3 to Get Ready: Life's One-Hundred Year Marathon

By Frank Herbert Spittle

Many opportunities surface only once. When meeting challenges, too often you'll only fire off one round. Make it your best shot.

In 3 to Get Ready, Frank Herbert Spittle reviews life’s aspects through “the way I see it,” examining mistakes, and remedies for surviving rough patches. He offers a collection of essays, examinations, revelations, memoirs, and lamentations, all spiced with the humor found throughout his writings.

The big puzzler: how to prepare the way for enjoying ones hundredth birthday. It’s a large order, but everyone alive holds the gift of thirty additional years more than generational predecessors. We’re all living longer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503540439

Frank Herbert Spittle

After thirty-two years dodging spitballs in the front of classrooms that frequently held aspiring delinquents, Frank Herbert Spittle switched teams. He sat down and recorded mischief-packed escapades in two books of zany yarns describing his youthful hijinks in Can You See Me Now? and Sailor, Write Your Mother. Two later books featured Frank’s now popular protagonist Montgomery St. John. In writing The Trailer Two Spaces Down and Near Occasions of Sin, the author harvested a boundless curiosity and the experiences from a rich life. The two fast-moving mainstream novels launched Frank into what he describes as “the satisfying lifestyle of a writer—without deadlines.” While a teenage Eagle Scout, the author of 3 to Get Ready quit high school to enlist in the US Navy as a seaman recruit. He served on active duty for five years, earned a GED aboard the destroyer USS Ozbourn, saw action in Korea, and advanced in rank to chief warrant officer while later serving in the reserve. After receiving his master’s degree, he went on to play leadership roles in the US military, corporate public relations, and California education. In fifty-three years of marriage, his wife Darlene and he reared two daughters to individual successes. Frank has explored thirty-two countries. He’s received local recognition as Toastmaster of the Year. All of this capped off by a career arguing ratios, proportions, and the Pythagorean Theorem with thousands of rambunctious teens. He makes his home in Laguna Hills, California, where he writes daily, enjoys frequent travel, and often yearns to scratch that itch for adventure.

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Copyright © 2015 by Frank Herbert Spittle.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

All scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

Rev. date: 02/19/2015

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Contents

My Philosophy

WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE?

We Feel Lust, Think Love, And Reap Disappointment

In Love With The Teacher

Teenage Sailor Takes His Love To Town

Hardwired Into The Genes

Plotting The Curve Of Life’s Erotic Ventures

When The Band Stops Playing

MEET THE FAMILY

Something About Myself

Cinder Alice

Circus Elephant Escapes

Teenage Insanity—It Might Be Inherited

The Feast Of Love

PRAYER

The Art Of Asking

The Unanswered Prayer

SPIRITUALISM

The Face Of God

A Closer Look At The Bible

Science Fiction Here And Now

MIND - BODY

When Kittens Begin To See

As A Man Thinks In His Heart, So Is He

SCHOOLS, STUDENTS, AND LEARNING

Born To Teach

With A Laugh Along The Way

Questioning An Answer

Room To Learn

What’s The Beef With The Schoolhouse?

A Classroom Teacher Responds To Education’s Critics

Vouchers Could Kill, Not Cure

THE TOOL BOX

Nail That Job Interview

Forgive. Let Go Of The Past

Want To Take Up Arms In The War On Drugs?

TRAVEL

Everyone Dies; Not Everyone Lives. Travel And Taste Life

What Is A Guide?

Take Along Something To Read

Trains, Planes, Tuk-Tuks And Rickshaws

A Hidden City Carved Into Solid Rock

Ho Chi Minh City — A Walk On The Wild Side

Corn-Silk Fungus, Grass Hoppers, And Shamans

THE MIDDLE KINGDOM, FIVE THOUSAND MILES

AND A WORLD AWAY

The Pharmacy Offered Powdered Pilose Antler

A Chinese History Lesson Pre Chairman Mao

Super Market—Chinese Version

Why Did You Bomb That Building?

My Favorite Travel Destinations

ATTITUDE

Freedom, Our Precious Lifestyle No Accident

The Journey From Boy To Man

Play On The Only String You Have

Circumstances Do Not Make A Person

Develop That Charismatic Person Within

WRITE IT

You Hold A Story Within You — Free It!

