Events

  Boy, as a kid I used to love The Monkees too. I remember watching them and my Dad saying he couldn't believe they actually got 'paid to act like idiots on national TV'. He wasn't big on their music either. I'm sure later on he would have preferred The Monkees on my stereo versus Van Halen. Once upon a time, probably 1982, he called the family to the porch for a picture and I was decked out in a concert jersey, my 'holy' jeans and at least four bandanas wrapped here and there, the big tiger striped one around my neck, hair everywhere. Hahaha, he would not take the picture until I at least took the one off my neck. "This is real life, not #*%@ Van Halen!", he said. I think I was stunned that he actually knew the name of the band. I recovered quickly enough- "It's just Van Halen, Dad. Not #*%@ Van Halen.", I said, hahahaha. What a smartass kid I was.

   But I digress. I mentioned the 'Stony Brook Bypass' previously, my usual route home. Monday night as I passed the apartment complex on one side there was a teeny little girl in rain boots standing all by herself not a foot off the side of the road. Now, it's not a main artery, by any means, but it is a pretty heavily trafficked cutoff and this was right after work so it was waaay  too busy for this tyke to have any business whatsoever standing virtually on the roadway. I thought, 'If nobody stops and finds out what's going on you'll see her on the evening news hit by a car...', so I swung around and as I came back to the spot where she was standing there was a van stopped in the road and the wee lass crossing deliberately and none too speedily in front of it! Ay-yi-yi! By the time I got off the road and parked, a woman in another van had stopped to help too. I thought it better anyway that a motherly figure approach the girl but, fearing an untoward domestic situation, the woman asked if I would accompany her as she walked the girl home. Which I did along with another fellow who happened by and overheard the woman quoting the little girl, 'I don't want somebody to call the police on my Mommy and Daddy..' Finally, the girl spotted her father walking about the complex, a mite too casually by my estimation given the life-threatening circumstance his four-year-old daughter had wandered into. He did seem genuinely consternated when apprised of the situation, however, and we left it at that. Not that my kids never made an escape or got out of sight at a tender age, still, it was no small cause for wonder that such a small fry would A) have free run of an apartment complex where she could endanger herself in any number of ways and B) determine she needed to cross a busy street to a business where she was unknown and knew no one... Go figure.

   In other news, the toy haven is coming along. All that remains are one materials shelf and the video shelves to arrange. The videos are a real mess, tapes and more tapes and even more tapes- Batman, Star Trek, Bonanza, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, lots of other sci-fi and TV westerns -and then DVDs stacked on top of those stacks. I hate to unload any because I know I'll need to watch it as soon as I do. Oh, yeah, and a little sorting of the storage bins of various and sundry craft materials, fabrics, dolls and doll parts, photo file and who-knows-what-else I've stashed and forgotten. By the time I'm finished I figure I'll have to start all over dusting the plastic men. Some of them were really, really hairy looking after standing here unattended for many, many months. I finally stopped trying to dust and wipe them individually and dragged them by the handful into the driveway and hosed them off, no kidding, and let them dry in the sunshine. I was careful not to do too many at one time though lest passersby think it was a toy yard sale or something going on.

  I should be getting accustomed to the bachelor life by now. This week my spouse is out the door Wednesday headed to Kentucky for the weekend, some sort of spa retreat with her best gal pal whose husband begged off. And the kids'll stay with their cousins to facilitate my girl child's work schedule, her workplace is only a stone's throw from their abode. It'll give me plenty of time to do my little rubber experiments and spray paint some homemade toy fixins, I guess. Maybe the neighbors will be out a night or two and I can turn the amp up to eleven, squeeee-ZOINKS!!! My erstwhile bandmates have been trying out some new playmates too, might be a chance to see what's happening on the rock scene... We'll see, maybe I can talk them into doing 'Hey, hey, we're the Monkees!'...