheat of said brush, it seemed as though their own wild physical antics had not subsided… in fact, they seemed to have increased in …. Urgency?
Eventually, and I mean after quite a significant amount of time, when compared to the amount of time I had been allotted, the thought dawned upon me… hmmm… I wonder… I JUST wonder… maybe… perhaps…. perhaps I ought to look around again, and see what those fellas are are going all nuts about.
Of course, it was at that moment that I discovered that when I’d leaped from the path of the train… I had simply leaped onto another set of tracks, onto a section that was juuuuuust about to be occupied by Killer Train Number 2. It was sort of an out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-frying-pan-again thing.
As you may have guessed, since this column is being penned today, I was able to dodge a train, for the second time in my life. My inner gazelle kicked in yet again, and I bounced out of the path of the second train, being operated by a guy with a pantload (number 2, I’d guess) that day. I can only imagine the locker room that evening at the train engineer depot, and probably even a subsequent spike in sales of Depends in that city.
The rest of my game of Frogger that day went less eventfully. Sure, I was perhaps more jittery than usual, but had certainly learned a lesson in situational awareness. There’s even got to be potential for some wise saying in there, like, “He who leaps from path of one train, may only be stepping in front of another. Leap again, Grasshopper—Grassleaper—Trackshopper—-whatever— but look before you leap.” Or something like that.
Okay… that should fill my word quota for the day. Work your way through Wednesday, and I’ll thee thou on Thursday!