Tag Archives: love

Airborne Kites Make The Heart Soar

by Woody

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

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From Woody’s column archives, June 2019…

On a recent afternoon with springtime in the rising breeze, something else wonderful was in the air: a kite.

Shortly, a second kite took flight as well.

Like bookends separated by a row of volumes, these two park scenes played out with an hour sandwiched between. Each vignette made me smile. Together, they made my heart soar to the clouds.

Before proceeding, a third kite bears mention – this one flown a quarter-century ago by my daughter, then age four. It was her first kite and she had impatiently waited many days for the wind to be steady enough for a maiden flight.

If memory serves, and I am certain it does for this remains a cherished image, My Little Girl skipped to the park while happily singing from the film “Mary Poppins” these happy lyrics: “Let’s go fly a kite and send it soaring. Up through the atmosphere. Up where the air is clear…”

After getting her 99-cent rainbow kite airborne, I handed the string to My Little Girl and her reaction, along with a beaming smile, was this: “Daddy, it feels like catching a big fish in the sky.”

This was a wonderful observation considering My Little Girl had never yet felt the tug of a fish.

Which returns me to the first kite I sighted this spring. Another little girl, perhaps six years old instead of four, was flying a triangle decorated with a unicorn instead of a rainbow. Watching from afar, I readily imagined she also was likely thinking of fishing in the sky…

…because instead of holding a spool of cotton string, this little girl controlled her kite with nylon line spooling out from a fishing rod. What an ingenious father she has, I thought.

Too, I thought back to climbing a tree to retrieve My Little Girl’s rainbow kite after the cheap string snapped and it fluttered into the clutches of a high branch. After the rescue, we promptly went to a kite store and bought nylon “rope” as she called the heavier string.

Time passes, but not all things change. The little girl with the unicorn kite tethered by fishing line seemed as excited as if Christmas morning arrived on a shining June afternoon. When the breeze held its breath too long, she skipped off to retrieve her fallen unicorn; held it overhead; then giggled when her father got the kite back up where the air is clear.

I could have watched this all afternoon, but too soon the happy pair departed hand-in-hand.

Not five minutes later, a second kite flyer arrived and the contrast could hardly have been more striking. Now I watched a gentleman, in his seventies I guessed, and alone, sailing a stunt kite without a fishing reel but with multiple strings that allowed him to make it zigzag and spin and even dive to within inches of the grass before soaring again.

Again, the fishing metaphor was clear for the gentleman was wearing a flannel shirt, stained pants, and brim hat that begged to be decorated with tied flies. Sitting in a folding beach chair, he seemed to belong lakeside or on an ocean’s pier.

As the gentleman flew his kite, seated patiently as if waiting for a big fish to strike his line, my mind returned to the little girl I had just seen; and then to My Little Girl; and in turn one more lovely thought…

…I imagined the gentleman’s mind was also wandering, carried back in time on the spring breeze to memories of flying a kite with his own little girl.

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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.

First Day of School Goodbye Tears

by Woody

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

From Woody’s column archives, August of 2012, the sentiments resurfacing recently while dropping his daughter Dallas off at the airport following a solo visit home from the Bay Area where she now lives.

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When it comes to saying hello to a new school year, the words of 19th Century French novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr seem perfectly apropos: “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.”

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

On her very first “first” day of school—at Ventura’s TLC Preschool—my daughter cried when I dropped her off in the classroom. It was a good 10 minutes before she was finally able to release me from her tight sobbing hug.

While the morning goodbyes slowly grew from tearful to cheerful as that school year progressed, the first day of TLC the following year was once again a messy runny-nosed red-eyed event.

Her first day of kindergarten at Poinsettia Elementary School was barely easier; fighting to hold back her tears with all her might, she failed.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Her first day of first grade was tearless, but certainly not fearless. Second grade was a little smoother still; her first day at Cabrillo Middle School better yet; and the first day of her senior year at Ventura High was a dancing cakewalk, but on her first day of college, or rather Move-In Day, my then-18-year-old daughter once again became a tearful 3-year-old preschooler. Instead of emblazoned with “USC” her sweatshirt could have read “TLC.”

