Category: Musings

The electricity went out. I don’t know why it happened. It wasn’t storming. The weather was nice. All I know is I was watching TV when the lamps suddenly flickered and died.

And that was that.

The house fell silent. The refrigerator quit vibrating. The A/C compressor was no longer humming. My dog stared at the ceiling fan slowing down. The power must have affected cell towers, too. I had no phone service.

For a few minutes I just sat in my living room, watching my dog dutifully perform an act of intimate hygiene.

Panic set in. What was I going to do? No electricity? No internet? No phone service? How would I contact a loved one in an emergency? How would I dial 911? How was I going to order cat food on Amazon?

I was becoming dangerously isolated from humanity, and fast. As an American, I am obligated by the Bill of Rights to keep current with essential news headlines at all times.

But without vital electronic devices, I had no idea what key events were happening in the global community. I was missing out.

What if something was happening in North Korea I needed to know about? How about Quebec? What if I missed vital updates on court hearings? Or the baby monkey kidnappings in Panama? Or the videoed rescue of the runaway zebra in Murfreesboro, Tennessee?

How was I supposed to live without constant headlines about various billionaires’ sex scandals? What about my 24-hour footage of violent demonstrations in Third World countries, massive explosions, terrorist bombs, bodies lying in streets, or “Live with Kelly and Mark?”

No more TV means no more rich dudes in courtrooms talking about rappers’ prostitution rings. No more news anchors gleefully saying the words “Harvey Weinstein.” No more commercials urging me to purchase gold, Colonial Life insurance, or any other valuable service Joe Namath provides.

Also, no more fast food commercials advertising plasticized meat-like “products,” injected with industrial-grade cholesterolized gelatine before being served upon “buns” that aren’t actually—in the legal sense—bread. This is usually followed by weight-loss commercial.

No more pharmaceutical ads about breakthrough drugs with vaguely Star-Trekky names that can (a) improve your life, and (b) kill you. No more lengthy drug company disclaimers which last about as long as law school:

(“Zelabubracil may cause kidney failure, brain bleeding, rare forms of eyeball fungi, inability to form sentences without spontaneously soiling your underwear, depressive disorders, suicidal thoughts, sudden interest in C-Span…”)

And what about my phone? No text conversations with family members that are purely based on sharing memes? No more spam marketers texting information about my auto warranty?

No more robo-calls from pre-recorded machines offering me critical information about debt consolidation services, urgent health insurance opportunities, or scams about fundraisers for upcoming congressmen’s balls. Everyone knows congressmen don’t have those.

No. Without electricity there was nothingness.

I felt lost and disconnected. Where was I going to get my excitement? How was I going to adequately feel afraid? How in the WORLD was I going to defend my principles on social media by engaging with people whom I’ve never met and subsequently calling them buttholes? What in the world was I going to do with myself?

Wait. I know. Maybe it’s time I lived my life.

By Sean Dietrich

The radio was on. WSM 650 AM. It was a summer night. The crickets were out. The garage door was open.

Daddy was changing the oil. He was lying beneath the Ford. I was sitting there, watching him work. Because that’s what kids did before TikTok.

The garage was peppered with posters of fighter jets, and model airplanes. My father was obsessed with planes. All kinds. He wanted to be a fighter pilot as a boy. But he was deaf in his left ear. So he became an ironworker.

His voice came from beneath the car. “Be a pal and get me another one from the fridge?”

He wasn’t talking about Coca-Cola. He wanted another bottle of Weekend Lubricant. I didn’t have far to walk. The fridge was beside his workbench. Our family’s beer fridge was always kept in the garage because we were Baptist.

I fetched another bottle. I handed it to my old man, who slid from beneath the car on one of those slider things with the wheels.

He was still wearing work clothes. Denim. Boots. He was still covered in soot from a day of welding column splices. It was Saturday. He had worked overtime, but still somehow had energy enough to cut the grass, paint the shed, and change the oil after work. Just how he was.

“Turn up the radio, Opie,” he said.

He called me that because I had red hair. Although the truth was, I was pretty chubby and looked nothing like Ron Howard. In fact, I looked more like I had eaten Opie Taylor.

The radio was playing the Grand Ole Opry. The garage swelled with the sounds of steel guitars and twin fiddles.

My father discovered that I was a musical child from a young age. I was 4 when he marched me into the music minister’s office and said, “My boy can sing. I want you to learn him to do it good.” Daddy paid $9 per week for voice lessons. That was a lot back then. The first song I learned was “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.”

“Do you have regrets?” I asked my father.

