At breakfast I cooked smokies, small-sized fried sausages. Jade, our family dog got up to the table with the rest of us.
“I can eat twenty of those!” Jade said.
“No you can’t,” I said. “You are a dog and eat from a bowl on the floor. I didn’t even set a plate on the table for you. This is not dog food.”
“Dad? Did you see these coupons for Taco Bell on the table?” said the Princess.
“Oh, you mean, the Taco Bueno ads? Remember what the last trip to that other place gave us?”
“Oh, yeah. That was a horrible day spent in the bathroom,” she answered.
“The next time you go to Taco Bell, take me! ” said the dog. “I loved the taco meat I found on the table last time you made the mistake of leaving some there.”
“Well, I do know that Taco Bell is universally loved by dogs.”
“How do you know that?” asked the Princess.
“Don’t you remember the Taco Bell dog? Or were you too young when he was popular?”
“I think I was too young.”
“Look him up on the internet.”
“Oh, yeah! I kinda remember that. He was a talking dog, just like Jade.”
“Yes, but I think he mostly spoke Spanish.”
“He’s handsome!” said Jade. “But look, he’s on television with very short fur… he’s naked! That would be very embarrassing.”
“Yeah, when it comes to TV spokes-dogs, you’d probably prefer Spuds Mackenzie. He had more style.”
“I never heard of him,” said the Princess.
“Well, he was before you were born. He was the Budweiser spokes-dog.”
“Did he talk too?”
“Just party language. He was always chilling by the pool with beautiful human girls.”
“Let me see more of him!” demanded Jade.
“Wow!” said Jade. “A dog who drinks beer and plays guitar! I think I’m in love!”
“That was so long ago, though,” I said. “He is probably dead by now. The average life span of a dog is only about ten years at the most.”
“Oh, now I am depressed,” said Jade. “And you know the only cure for that is to give me some of the breakfast sausages!”
So, as I gave a dog a sausage, I was deeply regretting the whole talking dog thing.
How It Should Be… According to Mickey
My bicycle was red. It was red and looked just like the ones that Captain Kangaroo had in his commercials that we watched on a black-and-white TV every day before we walked or rode our bicycle to school, across town a whole long seven blocks away. After school I could ride it out a whole mile and a half to Jack’s farm with Bobby and Richard and Mark the preacher’s kid to go skinny dipping in the cold creek in Jack’s South pasture. Jack was younger than any of us except Bobby. And it was a golden age.
Spiderman comic books and Avengers comic books cost twelve cents to own, but they were forbidden. And as much as we sneaked them and passed them around until they fell apart, usually in Bobby’s hands, we never knew that Dr. Wertham had gone to Congress to make our parents believe that comic books would make us gay and violent. He was a psychiatrist who wrote a book, so even if you didn’t believe him, you had to worry about such things.
I believed in Santa Claus until 1967. And after I found out, I only despaired a tiny little bit, because I began to understand you have to grow up. And adults can lie to you, even if they don’t do it to be mean. And the world is a hard place. And the golden age ended in November of 1963 when JFK was assassinated.
In June of 1968 I rode my bicycle out to the Bingham Park woods, Once there, I took off all my clothes and put them in the bicycle basket, and then I rode up and down the walking paths through the trees with nothing between me and God but my skin. I had a serious think about how life should be. All the while I was terrified that someone might see me. I was naked and vulnerable. A mere two years before that I had been sexually assaulted and was terrified of older boys, especially when I was naked and vulnerable. But I was a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals and Bob Gibson. They were repeated World Series winners. And they beat the Yankees in the series in 1964. And more important than that, cardinals were the little red songbirds who never flew away when the winter came. You don’t give up in the face of hardship. You face the trouble. No matter how deep the snow may pile up.
And in 1969, the first man to walk on the moon showed that a Star Trek world was in reach of mankind. Star Trek was on every afternoon after school. I watched a lot of those episodes at Verner’s house on his family’s black-and-white TV. The Klingons were always bested or beaten because the crew of the Enterprise outsmarted them. You can solve the problems of the universe with science. I know this because of all the times Mr. Spock proved it to me not just by telling me so, but by showing me how you do it. And what you can achieve is greatly enhanced if you work together like Spock and Kirk and Bones… and sometimes Scotty always did.
So, what is the way it should be? What did Mickey decide while naked in the forest like a Dakota Sioux shaman on a spirit-quest?
JFK’s 108th birthday was on May 29th. Dr. Wertham has been dead for 44 years. Bob Gibson was 85 when he passed away in October of 2020. Captain Kirk turned 94 in March of this year.
The Golden age is long gone. There is no single set of rules that can clearly establish how it should be now. But I like those ideas of how it should be that I established for myself while naked on a Schwinn Spitfire in a forest long ago.
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