Strong, silent type shortens prospects of a long life

January 21, 2018

There was a time when I believed talking would kill me. True, my mouth has almost gotten me clobbered more than once. He who smarts off learns to duck quickly. No, I’m talking about the little-boy logic that drove 8-year-old me into become the strong, silent type. I’d run out of comic books to read, so out of boredom, I tried deep thinking. After almost three full minutes of careful consideration, I hit upon my first great philosophy — we’re all born with a word limit and when we reach it, we die. It made sense to an 8-year-old kid. You couldn’t pack two gallons of milk ...

Taste-deaf husband tries to hear wife

January 14, 2018

I remember years ago slicing a banana into my bowl of CoCo Wheats. My 9-year-old daughter, drenching her waffles in syrup, wrinkled her nose. “Ew. That’s gross.” With all the sophistication of a then-35-year-old man eating children’s cereal, I replied, “Waffles are gross. Bananas in CoCo Wheats — delicious!” My daughter shook her head. “Daddy must be taste-deaf.” Times have changed over the last quarter-century. And I’ve switched to a sensible grownup breakfast of hearty, nutritious and fiber-loaded oatmeal. Of course, I stir in banana chunks and as many chocolate ...

A grammatical tirade never fixed the roof

January 7, 2018

I have always admired the kind of guy who can move into a broken-down place and renovate it exquisitely. The kind of guy who stands in the middle of a shambles and sees a room's potential. The kind of guy who replumbs a kitchen, miters a chair rail and installs a countertop. The kind of guy who owns power tools. I can hardly wait to dump my home so that kind of guy can move in and fix it. Thanks to my handyman efforts, that kind of guy is going to have a blast. My skill set tends toward subject-verb agreements, semicolon usage and understanding the apostrophe. In other words, ...

I resolve to solve these mysteries …

December 31, 2017

In the coming new year, I, Burton W. Cole, hereby resolve to discover the answer to these perplexing life questions: • How can one size possibly fit all? That has to be some serious elastic. Maybe it works by squeezing a person so much that he’s suffocated into the same size as his much more svelte neighbor. • I resolved for the last 42 years in a row to lose weight, so why do I have to keep buying bigger pants? Maybe I should look for one-size-fits-all. • Why do some people like to hear themselves talk far more than anyone else does? • If I resolved to eat even more ...

My way bypasses the muss and fuss of the ‘right way’

December 24, 2017

There are two ways to do anything — the right way, and the way it gets done when my wife isn’t watching. This is why I waited until Terry wasn’t home to repair the curlicued support rails on the back porch. If she’d caught me, she would have made me brush and polish all the metal before buying uniform sized and shaped screws to piece it back together the “right way.” Instead, I took 20 seconds to root through the old peanut butter jar of odds and ends for a handful of assorted screws, a couple nails, a pin from a watch band, broken tweezers and a petrified twig. Bam. The ...

Pack lots of toys on the sleigh!

December 17, 2017

It happens every year. Just when I finish the 17th addendum to my Christmas list, one of those horrible, awful, terrifying reports flutters onto my desk: “Scientists say stop giving so many toys to kids.” I am within full rights to ignore such nonsense. My 18th birthday is so far in my red bicycle’s rearview mirror that it can’t even hear me when I squeeze the ooga horn. Store clerks barely glance at my white beard before automatically ringing me up with the senior discount. I remember when a phone was something you used to talk to people, not to take their pictures. In short, ...