Monthly Archives: September 2019

Autumn Comes Knocking

by Woody

FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

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Autumn Comes Knocking

On The Front Door

            Were you, like me, caught off guard by a guest who came knocking on your front door this past Monday?

Even though I was expecting her, she still seemed to arrive surprisingly early. Yet when I checked the clock – the calendar, actually – it turned out she was perfectly on time: September 23.

Yes, autumn is here.

Truly, I should have heard her pull into the driveway. After all, for the past few weeks dawn has suddenly had a pleasant chill to it.

At the least, I should have heard her walking up the front sidewalk a moment before she knocked. I mean, the setting sun has seemed in a race lately to bring twilight noticeably a little sooner each evening. Goodness, I’ve even had to turn on my car headlights many evenings, something that in summer only seems necessary on a late night out.

Oh, how I love summer and will miss her dearly. In the eyes of my youth, it was without question No. 1 of the four seasons. Top two reasons: warm weather and no school.

Presently, however, if you asked me my favorite season I could not say. It is a fool’s errand of a question, a Sophie’s choice. It is like asking me to choose between Steinbeck, Hemingway and Twain. Impossible.

Spring, for starters, is blooming flowers and flying kites and, as Tennyson observed, when young men’s fancies turn to thoughts of love – so what’s not to love about the season?

Yet summer is beach outings and pool parties and vacations of travel and ice cream cones and bike rides – again, what’s not to love?

Winter, meanwhile, is cozy fires and family gatherings, sledding and snowboarding, mistletoe and Auld Lang Syne, and the New Year’s promise of approaching spring – how can you not love all that?

Thus, my favorite season is whichever one is currently visiting. And right now that is autumn. Many call it “fall”, but I think “autumn” is lovelier. By either name, its arrival brings with it …

A crispness in the air, even on our Golden Coast, that is invigorating.

Markets and coffee shops offering limited-edition Pumpkin Spice This, Pumpkin Spice That, Pumpkin Everything!

Hayrides and pumpkin patches and children spending half an hour, or longer, selecting The Perfect Pumpkin for a jack-o-lantern with all the care of a bride choosing her wedding dress and shoes.

Linus and The Great Pumpkin.

Carving jack-o-lanterns, going trick-or-treating, and having an excuse as a grown-up to dress up like Batman or Cat Woman.

Comfort foods such as homemade soups, chili and cornbread, marshmallows toasted over a fire, pumpkin pie/bread/pudding/cookies/coffee.

Leaves that show their true colors, not in the widespread explosions of oranges and reds and golds that our East Coast and Midwest friends enjoy, but in a way our limited-edition outbursts of Monet-worthy leaves-scapes here make them all the more precious and beautiful.

Speaking of leaves, autumn’s arrival always transports my mind’s eye back to a giant pile of leaves that took forever to rake together. It was in my friend Dan’s well-wooded backyard, back in Ohio of my boyhood, back when I was about 8.

Above the pile of leaves rose a colossal tree and from a strong branch hung a rope tied to an old tractor tire. We took turns pushing each other on that tire swing, soaring higher and higher still, before launching ourselves airborne and flying towards a giggling crash landing on Mother Nature’s leafy mattress of red and orange and gold.

Yes, right now I love autumn best.

Until winter rings my doorbell on December 21.

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FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

This, That, Baseball and Batman

by Woody

FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

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This, That, Baseball and Batman

Shooting from the hip on a hair-triggered keyboard…

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            Will self-driving cars be programmed to leave turn signals on mile after mile just for old time’s sake?

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For the love of Lou Boudreau! (Google him) I beg Cody Bellinger and all Major League batters to please, when the defense puts on an infield shift, poke or slap the ball to the opposite field and take all the singles you can get until they stop shifting!

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            Add baseball: My much-better-half was watching her beloved Dodgers on TV the other night and after the broadcast duo blathered on blah blah blah even more than usual, in rare total exasperation she sighed, “God, I miss Vin Scully!”

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            Speaking of The Golden Voice and my wife…

Nineteen summers ago was Scully’s 50th season behind the mic and in the press box before a game I asked him for an interview in the coming days.

