Recreation, Aggravation, Obsession By Les Tanner Not long ago, I was in the midst of one of my best pickleball games ever—my partner and I were up nine–zip, my lobs were working, I hadn’t hit a single ball
For me, nothing that summer was like the thrum of American Legion baseball. It was 1982. Fresh from college and pursuing a freelance sports journalism career on a diet of ramen noodles, store-bought pizza, and cheap beer, I spent a lot of my time at Caldwell’s Simplot Stadium, covering home games of the Silver Streaks Legion team for the Idaho Press-Tribune.
Beyond the stadium’s business-billboard fences, the summer scene was defined by railroad tracks and the Caldwell Night Rodeo. Sometimes during those lazy evening innings, trains would traverse the tracks, slipping through the season’s high desert heat, bound for somewhere in America. Baseball is America. So that was perfect. That was my backdrop for watching baseball in Caldwell.
At Simplot Stadium I first met William Bryan “Pat” O’Connor, the lightly redheaded, pot-bellied, and immensely popular guru of the local baseball scene. Everyone called him Pat. A Caldwell native and seemingly omnipresent fixture at sporting events, Pat was a professional baseball scout in those days, and onetime general manager of the Chicago Cubs’ Caldwell-based minor league affiliate. He also owned a local sporting goods store.
He had graduated from The College of Idaho some five decades earlier, and he asked what my major had been in college. I told him English.
“An English major!” he exclaimed, in mock excitement. He said when he was in college, an English major had become romantically involved with his girlfriend and had replaced Pat in her affections. From then on, he called me “the English major.” I took it as his way of being friendly. Continue reading
One morning in 1998, while I was out in the yard irrigating the lawn, I heard, then saw, a couple of loose boards on the back fence begin to rattle and shake.
It worried me for a moment, because I thought it might have been our newest family member, Niki the cat, who was outside with me and who we hope can be taught to stay in our yard. However, Niki was occupied for the moment with her exploration of the raspberry patch, so I called out toward the moving fence, “Somebody there?”
“Just me,” returned a male voice, and the boards parted to reveal a friendly face I didn’t recall having seen before.
The gray-haired gentleman who belonged to the face didn’t introduce himself, nor did I. We each knew who the other was. He and his wife had lived in the house beyond that fence—a house no more than eighty feet from ours—for a number of years before my wife and I moved to Caldwell in 1980, yet the truth is that my neighbor and I had never met.
Imagine that: living eighty feet away from someone for nearly eighteen years and never having seen him. I suppose if the boards hadn’t come loose because of errant irrigation water having rotted out a two-by-four along the fence’s base, it could easily have been another eighteen years.
We stood talking to each other through the gap for a few minutes, agreed to “get together sometime soon” to do a little fence mending, and then let the boards close again, separating us and our yards. Continue reading
When we moved into our present home in Caldwell in 1980, a nice brick sidewalk led from the front step to the driveway.
Besides allowing people to come to the front door without having to walk on the lawn, it provided a barrier to the water we used for irrigating the lawn once a week during the summer. Without it, we would have had regular floods in our garage. We had enough as it was.
Even back then, grass from the lawn had begun to spread into the cracks between the bricks, and before too many years had passed, the only clue to the existence of the brick walk was a slight elevation in the lawn on that side of the yard. I felt there was no harm in this. Folks could still get to the front door via the sidewalk next to the house. The only drawback was the weeds. Those cracks between the bricks, which allowed the lawn to invade, seemed ideally suited to the roots of dandelions and other such plants, and digging them out was next to impossible. The best I could do was to break the plants off at the surface, and this merely reinforced the vitality of their roots.The only solution to the problem appeared to be to tear out all the bricks, dig out the offending plants, and re-make the walk.
As one who dislikes rushing into things—the house might burn down, for example, and then there’d be no need for the walk—I waited until a couple of years ago to begin that cleaning-out process. It wasn’t a particularly hard job. In fact, it was somewhat interesting to see how the various types of vegetation had adapted themselves over, around, into, and under the bricks. I even discovered a couple of quarters long since lost in the cracks, and this gave me the excuse to take a break of several hours while I combed the yard with my metal detector, looking for more. I didn’t find any.
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We arrived at The College of Idaho in Caldwell on a chilly Saturday morning. Our mission: the Natural History Museum.
Our leader Teresa Hafen and I, her assistant, ushered our group of ten year-old Cub Scouts down concrete stairs to a metal door leading into the basement. As we entered a huge warehouse of archived items, excitement rose in the voices of the boys—especially Tyler, who is always a tad more enthusiastic then the others. They all proceeded to get louder and louder until we explained the rules, which included not touching anything and being respectful, particularly to our guides, who were volunteers. We met Nathan Carpenter, who immediately engaged the boys in a display of blowfish. He invited us to look around, and we looked, but I kept one eye on Tyler. Continue reading
“Why do you have the bucket in the house?”
For fifteen minutes or so, my wife had been home from work here in Caldwell and was checking the TV to make sure her favorite soap had been taped.
Since I was in the family room and out of her sight, she hadn’t paid any attention to what I was doing until I kicked that darned metal bucket.
“Just messing around,” I replied, impressed that she’d recognized the sound.
She hit the mute button on the remote. “Why are you always ‘messing around’?” she asked. “Don’t you ever have anything constructive to do?”
“I did all the things you had on the list,” I responded.
“My goodness,” she said. “Do you mean to tell me that you finally put both of those boxes up in the attic and carried out the trash? And it only took you six hours? That may be something of a record.”
“I do my best,” I replied modestly.
“Did you empty the dishwasher?”
“It wasn’t on the list.”
“Why do I have to put things like that on a list?” she asked.
“I’ve got other things on my mind,” I replied. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do unless it’s on a list.”
“What ‘other things’ did you have on your mind today that were so important?”
“Squirrels,” I said. Continue reading
The time has come, my friend Al said,
To speak of many things:
Of bricks and rags and scraps of wood,
Of nails and worn out springs.
My usual excuse for picking up run-over gloves, rusty washers, and other lost and discarded objects is that I am a child of the Great Depression.
I was born in 1934 and thereby missed, or was at least unaware of, the financial and weather-related problems of the 1930s. But my parents didn’t miss them. Their parents had tough times, too. Nothing went to waste in any of those households. Whatever the reason, I am what is known in polite circles as a pack rat. If there is a glimmer of potential use remaining in a container, or a piece of wood or wire or cloth, or whatever—the list is virtually endless—it joins a wealth of similar objects in the storage location of our Caldwell home that I fondly refer to as “somewhere.” My filing system is simple. If it has come in the door, it is still here. Somewhere.
Numerous examples come to mind, but the fifteen or so banana boxes we bummed from a supermarket produce manager when we moved to Georgia in 1965 will do. Anyone who might see them would surely agree that they are fine boxes indeed, and they served us admirably during the several moves we have made over the years since then. Empty boxes, however, do take up critical storage space, so several years ago I spent a couple of weekends creating room for them. First, I cut a hole in the ceiling of the garage and manufactured a great door for it. Next, I built a beautiful ladder out of two-by-fours and hinged it to the ceiling, so that it can be raised and lowered by a very clever pulley system of my own design. Eight sheets of half-inch plywood (A/C grade), sawn in half lengthwise to fit through the hole I’d cut, became a good, solid floor, and voila’, problem solved. Continue reading
