Category Archives: Uncategorized

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.

‘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.