Monthly Archives: April 2026

‘Do Not Touch’ Sign Ignored

by Woody

“I bet they greet Greg by name now,” My Much Better Half said the other day about our son and the staff at his local urgent care center, so many visits has he made the past few weeks for himself as well as with his young daughter and infant son.

We can joke because everyone is doing fine.

I am also laughing because I am reminded of my late mom taking either me, one of my two older brothers, or younger sister, to the E.R. pretty much on a weekly basis when we were growing up to get stitches, X-rays, plaster casts, emergency treatment for bad reactions to spider bites, and so on. Just typical 1960s free-range childhood stuff.

And then there was the time an embarrassing trip the E.R. was avoided by instead going to the Fire Department. Let me set the scene . . .

Kiddie Korner, our local toy store, had a number of swing sets on display with multiple signs that even five-year-old me could read: “Do Not Touch.”

One particular swing set featured a see-saw-like ride with bright-yellow hard-plastic seats shaped much like a conventional bicycle saddle. These see-saw seats had a constellation of dime-sized holes which My Big Brother could not resist seeing if his fingers would fit into.

They did!

Blood quickly pooled in MBB’s fingers, causing them to swell. Two of his fingers, and thumb too, got stuck. The harder he pulled, the more they swelled.

Adding to his panic, MBB knew he was not supposed to touch the swing set. He told me to get Mom, who was next door shopping for clothes.

Mom shooed me away.

MBB sent me again.

Again Mom sent me away.

By now MBB was in tears, from pain and more so out of fear of being discovered and scolded by the store’s owner.

On my third attempt, filled with urgency, I finally convinced Mom to come rescue MBB. Seeing the situation, she was deeply worried – less about MBB’s fingers than the thought of once again having to take one of her kids to the E.R., and this incident would top them all. Trying to avoid such embarrassment, she confessed MBB’s transgression to the store’s owner and asked for help freeing her son’s hand from its plastic prison.

The owner retrieved a wrench from the back storeroom and unbolted the seat from the swing set frame. He then told MBB to raise his hand high overhead, hoping this would improve blood circulation and help the swelling go down.

MBB, understandably, was crying because his eight-year-old fingers, now the size and color of grilled hotdogs, throbbed.

“Look on the bright side,” Mom consoled MBB. “It’ll make a great baseball mitt!”

MBB laughed and his tears stopped, but his hotdog digits were becoming bratwursts.

The toy store’s owner kindly drove us all to the Fire Department and suddenly I was thrilled MBB had ignored the “Do Not Touch” sign because we got to go inside the firehouse!

More excitement followed as one fireman after another slid down the giant silver pole, examined MBB’s hand and the hard-plastic swing set seat attached to it, shook their head in equal parts wonderment and bafflement while suppressing laughter, then called for a fellow firefighter to take a look.

Lubricating MBB’s fingers with oil, then grease, both failed and tin shears proved as futile as bullets to Superman’s chest.

In the end, one of the heroes carefully cut MBB’s plastic baseball mitt off with a hand jigsaw and Mom was set free from her weekly E.R. visit.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody 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.

Feathers Ruffled by Pair of Birds

by Woody

Déjà vu struck me earlier this week when a flying bird, a yellow-bellied Cassin’s Kingbird is my guess, struck the same window in my home with the exact same unfolding scene afterward as happened in the first half of this column from my archives nine summers ago, and so I share it again now…

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I love birds.

I love listening to morning birdsong when I first awaken. I like to spy them outside my window as I write during the day. And I like watching them soar in flight, especially floating on updrafts like a kite, no wing flapping required.

Sadly, I saw the opposite occur just the other day. A bird fell from the sky and crash-landed in my backyard.

In truth, I did not see it happen – I heard it.

BAM!

I knew instantly what had happened. Our home has two large picture windows on the second story, eastward facing, and a bird traveling westward had flown smack into one of them like in an old Windex TV commercial from my youth.

Happily, this deja vu victim number two also regained its senses and eventually flew away…

Hurrying outside, I found the victim lying on the grass directly below a window. I knelt and looked for signs of life, but saw none.

Funny, but my next thought was remembering a cartoon from The New Yorker magazine, although it was not humorous at this moment. A bird in heaven asks a winged angel: “You run into a window, too?”

I love birds, but I am no birder. My uneducated identification was a common sparrow. Common or not, its fate saddened me greatly and I went to retrieve a small gardening trowel to bury it.

Upon returning, my heart soared for the bird had only been knocked unconscious. Perhaps feeling a little cuckoo, the bird got to its feet, pirouetted, staggered like a drunk for a few steps – in a cartoon, stars would have orbited its birdbrain – then took flight, likely with a headache and sore beak.

Meanwhile, another bird story has been turning its pages at my house. For the past month or so, every time I have taken out the trash to the garbage cans at the side of Casa Woodburn, a bird has appeared out of thin air like a dove from of a magician’s hat.

In truth, the bird appears out of the thick ivy growing on a brick wall opposite the big bins.

