Tales from Mike's World

By Mike McNair

Mike McNair’s heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery in 2000 triggered a strange side effect – a compulsion to write. Since the attack, he has written two hundred newspaper articles, a novel, a children’s picture book, and a story that’s been read by millions on the Internet.

Tales from Mike’sWorld includes dozens of short tales that range from off beat humorous to thought-provoking serious.
Topics include reminiscences from Mike’s
1950s childhood up to modern-day observations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vivian Zabel
• Release date: Mar 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781940310237

Book preview

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Nonfiction

Edmond, Oklahoma

Copyright

Tales from Mike’s World

copyright © 2013 and 2015 Mike McNair and 4RV Publishing

This a work of nonfiction, and no parts of the book or any illustrations may be used,

except for brief excerpts in a review, without written permission by

4RV Publishing

2912 Rankin Terrace, Edmond, OK 73013

http://4rvpublishing.com

Cover art copyright © 2012 and 2015 by Aidana WillowRaven

and 4RV Publishing

Book design (print and digital) by Vivian Zabel

http://VivianZabel.com

Editor: Robyn Johnson

Editor-in-Chief: Harry Gilleland Jr

Print ISBN-13: 978-0-9852661-7-2

eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-940310-23-7

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Nonfiction

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

For Dave Collins

Contents

Part I  Introduction  

Part II  When I Was Young  

Part III  Family, You Gotta Love Them  

Part IV  Advice and Warnings  

Part V  I’m Okay, Really I Am  

Part VI  I’m an Idea Man

Part VII    A Tribute to Animals

Part VIII  A Tribute to People

Author’s page

Other 4RV Books by Mike McNair

A Distant Summer

a novel

Sammy the Shivering Snowblower

a picture book

Coming Soon

Billy Beechum and the Hooticat’s Secret

a children’s chapter book

PART I

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

Getting to the Heart of My Humor

The Magical Woods

In the real world, people work, attend churches, laugh, cry, pay bills, take vacations, get sick, and raise families. My small, southern Indiana hometown was a part of that real world when I was a boy in the ’50s. As towns go, it was a good place to be a child.

It was a law even in those days that children had to attend school. My elementary school was situated on the far south end of town, a short mile from my home. Like other schools, it had a principal, teachers, books, desks, a playground, friends, bullies, lessons, food, and recesses. As schools go, it was a good place to be a student.

But my town had something that wasn’t required by law. Smack dab between the realities of home and school was the Magical Woods. Its trees stood on tiptoes, as if trying to high-five God with outstretched branches. Sometimes, invisible musicians blew through those branches, turning the treetops into a woodwind orchestra of quivering leaves and swaying, singing branches. A stream meandered through the vast woods, and mysterious trails, perhaps created long ago by Native Americans for whom the state was named, crisscrossed it.

The most mystical place in the Magical Woods was the Enchanted Peninsula. Each time my friends and I crossed the stream, the peninsula cast a spell that caused us to sit and talk about the men we would someday become and the things we would accomplish along the way. Occasionally, when the invisible musicians played at their creative best, we sat motionless and listened to treetop concerts. As woods go, it was a wondrous place to be a dreamer.

Years passed. Sometime during the early- to mid-eighties, when I was married and had children of my own, I returned to my hometown to visit my parents. I drove my family to the south end of town to share the woods with them. I stepped out of the car and froze. Someone had turned the vast Magical Woods into a five-acre cornfield. Later that day, I happened to see the father of one of my childhood playmates, and I mentioned the missing woods. He nodded. I helped knock down those scrub trees one weekend last fall.

One weekend. That was all it took to erase the Magical Woods that was once a sanctuary between the realities of home and school. The next day, I walked through that cornfield alone. The stream was a ditch and the peninsula an insignificant lump of muck. I felt the hot July breath of invisible musicians trying to play one last song for old-time’s sake, but without the Magical Woods, they were unable to form a single note.

