by Red Green
Step Five
Bait your hook and drop it into the hole. Try not to think about your feet until they are completely numb. If you have a chainsaw, you can cut a trough in the ice and troll. Otherwise, you’re pretty well limited to jerking the line up and down and letting your mind wander. Do not fight the boredom. It is an intrinsic component of the sport.
Step Six
If you catch anything other than pneumonia, you may need help reeling it in. Especially if it’s thicker than four inches. Many of today’s sophisticated fishing reels are not meant to be operated with frozen fingers, so thaw your fingers by putting them in your mouth, unless you really don’t like the taste of bait. Once you’ve landed the fish, stick them face down in the snow until frozen. This will eliminate the need for a stringer, because you can mount the fish on Popsicle sticks and throw them into your cooler.
Step Seven
Once you’re back to the cabin, cover the fish in a light coating of bread crumbs and butter and then fry them up in a quart and a half of Scotch. Take them out of the pan and feed them to the cat while you drink the broth. This will remove all memory of the outing and allow you to go ice fishing on another occasion.
IT’S NOT HOW GOOD YOU LOOK, IT’S HOW HARD YOU TRY
As we get a little older and lose the blush of youth—and the slimness of youth and the smoothness of youth and the hair of youth and the youngness of youth—we need to recalibrate our instruments before evaluating our level of attractiveness. For most of us over fifty and beyond, it’s not fair to be judged on whether we look good. How can we possibly look good? We didn’t look good in our prime, and we haven’t appreciated over time. Instead, we now need to be judged on how much effort we put into our appearance. Did we shower? Put on fresh clothes? Shave? Get a haircut? Do we smell nice? Women love that.
There’s something inspirational about a person who keeps fighting against insurmountable odds. You’ve seen the photos, you’ve looked in the mirror, and yet you keep trying. Your partner will recognize these initiatives as attempts to please and will reward you—maybe not with style points, but certainly with effort points. And at our age, that and Miss Congeniality may be all there is.
WHAT NOT TO WEAR
Acceptance is a key component of a happy life. Chances are, your physiology has evolved considerably throughout your adult life. Your senses are probably somewhat less sharp; your patience and perseverance have diminished. And your annual weight increase has outperformed the stock market. All these factors affect your wardrobe:
• Shoes with laces
• Tight jeans and T-shirts, or any other clothes that have nowhere to keep your reading glasses
• Anything stretchy or see-through
• Anything that says “Bay City Rollers” on it
• Anything with buttons smaller than an Oreo
• Anything sleeveless
• Anything with a plunging neckline
• Shorts
TWELVE SIGNS YOU HAVE A BAD MECHANIC (DON’T ASK HOW I KNOW)
1) He charges you a half-hour’s labour for opening the hood because he couldn’t figure out the latch.
2) You tell him your car is a Ford and he’s never heard of it.
3) He opens up your transmission and whistles, then says, “Wow, look at all the little bitty parts in here!”
4) His certified mechanics diploma is written in Magic Marker.
5) He has only one tool: a borrowed sledgehammer.
6) He tries to inflate your flat tire with his mouth.
7) He tries to loosen the wheel nuts by hand and then announces, “These babies are really on here. I’ll need a wrench.”
8) You mention you had trouble with the dipstick and he fires his helper.
9) He inspects your resonator and announces, “Look, your muffler had a baby!”
10) He tries to replace your oil filter with an air filter, and when it won’t fit, he concludes, “This must be metric.”
11) He asks lots of questions like a good mechanic should, but one of them is “Where’s the engine?”
12) When you drive up to the service bay, he’s riding the hoist and yelling, “Geronimo!”
THINK BEFORE YOU RETIRE
These days, a lot of guys are being offered an early retirement package. And most of them are taking it—mainly because their feelings are hurt by a company that, after twenty-five years of service, says, “You’re so useless we’re offering you a bonus to quit.”
I know this can be a difficult time, but before you take an early retirement of any kind, there are a few people you should check with. First, your wife. Is she going to let you mope around in your pajamas watching Judge Judy, or is she expecting the laundry done and dinner on the table when she gets home from work? And how do your kids feel about Dad lying on the couch while they’re at school? What happens on Career Day, when you come in with a crossword puzzle? How about the city parks department? Do they think their pristine image will be enhanced by your presence on a bench somewhere?
Don’t do it. When the bosses offer the early retirement, hold out for a big payday and a transfer to somewhere exotic. If you’re useless enough, they might just go for it, and if you’re not, they’ll keep you.
WORD SEARCH
Here’s a puzzle for those quiet evenings when there’s nothing on TV because all the professional athletes have gone on strike again. The theme of this word search is different kinds of fish.