Again, I am only guessing that this is also a common house sparrow – scientific name Passer domesticus. However, even a birding expert would have difficulty making an accurate identification of this blur flying past his ear.

 The first few times this Hitchcock-ian attack happened, the Blurry domesticus made me jump out of my flip-flops. Eventually, I remembered to expect the feathery flyby and tried sneaking past the bird’s hidden nest. Perhaps it had a Ring doorbell camera, for it still flushed from cover, its natural instinct being to draw approaching prey away from its nest.

The very day after its fellow bird of a feather flew into the window, mishap befell again. When I took out the trash, this second bird flushed and somehow the nest was dislodged and fell onto the cement walkway.

Worse, there were eggs in the nest – four, upon closer inspection. Happily, upon even closer scrutiny, none appeared broken.

And yet the unscrambled eggs were of small consolation because I remember being warned in grade school that if a person touches a nest the mother bird will abandon it. If true, I now hoped this is due to human scent being left behind. Thus, I put on gardening gloves and carefully nestled the nest securely back in the ivy.

Then I hoped against hope for the best because I not only love birds, I had come to be especially fond of this domesticus nemesis.

The best happened. The next time I took out the kitchen trash my feathers were happily ruffled anew.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody 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.

The Bamboo Field and Sink of Dishes

by Woody

“Don’t worry that your children never listen to you,” essayist Robert Fulghum wisely wrote, “worry that they are always watching you.”

Sometimes our little ones do both. This happy insight struck me when my daughter shared a scene from her morning, her retelling evidence that she indeed took to heart a parable I told her when she was growing up and also watched me tackle large tasks with its inspired lesson.

The story, shared with me long ago by golfing legend Chi Chi Rodriguez while recalling his childhood in Puerto Rico, goes like this: “When I was a young boy we had a little field that was overgrown with bamboo trees. My father wanted to plant corn, but clearing the bamboo would have taken a month. He didn’t have the time because of his job. So every night when he came home from work my father would cut down a single piece of bamboo.”

Chi Chi paused, dramatically, then emphasized: “Just one piece.”

Before his conclusion, let me share my daughter’s similar tale.

“This morning,” Dallas said, “I woke up feeling exhausted even though my two young daughters actually slept in and I was able to get a decent amount of sleep. As my husband got them dressed, I got up to make coffee for him and tea for me.

“The kitchen was filled with dirty dishes from not just last night’s dinner, but from the past few days. I looked at those dishes and thought: Ugh! I CAN’T EVEN right now.

“My mind immediately began filling with excuses and reasons to ignore the dishes, yet again, until later. As if by putting them off until later some magical Dish Fairy would sneak into our kitchen and do them all for us. (Which only actually happens when my parents or mother-in-law or sister-in-law come over!)

“But the coffee strainer was dirty, so I had to wash that. Plus, I might as well wash my favorite mug so I could use that for my morning tea. Waiting for the kettle to boil, I did a few more dishes. And it wasn’t that hard to slot a bunch of dirty plates and bowls into the dishwasher. Already the counters looked much cleaner.

“I poured the hot water into my mug and still had a few minutes of waiting for the tea to steep, so I figured I might as well do a few more dishes. I took a sip of tea. Mmmm. Already I was feeling better, less groggy, more ready to face the day.

“My sponge was still soapy and I hate to waste some good soapsuds, so I scrubbed more pots and pans, then dried them and put them away. Meanwhile, Maya and Auden, miraculously, were entertaining themselves in the playroom. This far in, I figured I might as well keep going and finish the job. And that is what I did.

“Looking around the clean kitchen, I felt so much better about the day, my life, myself. It might sound silly, but my clean kitchen made me feel more confident and capable and cheerful. Instead of a sink and counter full of dirty dishes, I now had a clean slate. And it almost didn’t happen. It started with just washing one little dish.”

Just one single stalk of bamboo being cut down is how Chi Chi’s father started his daunting task.

“Just one piece, every night,” Chi Chi emphasized, concluding with a smile: “The very next spring, we had corn on our dinner table. The Bamboo Story, to me, is the secret to success.”

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody 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.

Music Between Sightseeing Highlights

by Woody

“The music is not in the notes,” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is widely attributed to have noted, “but in the silence between.”

Similarly, the magic of travel is sometimes surprisingly found between landmark sites and famous sights.

So it was on a recent trip My Much Better Half and I took to New Zealand and Australia. The magic began in the airport, in a terminal restaurant, in a booth next to a father having dinner with two of the most adorable children imaginable – a daughter perhaps age 5 and a son surely not yet 1.

This family of three was just a delight to watch; the father held the boy lovingly in one arm as he ate with the other; the daughter, sitting across the table, had the manners and charm to match the princess-like dress she was wearing; when her brother, wearing a bow tie on this obviously special occasion, began to fidget, she made him giggle with an elixir of dancing facial expressions and a voice on the edge being a song.

