Crinkly? Really?

Carolyn J. Rose

Recently Mike and I were privileged to spend 24 hours with our five-year-old friend Tristan Stone.

That’s when we discovered that we’re crinkly.

Like most kids, Tristan sometimes seems older and sometimes younger than his age. He sleeps with a stuffed lamb and needs a little help brushing his teeth. Later he reminds Mike to wash his hands and tells us we should drink plenty of fluids before we go to the pool.

That’s where we found out we’re crinkly.

Tristan informed us he could swim by himself all over the pool. Visualizing his parents drawing and quartering me if anything happened, I made the case for staying in the shallow end. I made another case for one of us being by his side at all times, claiming the lifeguards would throw us out if we weren’t.

Tristan agreed, but told me he wouldn’t need me because he was a better swimmer. “I’m young and like a monkey and my skin is smooth. You might sink because you’re all crinkly.”

“Crinkly?”

“Yeah.” He pointed. “Especially around your eyes.”

I refrained from the snappy comebacks I employed when I was a kid, world-class insults like: “Your mother wears combat boots.” or “Your father voted for Nixon.” I also refrained from sticking out my tongue because that would only create more crinkles.

After all, Tristan was just stating the obvious. Like it or not, I’m 67. And I’m crinkly.

Lemonade

Lenomade! Lenomade for sale! Only 25 cents! Lenomade!

 By Mike Nettleton

When I came home from the gym the other morning, the little boy across the street had set up a lemonade stand and stood beside his proud and bemused mother hawking his wares to the neighborhood. Keep in mind that ours is not a terribly busy street. I’m guessing that by the time he grew tired of the game no more than half a dozen cars passed by.

Still, he had the fire and fervor of a born pitchman, bellowing out Lenomade! Lenomade! in a shrill bellow that belied his limited lung capacity.

Carolyn, who’d been puttering in the yard, wandered over to buy a glass. When she asked him how much a paper cup’s worth cost, he screwed up his face in thought and then blurted 25 cents. Carolyn, always one to mess with kid’s minds handed him two quarters and said “All I’ve got is fifty cents, will that work?” The boy accepted her money, then stood, scratching his head, wondering what to do next. His mother, grinning all the while, prodded him. “Don’t you think you should give the nice lady a quarter back?” The boy considered the concept for a minute, then shook his head. “No.” Carolyn gave him the extra quarter as a tip.

She came back to the house, told me I should walk across the street and encourage the young entrepreneur. Ever obedient, I strolled across and bought a paper cup of yellowish liquid, brought it back to the house and set it on the kitchen counter beside Carolyn’s. (Note: I didn’t tip the boy. I figured he needed to learn early on that some customers are tightwads).

This incident reminded me of all the ways I tried to make money as a kid. My first epiphany was discovering that I could get three cents refunded on an empty pop bottle or a penny for a beer bottle. This worked pretty well until my parents reminded me that they’d bought the pop and beer and were therefore entitled to the refund. Rats!

The back pages of comic books offered a myriad of schemes for kids to make money. One involved a product called Cloverine Salve, which, according to their pitch, was magic for aching muscles and joints, healed deep bruising and cured general malaise. You sent them money, they mailed a package of flat cans of the stuff and you went door-to-door selling it at a significant markup. A couple of small problems arose. I had to borrow the money to buy the first shipment, the stuff smelled awful and I was possibly the worst door-to-door salesman every born. My standard technique involved knocking on a door and when someone answered it blurting out “You wouldn’t want to buy any Cloverine Salve would you? I paid the advance money back by snitching pop bottles and running them to the store.

I never opened a lenomade stand, since the place I grew up was cold, rainy and not conducive to lenomade sales. I did sell copies of a local weekly newspapers to the drunks at the Alibi Tavern, shag golf balls that had bounced into the gorse bushes at our local nine-hole course (I’ve still got the scars) and mowed lawns and pulled weeds.