Word List
lake trout hammerhead muskie minnows
Catfish walleye minnow grouper
rook sturgeon smallmouth turbot
rock bass pickerel eels bass
Sunfish tuna sharks angelfish
Perch largemouth goldfish kippers
cod pike salmon
HOW TO MAKE THE NEIGHBOURS THINK YOU’RE RICH
Perception is everything. Here are a few ways to make your neighbours think you’re rich:
• Once a week, arrive home honking the horn, jump out of the car, and pop a champagne cork, then rush inside laughing. (Quickly reinsert the cork so you’re ready for next week.)
• Have a set of magnetic signs that you stick on the sides of any trucks parked in front of your house: Excelsior Indoor Pools, Monarch Billiard Tables, Deluxe Home Theatre.
• Once a month, come out of your house with your briefcase handcuffed to your wrist. Look around furtively while your son, dressed as a policeman, escorts you to your car. Speed off.
• Stop at a fancy restaurant and pick up their empty expensive wine bottles to put out in your own recycling box.
• Make a deal with a friend to cut each other’s lawns.
NEVER STOP LEARNING
Sometimes at our age, we lose our enthusiasm for new experiences because we think we’ve tried everything or we’ve lost our confidence or we’re tired of standing in line in the emergency department. The trick with things you’ve never done is to pick something you can actually do. Friends and family may have suggestions. Maybe fly fishing or lawn bowling or origami. My wife suggested I try not interrupting her, but that only led us into an ongoing argument about time and space.
HOW TO BUILD A FIRE TRUCK
Maybe you’ve always wanted to be in the volunteer fire department but have never joined because you don’t have time or can’t pass the physical or just don’t want to be spending your weekends with the kinds of losers who are attracted to that kind of hobby.
Well, instead of turning normal citizens into firefighters, why don’t we just turn a normal car into a fire truck? Who hasn’t thrilled to the sight of a huge fire truck roaring down the street to put out a blaze you started totally by accident? It wasn’t your fault—it’s the lousy instructions that come with electrical appliances.
Fire trucks need shovels, picks, and axes. The trucks carry these tools on the outside, where firefighters can get them in an emergency. So just drill holes in your trunk lid, slightly larger than the diameter of the handles. Then the tools will sit right
there, ready for use. Don’t worry about the damage to the lid, because you’re going to paint this baby fire engine red.
Fire trucks also have lots of flashing lights. And so do you: Christmas lights. You probably have a set hanging off your eaves-trough that you forgot to take down, right? Just hook them to an extension cord. (That will limit the range of your truck, but any fire that’s farther away than the length of an extension cord is probably none of your business.) Attach the string of bulbs to your fire truck with wire staples, plastic clips, or duct tape.
A fire truck also needs a siren. Your horn is a good start, but for extra noise, loosen your alternator belt and your fan belt and your power steering belt, and then folks will hear you coming. If you really want to be safe, punch a few holes in the muffler. Plenty of hose is essential too, so get yourself a number of hoses and reels from the hardware store (or borrow them from someone who’s not around), and attach them near the front of the car. You can hook the hoses right to the engine’s water pump, and this becomes a pumper truck. And don’t worry about them not matching. We’re going to paint this baby fire engine red.
A fire truck wouldn’t be a fire truck without a ladder that can turn in any direction (because fires can happen in any direction, and you may park in any direction). So for that you need a rotating platform. Hold a three-by-three piece of plywood in the middle of your roof and drive a six-inch spike down through the middle of it. (Make sure no one is in the car when you do this.) To make your pivot point, run a rod through the ends of the ladders and through a couple of screw eyes in the roof, and then run rope up through some pulleys and you’ll have a ladder that fights fires in two separate directions at the exact same time. And she goes up or down, just like the professional units but at a fraction of the cost.
Just a word of caution: don’t drive with the ladders in the up position. Personal experience has shown that the ladders will make contact with high-tension wires, and although wood doesn’t conduct electricity, it burns well. My fire truck unfortunately caught fire. As soon as it cooled off, I painted it a beautiful fire engine red.
FAIRWAY FRIENDS
I have golfing buddies. They’re good guys, and we all get along just fine. But I think if you took those same four guys and put them in a car or sat them at a restaurant table or parked them on a bench for four hours, they would eventually be bickering and entertaining homicidal thoughts. This is because men have trouble socializing with each other when there’s nothing else to do. Put them together at a ball game or a racetrack or a golf course and everything’s fine.
Women, on the other hand, seem the complete opposite. They’ve been known to turn off a television in favour of conversation. They often spend a couple of hours over coffee with a friend. They work from a different set of rules than we do. Conversation can never be the central focus for men. None of us has all that much to say, and we have even less interest in hearing what the other guy has on his mind.
That’s why golf is such a great game for men. It’s the perfect way to feign interest in your friends without wasting a whole afternoon.
