Summer Fruit Doesn’t Taste Right Anymore

by Hero Jenkins

Summertime in southern California used to be a great time to be a kid, especially if you come from a large family. It meant that there were a lot of brothers and sisters and cousins to play with. It also meant that big brother or sister were in charge because the parents usually had to work. It meant that the doors would be flung open and we would be kicked out of the house.

The best part, however, was the abundance of summer fruit. The concept of buying fruit from the store seemed so strange to me because, for a time, we had all the fruit we could eat. Everybody in the neighborhood had fruit trees and almost everyone had to go to work. We thought nothing of hopping fences and helping ourselves. All summer long we ate peaches, plums, apricots, loquats, pomegranates, nectarines and cherries. They were ours for the taking.

But we soon had competition.

Every kid in the neighborhood had the same idea but there were rules, and for a while everything worked out just fine. You didn’t trash the yard or the tree because people would get mad and buy big dogs or put glass or nails on the top of their fences. Or they would prune back the tree so that it bore no fruit at all. You only took what you could eat that day and then you returned the next to get some more. There was plenty of fruit for everyone and it lasted all summer.

That was until a new family moved into the neighborhood. They moved onto our street. I don’t remember their names. We called them the “dirt kids” because they were always dirty. I remember there were a lot of them. There were at least three sets of twins, which was odd, especially in the days before in vitro fertilization. They were like locusts. They would descend upon a tree and eat everything including the leaves. They broke off branches and basically destroyed the tree… it never bore fruit again.

Every summer there were fewer and fewer trees to pick fruit from and the dirt kids were expanding out to a larger radius. Every summer it was a race to get to the fruit trees before the dirt kids could. Which meant we had to eat the fruit while it was still green in most cases. As a result, my taste in fruit hovers somewhere between ripe and almost ripe... bordering on barely ripe and still a little green. To this day I don’t really care for the ripened fruit available in the store; most of it is too sweet or too soft. It just doesn’t taste right.

I guess I'm going to have to plant my own trees and hope that the dirt kids have not had dirt kids of their own!

If It's Love... Then?

by Hero Jenkins

Monday Morning Survey

Police officers are often presented with unique dilemmas in the course of their work. Many are family dilemmas. Here’s one that a police officer friend of mine posed to me.

Imagine the blended family: two strangers who met and fell in love, each with kids from previous marriages. It’s the classic Brady Bunch family.

In fact I will use the Brady Bunch in this scenario because they are characters that most of us are familiar with. If there is a 'modern day' equivalence just plug in who you know.

Now here’s the dilemma. Imagine Marsha and Greg Brady are away at college. When their eighteenth birthdays roll around they announce that they have fallen in love and want to get married. Technically they are brother and sister. The parents are against it, but the kids have made up their minds and it is tearing the family apart.

You are the officer the parents call for help. What would you advise in this case?

Answer in the survey below, I will report back with the results later on in the week.

A Married Man’s Brain (survey results)

by Hero Jenkins

Survey Results (see original post and survey)

Survey responders

33% female

67% male

Women: 63% said sleep on the floor. Of that 37% who said the husband should sleep in the bed 66% were single or divorced.

Men: 47% said sleep on the floor. Of that 53% who said the husband should sleep in the bed 10% were single or divorced.

So the men were almost split with the edge going to men who would sleep in the bed. It didn’t seem to matter if they were married or single. The women on the other hand seemed to lean nearly two to one on the man sleeping on the floor.

A Married Man's Brain

by Hero Jenkins

I wanted to start this post with a survey. Don't worry, it's a short one (only 3 questions) I will post the results in a couple of days:





***

Is a married man’s brain wired differently than a single man’s? When science evolves further someone should invent a machine that can answer this question. All I have is anecdotal evidence and a theory... nothing concrete, nothing scientific to validate my theory - but I think it is.

Case study #1:

My friend's wife was injured in a car crash that required her to have surgery on her back. As a result of the surgery she had to sleep on a hard surface or else the benefits of the surgery would be minimized if not undone altogether.

Their mattress as it turned out was way too soft. They tried putting a sheet of plywood between the box springs and the mattress but that didn’t work. They tried sleeping on just the box spring alone - that didn’t work either. They went to the local mattress store and even the firmest mattresses available were not firm enough.

Eventually they realized that the only thing firm enough was the floor.  She insisted that her husband sleep in the bed and that she would be fine. “Go ahead honey,” she said as she got her sleeping spot ready on the bedroom floor, "it’s OK… I’ll be fine.”

There was no way he was going to just walk past her laying there on the floor night after night and then crawl into their incredibly comfortable bed. So he made himself a sleeping area right on the floor next to her. Now, when most women hear about this they erupt in a chorus of “Oh, how sweet.”

