Author Archives: Ben Gannon

Amazon.what?

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Evidently, Amazon.com is creating a spectacle these days notifying customers at grocery outlets they don’t have to pay until they receive the bill at home.  They are eliminating cashiers.

Personally, I love cashiers.  They make purchasing a tomato a little easier than the self check out which also requires proper identification.   If the CEO of Amazon wants to really shake things up, we should be allowed a mute button for the cashiers and customers because, usually, no one  gives a crap about the weather unless you live in a Mayberry barber shop with eighty year old misers.

 

 

24 Cigarettes

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Father’s day has passed.  So did my father…..many years ago.

When I was born, he was close to fifty, according to the Bible.

My father was a peculiar and fascinating man.  Smoking cigarettes kept him alive until he was almost seventy.  I miss him, but every father’s day, I think of the 24 cigarette clay mansion I was allowed to create on this wonderful day by my junior ‘high’ teacher before the celebration.

He did smoke, but I think he only used my gift as a paper weight.

 

 

 

The Fisherman’s Dwarf

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They don’t call me a fisherman.  I’m more of a fish monger.  Catching them can be exciting, cooking them is fun, and eating them is delightful.  Perhaps it is a silly metaphor, but it reminds me of the only brother who won’t be participating in a weekend fishing trip.  Exciting, delightful and fun would properly describe him.

Not only younger than my six brothers, I’m also shorter in size, strength, wit, generosity, public humiliation, and I wear a size nine shoe…on a good day.

Heading on this fishing trip with five of my older brothers, one of my brothers wasn’t invited, because we simply don’t like him and find his company disagreeable.  That’s nothing further from the truth.  His excuse for not partaking in our potentially angling mess is excusable. Sadly, he is the one who ties all of our knots and makes fishing, or anything, for that matter,  fun.

They call him Steve.

 

Menopause

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One of my sisters began menopause in her mid twenties.  It’s lasted for forty more years, yet I absolutely adore her, especially without moments of civil rage.  In our family, regarding my sisters, civil rage can be manifested by someone not making a deviled egg properly on Easter.  Thank goodness it only shows up once a year, much like Jesus.

On a two week road trip with her and many other siblings, at the age of eight, I wrote a hand written letter to someone else in our family proclaiming my sister was a being her usual “bich” self.  It’s so nice and special I couldn’t properly spell the name “bitch”.  I must have had great parents. The word was introduced to me by one of my other sisters and Elton John.

Being eight years old,  I really didn’t understand infants properly.  I didn’t even understand adults.  They all simply pooped and pissed their parents, uncles and aunts off.

My sisters’s children were always fussy, hungry or, perhaps, menopausal themselves during road trips.

At that age, I didn’t officially get it.  I still don’t.

The “bich” isn’t back, but she still lives.

Thank goodness.

 

Where’s the F—ing Chicken?!!!

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Coeur d’alene, Idaho isn’t an easy geographical region to spell.  Googling it or describing its location when using a GPS system or a local phone book may drive one crazy.  One day, in this unfair city, no one required a map or GPS to locate my sister, Mary.  She made it loud and clear where she could be spotted, not only in the State of Idaho, but, additionally, the Pacific Northwest. It wasn’t “Where’s Waldo?” It was, rather, “We know exactly where Mary is.”

I truly believe she made the F word almost Biblical one sunny afternoon.  (I don’t really remember, but I hope it was a Sunday after we had just completed our weekly term of duty…Catholic Mass.)

My mother made a hell of a fried chicken, and some of our family members, including me, were vacationing forty five minutes away to have a picnic in a city in Idaho I’m tired of spelling.  Seven months pregnant with her third child, my sister, Mary, was aboard the station wagon.  She was also hungry, or as I’ve learned with my urban dictionary wisdom, hangry.

With mom’s potato salad on ice, and an angry, pregnant mother (Mary) looking as if she was a shark with chum in the cab, we found a parking space ten minutes away from a picnic table.  Knowing she was settled in a proper space and spying the table, everyone, including Mary, felt at ease.  That’s a terrific feeling when you are afraid of your sister.

