Category Archives: Columns

Private Sector Use For GLOVEs

by Woody

In “What could go wrong?” news, it has been reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to spend up to $20 million to equip ICE officers with electrified patrol gloves that are cleverly, or sadistically, named Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters — GLOVE, get it?

Those who do get it, literally, will receive a painful shock designed to force submission without leaving physical marks, nor bodily evidence of misuse. Indeed, What can can wrong?

An outcry has risen to ban GLOVEs, but I favor limited use in the private sector. For example, equip school librarians with GLOVEs so they can gently place a hand on the shoulders of parents who raise a ruckus to ban books: “Shhhhhh, now. I’m sorry for your discomfort, but books never hurt anyone.”

As for teachers, these are not “kid gloves” as the manufacturer expressly warns that the GLOVE should not be used on children — however, parents who become threatening would seem fair game.

Anyone who must shake hands with That Guy (and we have all met one, unfortunately, often a businessman who is louder than his neck tie; or an annoying uncle; or a former frat boy with an ego larger than his true golf handicap which he has officially made smaller by cheating) Who Turns A Handshake Into A Feat Of Trying To Prove His Alpha Masculinity By Squeezing Your Hand Hard(!) While Grinding Your Knuckles Until You Wince, can turn the tables with a GLOVE and make him cry uncle first.

In a twist from the 1920s, fashionably dressed (or even casually attired) women in 2026 should henceforth start routinely wearing GLOVEs — if her date gets a little handsy, she can elegantly place a hand on his cheek with an electrified caress that surpasses a slap by delivering the kick of a mule.

The sports world definitely can use new GLOVEs. For example, when an obnoxious fan gets truly unruly, or outbattles a kid for a foul ball, how better to handle the situation than with an electrified high-five!

In soccer, the epidemic of flopping and diving when a foul never happened can be eliminated overnight by giving referees a GLOVE and marching orders to lend a helping hand up off the ground to every cleated Shakespearean performer.

A special baseball GLOVE — MITT: Mighty Irritating Timing Tool (trademark pending) — will put an end to extended replay challenges. With electrified MITTs, a baserunner’s twitching body will make it obvious the precise instant he is tagged. Or, no twitch: “Safe!”

The GLOVE will be ideal for restaurant waitstaff when a drunk (or sober) patron gets out of hand or overly flirtatious with a touching hand. Recommended voltage: 15 to 20 percent. As for annoying customers who order a steak cooked rare and then complain because it is pink inside, servers can simply dial up the GLOVE’s intensity, place three fingers on the beef and zap it to “well done” right at the table.

Constituents at town hall meetings will be allowed to “take the gloves off” by putting GLOVEs on to shake hands with any elected official who dodges their questions or flat-out lies.

Walkers and runners will certainly love the GLOVE. When an off-leash dog rushes at them, an electrified hand can safely defuse the situation — not by “petting” the unleashed dog into submission, for the animal is not to blame; rather, by zapping the irresponsible dog owner for not controlling their pet.

Ditto, except with the voltage set to “medium well,” for any dog owner who fails to pick up after Fido does his business.

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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.

Small Voices, Big Performance

by Woody

The first concert I ever attended, in my teens half a century ago to see Fleetwood Mac at the height of their superstardom in an outdoor stadium in Southern California, remains perhaps my most memorable — but not because it was a fantastic show.

Rather, it was unforgettable because they did not put on a show at all thanks to a windy landslide-powerful storm that blew in shortly before the band was to take the stage, forcing a literal rain-check cancelation.

Another concert, a few years later, also remains unforgettable — also for an unfortunate reason. Held inside Inglewood’s Fabulous Forum, safe from an unfabulous rainout, my buddies and I arrived very early and decided to stay in our car in the parking lot and listen to the album “Tommy” instead of going in to see the who-are-they band that was opening for The Who.

We timed things perfectly and found our seats during The Who’s opening song.

Or so we thought.

After the electrifying concert ended, including a handful of encores, Keven, George and I grumbled our surprise and disappointment that they hadn’t played “Baba O’Riley — to which a fan next to us told we three tardy idiots, “They opened with it and it was amazing!”

Vowing “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” I have been fortunate to see some other memorable concerts, all without missing the opening song, including Paul McCartney, James Taylor a few times, Tom Petty, and, yes, Fleetwood Mac under a roof, to name a fab four of my favorites.

