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Burton Cole column

Cows and people always return to their assigned seats

I ambled toward my usual pew, the one where everyone in church knows that I ALWAYS sit. If someone has a message for me, she leaves it on my seat. If a congregant returns a book he borrowed from me, he leaves it on my seat. It’s MY seat. But this morning, a lady — and a regular who knew better at that — was settled into my seat, relaxed and comfortable as if she always parked there. I offered a polite nod. She gave a bemused smile. She knew she was in MY seat. I tried a different spot. The padding bunched differently. The backrest bumped my shoulder blades all wrong. I was ...

From rocks to rubber ducks, we love our collections

I do not count the dust bunnies hopping around under my bed as one of my official collections. Also gathering dust is what used to be my across her dashboard. “It’s what we Jeep people do. We collect rubber ducks.” Traffic came to a halt. She grabbed a duck from a bag of them behind her seat, ran to another Jeep three vehicles ahead of us, and passed a rubber duck through the window to that driver to add to his army of rubber ducks in formation on his dash. “It’s what we Jeep drivers do,” she told me when she got back behind the wheel. “We greet each other with ...

Eh, what’s up with talking animals, doc?

Woodland creatures, jungle beasts and other critters molded my childhood. I learned from the comics that rabbits are smart alecs, mice build Magic Kingdoms and ducks are obnoxious — except for Yakky Doodle, and he had his moments, too. My first superhero was a canine named Underdog, who ...

I wasn’t screaming. It was the Tarzan yell

I wanted to be Tarzan. In my youth, I studied all 24 Tarzan novels that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote. I practiced the language of the great apes (“mangani”). If I worked at it, I could yodel that Tarzan yell without it dissolving into fits of coughing. Only two things held me back from ...

Heeding the call of the comfortably wild

It takes a tough old coot to leave modern conveniences behind and get out there and rough it. But that’s what I am — an old coot. And reasonably tough. It takes a little spirit of adventure, grit and muscle to do what I did, and I have nothing if I don’t have very little of those. ...

Magic leaf cajoles old dog into new tricks

“No, no, no!” My tormentor, er, teacher seemed a tad irritated. “It’s hold down the command and shift keys together, then, without letting go of them, you press that key, THEN, this key. After that is when you hit the ampersand. It’s so simple.” I felt sorry for the kid. He was ...