Exhaustion, thy name is Maxwell

Whew. My wife and I have just spent three days taking care of our 5-year-old grandson, Maxwell. Or maybe he was taking care of us. In any event, here's what he did:

* Built a Lego city in about an hour. That same task would have taken me a month. That is, a month before I gave up and threw the pieces against a wall.

* Went to Canobie Lake Park in Salem, N.H., where he rode the bumper cars (the Dodgem) six times in a row, often ignoring the traffic because he was busy looking up at the mechanism that causes a spark and propels the cars.

* Announced a career change. Instead of being a train engineer, with his grandparents as his assistants (presumably shoveling in the coal), he wants to join the State Police and operate the command center that is located within a police truck.

* Slept fitfully for a couple of hours, sending the bedsheets and pillows flying, then slept like a motionless angel for a couple of hours, then repeated the process.

* Instructed the plumber on how to tame the disaster that occurred when our outside faucet wouldn't shut off and our yard was being flooded. The plumber appreciated Maxwell's  instructions, acknowledging them with an angry grunt.

It was a marvelous three days, and I think I will recover nicely after an uninterrupted week of sleep.

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A couple of decades ago, when my daughter (a.k.a. Maxwell's mother) was about 13, I was practicing Michael Jackson's moonwalk in our kitchen when she looked up and said, "Why don't you be like other fathers and play chess or something."

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Now that the 40th anniversary of Woodstock is coming up, expect to hear from many great pretenders claiming that they were there. If all the people who say they attended the music festival were really there, the ground would have caved in, sending the attendees to the center of the earth.

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I never see anyone smoking a pipe anymore. I abhor smoking in any form, but I always thought pipe smokers looked kind of cool.

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My wife prefers to bring junk into the house by going to yard sales. I prefer to bring junk into the house by ordering on eBay and elsewhere. We heartily disapprove of each other's methods.

Toothsome thoughts

While in the dentist's chair yesterday, I told the hygienist that as our yard sale drew near, my wife was getting tense. "Getting tents is a good idea," she said, "because it might rain." I didn't correct her but chuckled inwardly. Then, as she tackled my teeth, my mind sailed back to when I was a boy and went to a cut-rate dentist, who would fill a tooth for about a tenth of what my current cleaning was going to cost. His stomach gurgled continually as he worked, but the price was right. I also thought that if I were to give a graduation speech, I would eliminate the baloney about reaching for the stars and say this: "Take care of your teeth, kids. You will look better and feel better and save scads of dollars over the decades." I imagine I would get a standing ovation.

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I remember toothpaste brands like Kolynos and Ipana. I remember chlorophyll toothpaste. I remember "miracle" ingredients like Gardol. I even remember tooth powder.

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The aforementioned yard sale is happening even as I write this. People are arriving in droves and buying in quantity. But why?

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Memo to Classmates.com: I don't care how many mystery people have signed my online guest book, I am not going to learn who they are by buying an automatically renewing membership.

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Blogs are contributing to the demise of literacy and fairness. (Fortunately, this blog contributes to nothing.)

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"There is no body fat in the Obama administration," writes a contributor who signs himself Rhyming Silver. He cites such physically fit administration members as Obama himself, Timothy Geitner, Peter Orszag, Emanuel Rahm, Arne Duncan, and Kathleen Sibelius. Then he drives his point home by noting, "Bill Richardson definitely wouldn't have fit in."

Where is H.G. Wells when you need him?

I want a time machine but not just any time machine. This one would allow me to be unseen and unheard as it whisked me exactly where I wanted to go.  I would stand with the crowd while Jesus delivered his Sermon on the Mount.  I would watch John Hancock boldly sign the Declaration of Independence. I would join the cheering as Lindbergh emerged from his little plane at Le Bourget field.  I would peer over John Steinbeck's shoulder as he wrote "The Grapes of Wrath." I would stand in Sun Studios while a singer with the unlikely name of Elvis Presley cut his first record. But perhaps the most significant destination would be a little apartment in Massachusetts in the 1940s. There I would gaze at my parents as they were in their 20s. And I would loook at two little kids playing and think, "Why, that's my brother and me!" This is getting spooky so I will  stop here.

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Hooray, hooray, it's the first of May. You know the rest.

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With less than 24 hours to our yard sale, the tension is unbearable.

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Embarrassing moment: I was walking down the street when a woman asked, "Am I allowed to park here?" Puzzled, I replied, "I have no idea." She in turn said with a sneer, "I wasn't talking to you." I turned around and there was a meter maid.

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Riding Boston's swan boats with my grandson on a sunny spring afternoon -- it doesn't get a whole lot better than that.

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All right, it's puzzlement time and here's one from Discovery Education, whatever that is. Two babies born on the same day in the same year with the same mother and father are not twins. How can that be? (Answer Monday.)

Jitters for sale -- half price!

The tension mounts as Saturday's yard sale nears. Will it rain? Will the Fear of Flu keep away potential  customers? Will my wife sneak out my treasures and sell them before I notice? Will anybody buy any of the junk we're selling? Oh, the uncertainty.

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Do the world a little good and visit The Hunger Site at www.thehungersite.com. Just one click gives food to the needy. No purchase necessary. You can also help feed animals, fight breast cancer, contribute to literacy, and save  rainforests. No, really.

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I finally saw "Frost/Nixon" and thought Frank Langella more closely resembled Ed Sullivan than Richard Nixon.

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When a teacher complained, parents used to give their kids a talking-to. Now they yell at the teachers.

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If you transpose the last two letters of FBI, you get FIB. (This was noted in my geezer class on the Rosenbergs' trial, during which some fibs may have been told about the defendants, who were hardly above reproach but didn't deserve death.)

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More often, we regret the things we didn't do, not the ones we did. This is hardly an original thought but an accurate one nonetheless.

When it came to being nice, he stood tall

He was a very little man and perhaps a little lonely. He would always stop to chat briefly with our neighborhood "gang" of kids, and to a 4-year-old me, he seemed like a very nice guy. I would find out just how nice when I once repeated to him what my mother had said in an attempt to get me to improve my diet: "My mother says you never grew very tall because you didn't eat your vegetables." The height-challenged man just smiled and nodded and said, "That's right. That's what happened. You should listen to your mother." A nice guy, indeed.

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In preparing for a yard sale, my wife is uncovering all kinds of treasures -- knicknacks, books, LPs, etc. -- that I had forgotten I even owned. I, of course, refuse to part with them.

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I love that Amstel TV ad that begins with a belllowing Dutchman.

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Answer to Tuesday's puzzlement: William Howard Taft is the other president buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

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The handful (fingerful?) of people who read this blog first thing in the morning may notice a few typographical or grammatical errors. Be assured that as the day goes on, these are corrected. Well, most of them anyway.

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Ray Bradbury is an American treasure.

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If the media had covered the buildup to the Iraq war the way they are covering the non-epidemic of swine flu in the United States, the Iraqi landscape might not have become littered with bodies.