This is Sydney, our cross-eyed little old lady cat. Her twentieth birthday is somewhere here in the middle of February. We don’t know the exact date because her mother was a feral cat who lived on the docks of Newport Beach and we adopted Sydney as a kitten, but back then “the middle of February” was the vet’s best guess.

She’s the last of her litter. Friends adopted her two sisters and they are both long gone.

The poor old gal made it to twenty, but we know she doesn’t have much time left. Although she’s never had a sick day in her life, she’s now skin and bones. Her hearing is completely gone. She has cataracts in her right eye. She’s hunched over from arthritis. She no longer seems to understand what the litter box is for. She sleeps about twenty hours a day. She hasn’t left our spare bedroom in years. And she’s pretty much stopped eating, so we know her days are numbered.

I just looked up a chart that says twenty cat years is equal to about ninety six human years.

Happy birthday, Syd. It’s been a pleasure having you around for the last ninety six years.

We have some very, very odd neighbors. Someone built this in their front yard about two blocks from our house.

Ten points if you recognize the pop culture reference in the headline.

As I said in a previous post, I’d never seen an icicle until the other day. Seventy-two years on this earth including two years of college in the frigid northern climes of Oregon, yet I’d never seen an actual icicle.

That situation has now been rectified.

I jokingly told Jamie that the icicles hanging outside our kitchen door are “big as a Louisville Slugger.” Then I got to wondering if that was true. So I went upstairs, grabbed my Louisville Slugger baseball bat, and took it outside to compare.

This is not just any Louisville Slugger. This particular Louisville Slugger is more valuable than gold. It has an interesting back story. Which means, of course, that I feel absolutely compelled to tell it.

The Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958 despite the fact that the city had no baseball stadium adequate for baseball at the major league level. Wrigley Field, the only real ballpark, was in a bad part of town and, even worse, it only seated about 25,000. So the new Los Angeles Dodgers opted to play in an oddly-reconfigured Los Angeles Coliseum, a converted football stadium, until they completed construction of the sparkling new Dodger Stadium.

The Dodgers drew immense crowds, so it was difficult to get good seats. In 1960 my dad gave me the assignment of sending a letter to the Dodgers’ ticket department to order our seats. Oh, how times have changed. Unlike today, when you go online and pick the specific seats you want, it was the luck of the draw back in 1960. But because tickets were so difficult to get, we were very happy to receive seats down the right field line near the Dodgers bullpen.

Another odd thing about the Coliseum, originally built for the 1928 Summer Olympics, was that it had bench seating, not individual seats. So there were the deYongs, sitting just behind the Dodgers’ bullpen, when a very attractive young woman walked up to us and very politely said, “Excuse me. I am Sandy Koufax’ girlfriend and I was wondering if I could squeeze in here with your family so I can be near the bullpen.”

Sandy Koufax is now known as the greatest pitcher of his generation. Maybe the greatest ever. But back in those days he was a marginal pitcher who was barely clinging to his place on the team. His pitching was so erratic that he rarely got into a game. He could throw about a million miles an hour, but no one ever knew where the ball was going to end up. He’d been in the big leagues for six years and had a losing record.

A couple innings later Sandy’s girlfriend walked down to the edge of the railing, called Sandy over and whispered into his ear. He walked away but came back moments later with a baseball bat in his hand, a Louisville Slugger. He handed it to her and she returned to her seat and handed it to me.

“I want to thank you for making room for me,” she said. “So I asked Sandy to get this for you.”

Of course, as baseball fans know, Sandy Koufax finally figured out how to be a major league pitcher the next season. He put together six absolutely incredible seasons in a row, a stretch unmatched in baseball history, retired at age thirty, and became the youngest player ever elected to the baseball Hall of Fame. He’s a legend, a living god who demands nothing of the world except privacy. He’s baseball’s answer to J.D. Salinger.

Here we are sixty years later and I still treasure that baseball bat simply because he once touched it.

I don’t care how big the damn icicles are, they’ll never measure up to this Louisville Slugger.

“A Christmas Story” is the funniest damn movie ever made. It was written and narrated by Jean Shepard, one of my radio heroes, who also wrote “Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories,” my favorite short story. (If you’ve never read it, do. I guarantee it’s laugh out loud funny.) One network or another airs a “Christmas Story“ marathon every year and despite the fact that Jamie and I have both seen it about fifty times, we always watch it one more time.

Throughout “A Christmas Story,” little Ralphie repeats that he wants just one thing for Christmas: “I want an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle.” Everyone — parents, teacher, even the department store Santa Claus — tells him it’s a bad idea because, “You’ll shoot your eye out.”

