It’s been decades since I last ran away from home. I was 3. I wriggled through the tunnel my beagle burrowed under the backyard fence and set out to celebrate freedom with my cousins Dale and Gary. My career as a runaway thumped to an abrupt halt when my dad caught up to me on the tractor. ...
I make my living building pictures with words. It’s an inexact science. Remember how in beginning wood shop you built a spice rack and someone said, “Oh, what a cute duck”? (There’s a reason I am not a carpenter.) Words can slap you with the same kind of disastrous results — ...
People pay up to $300 to calm their nerves by cuddling with a cow just like that one over — LOOK OUT! Sorry. I’ve been a bit jittery around bovines since one jumped on me. It was at our farm, and teenage me bent over the watering trough to clean out floating bits of hay — cows are ...
Among the greatest pestilences, plagues and pesky problems known to mankind — to womankind, too — is the earworm. An earworm is created when a bouncy song with lots of rhythmic repetition floats on the airwaves, gains too much altitude, freezes, and a chunk of the tune breaks off. ...
In the old days when I wanted a new car, I saved cereal box tops. Better yet, my new wheels came free inside the box. I was 8 years old and the cars fit in the palm of my hand, but let me tell you, that Monkeemobile was one sweet ride. “Here I come, drivin’ down the breakfast table...” ...
The return address on the plain, white envelope was marked, “Ohio Department of Aging.” I opened it. “Congratulations!” the letter inside proclaimed. “You’ve joined the ranks of nearly 2.4 million Ohioans eligible for a Golden Buckeye Card.” My passport to geezerdom had arrived. ...
I once heard of a man who decided to take a walk, so he got right up and did so. That man was single. If you’re married with children, you never get right up and do anything. A simple act of going to the store for a loaf of bread takes on all the rigors, debates and sidetracks of a ...
People keep telling me things I don’t want to hear. My blood pressure would improve to perfection if I had a human mute button. I’d call it the serenity button. I got the idea from my television. If a loudmouthed spokesman starts a commercial by yelling, “You’ll want to hear this!” ...
The summer heat is melting my brain. “Have you noticed that I’ve been doing weird things lately?” I asked Terry the other day in the car. “No more (something, something) than usual,” my softspoken wife said. I twisted the volume knob. “Why did you (something, something) do ...
I am perplexed. Baffled, befuddled and buffaloed, too. I thought — to paraphrase the great philosopher Spider-Man — that with great age came great wisdom. The aging thing I’ve got. My Golden Buckeye Card will arrive any day and I’m only a couple years away from being legally eligible ...
I hate it when truths that I hold to be self-evident turn out to be mere myths. It ruins my whole day. Did you know that maximum speed for a road runner is 20 mph while a coyote tops out at 43 mph? That means Wile E. Coyote could have caught the Road Runner without breaking a sweat — or any ...
A guy learns a lot having a 10-year-old grandson. Mostly, a guy learns that he can’t run, jump, climb or wrestle more than seven seconds without gasping, wheezing and collapsing. The second thing a guy learns is that he’s become horribly out of touch. I remember watching the Grammy Awards ...
The great philosopher Patrick F. McManus once wrote, “No greater bond exists between two male friends than shared ignorance.” In his 1995 essay “Hunting the Wily Avid,” McManus asserts, “Shared knowledge is fine as far as it goes, but one friend invariably knows more about a given ...
I awoke this morning in the usual way — to the whooping of my alarm. Or maybe it was to the microwave beeping to let my wife know her mug full of coffee was heated. I blipped, beeped and blooped my way through the morning routine. The timer on the oven bip-bip-bipped when the oatmeal was ...
Editor’s note: It’s hard to believe but Burton Cole is on vacation again. While he’s snoozing, we bring you this Cole Classic from June 27, 2004, when Burt was still a bachelor — which explains his behavior. We are diving headlong into another picnic season, and you know what that ...
Dad was wrong. As a kid, every chance I got during the summer, I flopped onto the couch in front of a fan to read books until I drifted off to sleep. Summers were for napping. Dad toiled at a full-time factory job before coming home to climb onto the tractor and work the fields the rest of ...
Gardening season has sprouted, which means there will be plenty of fresh vegetables soon. It’s horrible. I’m not against healthy eating, it’s just that dining on what’s good for me is, to use a scientific term, yucky. Do-gooder nutritionists claim we need lots of fresh veggies, ...
I read the other day that San Francisco won’t let lawmen use facial recognition technology anymore because sometimes the computer hoots and hollers, “Hello!” across a crowded restaurant at the wrong person. Me, too. The difference is that technology never pretends to be waving instead ...
Years of far-too-personal research have taught me that the best way to learn something is to screw it up. This is not true in all cases. Folding fitted sheets serves as the prime example. Experience makes a lousy teacher when it comes to sheets that frustrate me into fits. I end up wadding the ...
For a generation — my mom’s — Erma Bombeck was the voice of motherhood. Not the Shangri-la, idealized, TV commercial version of every-hair-and-tablecloth-in-place mothers. Erma wrote about the real-life adventures of mothers with piles of dirty dishes, dandelion bouquets and smuggled ...