Many, many years ago, on a trip when my daughter and son were not much older than this pair, a sweet stranger secretively paid the restaurant tab for us. Now, alas, the server said their bill had already been settled. Instead, I could only offer the father a compliment on his beautiful family.

And here came the real magic, for he said, nodding at the boy: “We just got him today.”

Was this an adoption homecoming trip? I did not ask, but I knew this: Our trip Down Under had just begun with our lips turned up into smiles.

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A bookend airport scene filled with love occurred two days later, for we skipped a full date in flight, upon our arrival in Auckland.

As MMBH and I crossed the threshold into the arrivals reception area, a man I guessed to be in his 50s raced ahead of us into the open arms of a similarly aged man eagerly awaiting him. It was a vision out of a movie, complete with a long embrace that lifted one of the two off his feet; an embrace that went on and on; an embrace that was accompanied by wet eyes.

It was, I surmised initially, a lovers’ embrace. Or, perhaps, two long-lost old friends reunited? No and no – siblings, it turned out, for as I walked by I overheard one call the other, “Little Brother.”

My new smile widened further when I imagined, half a century from now, the young girl from the LAX restaurant running through an airport to happily and tearfully embrace her little brother.

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Of the many unexpected sounds of music between the notes on this trip, here is one more.

New Zealand is renowned for its wines, and so MMBH and I toured a handful of wineries. The smallest one, off the beaten path, proved to be our favorite.

Its wonderful nectars, however, were not the reason.

With the seating all taken, we found an open spot against a wall to stand and sample two flights. Before either of us had finished our first small pour, a young woman walked across the room to invite us to join her party of four at their table.

“Party,” literally, because these friendly Kiwis – two sisters, one brother, and a husband – were celebrating a 30th birthday. The birthday boy kid brother, naturally, was the playful target of much laughter, and it was a joy to be included in this special occasion.

Indeed, singing “Happy Birthday” was more unexpected music on this trip.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody 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.

Ghosts in the Dressing Rooms

by Woody

The only thing special about the doorway was how un-special it appeared. Yet to enter was to pass through a portal as magical as the wardrobe in the beloved novel by C. S. Lewis.

Instead of traveling to Narnia, I not long ago stepped across a threshold from 2026 into 1878.

A white sign above the entryway, in a simple print font in black, read: “AWAY Dressing Room.” Along with its antiquated “HOME” counterpart, the visitor’s quarters are located inside the original Members Pavilion of the historic Sydney Cricket Ground and date back to the first cricket match played in the stadium 148 years ago. Nearly unchanged now from then, both Spartan rooms are still used by today’s stars.

The away dressing room is not a locker room for it has no lockers. Instead, wooden cubby units, each about a foot wide and five-feet high with one shelf at the top, line the walls with uncomfortable wood-slatted benches between groupings of two. Above every bench are three simple metal hooks, a modern upgrade from once-upon-a-time nails.

The cubbies are not without some magic for they are adorned with names and initials carved by pocketknives or scratched with nails, and also written in pencil and markers of blue and red and black. One can almost feel ghosts in the room and imagine not only yesteryear, but yester-century.

The rectangular dressing area is about the size of a wealthy man’s walk-in closet and connects, up four red-tiled steps, to a smaller room with showers, sinks, toilets.

The brick walls throughout are covered by layer upon layer of paint, thick as face makeup on an aging stage actress, the current color being the same cream as throwback cricket flannels.

A couple windows and a single fan hanging from high overhead serve as air conditioning. The ceiling, covered with pressed tin tiles, also features bare metal pipes running along two sides. Only a short florescent tube light betrays the 19th century.

The home dressing room and showers are larger, but not grandly so, although it does have true locker stalls and padded benches. “The home-team advantage,” our tour guide said unapologetically.

My favorite piece of nostalgia was a piece of yellowed paper, slightly larger than a placemat, displayed proudly and prominently above the doorway to be seen when exiting the home dressing room. It is a note, protected behind glass, handwritten by Sir Donald Bradman, the Babe Ruth of Australian cricket players. In easily legible cursive, in blue ink, with his underlined one-word signature “DGBradman” and date “10/12/28” at the bottom, it reads:

If it’s difficult / I’ll do it now

If it’s impossible / I’ll do it presently

The movie “Dead Poets Society” instantly came to my mind, and heart, specifically the scene when English teacher John Keating, played by Robin Williams, addresses his male teenage students in front of a venerable trophy case. The youthful faces in the century-old photographs within were once just like them, he says, full of passion and hopes and dreams and feelings of invincibility, but are now “fertilizing daffodils.”

“We are all food for worms, lads,” Mr. Keating continues, then memorably concludes by telling the boys the Latin term carpe diem – seize the day.

I imagined Sir Bradman, and the other star lads whose names adorn the wood-paneled lists of batting and bowling feats hanging in the two timeless dressing rooms, back when they were young and in their prime hitting “sixes” and throwing “jaffas” before becoming worm food.

Carpe diem. Do it now. Do it presently. The daffodils may bloom tomorrow.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody 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.