It Is My Duty To In-Form You...

(Reprinted from today's Times and News-Star)


Life requires good form.

If you don’t believe it, try getting a driver’s license without a form. Try going to school without a form. Try being born without one.

Forms don’t lie. People do. Which is why Loretta Lynn, one of the greatest and countriest country singers ever, was accused this week of being three years older than she really is -- however old that is. She says she’s 77. No biggie, except the long-ago forms uncovered by some inquiring mind suggest she’s 80 and was almost 16 when she got married, not 13 as she had claimed.

Either way, the Coal Miner’s Daughter is now and old miner’s daughter. You can run from the form, as Loretta has, but you can’t hide.

If you graduated this week, you know something already of forms. You’ve filled out forms to play YMCA ball, to join Key Club, to be on swim team, to get your cap and gown. You filled out a form just to get into school.

This is by no means the end of the form line. If you think it is, you are in for a long road of wasted time and money. As stupid as the form seems, as trivial as it might appear to you, it is the Holy Grail of Purpose for some people, and rightly so. There are Form Gatherers who live and breathe The Form. They can get on your nerves, but you’ve got to have ’em, or else anarchy ensues.

A couple of weeks ago we had Saturday morning physicals for high schoolers. I had to go to the gym because my high schooler did not acquire the form the day before. While I filled out the form, using a gym wall for a desktop, I asked that she note this, that life is filled with forms and if you forget your form, you are in for woe, and if you remember your form, you are in the gym now cracking jokes with your friends who filled out forms at home, and got their parents to sign them, last night.

As anyone who’s been humbled by the power of the form and has learned his lesson will tell you, “a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.” In other words, next time you forget the form, the consequences will be high and will be yours, completely, to oversee.

That seemed like a big deal over nothing until later that week when the lesson hit home, to the tune of about 20 large. I’ll explain:

I have a friend and sometimes column correspondent who is scheduled to have an offspring graduate, with honors, from a highly regarded private college. The only problem is, his daughter forgot to fill out a form way back at the first of the semester. The class she’s in, and has passed, she’s technically NOT in. She never registered. So she can’t graduate. So say the Form Gatherers and the highest of the high, the Form Judges.

This could be a mistake in the realm of $20,000. A do-over in the grownup world is expensive. In the grownup world, these excuses are met with laughter, a look of disgust, and often a snide remark.

“But I didn’t get a form.” You should have.

“I didn’t know you had to have a form.” You always have to have a form.

“I hate you and your forms!” Yawn.

Remember when God made the world? It was “void and without form.” That’s the first thing He fixed.



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Hurts me...

Banjo player Doug Dillard, an influential bluegrass musician who played with many rock outfits, appeared on “The Andy Griffith Show" and with his family band the Dillards, died Wednesday in Nashville after a long illness, the group's longtime publisher Lynne Robin Green said Thursday. He was 75. (From the AP)

What in the Sam Hill is going on?

Donna Summer last week. Robin Gibb (we're now down to one solitary Bee Gee). Earl Scruggs a couple of months ago. Goober.

And now one of the Dillard boys. He's with the banjo, above, as one of the Darlin' Boys, as they were known on The Andy Griffith Show. The Dillard's standup bass stud (with pipe) died last year.

"We Shall Meet But We Shall Miss Him..." Sing it boys...

Sigh...Everybody hang in there...

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Taking It One Test At A Time

(from today's Times and News-Star)


In her wonderful book “Bird By Bird,” Anne Lamott tells the story of her older brother who’s faced with completing a grade school report on birds he’d had three months to work on. The night before it was due, he sat “at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead,” Lamott wrote. “Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”

One of my favorite stories.

In the past couple of weeks I have seen students in a similar situation, trying to get the shutters closed and the hatches battened down as the end of another school year comes. You’ve got your ants, who have been storing up food all winter, and you’ve got your last-minute one-armed paper hangers, praying for relief and a miracle. But whether in the long run or short run, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

Bird by bird.

“Bird by bird” is an uptown cliché for the athletic “one game at a time.” I am all about athletic clichés. I can count on them to bring me joy when few other things will. I have been reminded lately that the whole end-of-the-school-year conversation could spill out in nothing but locker-room or sideline clichés.

                                                          *****
“We go now to Mr. Hedy’s English classroom, where the American Lit final will take place tomorrow at 10. How are you today, Mr. Hedy?”

“That’s Hedley. Hedley.”

“Mr. Hedley. Of course. I’m sorry. And how are you today on the eve of the class final?”

“Excited.”

“Why?”

“Well, it all comes down to this. I mean, this is what we teach for, what we train for, what we study for, what we conjugate verbs for. It’s why we read and write and carry on with infinitives so. This is what English class is all about. I’m excited.”

“Give us an idea, Mr. Hedley, of the personality of this class.”

