Gathering Moss: Rest Stops on the Road Downhill

By Richard Cutler

More wit and humor from the author of Over the Hill Without a Paddle: And Other Signs of Confusion in a New Millennium. This time he gives us his skewed take and observations on everything with titles from A to Z-except for nine letters in between that apparently aren't that funny-and including the numbers One, Two, Three, and the words First and Second. Check it out. Among the subjects that catch his fancy are wives, husbands, children, grandchildren, doctors, hornets, birds, ants, dogs, morticians and sex. He pitches shows to TV programmers, points out a shortcut to young men in the back seats of cars, and scrutinizes both Family Jewels and Amazon Undies. All of which-and more-go to prove that even someone who has inched his way over the hill and then rolled down the other side can still find plenty to look at if he just lands facing up.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 26, 2003
• ISBN: 9781462077229

Richard Cutler

Richard Cutler currently lives in Colorado where he writes in a semiprivate room situated one mile and a long flight of stairs above sea level. After he catches his breath, that is. His best-remembered book is probably in your hands right now. Book two may follow.

Book preview

A Man for Two Seasons

OK, I admit it: I hate spring and summer. I’m a fall and winter kind of guy. And that is akin to blasphemy in my circle of friends.

To them, spring is about digging flowerbeds, planting, weeding…and the smell of fertilizer. Summer is complaining about the heat. It’s enough to make one wish that Groundhog Day came more than once a year and he saw his shadow every time.

Oh sure, the older I get the less attractive part of winter, when arctic blasts ride the jet stream, or whatever, down from Canada isn’t something I look forward to with quite the same enthusiasm I did when my circulation was working better and heavy clothing seemed more able to keep out the cold.

But that is still better than spring. Spring was derisively referred to as Mud Season—mostly by mothers—where we lived when I first started school. It’s not as if we kids could avoid it: Kids are all about finding the shortest distance between two points and every shortcut was mostly mud. And we had mud that sucked your boots off…In fact, the smell of wet leather boots drying on the radiator and the memory of my mother’s punishing version of house arrest for something I couldn’t resist remain with me still. That, and the smell of cod liver oil, the universal spring tonic that was good for what ails you whether anything ailed you or not—and could make spring distasteful to anyone one tablespoonful at a time.

Come to think of it, my aversion to summer and my nocturnal nature both had their roots in childhood as well. During the early years of WWII when daylight-saving time became war time and was kept in effect year-round, some places—like where I lived—still added an hour of daylight time in summer. Now there were TWO extra hours of light at the end of the day.

This meant it didn’t get dark until 10 o’clock or so.

This may have been great for grownups who spent their long days working in windowless defense plants but it was hell on kids. Well, some kids. Some of us had to be in bed after supper at 7 or 8 o’clock during the week like it was still a school night or something, no matter that certain other and YOUNGER neighborhood kids were outside playing hide-and-go-seek or ring-a-levio, or any other similar fun game requiring shrill screams and shouting from its participants…while we had to lay in bed and listen, unable to sleep.

Of course, getting to sleep on sweltering New England summer nights back then, before air conditioning, wasn’t made any easier when you had to keep turning your pillow over and over looking for a cool, dry spot. Although, except for serving as one more bad personal remembrance from that hottest of seasons, this is all beside the point.

The real point is that this miscarriage of justice (no doubt bordering on child abuse if judged by today’s more enlightened atmosphere where kids have equal rights like everybody else), which forced me to endure those nightly hours of humiliation and torture, is the very reason why I will now do most anything, even resorting to watching old movies or reruns of Oprah, to keep from going to bed. It is probably just a happy, unintended and consequential side effect of all this, I imagine, that I also hate to get up come morning.

Anyway, fall is something else. My wife and friends (yes, she’s one of them) say fall and winter are about bleakness and dying and could only be appreciated by someone with my naturally dour expression; an expression, by the way, that has evolved honestly through many generations of stereotypical North-of-Boston (Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont) ancestors and is an apparent affront to the Have-a-nice-day crowd who are always telling me to smile. Smile, they say. It can’t be that bad. But what do they know? Spring and summer ARE that bad: heat, sweat, yard work…mosquitoes. Especially mosquitoes. What’s to love? Where’s the fun in planting lawns, then mowing lawns; planting flowers that you can buy on any street corner for a couple of bucks; sunburn?

Nobody sings about SUMMER in New York. Or a SPRING Wonderland (OK, except for in the Rockies where springtime is really a myth).

Yes, I’ve heard about that spring-and-a-young-man’s-fancy sort of thing, but my wife has always been against my checking into stuff like that. At any age.

And summer, to me, has always been about lying in the shade and waiting for fall. (I know they call it autumn but what kind of word is that?)

First of all fall is when that blasted daylight-saving time ends and night people can start to feel alive an hour earlier every day as nature intended.

All right, fall has lost a large part of its appeal now that the wonderful aroma of burning leaves is prohibited by law most everywhere. And Halloween is probably next in line, already being banned in some public schools as a satanic holiday. Never mind that it is short for All Hallow Eve and ushers in All Saints’ Day. It appears destined to join Christmas, Easter and smoking as things students shouldn’t know anything about. And if it is all really about the separation of

A Man for Two Seasons 3

church and state, as claimed (no, not the smoking part), how come government employees get Christmas off with pay, schools and other public buildings are closed that day, and the post office delivers no mail when they know it’s the busiest time of the year?

