Monthly Archives: May 2026

Story From An Enchanted Keyboard

by Woody

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life,” Oscar Wilde famously wrote and sometimes it is indeed the latter.

For example, my novel in progress features an enchanted typewriter upon which some things that are typed magically come true. To illustrate how this art imitates life, let me share something I typed in the spring of 1987:

“The storm clouds are clearing. From here on out it is going to be rainbows for Dallas. Life will be an endless string of tap-ins for birdie, 40-serving-loves, proms and roses and four-leaf clovers.”

The QWERTY keyboard I wrote that column on proved enchanted indeed. Sure, there have been some stone-stubbed toes and stepped-on thorns in Dallas’s field of four-leaf clovers – but mostly it has been a Rose Parade and Disneyland and a sunset beach walk for my daughter who was born three months prematurely weighing 2 pounds, 6 ounces.

Walking my preemie “fighter” down the wedding aisle!

Dallas came into the world by emergency Cesarean section because my wife’s preeclampsia, a life-threatening collection of syllables for fetus and mother alike, spiked rapidly. Santa Maria did not have a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, so a four-person team of specialists flew in from Fresno to perform the dicey delivery and – if prayers were answered – take the newborn back with them.

Lisa pleaded for anesthesia as she did not want to be awake and NOT hear a newborn’s cry, but because she had recently eaten this was not possible. Holding our new daughter also proved not possible because mother and child both required continued emergency care.

Hours crawled by with my fears rising before a doctor finally came to tell me I had a daughter. “She’s a real fighter,” he added assuredly and she needed to be.

While Lisa remained in the Operating Room, Dallas, in an NICU incubator-on-wheels, was rushed to the ambulance bay for a speedy ride to the airport and a flight to Fresno. En route, however, the four superheroes in scrubs paused briefly in the hospital’s hallway.

In one of the kindest acts I have ever experienced, and ever will, a surgical nurse opened one of the round portals and told me to place my hand on Dallas’s tiny, spindly, delicate torso. In the coming days, for two months, I would have to scrub my hands with disinfecting medical soap for a full three minutes before visiting Dallas in the NICU in Fresno, but presently there was no such time to spare.

With urgency, yet calmly, the angelic nurse said Dallas had not yet felt skin-to-skin contact because Lisa was unable to and the medical team, of course, wore surgical gloves. The nurse emphasized that such real touch is vital; her grave tone and penetrating eyes delivered an unspoken cold truth as well: This might be the only time your daughter ever feels skin-to-skin touch.

Thermal air escaped the open portal as I timidly reached into the high-tech Plexiglas womb, carefully avoiding a web of wires, tubes, and monitors, and ever so gently placed my hand on Dallas’s stomach. Her skin was warm and supremely soft and wondrous. It remains, to this day, arguably the most magical moment of my life.

That 15-inch-long baby girl now stands 5-foot-10 and has no heart or lung ailments as “extreme preemies” often do in adulthood. Indeed, she ran track and cross-country through high school and is an avid hiker today.

Too, Dallas has enjoyed proms and roses and four-leaf clovers; a wedding day and motherhood and dreams achieved; and today, May 29, celebrates a miraculously happy 39th birthday.

Yes, my enchanted keyboard induced some real-life magic.

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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.

Ducklings Dancing in the Sun

by Woody

“Swan Lake” is not all it is quacked up to be.

Indeed, with apologies to the great Russian composure Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, his celebrated ballet about Princess Odette that has been mesmerizing audiences ever since premiering in Moscow’s elegant Bolshoi Theater in 1877, was transcended this past weekend by the dance “At the Pond – Ducks” in an outdoor amphitheater in a park in Torrance with picnicking patrons seated on a grass hillside.

Princess Amara was one of the six Ducks who graced the cement stage wearing frilly tutus as bright yellow as the spring sun and smiles that shone even more radiantly. The Ducks were actually Ducklings for they are all quite young. Princess Amara, for example, is four months shy of turning three years old – which I happen to know because she is my granddaughter.

