Randy Fitzgerald

This column originally ran in City Edition

Last week I was giving a speech at a local nursing home and, to my amazement and horror, I suddenly noticed that my wife, who had come along with me for the first time in years, was definitely yawning.

            It wasn’t one of those small, discreet, behind-the-hand, ladylike yawns either.  It was an eyes-closed, jaw-dislodging, back-teeth revealing, nightclub-bouncer kind of yawn that, had I been close enough to hear, was probably audio-accompanied by a big “AHHHHHHH.” That yawn, from my very own wife, if you can conceive of such disloyalty and disrespect, was disconcerting enough to make me lose my place in my speech. Had I been talking about the R.O.U.S. under our dishwasher? Or recounting a romantic Valentine’s story?  Who knew?

            On the way home, I must admit I took Barb to task a bit. “Do you realize,” I said to her, “that I speak at least two or three times a month to clubs and groups all over town,

and you’re the first person I’ve ever had yawn in my face.”

 ”Do you realize,” she said in her own defense, “that you’ve been giving exactly the same speech for over 20 years?  And that Richmonders are a very polite lot?”

            That hissing sound you hear is the wind going out of my sails.  She was absolutely right.  This is the 24^th year that I’ve been writing a column, and from the very first year, local organization started inviting me to come over and deliver a speech and, yes, I’ve been delivering pretty much the same one ever since.

            It’s one heck of a speech, though, if I do say so myself, and it almost always makes people laugh.  “I can’t change that speech,” I said to Barb.  “All the really interesting parts of my life are in there. I’ve honed and perfected it over the years, and besides, I know it backwards and forwards.”

“Well, duh,” she replied. “If you don’t know that speech after delivering it for 24 years, your brain would have to fit in a thimble.”

 Nevertheless, I take comfort in the fact that I’ve got that baby down cold-hand gestures, dramatic pauses, shy smiles and all. For instance, I know exactly how to gesture to indicate a conflagration when I tell the story about Barb’s ceremonial candle that ignited the purse of the woman in front of her in the solemn nighttime processional up the driveway at Graceland.

            I’ve also mastered looking suspiciously over the top of my glasses at the ladies in the front row when I talk about meeting Ross Perot and hearing from him about “crazy old aunts in the attic.”  I can demonstrate exactly my stance when I eased an unwelcome bat out our bedroom window with a tennis racket.  I can roll my eyes perfectly when I recount how Barb, distracted by an interesting conversation with her sister, forgot they were in a funeral procession and attempted to pass the hearse carrying her aunt’s body.

            I can summon a really innocent, misunderstood look when I tell about misplacing a Pepsi-Cola truck I was driving for a summer job. And I can make the hair stand up on your neck when I quietly talk about sharing a table with a man who had murdered four people.

Listeners seem to get a kick out of learning I once had a traffic accident on the way to the insurance company to report a traffic accident. They’re initially doubtful when I tell them I have exchanged hellos with the Queen of England and sung “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” with Art Garfunkel, but I have so many details to share I can eventually convince them that both stories are true-which they are. It makes me happy to talk about one of my really good friends who is the world’s largest leech-grower, or my brother, who is a really funny, unusual kind of guy. Audiences seem to like the stories of my own misadventures, like that fact that three pairs of my eyeglasses (one pair at a time) have been run over and converted to splinters and shards by power lawnmowers. (In the last year, I can add a cell phone to that list as well.)

            “Good stories all,” said Barb on the way home last week.  “But you have got to write a new speech.  When you put your wife to sleep with the same old stories, it’s time.”

            So for all the nursing homes, retirement clubs, schools, professional groups, churches and community and fraternal organizations that have invited me to speak over the years, often more than once, let me announce here that I am working on a new speech.  Dave Barry, Willie Nelson and Lewis Grizzard will no longer be featured, the Weinermobile story will be retired, and I won’t have my brother Terry to kick around anymore. 

And just what will I speak about?  Well, I have an awful lot of stories left about my wild and wacky wife.  I bet I won’t see her yawning through those.   