Crafting Your Story Get It Onto Paper

EXAMPLE OF A SHORT STORY

A Touch In Time

EXAMPLE OF A CHILDREN’S STORY

This Drip Wants Your Attention

EXAMPLES OF FREE VERSE

Love Will Find A Way

My Jersey Girl

EXAMPLE OF A NOVELETTE

(DEFINITION: 17,500 TO 40,000 WORDS)

SERINGUEIROS – BRAZIL’S EARLY 1900’S

RUBBER TAPPERS

Chance Of A Lifetime

Contract With The Devil

Seeking Fortune Up River

The Journey

Paradise Lost

Settle-In Day

Learning The Ropes

Girls Arrive!

Chills And Fever

Adventure Unravels

HERE’S TO A GREAT SECOND HALF

Retirement Essentials

Living The Good Life Through And Past One-Hundred Years

To

E.A.R.

Who took a shine

to this scuffed boot

MY PHILOSOPHY

How do you define yourself?

Are you what you have? I own a home with a paid up mortgage, my new car sits in the driveway. If that’s who I am, who am I if I lose them?

Are you what you do? I am an educator, successful by most measures. Who am I when I no longer stand before a classroom of students?

Are you what others think of you? Some of my friends think I’m hot cakes (as I’m sure some of your friends feel about you). But folks can change their opinion, then who am I?

Becoming aware of a new acquaintance’s possessions, or profession, or reputation isn’t enough to understand who he is—because any of that can change. If you want to know someone, discover what he thinks.

I’ve examined the question: What do you think? Life evolves through: Thought – Action – Form. That’s why our thoughts are so important for success. They are the impetus for our action that results in form.

I’ve suffered the honest soul-searching and been able to come up with some answers to the way I see it. I’ve examined thoughts aligned with individuals I admire, and other thoughts unique to me. I’ve settled on a few here:

You can trust your gut in much of decision making. Border guards and airport screeners understand that, more often than not, the sense we experience is the result of unconscious pattern recognition.

Being swept along by the written word can form thoughts capable of changing a life. As a university student examining the pedagogy involved in aiding an individual to acquire reading skills, I came to appreciate the mystical power in the miracle of reading.

There is no test to measure the fire in an individual’s belly. Today you and I live in a testing culture. My grandson, when a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore, took the California High School Exit Exam. But I have a problem with this and other instruments that evaluate individuals: I want one of these psychometric experts, those who design the measuring instruments, to explain to me how we test curiosity, ambition, creativity or a sense of adventure and a willingness to risk—all traits of the super achiever.

Mother Theresa offered, The hunger for love and recognition is stronger than the hunger for bread. Amen to that.

As you’ve guessed by now, I feel an individual is best defined by what he thinks. As you read on you’ll gain a glimpse at who I am by observing The way I see it.

How do you define yourself?

WHAT IS THIS THING

CALLED LOVE?

WE FEEL LUST, THINK LOVE, AND REAP DISAPPOINTMENT

It rolled to a stop several houses down. Professionally painted flames of yellow and red flowed back from its hood. The wheel wells of the pickup were taller than my garage door. I watched from our front window while my disobedient teenage daughter, barefoot in her bathing suit, beach towel streaming out behind her, sprinted toward the forbidden love interest. She struggled up into the cab,. The custom exhaust pipes rumbled. The two of them rolled away in the direction of the ocean.

So my little girl continued to spend time, against her parents directions, with Laguna Beach’s older King of the Surf. To ventilate while we awaited her return, I pieced together some thoughts about love:

Male and female players need to be reminded that for every little hottie or stud muffin one engages, there’s an ex-playmate somewhere who’s tired of dealing with ’em. Love sometimes dies slowly, but one way or another love is fleeting. Too lightly, people hardly old enough to vote commit to a life of matrimony, their imaginations unencumbered by inconvenient facts. They’re chained together until one, or both, wake up to the real world, then need tweezers to pick up the pieces of what’s left.

Thoughts of lifelong togetherness with that special one come to all of us, it seems to live deep in our marrow. However, great sex and stimulating dates don’t maintain through years of marriage. Woe to the naive who approach every new love as forever. In The Lives of the Muses Francine Prose wrote …passion is short-lived, one of the least sustainable emotions. Love with all its illusions tends to eventually flee, creating an opening for the relationship to go south. But, unfortunately, the power of longing is even more exciting than the thrill of possession.

