Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots was a plastic boxing match game marketed to kids in the early 70s. From opposite corners of a 14 x 14 plastic tabletop boxing ring surrounded by plastic rope—no chance to “rope a dope” here—two seven-inch-tall plastic robots with outsized fists in molded plastic gloves threw punches at one another when you pressed the buttons on the control lever on your side of the ring. You could adjust the angle and frequency of attack by moving the lever back and forth and pressing the buttons more rapidly with your thumbs. 

I think my sister Ann and I had one. Or this may be a false memory implanted by years of television commercials on that little black and white set. I’m not sure. I seem to remember pressing the buttons and moving the lever. It must be a real memory as I was never a big fan of those kinds of games. I did not like pinball or later, Pac Man. I’m not a fan of the X-Box. Though I really loved those electric air hockey games whose puck glided on jets of cool air pouring up through tiny holes in the surface of the imitation “rink.” The puck floated there as if magically suspended in time and space between my net and that of my opponent. The sound of the paddle meeting the puck swaks in my mind’s ear as I type this now. 

These games of childhood come back to me as I contemplate today’s writing prompt: The ideal versus the reality...

One-hundred-fifty-six years ago today, Abraham Lincoln was struck down in the blush of youth. Honest Abe was not a babe, he was 56. His presidency was in the blush of its youth. 

I am older now than he was when he went to the theatre. It is amazing for me to imagine that I have made it this far. It’s not that I have lived a dangerous life of drugs and debauchery, but that my imagination as a child—when I worshipped Lincoln because of Black friends and a children’s book depicting Honest Abe holding a friend upside down over his head so that he could walk with muddy feet upon the ceiling of Nancy Hanks Lincoln’s immaculately clean log cabin in Kentucky—could not conjure the notion of a me so old as I am today. Older than the great man himself, who was indeed very old and with wrinkles and a tall hat. 

If my dharma were the pursuit of truth, I’d not be here tapping these keys right now. I’d have never left welding, where everything is black and white. Well, it’s really black and silver or sometimes black and copper; there are no gray areas. A weld is either a good one or a bad one. There is no in-between. You have to bring the metal up to the right temperature, use the right mix of oxygen and acetylene, the right flux. It can be fiddly, but there’s no getting around a good weld. It’s truer than the metal it unites. Period.

Other things, like the future or what a dog thinks, are not as straightforward. 

On Saturday morning, a chickadee hit the sliding glass door and fell to the snow. I heard the clunk of its little head on the cold glass only in retrospect. At the time, I didn’t consciously notice it until my dog Dewey brought it to my attention. He whined and whimpered at the lower corner of the big glass door. Pinned to the spot, he looked out with concern. When I finally got his message, I went out onto the porch and scooped the unconscious bird into my hands. 

When we lived at Terry’s house—a small log cabin in East Charlotte at the end of a very long and sometimes treacherous dirt driveway, I counted getting all the way home a small victory. Let me clarify, sometimes that victory was actually quite large. I tended to drive low-to-the-ground fuel-efficient Honda Civic Hatchbacks back then. Though I often outfitted those Hondas with studded snow tires, the depth of the snow in the driveway sometimes prevented entrée. Terry plowed the driveway himself and on his own schedule, which wasn’t always mine. He had built the cabin himself from timbers he’d taken from the land with a team of horses he’d borrowed from a neighbor. He was an excellent, though sometimes taciturn housemate. His cabin was the perfect landing place for us when we packed up and left Emmett’s dad.

It is the season of bizarre vegetables. Being the thoughtful Vermonter that I am, I subscribe to a local farm share. Every two weeks I get a basket—actually it is a yellow plastic bag—filled with fresh produce. This is the time of year when my “Standard Family Share” gets weird. Red and yellow carrots, entire branches of Brussels sprouts, parsnips, and kohlrabi find their way into my kitchen. Who are these strangers?

I am Ashwagandha. “The smell of a horse” is my Sanskrit meaning. Though I am not a horse, my name conjures images of horses—manes whipping in the wind as they gallop along deserted beaches on the Arabian Sea or climb high plateaus in Nepal and Uzbekistan. Wild, ferocious, and free are the ways you describe me. 

Under the right conditions, I can be obedient. For those who tame me, I calm nerves and slow racing hearts. I am the herbal supplement Indian ginseng; I am poison gooseberry, from the nightshade family. 

Leon is dead. He fell on Sunday and broke a leg. Two days after his presumed rebound from surgery, he died peacefully in his sleep. He was one hundred years old. Short, Jewish, with a big nose and a huge presence, Leon was a maverick and something of a flirt. He lived in Southern California and until two years ago, drove an immaculate white Buick with powder blue interior. 

That he drove a car so late into his 90s was a bone of contention for his family, the family of my dear friend and best yoga buddy, Andy, Leon’s grandson. I did not get to have a vote in the driving dispute, but when Andy called to ruminate and kvetch a little bit about Leon driving, I asked him if the glistening white chariot had any dings or dents. “It’s pristine,” he intoned somewhat deflated as he vacillated about joining the license-revocation camp of the family...

During the pandemic I don’t seem to know what day it is. My regular work has become so entirely irregular that the foundation upon which my full catastrophe—as Zorba the Greek would call it—once balanced now rests upon a teeter totter whose lead-based paint flakes off its dried out 2x6 and creaks on rusty hinges in a wind which is very strong today.

Dried out maple leaves fly by my window on unseasonably warm gusts, 35-40 knots out of the Southwest. This is no sultry Nat King Cole Autumn Leaves kind of wind, ‘C'est une chanson Qui nous ressemble’ but a blaster that makes all the apples drop.