Naturally, this connection has nothing at all to do with my critique that Princess Amara, despite her ballet slippers barely moving during her first dance number, was the prima ballerina of all the Ducks and merited the florist shop worth of bouquets she received from adoring fans afterwards.

My favorite dancing Duckling Amara and her Daddy…

By the way, getting one’s ducks in a row surely has never been more challenging than with these little Ducklings – as well as the 3-year-old Dragonflies, 4-year-old Lily Flowers, 5-year-old Frogs, and even the much older Disco Snails who amazingly turned Sunday afternoon into “Saturday Night Fever.”

A second Duckling in particular also stole my heart. It happened during the “Daddy Dance” when this danseuse went off script and wandered away from the practiced choreography – and also away from her father, who continued performing with his other slightly-older daughter – and began twirling around and around and around, with her face tilted heavenward, like someone trying to purposely make herself super dizzy.

Here is the best thing about the dizzy Duckling: her dad did not chase her down and make her dance with her sister and him; nor did an instructor step in from the wings to make her perform the dance the proper way; and, wonderfully, the audience did not judge her harshly, but instead rewarded her throughout with a rising ovation!

The priceless life lesson – and really, the hour-long production with many dozens of students of all ages was all about learning self-esteem and confidence, practice and dedication, performance and joy – was to dance like no one’s watching, even when a few hundred are.

Something else I loved about all the Daddy Dances (each Duckling, Dragonfly, Lily Flower, and Frog had a moment in the spotlight alone with her daddy) was that the fathers dressed up in suits and ties. The message to the daughters was that this was a Big Day and they were worth all the fuss.

For the dads, meanwhile, it was a glimpse into the future many years off – yet only a blink away – to another Big Day and a similar pas de duex with their grown daughters again wearing lacy dresses, of wedding white instead of yellow or blue or green or red.

Certainly this is what I was imaging as I watched Princess Amara and her daddy –

Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev were less perfect in “Swan Lake” – dancing to Rod Stewart’s “Forever Young” and I wished for its lyrical message to come true for all of these tiny dancers:

May sunshine and happiness surround them always; may they always be proud and brave and strong; may they experience good fortune and love, and in their hearts remain as forever young and joyous as Dragonflies, Lily Flowers, Frogs, and Ducklings dancing under the sun.

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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.

Fun Shows Up Out Of The Blue

by Woody

Sometimes you go searching for fun and find it.

Other times, fun finds you out of the blue.

The latter happened to me on a rare blue-skied afternoon during these recent “May Gray” days. I was on a run at a park and had slipped into a meditative state of inattentiveness when I was nearly skulled by a booming tee shot.

No, some knucklehead was not hazardously hitting golf balls. Rather, it was a game of Frisbee golf – properly called disc golf – that I had crossed paths with.

More precisely, I had inadvertently crossed the impromptu fairway and a drive to make Rory McIlroy proud – a drive that reminded me of a Frisbee I saw fly a full 100 yards in the Rose Bowl Stadium in 1975 in the inaugural Canine Disc World Championships as Ashley Whippet raced like a four-legged comet from one end zone to the other to make a dazzling high-jumping snag – caused me to duck, lest it catch me squarely in my canine teeth.

This was actually the second tee shot from this twosome that came my way. The first one did not buzz my bill-hatted head; it took aim at my shoetops. Specifically, it landed on its rim and a cross-breeze held it upright as it rolled like a wheel off its axel for a bonanza of extra distance.

Unfortunately for “Lennie” – my imagined name for the thinner of the pair because he and his bigger companion “George” brought to my mind the dual protagonists in the novel “Of Mice and Men” – I had not yet realized they were playing disc golf. Instead, I thought it was an escaped toss. Hence, embarrassingly for me and aggravatingly for Lennie, I intercepted the Frisbee thinking I was doing him a kindness.

More aggravating for Lennie, I threw the disc back to him – and thus backwards up the fairway and away from whichever tree or light pole was the designated hole.

More embarrassing for me, my toss resembled a tiny UFO piloted by a drunk alien. Had there been a sand trap, it would have landed in it.

