Stuff - Just Some Things I Felt Like Talking About

Most of you know that we live on the shores of Whitmore Lake, Michigan – “Where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children spend every winter asking why the heck we still live in Michigan.”

What you may not be aware of is that every Spring we also provide the headquarters for a sort of singles club. For ducks.

We call it Club Mallard. Sure, we also get a fair number of geese, and the occasional swan, but our clientèle is mostly ducks. They come in about this time each year, hoping to find that “perfect someone” to spend… well, at least the next couple of weeks with.

A few weeks ago I described my hair color as "RTG." This, of course, stands for Rapidly Turning Gray, and is a matter of pride for me. 

Now I'm not talking about "sexy gray," like Richard Gere or Anderson Cooper. Their gray hair is more of a fashion statement. In fact, I think those guys were salt-and-pepper in about the third grade, and I'm pretty sure they used that "silver fox" thing to charm the third grade chicks right out of their Twinkies.

No, I'm talking about the gray hair you get because you are old. Now, I have been working on getting old for a very long time. And through all those years I have filled most of my leisure hours with pastimes like scuba diving under frozen lakes, so I feel like I have pretty much earned every patch of white that has cropped up on my noggin. 

In other words, rather than resisting the signs of all those passing years, I'm just plain happy to still be here.

All right everybody, it's time to toss Sis, Mom, Granny, Cousin Elmer, Emmy-Sue and the young-uns into the old Ford pickup, grab a couple of cases of Budweiser, scream "Yeeeeeee-Hah!"  and head on down in the general direction of Talladega...

NASCAR's back!

Last weekend, the Daytona 500 marked the beginning of a new season of watching Tony Stewart put Kurt Bush into the wall in turn four - or vice versa - and I could not be happier.

The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing is an undeniably American sports institution. It was born in 1948 on the sand at Daytona Beach, Florida, when a bunch of mostly-retired moonshine runners decided to go out and swap paint on their post-war Buick, Cadillac, Chrysler, Ford, Hudson, Kaiser, Lincoln, Mercury and Oldsmobile street cars.

As anyone who has been around me at all is aware, I play the guitar. I play it constantly, enthusiastically, and just well enough that I usually avoid being attacked by angry villagers with pitchforks. And for more than 35 years I had one main guitar, born the same year as me, a 1951 Martin.

I picked up that guitar when I was in college. I traded for it, swapping all the stuff I had left over from my 1960's "rock star" days - including a solid body electric guitar that would be worth a small fortune today - for a little wooden box that had pick marks on the top and "John S. Miracle, WCPM, Middlesboro, Kentucky" stenciled on the guitar case. It seems that old John had spent about 20 years breaking it in, and I decided that it was the least I could do to carry on in his honor.

I hardly ever went anywhere without my guitar, and I wasn't shy about hauling it out and banging through some songs with a bunch of friends. I can think of at least a few times over the years when that guitar and I woke up on a beach somewhere, both of us sleeping off what was probably a pretty interesting night before.

Our lake finally froze.

Actually, this year we had the earliest hard freeze I can remember, followed by a complete January thaw. You know, it seems like everywhere you look, the weather is doing strange things - Midwestern tornadoes for Christmas, winter droughts, fires, floods.

But I guess you have to respect our nation's leaders when they say the jury is still out on the cause of all this. I mean, how can we really be sure that dumping millions of tons of industrial crap into the air will upset nature's balance? And while we're studying the problem, how can we possibly justify making rash changes that might save a few thousand species at the risk of jeopardizing the ability of energy company executives to keep using platinum dental floss?

But this column is not about all that stuff. It's about ice skating.