This column first ran in City Edition

I am, definitely by default, the computer geek at my house.  And somewhere on the South Side of this city right now, my brother Terry is rolling around on the floor laughing as he reads that.

            Terry knows, as do I, that I have absolutely no technical-or, for that matter, mechanical-skills of any kind. An early realization of my inadequacy in these matters came at the age of 16, when the first car I ever owned, a 1950 Rocket 88 Oldsmobile, was towed away, the block cracked because I didn’t know that anti-freeze was required in the wintertime.

That car was the first of a series of losses inspired by either my ignorance of how things work or my lack of interest in how things work.  I only care that things DO work, and I’m happy to leave care and upkeep to others.  Tell that to the dryer whose motor burned up because I didn’t know those things had lint filters that needed to be cleaned.   Or the power mower that died a quiet death because I couldn’t keep up with its need for oil.

I’m telling you all this without shame because I know there are lots of other fellows out there very much like me, guys who are great dads, loyal husbands, faithful friends, good breadwinners, skilled bon vivants, but who are clueless when it comes to “things.” I comfort myself, as should you, my friend, with the knowledge that we all can’t be tops at everything.  Still, there is that sad story of the Palm Pilot.

A number of years ago my then-college age daughter coughed up a lot of money from her rather small bank account and bought me a Palm Pilot for Christmas.  I ohhhed and awwwed over it appropriately and, after she left to return to school, I got out the instruction book and managed to put in the names and phone numbers of family and friends. Then I put the thing on a shelf, and it has been there for all the years since, untried and untested and, frankly, unwanted.  (I can say that in print since she is in graduate school in Austin, Texas, now and unlikely to read this.)

So do not put me on the list of folk to whom you are awarding a Blackberry. I don’t really know what one is or does, and I am happy to restrict my intimacy with blackberries to the ones I put on my cereal. You grasp, then, that while I may be the household computer geek by default, I am hardly a geek at heart. I’m simply better with computers than my wife is.

Actually, I may be closer to the old definition of “geek,” which has undergone a total redefining in my lifetime. I first heard of geeks back in the sixties, when the word applied to carnival performers who performed strange and depraved acts such as biting the heads off chickens.   So I guess it might be said that Ozzy Ozbourne was then, long before we knew of Bill Gates, as close as the world came to having a recognizable geek. In saying I might be closer to that original definition, I mean that-vegetarian though I am-I would probably be better at relieving a chicken of its head than I am at troubleshooting a computer.

Here I sit, case in point, in front of the old PC, eternally grateful to have mastered Microsoft Word and e-mail and not sure of much else in this great world of computer madness. Barb and I may be the only computer owners left who have never visited eBay.  We have managed to buy a few things from Amazon over the years, but we’re eBay virgins.  Sadly, there are lots of things we’d love to sell on eBay (a Palm Pilot?)-but not so much that we want to take the time to find out how to do it.

While I know my limitations with computers, I must add that I concur with the consensus that they’re an absolutely fantastic invention. My great and good friend down in Georgia, Jim Colvert, who will be 86 this year, says he is darned glad he has lived so far into the computer age.  He spends most of his days at his computer, learning more and more about it and, thanks to it, more and more about the world and literature and aviation and music and all the other subjects that interest him most. He shows off his latest computer to visitors the way I used to show off my 1950 Rocket Oldsmobile, before its untimely end.

I share with Jim the excitement over this new instant availability of information and learning. I am extremely well versed at Googling, as is Barb. In fact, when I took over the computer from her a few minutes ago to write this, she was Googling the history of sabbaticals and getting back a wealth of information.  Googling is a godsend, except to our hardback encyclopedias, which get little use anymore.  And, thanks to Spellcheck, our dictionaries also remain on the shelf, no doubt feeling as obsolete as I do.