“We’re young. Inexperienced. But we’ve studied together and gotten better – jelled, you could say – as the year’s gone along. Everybody thought we were toast after we struggled with Hawthorne. But we came back and have a chance at the final now. We’re excited.”

“Did you think you’d get to this point?”

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried, but this class made me a believer. The kids deserve to be here.”

“Mr. Hedley, your class has a chance to raise the GPA of the whole school with a good showing on the final. What do you think is the key today?”

“Well, we’ll have to play both sides of the symbolism, no question. Be ready for sonnets and short stories and similes. And alliteration. We respect a guy like, say, Eliot, and know he can come at you with conceits, with your metaphors, and you better be ready. I think our kids are. We’re all pretty excited just about being excited, about the excitement.”

“What do you think your pre-test speech will be?”

“Oh, I’ll just tell them we’ve come a long way. Hey, nobody gave us a chance. So the key now is just to relax. Don’t cheat. Let the test come to us. Give 100 percent. Leave it all on the exam. We’ve just got to take it word by word.”

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Hurts Me...

Hurts me bad.
Donna Summer. 63.
Had battled cancer for a while.
Liked me some Donna Summer. "Hot Stuff" "Last Dance" And all like that.
Rats.

Dan Jenkins: Dead Solid Perfect

This past weekend, Dan Jenkins was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame for his contributions to golf journalism over the past 60-plus years. The photo above is from the AP. The guy waving is from the golf gods. Dan Jenkins. Genius and funny and knows more than anybody esle alive about golf. It means something to him and you can tell when he writes. Love him. He's made a lot of people happy by making them laugh, and he's made a lot of people smarter about golf, including golf people, whether they want to admit it or not. Most of them well. Good for Mr. Jenkins. He's the first writer to be inducted as a "vertical human." 'Bout time ....

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Service With A Smile: Goober Says 'Bye'

(From today's Times and News-Star)
“Three hours is a long time to go without eating.” – Goober Pyle

Having never studied motor engine repair, I have a respect for car mechanics that’s both deep and wide.

I’m thinking now of Mr. Cox, who kept my Triumph Spitfire running through the early 1980’s with nothing more than a well-placed clothes pin on a fuel line. I have a shirt from his Shell station hanging not five feet from me right now. Good times.

Ransom, with the greatest auto repair name in history, grew up in Shreveport’s Cedar Grove, learned the ins and outs under a shade tree, and now has businesses in two towns. My rides are beneficiaries of his prowess under the hood.

Hayes Barfield holds a special place in the little-boy chamber of my heart. He lubed and oiled and replaced and repaired most every engine in Dillon County, S.C., in the 1960s. It is here where I learned girls could fix stuff too, and that every girl mechanic preferred working in either blue jean cutoffs or a swimming suit; nobody held vice grips quite like Miss October.

And Hayes was one of five guys who let me go to the South Carolina-Clemson football game with them in 1967, even though I was just a boy. You don’t forget stuff like that.

But the mechanic by whom all other mechanics are measured was born and raised in Mayberry, N.C. I think the gentlemen I’ve mentioned would agree that Goober Pyle was the whole package.

George Lindsey, who portrayed Goober on “The Andy Griffith Show” and “Mayberry, R.F.D.” and was a regular on “Hee-Haw,” passed away last week at 83. It’s a lucky break for fans of Goober that, because of film, Goober and his felt hat and high-water britches, complete with oil rag in the back pocket, will always be around.

Enough time has passed that a couple of generations do not know, automatically, who Goob is. Hurts me. Reminds me of a time when a newspaper entertainment reporter heard me talking about Paul McCartney and the Beatles and said, “You mean Paul McCartney was in a band BEFORE he was in Wings?”

I’m getting old.

Goob was not “the Beatles of comedy” or of character actors, but he was top shelf, and all the younger generation would benefit from checking both him (and the Beatles) out. (It was this past week in 1970 that the Beatles released their final album, by the way. Don’t seem right…)

My cousin Other (pronounced “OH-thur”) reminded me just this week that it was an unseen Goober, not introduced as a character yet on “Andy Griffith,” who was going to fix the eight cylinder car broken in Mayberry on a Sunday, when no one worked. And it was Gomer Pyle, Goober’s cousin, who told Mr. Tucker that Goober once put a V-8 car engine on his rowboat and that now “that thing’ll do 80,” Gomer said. “That’s fast on water.”

So Goob was funny before he was even on the show. He liked Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan) on the “Tarzan” movies: “She sure can swim.” Had a crush on Flora Mallerby, a waitress at the diner. Was a champion pancake eater (won the county fair contest and everything). Read seven comic books a week, minimum. And could imitate Cary Grant and Edward G. Robinson and Chester of “Gunsmoke.”

And he still makes us laugh. Your best mechanics, they make things run better, including people.

Book Lover's Diary: "The Last Boy"

The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood
By Jane Leavy

Came out last year but I waited 'til this week to read it. Four-plus out of five stars. Bittersweet...