“Huh?” came the voice beneath the four-wheeled piece of Dearborn Steel.

“Where’d you hear that word?”

Shrug.

He slid from beneath the car. He stared at me. “You mean do I wish I’d done anything different? Of course I do. Everyone has regrets.”

“Like what?”

He was still lying on his back. Socket wrench resting on his chest. “Why do you ask?”

Another shrug.

“Well,” he said, “I wish I’d gone to college. That’s Number One. Wish I’d made something of myself. Wish I didn’t walk on iron beams all day. Lotta men die doing what I do.”

“What else?”

He thought. “Oh, I wish I would’ve taken flying lessons. I always wanted to fly. But when they told me I’d never be a Navy pilot, on account of my dead ear, I cried for a whole year. I hated myself. Hated this gimp body God gave me. But I shouldn’t have given up. Shoulda taken flying lessons. But I didn’t. I regret that.”

“Is it too late?”

“For flying lessons?”

Nod.

He sighed and took a sip. He looked into the faroff. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

The music of Loretta Lynn filled our garage. “But it doesn’t matter, because you know what I’ve learned?”

“What?”

“When you were born, I learned that the most important thing I would ever do was be a daddy. I didn’t care about me no more. I only cared about you. Cared about watching you succeed.”

“Me?”

“Yessir. You shoulda seen yourself. You were pitiful. You came out of your mama helpless and nekkid. You didn’t even have a name. So I gave you mine.

“And when I held you that first time, I promised myself that anything I ever did, from that day on, would all be for you. That was my job. To look after you. Not to be a pilot. Not to be rich. Even after I die, so help me, I’ll be looking out for you however I can. Because you’re mine. And I’m your’n.”

I am a middle-aged man now, older than my father was in my memory. But tomorrow night I will be performing at the Grand Ole Opry. And I wonder if he isn’t the reason why.

By Sean Dietrich

Memorial Day is the unofficial start to summer, and summer was in full bloom in America. The nation experienced mostly beautiful weather.

 

The Midwest had highs in the 80s, The Southeast experienced temps even higher. Temperatures in the Florida panhandle exceeded approximately 173 degrees.

But it’s important to remember that it wasn’t a great Memorial Day weekend for everyone.

Yesterday in Saint Louis, for example, a man named Phillip was playing baseball with his kids while his wife, Lindsey, was making potato salad inside. The day was going swimmingly.

“Guys in my family have always played baseball on Memorial Day weekend,” Philip wrote to me this morning in an email. “It’s a longstanding tradition for us.”

Phillip was pitching. His 11-year-old son, Austin, was at the plate. Phillip delivered an easy pitch underhand. His son swung the bat like the baseball had personally insulted his mother. The bat connected.

PING!

The good news is that Phillip’s son hit a line drive. The bad news is: it was a line drive which struck a part of Phillip’s anatomy most often associated with procreation.

The ball nailed Phillip. He howled in pain. He went down under the power. His kids all gathered around him and asked if he was okay. All Phillip could utter was, “Go get your mom, please.”

It bears mentioning, Phillip’s son was using an aluminum bat not a wooden bat. Which might not sound like an important detail to this story except that the exit velocity of a ball hit by an aluminum bat is a LOT higher than that of one hit by a wooden bat.

A ball hit by a wooden bat has an average velocity of 60 to 80 mph. Whereas a ball hit by an aluminum bat is capable of breaking the sonic barrier.

Phillip’s wife approached her husband and asked her children what had happened.

Her 4-year-old son remarked, “Austin hit daddy in the Twinkie.”

His wife had to excuse herself for a moment. When she returned, her face was red and she looked like she’d been laughing.

“I wasn’t laughing,” said Phillip’s wife. “It’s allergies.”

Then, his wife single-handedly loaded Phillip into their SUV. She placed him in the cargo hold because Phillip was incapable of sitting. Phillip laid on on his side throughout the long ride to the hospital and tried to remind himself to breathe.

Occasionally, he heard a cackling sound coming from the front seat, but his wife swears that her allergies get so bad this time of year.

“My wife doesn’t even have allergies,” Phillip writes.

At the hospital, a doctor checked him out. The nurse removed Phillip’s trousers and the medical professionals inspected the bruising. The doctor asked how it happened.

Phillip’s 4-year-old spoke again. “My brother hit my daddy in the Twinkie.”

The doctor nodded, covered his mouth, then excused himself briefly. The medical man left the exam room and Phillip swears he heard the sound of the doctor’s allergies acting up.