Upon sitting on the picnic table stools, Mary recognized Mom forgot the chicken, and all Hell broke Mary loose.  She began calmly.  “F–K!” Embarrassing our mother as the brothers decided to take a dip in the lake, we heard Mary scream,  from a little less than a mile away, and to everyones’ terror, “Where’s the F—ing Chicken?!! Even the ants scattered.

I’ve never been pregnant, and I don’t wish to be.  Men are blessed by God in certain ways. There were times when Mary should have been blessed in the same way.

The memory didn’t scar me.  It merely etched, or branded a memory I won’t forget.  When we returned from the beach at a safe time, we were blessed with some grocery store fried chicken along with mom’s potato salad.  We were additionally blessed with a sister returning from fried chicken hell to Fried Chicken bliss.

God Bless her.

 

Tools and T-Ball

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On God’s Seventh Inning Stretch, he created T-Ball.  It was one of his many mistakes. Actually, that’s not entirely true. He probably was just messing with us when he gave us the gift of the Tee, but, as usual, we abused it.

Never having played in the rough and tumble, hard knocks world of T-ball, I still know a thing or two about it.  Watching it was penance for many of the sins I’ve committed.

A tee was meant to be used as a training tool, increasing the chances that an inexperienced batter could hit a line drive.  This is when God said, “Hey, baseball ain’t that easy.  Don’t hit the tee, my son, hit the ball.”

This created controversy amongst the players’ mothers and fathers when their children weren’t successful.  Some of the mothers and fathers were logical.  “It’s sitting right on top of the tee.  Just hit it.”  Others made certain their child would never be competitive again. “Great Job.  You didn’t hit the ball or the three foot tall tee, but you did hit air, so run…..run…..run… (to a base you didn’t earn)!”

Trying to create an organized, or engaging event out of T-Ball is simply a crime for those who are in attendance and fantastically ridiculous if you think your five year old will learn something about the true form of baseball from this “S–t” show.

This is when parents began sacredly believing this gift was delivered by Him so youngsters could be humiliated in front of their mothers and fathers wishing they could actually hit a ball off of that tee.   If you know anything about baseball, or the Bible, the tee is punished along with the child, yet the ball is set free, dropping majestically into the dirt in front of the batter’s 400 dollar nike cleats.

As Tom Hanks stated in “A League of Their Own”, there is no crying in baseball, but, according to God, I guess there is crying in T-Ball.

These Aren’t Gold?

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At the ages between five and 18, when you win wrestling tournaments, you receive a medal.  It may look like gold, but isn’t genuine gold. As a youngster, around nine or ten years of age, I won a few myself, but they weren’t even worth a copper penny.  They weren’t worth zinc.  Then, I began taking second and third place, thus receiving silver and bronze medals.  Those medals were made of aluminum foil and caramel apples.  The gold ran out for me just like it did for those after the rush.

In Alaska, they refer to those gold medals as fool’s gold.  Evidently, nobody can fool one of my great nephews.  His name is Rocco, and with that name, you better live up to that name.  As a wrestler, so far, he has.  He additionally is trying to maintain a sense of reality. With the help of his father, after winning a few of these “gold” medals himself, his father, Pat, had to break the news to his young son.  “Rocco, you know those aren’t made out of genuine gold, right?”

“These aren’t really made of Gold?”

“No.”

Wildly disappointed, and with maniacal curiosity, Rocco asked, “How do I get REAL gold?”

Pat made an attempt to explain to his son what real gold was, then proceeded to tell him how he could obtain this precious medal.  “You mine for it in California, or Alaska or win it in the Olympics.”

This didn’t sit well with Rocco at all.  Quite sure his goal is not to be a miner when he grows up, I guess we’ll see how much sweat, blood and tears he have will to suffer through to obtain gold at the Olympics.

Honestly, I think a smaller, yet worthy and more obtainable goal, would be striving for becoming, I don’t know, a doctor or an astronaut.

I’ll write the conclusion to this blog in about twenty years.