Fall means football. (All right, so do parts of spring, summer and winter anymore, like basketball and hockey; not that there’s anything wrong with that.) The air is brisk. You’re comfortable in a sweater or jacket. And thank God for Thanksgiving. Surely nobody can argue with that.

Winter is ski trains, new-fallen snow, snowmen, snow days, cozy evenings by the fire, mulled wine, cider and doughnuts, company…and all the trappings of that aforementioned December holiday that probably only department stores will be able to mention by name one day soon.

Yes, there’s ice and slush and cars that won’t start but that’s what unused sick days and the auto club are for.

And another thing about spring and summer people is that once those seasons arrive and they can do all the stuff they’ve been talking about doing around the house they can’t wait to get away.

They’re all about going to the country. I’m not crazy about that either.

Listen, in this day and age, unless you are visiting a farm or planning a weekend visit to Canada or Mexico, you aren’t going to the country, you’re going to suburbia. Going to the country is about roughing it. It isn’t RV campgrounds with hookups for water and electricity. It isn’t a secluded beach or national park with gas stations near the entrance and a convenience store down the road that may or may not sell bait.

And if you are on a farm you’ll know it. Farms, as someone once said, are all about going to bed early, getting up early, and watching where you step.

Sure, in the city these days, where every other loft, condo and apartment dweller has a Doberman-Class pet, a large part of city life has to do with watching where you step too. But at least there are no crickets or cow noises to wake you up.

And no, I don’t know why these spring and summer friends of mine put up with me either. The only reason all these people tolerate me, I suppose, is because of how opposites are said to attract. Or because they like my wife. Which is where that whole opposites attract thing got started for me in the first place.

Amazon Undies

Imagine my astonishment when I logged on to Amazon.com the other morning to check the sales ranking of my book, Over the Hill Without a Paddle, and found a statement there proclaiming that people shopping for my book wear Clean Underwear.

Ordinarily, when checking a bookseller’s website, one might expect to see something along the lines of Customers who bought this book also bought War and Peace… or some such title(s).

All right, maybe the other books MY readers buy run more toward Something or Other for Dummies, or The Idiot’s Guide to Something Else, but that’s beside the point. This told me that with my people neatness counts. My mother would be proud.

I admit my first reaction on seeing the italicized emphasis in Amazon’s statement was that it indicated such a revelation surprised them.

In truth it wasn’t the audience I thought I was writing for either.

But next I thought that someone was sticking his or her nose where it didn’t belong.

And then I realized that it was actually a good thing.

One always hopes to be writing for a civilized, literate and considerate readership, and this was validation that mine must be such folks.

I thought it must follow then that these are not the sort of people to appear unkempt. They are people who are concerned with their appearance, listen to their mothers, and are probably determined to make a good impression in any situation, be it on admission to a hospital emergency room or undressing for a one-night stand.

One would think that all this goes to show that Amazon takes their customer profiles seriously. That they’ve got this demographic thing down cold.

I thought so too.

I won’t tell you how I know but I have since found out it just isn’t true. So I went back to the Amazon site and, sure enough, on closer inspection this whole underwear thing is less a means to sell my book than it is to promote their newly launched Apparel Store.

The Amazon statement doesn’t say ALL my people wear underwear. It doesn’t indicate gender. It doesn’t say up front whether their products are worn by men, or women, or both.

Maybe I really haven’t misjudged my readers after all.

It seems my readers also wear Ladybug RRain Boots and Cheetah Print Slippers. God. I hope that’s just the women.

And Call Me in the Morning

I just got an e-mail from an editor friend of mine that troubles me. She told me she couldn’t make a meeting we had set up—and that’s OK—but the reason is that she has come down with a bad cold or the flu. She isn’t sure which. What-ever’s going around, she said.

What bothers me is I didn’t even know there WAS anything going around. I’ve got to get out more, I thought. No, wait a minute. I’ve got to stay home and take shallow breaths through a surgical mask while popping vitamin C’s and sucking zinc lozenges…like the hypochondriac my wife, Dorothy, says I am just because I get a sore throat every time she sneezes. So much for TLC from spouses in the nursing profession, by the way.

(Of course, in my defense, you’ve got to understand that my wife doesn’t just sneeze and get it over with. She’s a serial sneezer. She can execute 5, 10, 15 in a row. I’ve told her God bless you so many times she is practically assured an express lane to heaven when the time comes to check out.)

But she is right about colds. I am very susceptible to them. I can come down with one just by standing too long before an open refrigerator.

I know, I know; the theory is that colds are supposed to be caused by a virus or something. But I have found that getting a chill or sitting in a draft works too. Look at children: People say they always have the sniffles or something. Well, duh! They’re SHORT! They practically live right down there by the floor. How safe is that?

And what are viruses anyway? According to my dictionary, they are germs that are so small that they are the germs that germs themselves get. They are submi-croscopic: You can’t even see them with a microscope! (All right, my dictionary could be a little outmoded, I don’t know—the New Words section lists blitzkrieg and teenager—and maybe science has progressed somewhat since then, but I’m not getting a new one just because a couple of definitions may have changed. You don’t throw out all the batter just because the test pancake isn’t that great.)

So, that’s what it says and that’s good enough for me.

How did this virus theory get started? I’ve heard that some scientists were