True to his word, he phoned me at home a couple days later to set something up and my wife answered the phone.

“This is Vin Scully,” the caller said, needlessly identifying himself because his voice was unmistakable. “May I speak to Woody?”

Unfortunately, I was out and more unfortunately had not mentioned that I was expecting the call.

Most unfortunate of all, my wife assumed it was one of my goofy friends imitating Scully and joked in reply, “Who is this really?” and then playfully hung up.

The classy Scully phoned right back, to the great chagrin of my wife, who instantly realized her mistake and apologized before telling him when she expected me home.

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            More Scully. My writing idol, Jim Murray, was receiving an honor at the Beverly Hills Hotel and because of some good luck I was in attendance.

And because of some beverages, I was later in the men’s room when in walked Scully. He greeted another person who was leaving and his trademark voice echoed off the tiled walls as rich and melodic as a cello in Carnegie Hall.

I remember laughing to myself, imagining Scully doing the play-by-play right then and there: “Kirk Gibson steps up to the urinal, takes his stance…”

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            One final Scully memory. At the end of my interview with him in the press box hours before the first pitch, I sheepishly asked Scully to do a play-by-play radio call with me at bat. He asked who I wanted on the mound and without hesitation I said the great Bob Gibson.

Oh, how I wish I’d used a tape recorder for interviews back then instead of notepads. No matter, in my mind’s ear I can still hear the imaginary broadcast as “Woodburn fouls off another fastball and works the count to deuces wild – two balls, two strikes, two out with two men on.”

I still half-expected Scully to impishly have me strike out, but instead my Major League career batting average is a perfect 1-for-1 with an RBI line-drive single to left field in Dodger Stadium.

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            For some of us, who wore a bath towel pinned around their neck throughout kindergarten, today is a super holiday: Batman Day.

This year’s official occasion marks the 80th anniversary of DC Comic’s Dark Knight and will be celebrated around the world. Indeed, the Bat Signal will be lighted in Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, London, Montreal, Mexico City, New York, Los Angeles – and perhaps a kindergartener-still-at-heart’s home in Ventura.

Let me close with this wisdom from a poster that says it all: “Always be yourself, unless you can be Batman, then always be Batman!”

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FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

Friendship Turns Back Calendar

by Woody

FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

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Familiar Laugh is

a Time Machine

H. G. Wells knocked on my front door Sunday morning and when I opened it the pages of the calendar flipped backward, months, years, four decades in all, in an instant.

Greeting me was my college roommate from freshman year. In 2019, I was 18 again.

Fingerprint analysis could not have been more accurate in identifying Matt than the proof provided by his smile. Father Time may have stolen his bushy, dark curls and added lines of wisdom to his countenance, but his grin was as broad and radiant and familiar as ever.

In the only photograph I have of Matt, for there were no ubiquitous cell phone cameras always at the ready in 1978, he is flashing his trademark electric grin as sun-bleached-mop-haired me goofily flashes a peace sign of rabbit ears behind his head.

Goofing it up as UCSB freshmen with my roommate Matt Bell.

In my mind’s eye – rather, mind’s ear – there is something even more identifying than Matt’s smile: his laugh. DNA profiling could not be more precise for identification. It is a hall-of-fame laugh, part cackle, part music.

Matt freely played that music again Sunday morning and it was more wonderful than Cheap Trick and Tom Petty and Pink Floyd making our dorm widows rattle on a Friday night.

Words of hello being insufficient after so long apart, we promptly embraced on the front doorstep – perhaps for the first time ever because college roommates in the ’70s didn’t generally hug.

The next two hours passed like two minutes as we played catch-up on our lives, our long marriages, his three children and my two plus a granddaughter, our jobs – he’s a high school principal in Northern California – and on and on. The eggs and pancakes and coffee grew cold half-untouched because the air was so warm with conversation and memories and laughter.

It’s funny sometimes what memories pop to mind. Matt was on UC Santa Barbara’s gymnastic team and while I recall him being dizzying good on the rings and pommel horse, my favorite feat of his was when he walked the entire length of our dorm hallway on his hands while the rest of us cheered as though it was the Olympics.

