Ellie Mae

Ellie Mae
Beautiful Ellie Mae

Freddie, the French Bulldog

Freddie, the French Bulldog
Lazing on a sunny afternoon

The artist

The artist
Ollie Mac

Ollie and Annie

Ollie and Annie
Azorean grandmother

Acrylics and watercolors

Acrylics and watercolors
Cannabis and sunflowers

Papa and Ollie Mac

Papa and Ollie Mac
Priorities, Baby

Acrylics and watercolors

Acrylics and watercolors
Hollyhocks

Mahlon Masling Blue

Mahlon Masling Blue
My friend and brother.

Mark's E-mail address

bellspringsmark@gmail.com

Thursday, December 22, 2011

No Applause-Just the Money

No Applause, Just the Money
How better to get to know someone, than finding out all of the dipsy-doodle sorts of things he’s done?  I mean, I could start off with all of the hot stuff, (I’m thinking, I’m thinking) but then I would have no where to go but down.  So here I go with five embarrassing moments of my life, in reverse order.  Note that I did not say the five incidents; no, sadly, there are lots more.
5) Red lights: I have received one motor vehicle, moving violation in my life, and that was in 1974.  Moving?  If we had been moving, I would have been all right.  I was driving in San Francisco (if you have ever driven in San Francisco, then this will sound normal) and I came up to a red signal.  It was four in the morning.   There was absolutely no cross-traffic.  I was perched on the edge of the intersection, waiting for that red light to turn green, and I waited.  Had I timed the signal, from the moment it turned red, until it turned green, it probably was not an obscene amount of time.  Whatever.  My passenger was using the headlights of the cars behind us to read a map.  All we wanted was to get through to the Golden Gate Bridge, and on up to NorCal.  Inexplicably, after waiting for what seemed forever, I decided to go for it, and just drove right through that intersection.  When that spinning red light, immediately behind me went off, I was mortified.  I could just imagine all of the people in the vehicles behind me, as I up and crossed the empty intersection, with a police ossifer sitting right behind me.  Achtung, Chuckles.
4) Whiny knee: Before I had my left knee reconstructed, in 1994, lack of an ACL left me apt to suddenly find myself prone on the ground, if I varied from placing one foot, directly in front of the other.  On an afternoon, when I was uncharacteristically late for a K-8 staff meeting, I came rushing in the back door of the staff room, and made a quick left, and fell splat on my face.  When the applause died down, I took my seat.
3) Language acquisition: We were sitting around in 4th period religion in our assigned seats, my freshman year of high school, and the priest teaching us had told us to just chill the last ten minutes of class.  The guy to one side of me was one of the popular kids (only boys on our side of the campus) and he delighted in tormenting me.  I was trying to avoid his sarcasm, which was deadlier to me than the check on check shirt and pants I chose to wear to school one day, when at one point he punctuated his comment by adding, “Blow me, O’Neill.”  The rest of the guys thought that was pretty funny.  I didn’t know one way or the other if it was funny or not, because I didn’t, at age 13, know what it meant.  I was embarrassed as all get out, and said the first thing I could think of, ”You’d like that, wouldn’t you Tom?”  The reaction was swift and hilarious.  No one expected that to come from me, and they directed their laughter-for once-at Tom and not at me.
2) I was driving my ’64 Nova, the year after I graduated from high school, and socializing at an unprecedented rate, when I did a cruise past a rambunctious neighborhood party, where the action spilled out on all sides of the house, so there was a good crowd out front.  In my pre-VW bus days, this little Nova was kind of fun.  My older brother had done a few tricks to the engine (no boring details about “bored out engine blocks” and Mickey Thompson Pop-up Pistons) so it was frisky.  I decided to light ‘em up, which entailed coming to a halt about a block shy of the party, red-lining that engine and letting up the clutch gradually, allowing the back wheels to spin.  It’s appealing because it is loud, pure and simple, and I was trying to break the loud barrier.  At the peak of all that noise, I was directly in front of the party.  All was one with the universe.  And then there was silence, deafening silence, as I was suddenly floating with the gas pedal useless to move forward and the car already beginning to drift to the side of the road.  Deadly silence.  It turned out that the universal joint, which held the drive shaft in place, and allowed it to function properly, had just exploded, and that drive shaft was lying in the middle of the street.  More applause from the peanut gallery.
1) I was at one of those same parties, eyeballing a certain sweet young thing, entertaining notions of sugarplums, when I actually got up the courage to approach her and make with the palaver.  Everything seemed to be progressing nicely, when an unknown commodity approached, giving “Sally” the once-over.  She greeted him warmly, but was careful not to diss on me.  Taking my arm, she turned to her friend and said, “Marty, I would like you to meet my good friend, Larry Palinkus.”  Larry Palinkus?  He wasn’t even at the party.  Where is that handle you pull, when you just want to fall through the floor?

6 comments:

  1. How embarrassing :) But I especially liked that you put Tom in his place, the little bully.

    Briefly one of mine:

    After being with my employer for 10 years, I decided I needed a change and applied for a job in another company. Now, obviously I had not been on an interview in 10 years.

    The first question was a softball one, something like "How do you like this warm weather we are having?" I opened my mouth to speak, but no words would come out. It was like they were stuck in my throat.
    Even a stutter or stammer would have been better, but nothing.

    After what seemed like hours, (although I am sure it was only seconds), I was eventually able to croak out what was probably an incoherent response.

    To this day, I don't understand why that interviewer never called me back for a second interview. He probably lost my phone number or something.

    Anyway, I decided that I kinda liked where I was working and stayed there another 10 years.

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  2. Well, Mark, I'm proud of you that you could even put all of that in writing! I just cringe when I think of some of the embarrassing things that have happened to me in my life, and I cannot and will not think further of them! haha. Yours make good reading, though!

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  3. Way to go, Marcus Vespuci! EP intended.... You are too cute. I must bury all the embarrassing moments in the way I pretty much bury most of what is gone.
    I can tell you, though, that high school was just one embarrassing four year period - not much redemption there. The only good thing about high school (and this might sound odd to some people) but I actually got a lot out of it academically.....

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  4. Academics at Bishop Amat? I was introduced to "The Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf (!) Chaucer, Shakespeare, Sartre, Camus, and Hesse. That was after freshman year, when we read 26 literary classics, including four Dickens novels, Dumas, Orwell, Melville, the Bronte sisters, et al. It was a miracle that I escaped senior physics, being the first male to be "granted" the boon of a study period. (I was working 34 hours a week at Sunrize.)

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  5. Oh, I'm with Judy. Embarrassing stuff has some SERIOUS staying power--and there are things that thirty or forty years later I can't write about without blushing and squriming. Thanks for being brave enough to share yours. :)

    I gave you the Liebster award. You can read about it here: http://maskedmom.blogspot.com/2011/12/liebster-sequel.html

    Don't feel obligated to play along on my account. Just considered it a little unconditional bloggy love. :)

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  6. Not play along? The game's afoot. My new stomping grounds has a very un-high school-like feel to it; the other "kids" are much too nice. Does this mean there is no detention?

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