Big names are wonderful, but to my concert honor roll I added a new performance last weekend by the small attendees of the annual Crescendo Summer Music Camp. Their hour-long songfest, held in the Camarillo United Methodist Church, was nothing short of magical.

Magical does not mean flawless, for herding two dozen kindergarteners and first-graders onstage and into proper alignment is bound to have a lost sheep or two, so to speak, that needs a shepherd to guide it home.

Expectedly, not every note was sung in key, nor every dance step executed in sync — or even executed at all. Too, the sixth- and seventh-grade handbells symphony, under the expert direction of camp co-director Kristi VanKeersbilck, occasionally rang notes a fraction early, or late — but every note was struck with visible joy on the bellringers’ faces.

And that was the real magic of the concert — the joy on the faces of the 98 young performers and their eight music teachers’ countenances as well. Joy being highly contagious, the packed pews were also filled with the sunbeam smiles of siblings, parents, and grandparents, including my wife and me to watch our 7-year-old granddaughter Maya sing “I Am a Pizza” with laughter in her eyes and “You Are My Sunshine” with welling moisture in ours.

Another highlight was “Do Re Mi” sung by second- and third-graders, their rendition rivaling the Trapp children’s in my opinion.

Similarly, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” was a roaring success and Prince’s “1999” was royally good; Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber, and Earth Wind and Fire songs were also well worthy of applause.

But my favorite performance, most assuredly, was the finale. Under the guidance of co-camp director Connie Halpern (belovedly know as “Mrs. Fig,” who used to own The Bookworm bookstore in Camarillo), the Crescendo Campers took the stage en masse, spilling into the wings on either side, and sang — and signed with their hands — “Heal the World.”

Unlike “Baba O’Riley,” I would not have missed it for the world.

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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.

Mourning Beloved Irish Musical Poet

by Woody

Irish poet-singer-songwriter Glen Hansard died last week, tragically and far too young at age 56, leaving behind a wife and three-year-old son. As evidenced by the viral outpouring of grief on social media, he also left behind more fans worldwide than he could have possibly known he had — including me.

My son first introduced me to Hansard’s indie-folk music 20 years ago, and my daughter and I had a truly masterpiece evening together at one of his concerts last October, as shared in this column from my archives…

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Sometimes, rare wonderful times, when everything seems to be going wrong it somehow all turns out wonderfully. Such was the case the other evening when a young child cried and technology pouted and traffic threw a tantrum – and serendipity just kept smiling over and again, and once more.

Ever since she was a toddler my daughter and I have gone on “Daddy Dates,” as she called them then, and still does, because to my great fortune she has not outgrown these special outings, just the two of us, even though she is now well into her thirties.

In one of my favorite photographs, Dallas, maybe 5 years old, wears a sunflower dress and holds a bouquet to match, and I am in a “tuxedo” which is what she called the sport coat she requested I wear. I, in turn, requested that when she was older if a boy did not open car doors and pull out her chair, she not give him another date.

Naturally, when she and I went to a concert in San Francisco’s Masonic Auditorium recently I opened doors and helped her into her seat because I do not want to be unworthy of future Daddy Dates.

This date almost ended before it even began because a tearful two-year-old did not want her mommy to leave. A delay that would surely make us late should have been frustrating, but instead it was actually a joy to watch my daughter soothe her own daughter with love and patience.

Heavy traffic, followed by a serpentine security line, then a brief snafu with our online tickets all conspired to make us miss the opening song. And yet, somehow, we made it to our seats literally five seconds before the house lights went down and the music rose up. It was as if serendipity winked and asked The Swell Season to wait specifically for us.

As for our seats, a birthday gift from my son, they were terrific: floor level, slightly left of the stage, and so close we could see Markéta Irglová’s fingers dancing – gently sometimes, other times frenetically and mesmerizingly, always seemingly perfectly – on the piano keys.

Similarly, the skill and passion of Glen Hansard strumming his acoustic guitar with speed and fury was a thrill to behold and explains the comet-shaped gash worn through its face just below the sound hole.

The Swell Season sang familiar old hits from the movie “Once” and new gems from their 2025 album “Forward,” but the highlight was the final encore, an acoustic rendition, sans microphones, with the ginger-and-grey-bearded Hansard magnetically leading 4,000 patrons in a goose-bumps beautiful sing-along of the classic American folk song “Passing Through” popularized long ago by Pete Seeger.

Joining in I was 11 again, transported back to elementary school when my beloved fifth-grade teacher Mr. Hawkins played guitar for sing-alongs.

Walking the city aimlessly after the concert, Dallas and I happened upon 608 Bush Street and serendipity smiled once more with a California Historical Society commemorative plaque noting that Robert Louis Stevenson, the great Scottish writer who penned “Treasure Island” and “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” briefly lived and wrote here in 1879 and 1880.

Our Jekyll-and-Hyde evening continued on the drive home with freeway traffic wheezing along as congested as lungs with pneumonia. Yet this, too, proved to be a silver lining because it wonderfully extended our time together.

Naturally, I walked my date to her front door – but there was no need to apologize to her father for missing curfew.

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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.

Broken In Bone, Not In Spirit

by Woody

Auden, my elfin three-year-old granddaughter, took a tumble the other day and despite landing on plush carpet fractured her left arm.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain said, and a poem in my family annals now includes these couplets: bed and sled, skating fall and basketball.

My daughter, long before she was Auden’s mommy, fell while roller-skating at slow speed and broke her left arm at age 10; a couple of years thereafter, my son, coincidentally also 10 at the time, broke his left arm playing basketball; and when I was 7, I too broke my left arm.

Four fractures, arms each, all in portside rhyme.

A brief trip down memory lane – rather, a sled ride down The Big Hill in my boyhood neighborhood in Ohio. Having reached the speed of a comet, I skidded off course through an icy turn…

CRASH!!!

…into a two-foot-high stout steel pole.

Brave Auden and me…

The pain screaming through my wrist and arm was nearly surpassed by the fear of my dad’s raised-voice scolding when he found out the Flexible Flyer I turned into bent steel and splintered wood – while also splintering my ulna and radius – had been “borrowed” from my friend’s big brother without asking.

At home, including at the table at dinner, I kept my winter coat on to cloak the swelling. Mom asked me to take it off. I kept it on. Dad insisted. Shedding the sleeve over my injured arm felt like peeling the skin off.

Mom, despite being a housewife not an orthopedist, without aid of an X-ray image instantly made an accurate diagnosis: “Oh, honey, you broke your arm!”

To which, family lore has it, I angrily huffed through tears: “I knew you’d say that!”

When I saw Auden seated at her kitchen table after bath time, refusing to put on a shirt because it hurt too much to move her arm, I quietly thought: “Oh, Audie, you broke your arm!” X-rays confirmed my silent diagnosis, albeit with twice the precision: it was fractured in two places.

Two hours in Urgent Care seemed like a week, but Auden waited patiently and bravely as we read books. When her name was finally called, she was greeted by doctors and technicians who not only provided expert medical treatment, they were experts at being friendly and warm and reassuring to a little girl in pain.

I won’t say Auden enjoyed getting X-rays taken (positioning her arm this way and that caused tears to flow anew) or getting a cast put on, but she did like staying up well past her bedtime.

She left Urgent Care with a smile having replaced her tears and with a “snazzy” – her newest word learned from her grandpa – fiberglass cast as colorful as a World Cup soccer jersey, a camouflage pattern of yellow, pink, blue, and green reaching from hand to shoulder.

Today’s casts are indeed snazzier than the plain white plaster ones of my youth, but the throwbacks had one advantage: friends and family could sign them whereas ink doesn’t take well to fiberglass.

It’s funny the small things we sometimes remember, even after half a century has slid by seemingly as fast as a sled down The Big Hill, and this remains indelible to me: my big brother Jimmy doodled a sledder on my cast and wrote: “Fast And Fearless!”

If I could I write on Auden’s slick cast without it smudging, I would quote from Shakespeare’s play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” when Helena says of her friend Hermia: “And though she be but little, she is fierce.”

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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.

Fair Makes Big-Eyed Kids of Us All

by Woody

The 152nd Ventura County Fair opening next week on July 29…

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The John Mellencamp song “County Fair” comes to my mind every summer with one lyric especially making me smile: “Kids with eyes as big as dollars / Rode all the rides.”

That, in a single image, sums up the Ventura County Fair to me – kids getting their thrills on carousels and trains, sky swings and the Tilt-a-Whirl, small roller coasters and the giant Ferris wheel. The latter always makes me think of two little girls.

The first girl, then age 5, went to her first County Fair alone with her father and on the drive home she could be heard softly whispering to herself, “Ferris wheel, Ferris wheel, Ferris wheel,” so as not to forget the name of her favorite of all the rides she rode.

Arriving home, the little girl – now my wife – raced inside and exclaimed: “Mom! I rode the merry-go-round!”

Another cherished Ferris wheel memory is captured in a framed 8-by-10 black-and-white photograph. Snapped candidly by former Star photographer Gary Phelps three decades past, before newspapers became colorful, it still hangs on my daughter’s childhood bedroom wall. Frozen in time, she is 4 years old with excited eyes as big as dollars. She is seated snugly beside her father – me – with one arm around her. We are both smiling as we soar skyward. It was her first VC Fair and made a lasting impression as one of her earliest childhood memories.

It is a magical memory of mine as well for the Fair makes kids of us all.

This year’s Fair theme is “Find Your Fun” and never has a challenge been easier. If not the rides, then the win-a-stuffed-animal games or various exhibits or concerts or culinary delights will give you eyes as big as silver dollars.

Legend has it Babe Ruth played an exhibition game a century ago in the mid-1920s at Seaside Park which is, and has been since 1914, the site for the Ventura County Fair that originated in 1874 at the Pierpont Bluffs. This claim to fame makes the current fairgrounds all the more special. After all, while throwing baseballs at milk bottles on the midway you can imagine yourself trying to strike out “The Sultan of Swat.”

The Fair is also special because of its spinning, dipping, whirling rides with G-forces to make a NASA astronaut’s stomach woozy.

Speaking of woozy, the Fair is special because the food can also make your stomach spin with concoctions that include almost anything imaginable served on a stick, deep-fried, or dipped in chocolate – or all three – and which the Star’s intrepid reporter Tom Kisken bravely samples and shares glutinous gastronomic reviews of annually.

The Fair is special because it serves as an excuse for young parents to play hooky from work for an afternoon.

The Fair is special because of the amazing exhibits of paintings and photography, handmade quilts and home-baked cakes, et cetera and so forth and so on.

The Fair is special because of the midway games, even if the basketball rims are too high and so bent out of round that Stephen Curry would be lucky to sink 1 out of 10.

The Fair is special because the carnies are such colorful characters.

The Fair is special because of the 4-H junior livestock auction and blue-ribbon rabbits the size of English bulldogs.

And the Ventura County Fair is most special of all because of the vertical merry-go-round overlooking the ocean. The seagull’s view atop the seaside Ferris wheel is even more magical if you are sitting beside a kid with eyes as big as silver dollars.

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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.

Golden Thoughts and Green Flashes

by Woody

In “Tortilla Flats,” John Steinbeck’s first novel of critical acclaim, the great author wrote: “Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning.”

As are my thoughts while running any time of the day.

Late afternoon is my preferred time to be fast afoot, after finishing my writing day at the keyboard, and therefore my slow and deep and golden thoughts often stretch into the golden hour of sunset. It is difficult to imagine a day, even one that has already been a masterpiece—but especially a salt-in-the-coffee kind of day—not being made sweeter while savoring a sunset during a run when the sky becomes a child’s finger painting in progress, a kaleidoscope of grape and strawberry colors swirling and flowing Van Gogh-like.

My favorite sunsets are seascapes. Of these, the most magical—and which I have seen only twice, both times while pausing during beach runs—feature a “green flash” when, at the exact instant the sun fully melts into the water’s horizon, there truly is a rare bright-green pinpoint flash of sunlight.

A sunset in Hawaii, albeit with no green flash…

On each occasion—the first running barefoot on the bronze-hued sand in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico; next in training shoes along a two-lane beachside road in Kona, Hawaii—I resumed my run feeling like I had a rising trade wind at my back and Hermes-like wings on my ankles.

On the same run that I saw the green flash in Kona, I momentarily watched two fishermen—one was a fisherboy, actually; grandfather and grandson, I surmised, the latter maybe ten years old. Though they were surfcasting, my thoughts turned to fly-fishing because it is the angling art my grandfather favored and gave me instruction in when I was a fisherboy.

The lessons were less than fully successful as I never mastered the rhythmic ten-to-two-o’clock ideal casting motion of the rod tip. Or, perhaps, what I learned simply took a good long while for me to appreciate because I now think running is my version of fly-fishing, affording respite from life’s busyness; a slice of quietude in a loud world; a brief escape from what needs escaping; time to myself for thoughts that are slow and deep and golden.

When I am out running on a beach or bike path, road or grass field, I am my father’s father patiently casting a hand-tied fly into a brook or stream or pond or lake. “The gods do not deduct from man’s allotted span the hours spent fishing,” Grandpa Ansel liked to say, quoting an old proverb, and this is my adopted rationale as well for my hours spent running—for which I celebrated my 23rd “Streakiversary” earlier this week of having run a minimum of three miles every single day since July 7, 2003.

Playful epigram aside, from time to time I ask myself: Is time spent running time well spent? After all, as Ernest Hemingway poignantly added in a postscript to a letter to a friend: “Time is the least thing we have of.”

My daily hour or two dedicated to running is not precious time misspent, the gods would agree with me I have come to believe, because it leaves me, as Walt Whitman wrote of walking, “enriched of soul.”

More angler wisdom, this time from Henry David Thoreau: “Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”

My own flash—green flash!—of insight from my Streak: it is not entirely the run I am after.

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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.

Appreciating What You Will Miss

by Woody

From my column archives, originally running in July of 2012, now updated slightly…

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“My kids. Nick. Spring. Fall. Waffles. The concept of waffles. Bacon.”

These are the first few things writer-filmmaker Nora Ephron listed in her short essay titled “What I Will Miss” in her fine, and final, book: “I Remember Nothing And Other Reflections.”

Also: “A walk in the park. The idea of a walk in the park. The park. Shakespeare in the Park. The bed. Reading in bed.”

It is a superb essay, like all of Ephron’s writing, but when I read it – not in bed, for I am not an in-bed reader – I remember thinking it seemed out of place; she was too young; this piece was for a future book.

I had missed the clues that seem so obvious now, such as the previous essay “What I Won’t Miss” (“Dry skin. E-mail. Funerals. Small print…”) and the Acknowledgements page that concluded, “And also, of course, my doctors.”

Like the marvelous writer she was, Ephron had told us without telling us. She was battling leukemia. A battle she lost the first week of summer in 2012 at age 71.

Here is what I hope, that Ephron wrote “What I Will Miss” long before she first became ill, under a different title, perhaps “What I Love Now.” Such a list is something we should all write, right now, whatever our age, to help us more fully appreciate these things today.

In this spirit here is a short rundown, off the top of my head, of “What I Love Now”…

My four young grandchildren. My two kids and their spouses. My wife. Family and great friends – and Murray, our boxer, who is both. (Murray, sadly, is now on my “What I Miss Now” list.)

The beach. The ocean. “The Old Man And The Sea.”

The Ventura Pier. The Channel Islands. A Pacific sunset with clouds painted in the sky the colors of flames.

Yosemite Falls. Niagara Falls. The fall colors.

Summer. Daylight Saving Time. Watching fireworks on the Fourth of July.

The smell of sunscreen, the smell in the air after it rains, the smell of Thanksgiving all afternoon long.

Fleetwood Mac. The Beatles. The Who. James Taylor.

Running along the beach, any beach; in a park, especially New York’s Central Park; in the sun, in the rain, in a road race; and the adventures of running in a new place.

Every book by my hero John Steinbeck, my daughter Dallas Woodburn, and my dearest of friends Ken McAlpine.

Newspapers. (Sadly, again, these are rapidly joining my “I Miss” list.)

A hot shower. A warm bed. A cold pint. Not in that order.

John Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success” and my favorite Wooden-ism: “Make each day your masterpiece.”

The last moments awake in bed after a long, full, masterpiece day. Even better with the sound of rain on the roof.

The sound of Vin Scully on the radio. (“I Miss.”)

Date nights. Van Gogh’s Starry Night. A personal museum of paintings by my son.

The simple grace and quiet strength of trees and rivers – and some people. People who have empathy and authenticity. Curious people who never stop learning.

Chocolate-chip ice cream. Chocolate-chip cookies. Chocolate chips. Chocolate.

Finishing writing something that I feel is as good as I can do.

Movies, which for this list today seems fitting to pick three by Nora Ephron, even though I get them confused: “When Harry Met Sally”, “Sleepless In Seattle”, and “You’ve Got Mail.”

And yes, waffles instead of pancakes, definitely.

My grandchildren. My kids and their spouses. Lisa. I know I already said this, but I want to emphasize it.

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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.

Wheels of Fortunate Kindness

by Woody

Three short stories, all taking place recently and involving wheels, but linked even more so by kindness.

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My writing desk in an upstairs loft overlooks an orchard and a well-traveled road. Every now and then I look up from my laptop and enjoy the view, and so it was the other morning I saw an SUV pull over and stop on the dirt shoulder abruptly enough to raise a small dust storm.

With the hazard taillights blinking, a woman driver got out and walked to the passenger side where she stood with phone in hand to her ear.

A short moment later, far too quickly for the person she had called to already arrive, a car so clean it could have just come from a car wash – and certainly would now need a rinse – stopped on the side of the road directly behind the SUV.

A male driver, seemingly middle-aged like the woman, got out and talked with her. From afar, they did not seem to know each other, much less be a husband coming to his wife’s aid.

He was, I believe, simply a Good Samaritan who had stopped, and stayed until a tow truck arrived, then left without a quick kiss or hug goodbye one would expect from a couple.

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A second tale, also involving four wheels, this time on a grocery cart.

Instead of a clichéd lone wobbly wheel, it was a lonely gentleman pushing the cart who seemed a little unsteady. This was certainly to be expected because, judging from his “World War II Air Force” ball cap, he was well into his 90s.

As I walked toward the store’s entrance, I watched across the way as the veteran returned his cart, quite far, to the return rack, a slow walk that seemed to take great effort.

It is said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who return their carts and those who don’t. When I exited the grocery, I learned there is a third category: a rare person who returns multiple stray carts, for the WWII vet was now bringing back a cart back from a different area of the parking lot.

While I had only bought a single bag’s worth of groceries, and thus had no cart to return, I was now inspired to retrieve what appeared to be (for now) the last orphaned cart.

When I crossed paths with the nonagenarian, he offered me a handshake and said, “You’re a good man.” Surveying the parking lot, he added: “It looks much better. I think I’ll go home now.”

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A third scene, this time featuring a two-wheeler.

The bicycle was of the e-bike variety that are, too often, ridden too fast and too carelessly. Kid e-cyclists, especially, seem to make drivers hit their brakes and pedestrians jump from harm’s way.

And yet the other day I saw a gang of teen e-bikers riding around at a local park, safely and sanely, laughing contagiously and bothering no one.

The best part, however, was when one of the kids peeled away from his friends and raced across a soccer field; jumped off his e-bike almost before it had come to a compete skidding stop; looked both ways for traffic; then ran into the street to retrieve an errant soccer ball before a car flattened it.

The teen boy hopped back on his e-bike, fully inflated rescued soccer ball under one arm, and delivered it to a youth player on the field.

I am certain the WWII vet would have given him a handshake.

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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.

Father’s Day: Experiencing Poetic Role Reversal

by Woody

This Sunday will be my son’s third Father’s Day and one of my own greatest joys as a dad has been watching him as a dad.

Truth be told, I actually got a glimpse of my son as a father a decade ago when a line of poetry by William Wordsworth – “The Child is father to the Man” – played out when I was visiting him, then 27 years old, in New York City.

I embraced this turnabout as happily as I embraced him at the airport. In fact, his surprise greeting at baggage claim was the beginning of our role reversals.

I had planned to take the subway from JFK and meet my son at his apartment in Lower Manhattan. Worried about me navigating the subway system, he covertly trekked out to meet me. A very father-like thing.

This played out again and again the rest of my visit: my son insisted on carrying my luggage; gave me his bed; lent me the jacket off his back when the night air turned cold.

Father and son-turned-father and his son…

The most dramatic way my Child was father to this Man occurred when, in similar fashion to how I used to take him to Ventura’s now shuttered H.P. Wright Library, he took me to the venerable New York Public Library.

On the way there, I was jostled in a rugby-like scrum getting on a crowded subway car and my right index finger got sliced open, as if by a long stroke of a potato feeler, by the closing door. Firm pressure with a napkin largely stanched the bleeding.

We exited at the next stop and my son located a pharmacy and bought Band-Aids and tape. But when I removed the napkin the red floodgates reopened.

“I’m taking you to get stitches right now,” the Child-turned-father-of-the-Man demanded.

At Urgent Care, my son signed me in and did all the necessary paperwork. He even accompanied me into the treatment room as had I with him numerous times long ago.

The first anesthetic injection made me curse and the second was even worse, bringing tears to my eyes. The whole while my son held my other hand and told me how brave I was being. He then distracted me with laughter – kept me in stitches, if you will – as I received 18 sutures.

To be honest, the painful mishap was worth the experience of seeing this side of my boy-turned-man.

For the remainder of my visit he kept the tables turned. He changed my bandage. He focused our itinerary on me. He led and I followed.

At a jazz club one evening, my son and I arrived early and were rewarded with the best table in the joint. Moments before the performance began, however, the manager asked if we would consider changing places with an elderly couple too feeble physically to sit on tall stools in the rear of the room.

Because my son and I are tall, the manager felt we could still see the show but emphasized: “You really don’t need to. I just wanted to ask.”

Without a beat’s pause, my son replied with enthusiastic sincerity: “Of course they can have our seats.”

We went from first row to worst row – and I could not have been happier or more proud.

Wordsworth’s poem also includes this stanza: “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky.”

So, too, does my heart leap up beholding the kind of Man my Child has become, and the rainbow of a father Greg is to little Jayden and his big sister Amara.

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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.

Commencement Address for Classes of 2026

by Woody

“Ladies and gentlemen of the class of (2026): Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.”(1)

“The best advice I can give anybody about going out into the world is this: Don’t do it. I have been out there. It is a mess.”(2) “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go for it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”(3)

“Find your Passion with a capital P!”(4) “The fireworks begin today. Each diploma is a lighted match. Each one of you is a fuse.”(5) “You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world’s happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely or discouraged. Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime.”(6)

“Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.”(7) “Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine.”(8) “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”(9)

“Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.”(10) “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”(11) “Always, always, always, always, always, always, always do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”(12) “Fortune befriends the bold.”(13)

“It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.”(14) “You cannot achieve mountaintop dreams with downhill effort.”(15) “And will you succeed? Yes! You will indeed! 98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.”(16)

“Make today your masterpiece.”(17) “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”(18) “You can’t do anything about yesterday, and the only way to improve tomorrow is by what you do right now.”(19)

“Do not judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.”(20) “The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit.”(21)

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”(22) “Learn as if you were to live forever; live as if you were to die tomorrow.”(23) “When you get, give; when you learn, teach.”(24)

“Wise are those who learn that the bottom line doesn’t always have to be their top priority.”(25) “We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.”(26) “If you don’t make an effort to help others less fortunate than you, then you’re just wasting your time on Earth.”(27)

“There is a good reason they call these ceremonies ‘commencement exercises’ – graduation is not the end, it’s the beginning.”(28) “When you leave here, don’t forget why you came.”(29) “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”(30)

“When you leave home, you take home with you.”(31)

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(1-Mary Schmich. 2-Russell Baker. 3-Howard Thurman. 4-Wayne Bryan. 5-Eward Koch. 6-Dale Carnegie. 7-James M. Barrie. 8-Anthony J. D’Angelo. 9-Ralph Waldo Emerson 10-Ray Bradbury. 11-e.e. cummings. 12-Ralph Waldo Emerson. 13-Emily Dickinson. 14-Edmund Hillary. 15-Woody Woodburn. 16-Dr. Seuss. 17-John Wooden. 18-Mark Twain. 19-John Wooden. 20-Robert Louis Stevenson. 21-Nelson Henderson. 22-Henry David Thoreau. 23-John Wooden. 24-Maya Angelou. 25-William Arthur Ward. 26-Winston Churchill. 27-Wayne Bryan. 28-Orrin Hatch. 29-Adlai E. Stevenson. 30-Dr. Seuss. 31-Maya Angelou.)

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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.