On Christmas morning his parents surprised him with the BB-gun. He ran outside and took his first shot, the BB ricocheted back, broke his glasses, and damn near put his eye out.

Thinking quickly, little Ralphie told his mother that his wound was caused by a falling icicle.

Hey, I was born and raised in California. I knew nothing about icicles. I’d never seen one until today.

Now I can’t go outside because I’m afraid one of those things will put my eye out.

Global warming, my ass. Texas is suffering from the lowest temperatures in thirty years. Our heating system can’t keep up with the cold and it’s currently 56 degrees Fahrenheit in our living room. Luckily, upstairs is nice and toasty. All the pipes in the house are frozen, so we have no water.

On the positive side of the ledger, our little guest house is sauna-like, and its pipes are gushing with plenty of hot water. Unfortunately, we moved all the furniture out of the guest house because we’re planning to remodel.

How the hell did pioneers survive this kind of weather? Their houses were drafty. Their clothing wasn’t made of modern miracle fibers. They had fireplaces, but had to go out into the cold to cut fire wood. I, on the other hand, feel like I’m suffering because I have to walk twenty feet from the house to the guest house to take a nice, long hot shower.

Just got an email telling me that Anchorage, Alaska is 10 degrees warmer than McKinney.

Pass the whale blubber.

 

 

 

I never realized until this week that I could find stats that tell me all sorts of interesting information about visitors to JimandJamie.com and their reading habits on the site. Here’s what I found out:

Despite the availability of hundreds of stories about our travels, Google searches lead the most people to two specific stories day after day after day. Let’s be clear here. I’m not saying they were the most searched, most read stories yesterday. Nor last week. Nor last month. I’m saying that these two stories are the most searched and most read every single day of the year. They’re not, as you might reasonably assume, stories that show beautiful scenery from around the world. They are not stories about the interesting people we’ve encountered on our journeys. And they are not stories about unusual or exciting experiences. No. Not at all.

The all-time most popular story is something I posted from South Africa five years ago. The title of that article is “They will bite you on the balls.”

The second most popular is something from Tahiti almost eighteen months ago titled, “Quinn’s Bar and the Trans-Pacific transvestites.”

In the words of Joe Biden, “C’mon, man.” Are there really that many people around the world interested in South African honey badgers? Or long-gone bars in Tahiti?

Or is the internet just crawling with folks who are inordinately interested in transvestites and being bitten on the balls? And is there some kinky connection between the two?

I don’t know what key words these people are searching, but I’m willing to bet that neither “honey badger” nor “Tahiti” was among them.

We got up early this morning and drove over to Texarkana, Arkansas. Put a check in that box because we have now visited our 43rd state.

The twin cities of Texarkana stretch across both sides of the Texas-Arkansas border. Texarkana, Texas has a population of 36,688 and Texarkana, Arkansas is called home by 29,901. As you might expect from its name, State Line Avenue delineates the border between the two cities and two states. Stand on the eastern side of the street, you’re in Arkansas. Toss a rock across the street, it lands in Texas. Apparently thousands of people cross back and forth to live in one state and work in the other.

Each city has its own mayor and its own city council and, undoubtedly, its own unfunded municipal retirement benefits. But they share a federal building, courthouse, jail, post office, Chamber of Commerce, water utility, and some of the shabbiest streets on which I’ve ever had the honor of driving.

I learned a new word while we were there: portmanteau. A portmanteau is a word that combines the sounds and meanings of other words, such as motel (half “motor” and half “hotel”) or brunch (half “breakfast” and half “lunch”). In this case, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana were combined to create Texarkana. Whoever created the name Texarkana was fudging a bit because it’s thirty miles down the road to the Louisiana border.

Turns out some famous people hail from Texarkana: Dan Blocker, who played Hoss on the old Bonanza TV show. Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and one-time presidential candidate. Parnelli Jones, the Indy race driver. Scott Joplin, the King of Ragtime music. Eddie Matthews, former slugging third baseman for the Braves. Legendary golfer Byron Nelson. Ross Perot, another former presidential candidate and legendary businessman.

Unfortunately, I can understand why they left. Texarkana is the one of the most depressing places we’ve ever visited. Its downtown is filled with beautiful old buildings, but many of them are boarded up and abandoned. The streets were empty. It was as if Texarkana was ground zero for the first neutron bomb — the buildings were still standing, but there were no people. It was eerie. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say the death of this once vibrant city was probably caused by the construction of the freeway miles away from the downtown. Lots of great American downtowns were unintentionally killed off when new freeways changed the traditional traffic patterns of the cities they bypassed. Texarkana grew up around the intersection of two railroads. It looks like it died when the importance of railroads was supplanted by freeways.