For a long time, I thought the men had destroyed the Magical Woods when they knocked down the trees that weekend, but I finally realized that wasn’t the case. The woods’ magic is as real today as it was all those yesterdays ago. It exists in my memory, and it becomes more magnificent with each passing year. A woods. A vast woods. Trees on tiptoes. Boyhood friends. Invisible musicians. The Enchanted Peninsula. A Magical Woods separating two realities.

I can no longer walk through the woods with boyhood friends as I once did, but you and I can experience it together on the backs of my words. All you have to do is read and believe. Come. Grab my words and hang on tight. We’re about to fly through six decades of time and space.

We made it. The woods looks just as it did sixty years ago. That’s the peninsula over there. See how magnificent it is? Let’s relax on it and listen to treetop music. Mmmmm. Beautiful, isn’t it? They don’t write music like that anymore. Do you feel the woods’ coolness? It gives me goose bumps.

It’s a wonderful feeling, being a young boy again and sitting on this peninsula with my entire life ahead of me. Do you know what I want to be when I grow up? I want to be a scientist and create things people haven’t even thought of yet. Or maybe I’ll become an astronaut and fly to Mars and Venus. Or I might become a writer and tell the world how special this woods is. Nah. I’d never be able to do that. I’ll probably just become an astronaut.

*****

The Magical Woods with its Enchanted Peninsula really did exist. From the time I was a six-year-old first-grader until my teachers showed me the door when I finished sixth grade and moved on to seventh grade at another building, my friends and I often walked through it on the way to and from school, something my parents never knew.

I’m glad they never found out because it became my safe place, the retreat I visited when life got too demanding or scary. When I could no longer physically walk through it, first because I had moved hundreds of miles away and then because men had knocked it down, I strolled through it in my mind, sitting on the peninsula with long-ago friends until I could once again face real-world challenges.

When the sun peeked through my bedroom window the morning of June 22, 2000, I had no reason to suspect the day would be any different from the 21,266 that had preceded it. Yet, something would happen late that afternoon that would send me racing back to my mind’s Magical Woods safe-place memory for sanctuary and change my life forever.

I was beginning my twenty-ninth year as a high school counselor, and, since I’d be putting in long hours working on the 2001 student schedules, my wife Nancy took the opportunity to visit our daughter and her family near Appleton, Wisconsin, a hundred and fifty miles north of our Richland Center home. She had left me home alone, but that shouldn’t be a problem. After all, I was an adult, not some latchkey child. What could possibly go wrong?

After everyone else left work for the day and I was not only home alone but also at school alone, a heart attack blindsided me, and on July 7, I underwent quadruple bypass surgery.

Before the surgeon sent me home, he asked what I did for a living. When I told him I was a high school counselor, he told me I should quit because the position was too stressful for my heart. Of course, four weeks later I went back to work full-time.

As days became weeks and then months, I thought more and more about the surgeon’s advice.  With the support of Nancy and my two adult children, I made the most difficult decision I’d ever made in my life. I retired at the end of the 2001 school year.

When I was a teenager, I thought life would go on forever. But I suddenly understood its temporary nature and realized I had done nothing to let future generations know I ever existed.

The heart attack and bypass surgery brought about two drastic changes – an unexplainable ability to set off security alarms every time I enter and exit Wal-Mart and other department stores and an uncontrollable urge to write. I sit at my computer nearly every day inputting words that become sentences and paragraphs, stories and books. Something good has risen from something terrible, an indelible footprint destined to leave evidence that I once walked this earth.

*****

Footprints

Footprints are fleeting.

I made thousands of footprints on my grade school’s playground, where they remained only briefly before wind and rain wiped them away like teachers’ dusty erasers and custodians’ water-soaked rags wiped away my incorrect math attempts from classroom chalkboards. Later, the wrecking ball erased not only the once-grand school building, but also the millions of imperceptible little footprints made on its wooden floors by generations of elementary students.

I loved high school, and I left footprints all over the place: causal ones in the classrooms, barefooted ones in the locker room, sock-covered ones at sock hops in the new gym, and formal ones at prom. And I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but I even left a few on the milk carton dispenser located in the old gym.