Matt remembered stories I had forgotten and vice-versa. Most of them I dare not share in this space, but here’s one more that I will. I had sophomorically sabotaged his toothbrush with soap and Matt retaliated ingeniously by somehow putting a small measure of sunscreen inside my tube of Crest.

As I spit and rinsed, rinsed, rinsed, Matt guffawed. I squeezed away a third of the tube to get rid of the contaminated portion and started brushing again. Again, I gagged. This happened a third time as well.

By now Matty sounded like Muttley the cartoon dog. I believe it was the only time either of us got even halfway upset at the other – in truth, I think I was mad at myself for falling for the well-played prank over and over.

Now I’m mad at myself for falling out of touch with Matt after graduation. More so, however, I’m thankful for the miracle of social media that allowed us to reconnect after 37 years.

To give you one more snapshot of what a masterpiece reunion we had, and to further encourage you to reach out to a friend you may have lost contact with, Matt and I were so busy enjoying ourselves that we forgot to take a picture together. We plan to remedy that soon.

It has been said that it takes a long time to grow an old friend, but it can also happen over breakfast.

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FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …

Memories Tragically Go Unmade

by Woody

FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

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Buoyed in Boat Tragedy

by Two Uplifting Emails 

Making memories, that is what the 39 people aboard the Conception were doing.

Certainly most of the 33 passengers were off the Santa Cruz Island coast specifically to go diving, and the crew of six was on hand to give them the opportunity to do so, but above all they were all out there on our postcard waters to make memories.

In the aftermath of the tragic below-deck nighttime fire that claimed the lives of all 33 patrons and one crewmember, I was reminded by a reader of a recent column of mine that the trip to sea was about making memories.

Coincidentally, Sheila Kane McCollum wrote of our scenic underwaters:

“Tears streamed down my face this morning as I read about your ‘Daddy Dates’! Your recounting of your time with daughter Dallas brought to mind so many cherished memories of my own times with my wonderful dad.

“After my brothers (four and five years my senior) moved away, I took up scuba diving so Dad and I could have that to share. We spent many weekends out at Channel Islands exploring the reefs and searching for the elusive lobster.

“Because I had gone on a rafting adventure, my dad suggested we do a trip together. We drove up to Kern Valley and spent two days rafting and camping at night on some hard earth. I can’t say he loved the rafting as much as I, but we both thoroughly enjoyed our three days together, laughing and making these memories.

“Dad has been gone more than 20 years, but my memories bring him back with love, admiration and appreciation.”

When Sheila’s email arrived, a week before the stunning Conception catastrophe, it brought a smile to my heart. To figuratively see her take down a flowered box from the top shelf in her closet, set it on her bed and remove the lid, and unwrap the tissue paper that has kept safe these memories of her dad for two decades, is lovely.

Two weeks later, that image also makes the heart weep for all the memories of a dive trip that won’t be unwrapped and retold, smiled at and enjoyed, 20 years from now.

The grief, even for those of us who may never have heard one of those memories shared, is leaden. There have been far too many unbearable tragedies locally, from the Thomas Fire to the Borderline shooting to the Conception.

And yet another reader, also in a recent email, added some thoughts as a buoy. Responding to my column about playful kids at a summer camp, Diane Sweet wrote:

“I have enjoyed your columns for years and now look forward to my Saturday laugh or cry as I read your banter, philosophy, and encouragement. Today was exceptional as I was with you on the playground and talking to the kids – albeit I would not be running!

“I am celebrating my 70th birthday this week, and I totally agree with you and Walter Hagen, ‘Don’t hurry, don’t worry. You’re only here for a short visit. So don’t forget to stop and smell the roses.’

“I know 70 years sounds ‘old’, but it has gone quickly! I am continually trying to ‘enjoy the moments’. I have a beautiful and fragrant ‘Yves Piaget’ rosebush that I bought at a farm in Carpinteria that I just stop and smell whenever it’s in bloom. The sweet scent reminds me how precious and temporary life is and I don’t take it for granted.”

Perhaps that sentiment – and fond memories – is all we have to hang onto when our hearts collapse in sorrow.

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FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …