Author Archives: Woody

“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.

‘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.

Singing Praises of an Old Gem

by Woody

The late Henry Lawson, known as “The People’s Poet” of Australia, could not have adequately described the lovely grandeur of the Sydney Opera House in a poem, even an epic one numbering a hundred pages.

Patrick White, the only Aussie to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, similarly in a full novel would have failed to do justice to this waterfront architectural marvel comprised of fourteen gracefully billowing “sails” – or “shells,” depending on the viewer’s imagination – shimmering with more than one million tiles on the outside.

Like the rarest of beautiful people, this World Heritage Site No. 166, which opened in 1973, is somehow even more breathtaking on the inside.

The day after My Much Better Half, herself outwardly beautiful and even more so inwardly, and I toured the Opera House we visited the Sydney Cricket Ground and had our breath taken away anew, and by surprise, by the gorgeous red-brick masonry and overall grandness that greeted us outside and the beautiful history waiting inside.

At Sydney Cricket Ground with MMBH.

The Sydney Cricket House – my nickname for it, trademark pending – is a mere three miles from the Opera House but nearly a century removed, having been founded in 1878.

To put that in some perspective, Wimbledon’s historic Centre Court dates back to 1922 and Fenway Park, the oldest Major League Stadium, was built in 1912. With its preserved old-school architecture and dark-green palette, Sydney Cricket House looks like the shared grandfather of Fenway and Wimbledon.

A dear friend of mine, a travel writer of great merit, always reminds me before I depart on a trip to explore hidden alleyways and gateways and doorways because those are often portals to enchanted experiences.

The Sydney Cricket House is not exactly hidden down an off-the-beaten-path alleyway, but MMBH and I did seek it out almost by serendipity. With a couple hours to fill before heading to the airport on our final day in Australia, the stadium tour simply fit the time opening.

Jimmy Cricket were we surprised and enchanted!

The stadium has been expanded, time and again, and is now a double-decked circular structure, complete with towering lights for night matches, that holds 40,000 spectators. But in the northwest corner, shining like matching diamonds on a necklace, the original twin grandstands remain.

The Members’ Pavilion and Ladies’ Pavilion, as these grand old stands are named, look like something time forgot. Imagine old Yankee Stadium, with its wooden bleachers and support poles for the roof and ornate balustrades on the upper-deck seating, and add a clock tower – analog, of course! – top and center.

The grass “pitch” in the Sydney Cricket House is huge and oval, measuring 155 meters by 140 meters, and is as well manicured as Wimbledon’s Centre Court lawn.

The Members’ Pavilion, originally christened Men’s Pavilion, houses the Home and Away dressing rooms. Exiting these sanctums, players walk down an aisle amidst the spectators to get to the playing field where they make their entrance through “The Sir Donald Bradman Gate” – the Babe Ruth of Australian cricket – bearing a bronze plaque with bas-relief likenesses of his visage and in full swinging a bat, as well as a short biography.

On this day that saw the mercury rise up to 93 degrees – 34 Down Under in Celsius – it was all very cool to see.

Coolest of all, despite not being air conditioned, was seeing the original 19th-century dressing rooms that are still in use by today’s cricket superstars. Entering these doorways was to step through a magical portal to yesteryear and took my breath away.

I will escort you inside both next week.

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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.

Tasmanian Devil Was No Cartoon

by Woody

After three days on end at sea traveling from New Zealand to Australia, my headspace was a little loony.

More accurately, I had “Looney Tunes” on my mind.

Specifically, recalling Saturday morning cartoons from my childhood.

Most specifically, episodes with the Tasmanian devil “Taz.”

This was partly because the cruise ship passed through the Tasman Sea en route to Hobart, and furthermore because our itinerary while in port included an excursion 30 miles north to Tasmania and the Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary that promised to have rescued kangaroos, wombats, and Tasmanian devils.

A koala just chillin’!

As for the latter, I found it hard to believe any relative of Taz would ever need rescuing – other than from Bugs Bunny, of course.

Injured “patients” in the animal hospital during our visit included a forest raven (injured in a dog attack), blue-tongued lizard (also bitten by a dog), collared sparrowhawk (hit by a car), and a tawny frogmouth that refused to tell the veterinary staff how it injured its wing.

Outside, in spacious ground habitats and soaring aviaries, we saw an array of other birds; a bare-nosed wombat, which looked like a giant guinea pig on steroids; and a large “mob” of forester kangaroos as tame and friendly as Labradoodles. The Labra’roos even ate kibble out of My Much Better Half’s palm and purred louder than contented house cats when I rubbed and scratched their down-soft chest fur.

A sign at the Tasmanian devil’s enclosure asked: “What does it look like? A dog, skunk, badger, wolverine, rat?” The lone T-devil in current residence refused to offer an answer by hiding in its den.

I did learn that Tasmanian devils are marsupials, but other than having a pouch share little in common with kangaroos. One unstated difference between them is that T-devils do not readily let humans pet their chests.

Also, while ’roos are herbivores, T-devils are scavengers – which is how many of them wind up at Bonorong, being hit by cars while dining on roadkill.

My Much Better Half had been especially keen on meeting a Tasmanian devil, so to drown her sorrows we ended the day at the Hobart Brewing Co. in a big ol’ red barn of a building on the historic railyard waterfront. No much to look at from outside, the craft brewery’s taproom and offerings inspired me to write in my travel journal: “Maybe my all-time favorite microbrewery! So charming – beers so good! Especially the Red Shed Red Ale!”

While we had sadly not seen a twirling, twisting, Taz-like Tasmanian devil, the generous flight of local beers made my head happily spin a little.

Two days later my head spun a new, now with irritation, when MMBH and I missed the boat – literally, due to bad luck – for a harbor tour of Melbourne. As sometimes wonderfully happens when traveling, Misfortune was soon revealed to be Serendipity in disguise.

Healsville Sanctuary, our substitute field trip, proved to be the Hobart Brewing Co. of wildlife reserves. We saw, up close, an armful of cuddly-looking koalas; a dingo, red as fox and handsome as any Best in Show champion at Westminster; a few emus, all tall as men; a duck-billed platypus…

…and a Tasmanian devil!

Resembling a bulldog, black with a flash of white on its muscular chest, albeit with a sharp snout, it scampered hither and dither as if excited to be off leash in a park. All the same, it fell short of my childlike expectations, for this “Taz” did not spin in a dervish blur like a figure skater, or grumble and drool and throw a funny tantrum.

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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.

Staying Upright Down Under

by Woody

Woody’s award-winning novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available (signed copies) here on my home page and also (unsigned) at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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On a morning so raw and rough the dolphins and whales sighted a day earlier off starboard of this cruise ship now decided to curl up in warm blankets and stay underwater safe from the bone-chilling wind, I went for a run.

To be honest, if I did not have a consecutive-day running streak dating back to July 7, 2003, I would have remained inside wrapped in a heavy wool blanket myself.

Instead, I was outside on the exercise deck of the “Noordam” traveling deep waters between Port Chalmers, New Zealand, and Perth, Australia. Winter still in America, it was late spring Down Under but the weather did not agree with the calendar.

While My Much Better Half showed she is also My Much Wiser Half by enjoying a massage with warmed lotions, I decided to brave the elements for thirteen miles as an antidote to the ship’s abundantly delicious food that can, just by looking at it, add five pounds.

The “Noordam” in port on a slightly nicer day…

The first few miles were not overly miserable but then, as if in time-lapse photography, the unfriendly weather become downright irascible — nasty and cold, windy and wet, with light raindrops that flew sideways and stung one’s face like acupuncture needles.

Meanwhile, the swells grew, Grew, GREW to between five and seven meters — fifteen to twenty feet!—according to the captain. The exercise deck remained open, surprisingly, as it began rising and dipping like a rollercoaster. These gargantuan undulations were accentuated at the bow and stern, making me feel either almost weightless or else experiencing extra G-forces on my legs.

I maintained my “sea legs” for the most part, but the highest crests and deepest troughs caused an occasional stagger as if I had had four Foster’s for breakfast.

While the frequent one-sixth-Earth’s-gravity-moonwalk-like-strides made the maritime run memorable, the best part was sharing the experience — and sharing hellos and a few high-fives; one woman reading in a deckchair shared a book recommendation, The Book of Goose — with a few other sunny-minded souls.

One fellow exerciser, despite standing slightly stooped, stood tallest in my estimation. In his eighties, I guessed, he was an inspiration for certain. Lap after lap (one time around the deck measured a full third of a mile, larger than a running track!) in weather fit only for a goose, he persisted for a full hour…

…using a walker!

His steps were minced greatly and his legs were bowed slightly, yet he somehow exuded the aura of an athlete. When I slowed down on one go-round to say “Hello, you’re awesome!” he took hold of my arm, lightly, introduced himself as Ichiro, loudly, and said he had once upon a time been a runner — “a sprinter, not a distance guy.”

Ichiro wore dark shabby sweatpants and a fisherman’s cable sweater of cream color, slide sandals with soggy socks, and a straw sunhat that I have no idea how he kept from blowing off. In my mind’s eye, I saw Hemingway’s Santiago in “The Old Man and the Sea.”

Charmed by Ichiro’s friendliness, I walked beside him for one length of the ship and This Old Man on the Sea wisely told me to appreciate being able to run even — no, especially — on days like this one because some day I will no longer be able to.

With that, and with a slight formal bow, he waved me away with the request to do an extra mile for him.

Thus my foul-weather run happily, and gratefully, became a fourteen-miler.

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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.

A Sheep Dog, A Sheared Sheep

by Woody

Woody’s award-winning novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available (signed copies) here on my home page and also (unsigned) at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Ross Millar, a New Zealand sheep farmer, for fifty years has lived the song “Whistle While You Work.”

“I am the Elton John of whistling,” he told me not long ago, with a wink, for he is as humbly down-to-earth as his dirty work boots.

Watching Sir Ross in concert is both sight and sound to behold as he guides his working dogs with a sundry of whistled notes that carry a country mile, even piercing through wind, and create a lovely melody.

Racing up a mountainside, Scottie, a star border collie, looked like a black-and-white-drone-with-a-tail skimming just above the grass and shrub. Instead of a handheld radio controller, Ross steered Scottie with short and long whistle blasts, and combinations, the tone and inflection varying in a precise musical language.

Ross Millar and a newly shorn sheep and a pile of wool.

“The dog’s job is to do what I tell him to do,” Ross the boss noted frankly. “And I will keep telling him all day long if I need to until he does it.”

Scottie only needed about seven minutes to silently herd a lone sheep from half a mile away up in the foothills back down down to Ross’s side.

“The sheep thinks ‘this is a wolf and I’m breakfast, lunch, or dinner,’ ” Ross explained as to why Scottie need not bark to do his job.

During the demonstration, Ross did his job like a pool shark calling shots. He would tell a dozen spectators precisely what he wanted Scottie to do: “Turn left – right – stop – come – go above – go around – go down – that’ll do.”

And then: Tweet! – Tooooooot! – TWEETtweeeetTOOT! – or some other shrill melody and Scottie would “muster” the sheep into the side pocket via a bank shot, so to speak. It was nothing shy of amazing.

Here is something else amazing: a working dog on a sheep farm routinely runs ten miles, sometimes as far as a half-marathon, in a single day.

With Scottie’s short work for the moment done, Ross bent to task in the shearing barn. He began by pinning a sheep as a wrestler does an opponent, a feat accomplished with ease for at age sixty-something and standing six-foot-something, topped by thinning grey hair, Ross appears fit enough for competitive rugby.

Next, quick as an Army barber giving a recruit a buzz cut, he sheared the cloud-fluffy-animal as bare-skinned as the day it was born without a single nick and drop of blood or even a patch of razor rash.

Ross said an “expert” can shear a sheep in one and a half minutes – about half the time he had just taken – and tally more than 300 in a working day. Prodded slightly, Ross said that while he was a bit rusty now, he had indeed once been an expert.

Prodded further, privately, Ross told me in his heyday he could shear a sheep in a few ticks under a minute-flat – the equivalent, I guessed, to New Zealander Peter Snell setting the mile world record of 3:54.4 in 1962.

“I love all animals,” Ross said, smiling, as he reassuringly caressed the freshly sheared sheep. “And some humans, too.”

Speaking of humans, I playfully asked if he trained his two children when they were young with whistle commands – to which Ross answered seriously and succinctly, “No.”

When I in turn asked his wife Mary if she did so with her husband, she wryly said with a twinkle, “Oh, yes, but it didn’t take!”

And did he ever try to train her by similar whistling fashion?

Mary, after a short laugh loud as a shepherd’s whistle: “He’s a little smarter than that.”

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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.