Society’s entertainment industry supplants reality. Thanks to films, pushing baloney at the rate of twenty-four images each second, and stupid escapee pulp-romance stories, too many marriages end in disappointment. Producers, people we don’t know who can’t get the music right in their own lives, paint fairyland relationships and propose unreliable advice to their audiences. Too often a couple’s lives are filled with loss because neither understood how difficult the world of marriage could be—their understanding only a veneer, all contrived. Marital commitments, brought into shallow unions anchored by Hollywood fairy tales, are doomed.

We somehow forget our established concerns for individual differences in education, class, religion, world view, or interests. Lovers, particularly younger players, feel their love will conquer all, not recognizing that sexual attraction is essentially a trick nature devised to bring us together.

Playing out the fourth-quarter in life’s match of the sexes, it’s easier for me to analyze the results of romance than it was earlier, when we dealt with projections. And the results lead me to one conclusion: The words of the marriage vows are serious and demand a Herculean commitment from each party. Whoever observed, probably somewhere on the Indian sub-continent where marriages are still arranged, that love does not give birth to marriage; true love, if it comes at all, arrives during marriage. He got it right; allow a natural percolation..

People aren’t perfect. Relationships aren’t perfect. The way I see it, confusing excite with insight is a cocktail for disaster and doesn’t warrant a lifetime commitment. Everyone claims to know that but, particularly the young, too often feel lust and think love.

IN LOVE WITH THE TEACHER

We’d moved to a new neighborhood and my mother enrolled me in Coleman Junior High School’s eighth grade. I left my bike home and walked that first day of my new school. Only seventh grade scrubs rode bikes. I didn’t want anyone to make that connection.

I’d allowed enough time to get to the playground early, settled into a spot on the top row of a small set of wooden bleachers, and waited for the bell to period one. Alone, apart from the others scattered about, I looked down to a tight group of guys huddled on the lower planks—the in-crowd.

A tall, good looking guy stood facing the group. Black hairs sprouted in different directions on his upper lip, struggling to come together across the open spaces to present the beginnings of a mustache. He wore a Manual Arts High School letterman’s sweater, two stripes on the sleeve and the big M on the left breast. Probably borrowed from an older brother, or stolen. I thought he seemed too mature for our group of seventh, eighth, and ninth graders.

Directly in front of him sat his little rooting section. Each wore the in uniforms most of us tried to acquire, me in increments when I could manage enough money: Levi’s without a belt, worn low on the hips, extra long trouser legs rolled up three inches above a pair of Mexican made huaraches, hand dyed to a deep mahogany. The footwear cost five dollars and could only be found on Olvera Street, a day’s trolley ride to downtown Los Angeles.

The most expensive uniform item cost twenty-five dollars: an all leather, chocolate brown horsehide flight jacket. No substitute style would do. It must have a knitted waist band and cuffs, patch pockets, epaulets and a flap-covered zipper—or forget about it. White socks and a white T-shirt finished off the outfit. You rolled the short T-shirt sleeves up twice around the hem, if you could show enough biceps’ definition. My stick-arms didn’t qualify. My sleeves remained down.

The small group down front were har-haring and nudging one another over something the big guy had said. I put together parts like Spanish Fly and something about a gear shift knob. Same old crap-a-roo.

The Head Pachuco looked up into the stands, over the combed heads of duck ass styled hair, and offered through a twisted smirk, Anybody want a kid?

Showing off for his friends, he continued, This girl is goin’ to have my baby, anybody want it? His pals guffawed. If bullshit was music, this guy would be a symphony.

So Big Mouth had been doing some bobby-soxer and knocked her up. Where the hell do you find girls that let ya go all the way like that? I wondered again what it would feel like actually doin’ it? The whole exercise sounded simple enough, but there had to be more to it than that. Since my family had moved, I had no friends around from my old school to discuss it. Anyway, they were all in the same boat. I knew, because if any one of them had made it, he couldn’t have kept it to himself.

It must be really somethin’, the way guys talked about sex all the time. Every conversation got it in there somewhere, and the scribbling all over the walls in the boy’s restrooms, even scrawled across our textbook pages. I figured it must be out there and I’d somehow missed it. Maybe that’s what this Junior High School business was all about. We weren’t little kids anymore, threatened by our moms with going crazy if we didn’t stop doing that. Having to be satisfied with Tijuana bibles (comic books) featuring Maggie and Jiggs or Popeye and Olive Oyl in their nasty little eight page cartoon stories. The books were passed around so much they’d fall apart in your hands as you leafed through.

The next morning I walked past the bleachers where the same crowd filled yesterday’s seats. I practiced my cool-guy swagger, all part of the adolescent struggle for recognition. One of the squirts from the day before recognized me and tossed a knowing head lift. I didn’t want to acknowledge him right away. I felt a little anxious. Sometimes it’s hard to make a quick call and still act cool. But you have to keep a look about you of being out of the mainstream. Mainstream is not reality. It’s a spoof, and most people aren’t aware. But I’m aware. I am cool. This kid couldn’t be much if he’s kissing up to me. I blew him off.

Later in the morning my English class gave me fits. Hiked up skirts and tight sweaters on the bigger mommas in the room made me whacky, constantly distracted. I couldn’t share my third period fantasies with anyone here, because I hadn’t made a close friend yet.

Somewhere in my head I knew that I had to stop looking around and get some work done if I was ever going to pull a C.

My shop, PE, and Glee Club classes were all boys. More cute girls took English than in my Math or Science classes. And our English teacher, Miss Brinkley, like Doris Day, so damn cute and perky. Younger than the Glee Club teacher, Miss Tremble, my Doris Day, had been a cheerleader at U.S.C. just the year before. Every guy in room B-4 fell in love with Miss Brinkley.

Pinkie Morgan turned the room upside down one morning when he got out of his seat and walked up front to throw away a wad of paper. The teacher stood up from her desk about the same time to stroll the room, pausing to look down at the work of different students. Behind her back, ol’ Pinkie hurried over to her desk. Keeping one eye on the rest of us, he placed his cheek flat against her chair’s eat and inhaled an audible deep sniff, loud enough for all of us to hear, then hurried back to his desk before Brinkley could figure out what had happened. I guessed he just couldn’t help himself.

I laughed so hard my stomach hurt, because he’d told me at lunch the day before that he would become a Soldier of God the following weekend. His Bishop would come to Saint Ignatius, and slap Pinkie’s face while he knelt before him to be confirmed. He’d get his new name, Bart, like from Bartholomew. He thought that sounded cool. But they could have named him The Sniffer, after that little trick with the teacher’s chair.

I teased him with what my step-dad said about Bart’s church: A place of smells, bells, and yells.

Now they’re going to slap your face, I laughed. "You deserve it after that chair stunt. She should have nailed your scalp to the blackboard.’’

Miss Brinkly employed a technique in class that had students come to the front of the room to take part in the lesson in one way or another, responding to questions or writing on the board. But guys weren’t always able to just get up from their seats on command and walk around the classroom.

Finally my luck ran out. Brinkly called me to the front of the room. Panic! My morning wood showed no signs of settling. At first I tried to persuade her to call on me later.

But she would have no part of that and insisted, "Come forward now, please."

I unfolded myself from the desk, but couldn’t walk upright with the conspicuous trouser bulge. Bending over, Groucho Marx style, I shuffled forward, keeping my body in that awkward position all the way to the front of the room.

The class laughed. Miss Brinkly became angry with me for distracting from the lesson. I turned beet red, and the whole damn experience left me wondering if I was going crazy like my mom had preached.

*     *     *

Things really started cookin’ with noontime sock-dances in the school gym. I hadn’t learned the New Yorker well enough to risk it, but the slow dances put a girl right up against you. I liked that. However, the girls’ PE teacher glided about the gym floor separating couples who dared a full body press.

The day before a dance, each student was given a dance card, numbered with six blanks, and a little pencil hardly bigger than a tooth pick. At lunch the guys were to walk around asking girls for a dance, writing their name on her card and her’s on his. The last dance was the goal. Then you might be able to cinch things up for later—like meeting Saturday afternoon at the show. I’d race like hell toward the group of girls with Ann Sharkey, asking for a dance.

Says Sharkey, I’m all filled up.

Says Frankie, How can that be? We just got the cards.

Miss Sharkey turns toward a girl friend and they both giggle. Man. I hate when that happens.

Ya never get used to being chosen last, and trotting out with your glove to right field and watch the dandelions grow. I signed up on the girls’ dance cards by high pressure salesmanship, and only in the last five minutes before the first tune.

*     *     *

I’d finally gotten used to showering after P.E. in the midst of a large group of guys. There were naked kids of every shape and size dashing around the locker room, flipping each others butts with wet towels. Twelve to fifteen-year-old, little guys to boy-men like the new father at the bleachers, surfed on their bare butts over the water covered tile shower deck. Hair sprouted above most of our crotches and beneath our arms. Some guys had a full bush. Other squirts were clean, slick, like shaven bald.