Here’s one of the saddest photos I’ve ever taken. “LWORTH 5&10.” It’s one photo that symbolizes the death of a once great American company in the middle of a once great American city

Here in the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, there are probably pitiful few Americans who even remember the once dominant Woolworths 5&10 and even fewer who ever sat down at one of its lunch counters for a milkshake. I asked our 32-year old next door neighbor if he was familiar with Woolworths and he paused to think about it for a few seconds and then slowly shook his head to say no.

I’m getting old.

Luckily, there’s a lot more to Arkansas than the municipal death rattle that is Texarkana. People tell us the rest of the state is beautiful, especially the Ozarks and the northwestern corner of the state.

We’ll come back, but we’ll stick to the freeway and bypass Texarkana when we do.

The question before us today is “Have I been to Arkansas?” I honestly don’t know. Here’s why:

Back in 1959 my family took one of our many cross-country driving vacations. My dad loved long-distance driving. My mom loved seeing places she’d never seen before. And I loved the odd little souvenir stands and quirky tourist attractions along the road. My sister was less enthusiastic than the rest of the family because she had to spend the entire two week vacation in the back seat with her incredibly annoying little brother.

If you were to ask me if I’ve ever been to Arkansas, I would have said no. I have no memories of being there.

That being said, it is possible that we passed through during that 1959 vacation.

I know we stopped at Graceland, Elvis Presley’s new home in Memphis, Tennessee. There’s a famous family photo of my sister standing in front of the estate’s massive wrought iron front gate. She worshipped the King, and attempted to scale the barrier. Ebbis’ security guards immediately rushed out and threatened to arrest her if she didn’t stop. As my sister wiped the tears from her eyes, my dad put the car in gear, and we headed north for my Uncle Pete’s place in Gary, Indiana.

I got on Google maps and charted the route from Graceland to Gary. As you can see on the map above, today’s route turns northwest almost as soon as Graceland fades in the distance, crosses the Mighty Mississip and takes you directly into Arkansas. Then you take a hard right and skirt along the Arkansas side of the Big Muddy for ninety minutes or so before passing into Missouri.

The problem is that I don’t know if that’s the route the main highway would have taken back in 1959 pre-freeway America.

So have I been in Arkansas? Maybe. Do I get to check it off my list of states visited? I’d say it’s probably fifty-fifty, but that’s not quite good enough.

Texarkana is only a couple hours away, so Jamie and I may drive up this weekend, have a quick lunch, and make it official.

This isn’t exactly what you’d call a blizzard, but if you look closely enough you’ll see flakes of the white stuff coming down. The weather’s probably a little too warm for anything to stick to the ground, but we’ll see.

This is the first snow for Meadow, the little girl next door, so we hope it stacks up enough that she can go outside and play in it. Little brother Cooper is only two weeks old, so he’ll probably need to wait another winter or two.

 

The arborists came out yesterday to remove our third sick sycamore. Whatever killed the tree compensated for its death by making its trunk a little more livable for some other creatures. It was hollowed out like a huge drinking straw, and the empty space was filled with dozens of honeycombs and squirrels’ nests made of twigs, cloth scraps and lint.

 

It was a big damn tree, wasn’t it? Based on the height of the arborist up in the tree, it looks like it must have been about 60-70 feet tall. Our house is 110 years old, and the arborists estimated that the sycamores were 80 to 100 years old. When the tree was felled, it made a hell of a divot in our front lawn.

We’re sad to lose the sycamore and sorry to see the squirrels’ homes destroyed, but we have no regrets about ridding the neighborhood of the flying insects that somehow end up inside all the homes on the street.

The insects inside our sycamore looked like wasps, not bees, and the arborist said they were wasps. But I didn’t know that wasps made honey, so I googled “Do wasps make honey?” Up came this short article:

Ask anyone the difference between bees and wasps and they’re likely to say something like this: bees make honey, wasps don’t.

… the assertion that wasps do not produce honey is incorrect. Most wasps, it is true, do not make honey … But over a dozen species of wasps in Central and South America are known to produce honey, and have long been exploited by humans for this ability. Most well-known among the honey-producing wasps is the Mexican Honey Wasp (Brachygastra mellifica). This species ranges from northern Panama to the southern counties of Texas and Arizona.

I’m not so sure about the “… southern counties of Texas and Arizona” part of that info. We’re in northern Texas, not far from the Oklahoma border, but I’d swear that Mexican Honey Wasps (shown on the right) are exactly what crawled out of our fallen tree trunk. Jamie and I are positive that we recognize the reddish wings and the black and yellow stripes. That being said, neither of us will ever be mistaken for an entomologist, so who knows.