I retrieved my errant throw and made a gimme-putt-of-a-toss to Lennie who had walked closer. Only then did I realize they were playing disc golf and I had ruined his monster drive. I apologized; Lennie graciously said none was needed; and all three of us shared a laugh.

If I had to guess their ages, I would say George and Lennie were both in their late twenties – or perhaps about ten or twelve, for both were wearing baseball caps backwards and both were barefooted. I know this for certain: if you are barefooted in the grass with a ball cap on backwards, especially if the sun is beaming bright and warm, you are without doubt having fun.

A short while later they switched from disc golf to playing Frisbee catch while running pass patterns as in football. When I ran by George made a toss to me. Thank goodness for my bruised ego I caught it, but once again my return fling flew like spit into a headwind.

Somewhere in Camarillo I could hear my old Star colleague John Grennan, a scratch disc golfer, laughing at my ineptitude.

Laughing at my ineptitude, and silently cursing it too, I pleaded to George: “I need a mulligan!”

Reaching back to my Wham-O boyhood, I turned and coiled and uncorked a tennis-backhand-like fling that sailed straight and far.

Ouch-O adulthood! My triumphant toss brought a new embarrassment: Fun found me, but so did a slightly tweaked back disc.

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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.

“And therefore He made mothers”

by Woody

More than a century ago, in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday in May a national holiday in honor of mothers.

Along with moms, two big beneficiaries were a pair of fledging companies, both founded four years earlier: Florists’ Telegraph Delivery Association, better known as FTD, the country’s first flowers-by-mail service; and Hall Brothers Greeting Cards, which would later rebrand as Hallmark.

“All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother,” Abraham Lincoln once said, a sentiment worthy of gracing a Hallmark card for the rest of us to share with our own moms.

The great writer Rudyard Kipling perhaps put it best of all: “God could not be everywhere and therefore He made mothers.”

Motherhood, like God, is in the details. There are more examples of angel mothers’ godliness in small things than there are stars in the Milky Way, but here is one: Any sandwich tastes better when it is made by your mom for she always adds one extra ingredient – love – and, of course, knows if you prefer it cut in half diagonally or straight across.

The magic touch of moms extends far beyond sandwiches. Even when you are an adult, you will sleep sounder in a bed made by Mom; even when the same laundry detergent is used, clothes smell and feel better when Mom washes and folds them; and no hug can top Mom’s!

Yes, a mom’s love is in the details. One more example, from Mother’s Day a year ago. Our son and his young family came to visit, and my wife Lisa remembered that Greg and his lovely bride Jess favor a certain brand of non-alcoholic ginger beer that is hard to find. Lisa did not fail to find it.

Being a mom, Lisa also bought an extra six-pack for them to take home, along with two grocery bags filled with a cornucopia of favorite foods of theirs, and one-year-old Amara’s too.

While packing up to leave, Greg accidentally dropped a bottle of ginger beer on the kitchen floor and it exploded like a hand grenade with amber glass shards and bigger shrapnel flying everywhere. As messes go, it was a non-boozy doozy.

Lisa, bless her mommy heart, just laughed and asked her little boy if he was okay; asked him to step away carefully so he did not cut himself; told him not only that she would clean it up, but that she had been meaning to mop the floor anyway; all in a voice as sweet as when Greg was five and still called Greggie, for she did not want him crying over spilled milk – or spilled ginger beer.

Making the memory truly magical, however, is what happened next: Lisa’s little boy shooed her out of the kitchen so she would not get hurt, then swept up the glass and mopped the tile floor. The greeting card and flowers he had given her were nice, but this was the sweeter gift.

With this Sunday being Mother’s Day, let me close with another Hall Brothers card-worthy quote, from early-20th-century author Dorothy Canfield Fisher: “A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.”

Wise words figuratively, yet sometimes literally leaning is wonderful. I say this after recently watching Greg, a little boy grown into a 6-foot-3 man, lean down and wrap his mom in a cocoon-like hug while resting his chin on her head. Lisa’s smile and eyes closed in contentment were evidence that any day with a child is a mother’s special day.

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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.