When the doctor returned, he was out of breath and he had four other male medical colleagues with him who were available to offer their expertise. Also, the janitor said he wanted to see, too.

One of the veteran ER doctors, male, inspected the bruising and wore a grave face. Whereupon he looked Phillip square in the eye and said, “Son, I’m afraid we’re going to have to remove it.”

At which point, all medical staffers excused themselves again and Phillip heard more allergies in the hallway.

“What kind of world is this we live in,” Phillip wrote to me, “when doctors and nurses can’t even act professionally?”

Thankfully, as it turns out, Phillip will make a full recovery. The main advice the doctor gave Phillip was to use frozen vegetables—either corn or peas work best—to de-inflame the affected netherregions. Once the bruising goes away, the doctor recommends that Phillip retire his jersey and quit baseball altogether.

Phillip spent most of today in the supine position, lying on his sofa. All day, Philip’s friends have been stopping by to wish him well.

“They’ve been bringing me a lot of Hostess products,” said Phillip.

He hopes that by sharing his story he can warn fathers out there to take the proper protective measures when playing backyard sports.

“I just don’t wanna see this happen to someone else,” he added. “I think it’s time we talked openly about this painfully sensitive subject.”

Now if you’ll excuse me, my allergies are acting up.

By Sean Dietrich

“What is Easter?” the boy asked his grandfather. 

The old man and boy sat on the front porch. That’s where people used to sit in the olden days. They used to build porches on the fronts of houses so you could wave at your neighbors. Now they build “decks” on the back so you can wave at your above-ground pool. 

“Easter is a day of rebirth,” said Granddaddy. 

The two cohorts were still wearing their Sunday best. The boy: His necktie and khakis. The grandfather: His button down, crisply pressed, with only a few tobacco-spit stains on the collar. 

“What’s rebirth?” the boy said. 

“Well, you remember when you was born, don’t you?”

“No.” 

“Well, trust me you were born, or else you wouldn’t be here.” Granddaddy took a sip of his Doctor Pepper. “And today it all happens again.” 

“What happens again?”

“You get born.” 

“I get born twice?” the boy said. 

He nodded. “Look at the trees and the flowers, see how they’re all blooming? You see those azaleas across the street.” 

“Which ones are the azaleas?”

“The pink ones that Mrs. Wannamaker will slit your throat you if you touch.” 

“I see them.” 

“And the trees, look at them. They’re turning green. The birds are singing. That’s what resurrection means.” 

“It means birds?” 

“No. Resurrection means, when something comes back to life. And it’s a miracle, every time something gets reborn. Because a new beginning is a miracle.” 

“Is that why we look for eggs on Easter?” 

“No. Hell. I don’t know why we look for eggs.”

He took another sip. “Look,” he went on, “you know all those crosses people wear around their necks?”

“Yes.” 

“Well, I think we’re wearing the wrong thing around our necks. We shouldn’t be wearing the cross. The cross is death. It’s a tool of execution. It’s like wearing an electric chair around your neck. Or a hangman’s noose.” 

“Granny wears a cross around her neck.” 

“Your Granny was raised Pentecostal.” 

“What’s that mean?”

“It means don’t go to her church if you’re afraid of reptiles.” 

He unbuttoned his top button. “The point is,” he went on, “maybe we should be wearing the empty tomb around our necks. Because that’s where it all starts.”

“Where what starts?”

“That’s where your life begins. You will come to a point in your life when you have nothing. You will reach a moment in your life when everything falls apart. You will find yourself in a tomb, of sorts. You will be as good as dead.” 

“Just like Jesus?”

“Just like Him. And I wish I could save you from that fate, but I can’t. Because on that day, there will be nothing left for you, boy. Your life will be a wreck. You will be at your bitter end. 

“And in that moment, you will have only two choices: You can either lie down and die, or you can look up.

“What happens if I look up?” 

“Rebirth.” 

“Have you ever been reborn?”

“Many times.” 

“How did it happen?”

“It first happened to me when I was in Italy, fighting. And there were men with guns all around us. And my young soldiers were all going to die.” 

“And what’d you do?”

“We all looked up, and we asked God to help us. My men started praying. Out loud. We started talking to God. And that’s all it takes. You just have to talk. 

“Ain’t no magic words, no secret handshake, no special membership rules. Don’t ever let anyone tell you it’s more complicated than that. You just talk to God. And He’ll hear you. And He heard us that day in Italy.” 

“And what happened next?”

“I’m sitting right here drinking a Doctor Pepper, ain’t I?”

Granddaddy always had a way of explaining things so I could understand them.