I AM the head geek at my house, though, and Barb calls me when she can’t get online, or the computer freezes up, or something about the computer changes for no reason.  That last is the most aggravating thing to her.  As long as her menus and icons stay the same and remain in the same place, she is able to navigate her way to all the places she needs to be; but let me update something or change something and she has the female equivalent of a computer crash, a disaster known in the South as a hissy fit.

By the way, I just Googled “hissy fit” and found 636,000 entries. 

Maybe there’s still room in this world for a good dictionary.

Note: This column first ran in City Edition.

Those gosh-darn, dag-nabbit, berry-eating, night-squawking, heart-stopping birds!

            I don’t know how things are in your neighborhood, but my own has been overrun with rashes of robins for the past two months. They seem to be camping in every other tree, particularly on the branches directly over one’s car and especially if one’s car happens to have a cloth top.

            They first showed up in Ginter Park back when we were having that far-too-early spring, when the days were so warm that the crocuses came up and the March bells started to bloom.  When the occasional robin first appeared here and there, I would smile happily and contemplate the real arrival of spring, which then seemed right down the road.

            I think that’s what the birds thought, too.  My guess is that they all prematurely started their end-of-winter trek from parts south, headed north and home, when their flight (was it Jet Blue?) unexpectedly ended in Richmond. So here they stay.  They’ve come too far to head back to where they started, but all the weather reports of snow farther north have alerted them to the fact that they can’t yet move on.  So Ginter Park seems to have thousands and thousands of them stranded in our trees and bushes, resting on every available wire, chattering and rustling and setting up a hum that resonates even inside our homes, particularly last thing at dusk and first thing early morning.

            For a while they were kind of neat.  Barb bought a little seed and corn to feed them when temperatures dropped, throwing it around the backyard while chirping to them in her own version of bird talk.  But about the third time she had to scrap off the car-not the windshield, might you, but the top, doors, hood and trunk-the birds got a little less charming.

            But the crowning blow (some might say, literally) came one afternoon as we were taking a little walk around the block and passed beneath a big, multi-limbed tree.  “Oh, rats,” Barb moaned.  “We might as well go back-it’s raining.” 

            “I didn’t feel any rain,” I said.

            And reaching her hand to the top of her head, she said, “Well, I di. …” Her voice died away as she turned on her heels and went home to wash her hair.  After that, it was the Bird-Barb war. No more corn in the grass.  No more fond smiles over robins at play.

Sometimes I would arrive home from work to see Barb and the cat sharing the same window ledge, both cunningly surveying the aviary that once was our yard.

            From my perspective, the worst thing about the birds has been their ability to scare the living blue blazes out of me.  Sometimes right at dark, as Barb and I are walking to the gym down the street, we pass a tree or big bush that suddenly seems to respond to our approach with a faint, tiny rustling noise; and just as your mind starts to consider, “Is someone hiding there?”  out from the tree-SWOOOSSSH!-a hundred birds arise all at once with a collectively huge fluttering of wings, and for a split second your heart jumps and thuds in your chest.

            And then, realizing that it’s only the birds, you get the feeling that somewhere Alfred Hitchcock is laughing at you like a madman.  The really stupid part is, this swoosh of birds in the night keeps happening-when we take the trash out after dark or get out of the car late at night-and Barb and I keep jumping and flailing the same way each time.

            Barb ordered a cat.  Not a real cat-we already have Mr. Muffin, who occasionally approximates a real cat-but a black metal, one-dimensional cat with a child’s blue marble for an eye and pointy stakes on its feet to secure it to the ground.  Barb sunk it into the backyard in approximately the same spot where a few weeks earlier she had been merrily distributing corn.  The next morning when I came out to go to work, one robin was sitting on the fake cat, just above the blue marble eye, and several others were hopping around nearby, checking to see if any corn from better days had been overlooked.

 I scraped my car, noting as I did so that Barb’s car seemed to be covered with an old green shower curtain, a brick on each corner to hold it down. In the center she had drawn a caricature of a red-breasted bird inside a circle, with a big red diagonal line across it. 

I’ll let you know how that works.