The shower room held definite risks. You had to stay alert. Danger hid in the minds of those teenage deviates, waiting to spring on the unsuspecting. When Shawn Harrington had gotten his face soaped up, we’d all race over to surround him and piss up and down his lanky frame before hurrying back to our own shower stations, now afraid to soap our own faces.

And the locker room chatter of screwin’ girls. Talk, talk, talk. Lies, lies, lies…and dreams.

*     *     *

Miss Tremble, the boy’s glee club director, caused some gossip. She looked pretty good, though she had a pitted complexion. Lenny Wilcox said she looked like she’d been beaten around the face with a track shoe. In class she’d often burst into a throaty laugh at something said by one of the older ninth grade boys who sang down front, near where she directed all of us. She’d horse around with them while the rest of us were supposed to just hang out, ready to begin harmonizing Cielito Lindo.

In a voice too low for most of us high up in the back rows to understand, she’d joke with the boy-men, who’d bounce around in their seats nudging each other with their elbows. They’d suck up and laugh like somebody pulled a string in their backs.

Talk in the yard had it she was divorced. And hot. Eugene Hinkley bragged that, when he took drama, he banged her after school one afternoon, right on the sofa behind the auditorium’s heavy black stage curtains. I threw him the usual challenge you’d put to B.S.’ers. Say Mother’s Honor. You’re’ lyin’. But he stuck by his story and remained my hero throughout junior high.

My Glee Club was runner up in the South District Music Contest. Brother, that sex pot Mrs. Tremble directing us clowns into a near championship—my aching butt.

The way I see it, Junior High School was the worst two years of my life.

TEENAGE SAILOR TAKES HIS LOVE TO TOWN

The whole scheme hatched while on-board my navy destroyer in dry-dock at Vallejo, California. Just outside the shipyard’s main gate, bars and cat houses competed for the reputation of West Coast Prime Distributor of paid-for sex.

At nineteen-years-old I’d decided to visit a whorehouse. Every workday aboard ship began with adventure stories from the previous night’s liberty, set in the local Red Light District. It was time for me to earn my stripes in the world of poontang. I would become a real man, a man who’d been down the pike. In short, a man who’d had his ashes hauled by a pro.

*     *     *

I’d walked the alleyway before, returning to my ship after a night’s liberty. Buddies had pointed out the inconspicuous whorehouses. Tonight, two stiff drinks helped build up courage to walk casually along the leaning picket fences separating small unlit backyards in a quiet older neighborhood adjacent to downtown. Through the back windows of large, once grander homes, I caught glimpses of what looked to be typical working folks, unobstructed views though hidden from the front street.

Tonight I had decided to go it alone. If I chickened out, no one would be the wiser. And I didn’t want anyone from the ship blabbing around and causing a lot of hazing. I’d seen enough of that. A dog barked somewhere in the darkness, setting off a second, then another, to bring on even more uneasiness.

I stopped when I recognized the back of a cat house identified by a seasoned vet on an earlier liberty, and studied my objective. Uncurtained rear windows revealed a large kitchen with half a dozen women lounging about, chatting, smoking, painting their nails, and tipping bottles of Coke-a-Cola. I felt so damned self-conscious. I hadn’t any idea how to conduct the arrangements. Hello, I’m Frank. I was wondering, would it be possible to get laid this evening?

I prayed there was no dog in the yard to cause a fuss and prematurely announce me. My concern for not calling attention to myself was more real to me than any worry of being bitten by a guard dog. I wanted no witnesses. The wooden gate felt rough and weathered against my touch. It wouldn’t swing, I had to lift it to open. I stopped cold when it came off its top hinge and fell from my grip. Damn.

I strode toward the house, trying to appear comfortable with myself, and exhaled a nervous snicker. The irony of mentally debating whether to remove my hat or leave it pushed to the back of my head tickled me. Was there Cat House protocol? I decided to slip the white-hat into my trousers’ waistband, beneath the jumper, and put on a brave face. Deliberately clomping up the four porch-steps I made sure those inside heard, then I wouldn’t have to knock and wait there like a drooling imbecile.

Light from inside filled the kitchen’s screened door. I waited. Hi, just came by to read the gas meter. May I come in? What a lovely place you have here. Say, is that nooky for sale?

A woman showing a pleasant smile had moved to the screen and peered out onto the porch. She had dressed differently from the others in clothing