Well, there may have been some underlying sweetness in his actions but that’s not what was going through his mind. The way he explained it to me was that this move was purely self-preservational. Although she said it was OK, he'd been married long enough to know that in reality it was not. Being a married man myself, I agreed with his logic one hundred percent. But it got me thinking... would all men do the same thing? He had done a survey amongst his friends and family and had a result. When I heard the story I started an informal (and completely unscientific) survey amongst my friends and family.

Women were a hundred percent - they felt that if the wife said it was OK to sleep in the bed that the husband should have slept in the bed. But in almost the same breath, and with a twinkle in their eyes, they announced how sweet his gesture was.

My single male friends were also one hundred percent. They were in total agreement with the women but there was no twinkle in their eye when they reacted to what my friend did… it was something else and it was not polite.

However, when I talked to the MARRIED men things really got interesting. They were all in agreement that they would have slept on the floor, but the reasons varied almost as much as the individuals themselves. Some actually were being sweet but some were worried about resentment or what they called passive retaliation (like hot dog and Top Ramen dinners for life or horrible unthinkable things like: no sex ever again.)

So this is just a theory, but someday science may prove me right. Something happens to a man’s brain when he gets married. It seems to be wired differently than it was before. Perhaps if there was a way to take a picture 'before' and then several years thereafter. They could compare it to the 'never been married brain' and analyze the difference. And in case my wife is reading, “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing honey... I'm just saying it's different.”

Father/Daughter Dance

by Hero Jenkins

I was dreading the upcoming Father/Daughter Dinner Dance at my daughter’s high school. When I say dread, I’m putting it right up there with root canals and IRS audits; I did NOT want to go. To top it off, I learned that every one of these dances had a theme.

Seriously?

Not only do I have to make a fool of myself on the dance floor (I can’t dance in case you haven’t already guessed) but I have to do it in a costume!

My daughter was a freshman at a new school and she was excited. My wife was giving me one of those 'wife' looks... like: “You know you are going to this thing don’t you?”... “You know you have no choice in the matter right?” My football coach used to look at us and say: “The only way you are allowed to miss practice is if you are dead and someone brings me a note from God." It was one of those looks.

When I was in high school we did dances like "the four corners”, “the bump”, and “the hustle”. I had no idea which dance moves were current so I tuned into MTV and studied them. By the time dance night rolled around I was ready. My daughter was dressed like a rock star with huge glasses, boots, teal blue tights layered by other odd looking clothing that didn’t seem to match, and a plastic guitar. I was her bodyguard with dark shades and a leather coat. (I looked very cool I might add.)

When it came time to show off my moves I strutted out on the dance floor with the confidence of a pro wrestler who had memorized his script.

As it turned out, most of the dances at that time didn’t really require the male to do much. I basically did a two-step and looked cool (something I was already good at) and the women, or in this case my daughter, did all of the work. They also did most of the dancing with their backs to their partner which I thought was odd but whatever.

I did notice one other thing on MTV though. After the female had danced for a while, and if she was dancing well, it was the male’s job to acknowledge this by pretending to fan her to cool her off. So as soon as my daughter turned her back to me, I started fanning her just the way I'd seen on MTV.

Now, those of you who are old enough to have seen “Saturday Night Fever” will know what I’m talking about. (For the rest of you it’s “Step Up” I guess.) Anyway, just like in those movies, everybody moved off to the side and watched us go to work. My daughter had her back to me and she must have had her eyes closed because she really didn’t notice what I was doing until her friends who had all stopped dancing to watch us started screaming.

“Your DAD is SOOOOO COOL!” they shrieked!

When she finally looked back at me (judging by the look on her face) I realized I had done something REALLY dumb. Though I had no clue what.

“DAD! What are you doing!?!”

Before I could react, the song ended and she took my hand and led me back to our table (to a thunderous applause).

“Where did you learn that?!?”

“I watched MTV . . . why?”

“Do you even know what you were doing?”

“I was fanning you... I don’t understand what the problem is. Your friends loved it and all of the other dads are jealous,” I said proudly.

“That dance move is not fanning,” she said through clenched teeth, “that’s SPANKING!”

“Ohhhhhh...”

The only thing that saved me was that the other dads were clueless and their daughters thought it was so cool that they never told anyone what it really meant.

There were other Father/Daughter Dances but we never replicated the “magic” of that first one. It didn’t matter though because I'd already guaranteed my “star” on the dad’s “walk of fame”... which no doubt would have been moved to the “walk of shame” had any of the other dads actually realized what I was doing out there.