Fonzie Fonzarelli had the ability to play a record for free on the Happy Days television program by simply hitting the jukebox once in a certain spot. It worked every time. While not the cool cat Fonzie was, I had a similar ability. I could get a free container of chocolate milk from the milk carton dispenser simply by kicking it once in a certain spot. And like the Fonz’s jukebox slap, that kick worked every time.

School officials eventually removed the milk carton dispenser, an action that not only left me thirsty but also stole some of the most solid footprints I’d ever made. Then, twenty years after I graduated, the wrecking ball removed my high school, making off with all the invisible footprints decades of teenagers had left behind.

I was a counselor at the old Richland Center High School for nearly a quarter of a century. I left twice the number of footprints there than I’d left at my elementary school and high school combined. When the district built the new high school near the University of Wisconsin-Richland campus in 1996, I viewed the upcoming move from the old to the new with apprehension. We needed that new school, but it would be just a matter of time before millions of unseen footprints placed in the old school by long-ago and current students and teachers, mine included, would be erased forever.

At the end of the last day of school that year, I stood in the hallway just outside the Guidance Center and watched with blurry eyes as students left the building for the last time. The wrecking ball destroyed the school’s footprints in record time, and hospital employees now park where students once learned, laughed, listened, and lingered.

Shortly after I retired from the new high school in 2001, I realized that unless I could think of a way to make them more permanent, the footprints I had yet to create would end up erased like all the others, leaving behind no evidence I ever was.

Then it came to me. Footprints don’t have to be made by feet or shoes. My father-in-law signed and dated the quality carpentry items he made for his children and grandchildren. I still have a birdhouse and other items my dad made thirty years ago, as well as oil paintings and other artwork my mother created. Those are their footprints.

Mine could be words. This short account is a footprint that will last longer than those I made with my feet on playgrounds, in schools, or on sandy beaches. No one else in the history of the world has ever put words together in this exact order before, and unless plagiarized, no one will ever do it again. The same is true of the scores of other stories I’ve written and my novel, A Distant Summer, and my children’s picture book, Sammy the Shivering Snowblower.

I’m not saying I’m a great writer, because I’m not. And I’m not saying I’m a good writer, because I’m probably not that, either. But I believe when writers string words together to make original sentences and paragraphs that people read and enjoy, they create unique footprints that are both resilient and tough, the exact qualities needed to withstand attacks from even the most determined wrecking ball.

CHAPTER 2

The Most Famous Story Hardly Anyone Knows I Wrote

––––––––

Imagine for a moment you wrote an original story that showcased your creativity and e-mailed it to a few friends. They liked it so much, they e-mailed it to their friends, and their friends sent it to their friends, and on and on it went until it had been read by millions of people in the United States, Canada, the UK, India, and other countries. That’d make you feel good, wouldn’t it?

Now imagine that early on, someone deleted your name from your original creation so just you and a few friends know you wrote it. To make matters worse, because it’s on the Internet, people think they own it. They change names, places, and occupations. They add a word here and delete a word there. You don’t feel quite as good as you did a few seconds ago, do you? I know exactly how you feel because that very thing happened to me.

I’d been home from heart surgery for about a week when I received an e-mail from Jane, an Indiana woman I hadn’t seen in years. She had heard about my health issues from a mutual friend who knew my e-mail address. She said some members of our high school class were online together and they’d like to hear from me. A few days later, I sent an e-mail to the group, which soon became known as The Mayberry Connection, letting them know I was getting better.

Shortly after that, I began writing what I call triction, little stories that blend truth with fiction. It’s like creative nonfiction that sometimes takes creative to the extreme. Many of my stories are completely true, but the truth sometimes sounds so ridiculous people don’t believe it could really happen. Often I sprinkle in small to generous portions of fiction, but there’s always some truth to each story I write. Even I often find it difficult to distinguish where truth ends and fiction begins. Perhaps I can best explain triction by telling about the most famous story hardly anyone knows I wrote.

In March 2002, I attended a social gathering with Nancy, my daughter Brooke