UNMAKE YOUR PLANS
Once a year, you really need to clean out your drawers. More important, you have to throw out all your previous day planners. They’ll just make you feel stupid and old. I was thumbing through some that I found in the back of my desk. They go back a few years and had some interesting entries, including the following:
• March 12, 1975: Cancel VHS machine. Order Beta instead.
• April 14, 1979: Blow off meeting with Bill Gates.
• June 4, 1995: Buy Bre-X stock.
Get rid of all those day planners right now so that you can get on with your life. The secret to happiness in old age is to erase all traces of personal blunders and let fading memory work its magic. It’s called the George Bush Approach.
BRING BACK THE GOLD STAR
Back when I was in elementary school, we had a point system that allowed students to accumulate points over the week and have a shot at going home on Friday with a gold star. I miss that. We need to bring that sense of success back into our lives. Here’s a sample list of achievable rewards. Get a hundred points and the gold star is yours.
• Went to work most days: 10 points
• Vacuumed potato chip fallout around La-Z-Boy: 15 points
• Bought flowers for your wife: 20 points
• Bought flowers for somebody else’s wife: minus 20 points
• Said no to something illegal, immoral, or fattening: 10 points
• Watched a half-hour of PBS: 10 points
• Looked at your wife when she was talking to you: 15 points
• Listened to your wife when she was talking to you: 25 points
• Loaned money to your adult son: 20 points
• Got money back from your adult son: 0 points
• Had an ache and didn’t mention it: 15 points
• Had a surprise for your wife: 10 points
• Had a pleasant surprise for your wife: 50 points
HARDWARE 10, SOFTWARE 2
These days there is a great deal of emphasis placed on communication and interaction. We have cellphones and smartphones and pagers and email and networking. We have all this technology allowing us to exchange ideas easily and instantly. So what are we doing with it? We’re calling people when we don’t need to. We’re programming our cellphones to play tunes instead of ringing. We’re getting non-essential messages in a variety of formats. We’re playing computer games at our desks with strangers from around the world. We haven’t really improved communication—we’ve just made it easier for bad ideas to be shared.
Before the techno revolution, if you had a theory you presented it to a friend or a colleague first to see if it had merit. You could limit the embarrassment. Now if you have a theory, you create a website and broadcast it to the world. Life gets very difficult when everybody knows you’re an idiot. It’s bad enough when only your wife knows.
DIDN’T YOU DO SLIGHTLY WELL
I don’t think we should feel like failures when we don’t have a significant impact on the world. It’s often the little things—the small accomplishments, the minor victories—that are the most satisfying.
So for the sake of your own mental health, take a few minutes at the end of each day and try to focus on some tiny breakthrough you had in the past twenty-four hours. Maybe you feel good about not eating that doughnut. Maybe you feel good about eating them all. It doesn’t matter what it is. Look for small accomplishments. I consider each day that the police don’t have to come to my home a true blessing.
Find ways to feel good about yourself. We can’t all be Nelson Mandela or Albert Einstein or Jerry Springer.
WATCH THAT TELEVISION
You’re on the couch watching TV, grazing the dial with your thumb and tapping the remote like you’re sending Morse code.
Phase One
Your wife asks you to stop doing that and just find something and stay with it. You reply that you can’t decide what to watch until you find out what’s on. And you say it all without taking your eyes off the set.
Phase Two
Your wife suggests you look at the guide on the TV, which is what it’s for.
Phase Three
Your wife picks up her knitting or a book. Finally you settle on what you want to watch—a comedy, a sports event, and something with guns—and you’re keeping yourself apprised of what’s going on in all three. Then something really good happens on the comedy. Like Hawkeye is going to get a girl for Radar. So you settle on it for a while. Your wife looks up, but just then the commercials start and you’re back on the road, thumbing your way to a better show.
Phase Four
Your wife gets up, exits the room, goes out and buys her own TV, and files for divorce. It can happen. Life is about choices. So is television. You can’t have a successful marriage and a TV remote. I say go for the successful marriage.
Unless the playoffs are on.
&nbs
p; THEREFORE I AM NOT THINKING
Thinking is usually a good thing. It can save you from physical harm and psychological damage. But thinking at the wrong time can also create a lot of problems. Here is a short list of times when it’s better not to think:
• When you’re being rolled in for surgery.
• When you’re being disciplined by a loved one.
• When you’re watching an approaching hockey puck.
• When you’re undergoing a tax audit.
• When you’re at a wrestling match.
• When you’re getting directions.
• When you’re assembling an explosive device.
• When your spouse is telling you what to wear.
• When you’re asked for an opinion.
• When you’re at a board meeting.
• Whenever you’re feeling smart.
THE END IS NOT NIGH
I heard on the news that one day over the next few months, several of the planets are going to align themselves with Mars (which I think was a hit for the Fifth Dimension). It occurred to me that some cult leader is going to predict that day will be the end of the world. And he’s going to say that we should all prepare.