At one point, my friend Johnny and I decided we could pick up stuff on the beach that the tourists would find on their own later and sell it to them as they pulled into the roadside parking lots. Hey, a quarter for a piece of driftwood that looks like the letter J is a heck of a deal. An authentic Oregon Coast seashell for a dime. A steal.

Another friend, Bill, who was a bit of a scientific prodigy as a sixth grader invented a sluice box that would separate gold from the other elements of the black sand found in abundance on his father’s land in the dunes north of town. It worked, but by my estimation it would have taken until my forty-seventh birthday to come up with an ounce of gold. To make any significant amount of money we’d have needed a sluice box the size of a football field.

I forgot about the lenomade sitting on our kitchen counter until late in the day when time came for my evening libation. I tipped a little from one of the paper cups into my mouth and shuddered. Apparently our budding businessman had limited access to mom’s sugar supply. But, with abundant ice and a healthy splash or two of Jack Daniels it made a pretty good whiskey sour. I think we got our fifty cents worth. (Plus tip)

What do you remember about the ways you tried to make money. Lenomade? Walking a neighbors dog? Buying and selling stock online? (For the truly prodigal). Love to hear your stories. Leave a comment.

DISTANT VOICES, INSTANT MEMORIES

My son, Rob just turned forty, two weeks before my sixty-third birthday. I spoke to him the other day, teasing him gently about the inexorable march of time. His response was good-natured, but still, I could hear in him the tone of disbelief that his youth was a distant dot in his rear view mirror and that middle-age was more than something to await, poke fun at and dread. It is, instead, his present reality. He has transformed from the straw-haired gamin-bodied boy of the fading photos in my album to a bald (a gift from his mother’s side of the family, I think), somewhat thick through the waist, hard-working globe-trotter of the first order. His job, coordinating webcasts for Intel studios sends him all over the world. Sometimes, it seems like he spends more time in airplanes than his apartment in Hillsboro. Recently, for the first time in his life and mine, he got a raise and moved into an income category I never attained in my forty-three years of broadcasting. This is a good thing, and I reminded him of the many times he slept on our couch and occupied our spare rooms during the student/multi-hair colored thrash rocker/between jobs phases of his life. “Buy a king-sized futon,” I advised him. “You never know when Carolyn and I will show up at your door.” He laughed, but I detected an uneasy quality to his guffaw.

Coincidentally, about a week before our conversation, I’d discovered an unlabeled flash drive in the glove box of the Prius. It moved to a counter in the living room for a few days and finally, I took it down and plugged it into my computer. When the menu came up with the contents, I remembered where I’d gotten it—a birthday gift from last year’s birthday from Rob.

When my son was nine or ten, a small portable cassette tape recorder became his toy of choice. At the time, I co-owned and operated a four-track recording studio and creative advertising concern with my friend Rick Huff. Rob spent quite a bit of time there and even voiced his first paying commercial, a cute testimonial for McDonalds that padded his Chuck E Cheese arcade game contingency fund by $25. Soon, he was “laying down tracks” of many of the events of his life.

The flash drive contained dubbed-to-digital snippets of Rob, in a quavery sing-song boy-soprano commenting on our day to day life in Albuquerque, spinning stories about imaginary super heroes and editorializing on the “weirdness” of his dad and his partner Rick. This last part is hard to deny—it’s a matter of record with dozens of eager-to-testify witnesses. He also invents and sings songs—about his pets, about school and makes the random joyful noises only a kid knows how to generate. There are also clips of the television shows he was watching, including running commentary and several minutes of me, co-hosting the local segments of the Jerry Lewis Telethon.

I’m not overly sentimental about the past (Who was it said nostalgia’s not what it used to be?), but hearing his voice (and the younger version of my own) put a lump in my throat the size of a ruby-red grapefruit and dampened my eyes. He was a great little kid, a difficult, but still quality teenager and young adult. Now he’s a middle-aged man I’m proud to call my son and my friend. The flash drive is a sobering reminder that I don’t see as much of him as I’d like to.