My wife’s salty floodgates opened in turn, but I managed to maintain my composure as we walked away down the hall. My mistake was pausing to look back, hoping to see an empty doorway and thus my daughter inside her room having happily begun her college life. Instead, she was still in the hallway waving at me, her face sad and wet, her eyes red and puffy, her nose runny—and never have I seen her look more beautiful, unless it was on the first day of a school year when she was 3 or 4 or 5.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Do not be mistaken by her homesick hugs. My daughter is strong and confident and accomplished and embraces adventure. She has traveled extensively and thrice studied abroad. She loves arriving at new places—it is just she also hates leaving familiar old ones.

Yes, she has always been great at hellos and lousy at goodbyes and this is a lovely quality. Her tight hugs of greeting make one feel deeply loved; her wet envelopments upon parting somehow even more so.

Things change. Instead of a school bus, my daughter took an airplane this year on her way to her last first day of school, at Purdue, where she enters her final year of its M.F.A. creative writing program.

Things stay the same. At the Rubicon for passengers to continue on into the long security line at the airport it was a good five minutes until my daughter released me from her sobbing embrace. Over the years we have tried pulling-the-Band-Aid-off-quickly, but such hurried goodbyes causes more tears, not fewer. And so we linger, aging father and Daddy’s Little Girl Still.

After we eventually parted and I walked away a short distance down the terminal hallway, I did what I always do: I turned around for one final glimpse at her. I can never resist. Usually, she is well into the security line by then and can only smile and wave.

This time, however, she was not yet trapped. A grandmotherly woman watching the scene unfold said aloud, but not unkindly: “Rookie mistake. Never look back.”

I disagree. I was rewarded with seeing my 25-year-old daughter age 3 again as she rushed over to give me one last wet-and-wonderful first-day-of-school hug goodbye.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

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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.

Some days glow with ‘Moonlight’

by Woody

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

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In one of the all-time great movies, “Field of Dreams,” one of the all-time great cinematic characters, Dr. Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, recalling the one and only game he appeared in in the Major Leagues, a game that ended with him on deck without getting his first big-league at bat, makes an all-time wise observation:

“We just don’t recognize life’s most significant moments while they’re happening. Back then I thought, ‘Well, there’ll be other days.’ I didn’t realize that that was the only day.”

Yes, hindsight often affords the clarity to see that a seemingly common day was an “only day” that sparkled like midnight moonlight on a mirror-smooth pond.

Indeed, seven months after my eldest brother passed away, with the thick fog of mourning slowly burning away by the sunshine of warm memories, I realize the bright rays that are dearest to me are not the big moments – not graduation days or birthdays or weddings, even when I was his best man.

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wisely wrote. “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year and this time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”

The best moments, the most significant memories with Jimmy, were summer days swimming in a rural pond and nights catching fireflies; him teaching me to ride a two-wheeler and drive a stick shift; playing Euchre and laughing, playing board games and laughing, playing pranks on Mom and laughing; shooting pool and throwing darts and racing slot cars and HO trains, all in our basement; and so on, the ordinary coming into focus across time as special; halcyon day after day being an “only day.”

With this in mind, I recently wrote the following day in my heart, an ordinary day that even down the road I cannot imagine looking back at as being a day of significance, yet thanks to an Emerson-ian frame of mind it was a “very good one.”

The day started with a banana that was, to my taste, perfectly in the ripeness sweet spot – not a little too green and firm and slightly bitter as the day before; not a tad too brown and soft as would be the case tomorrow.

Next, at the keyboard, words flowed from my mind to my fingertips to the screen as effortlessly as water down a swift stream. Later, on my afternoon run, the miles flowed as easily as the typed words had and running an errand soon thereafter my car flowed through traffic like a flying magic carpet.

After initially just missing a left-turn green arrow, I altered my route home and went straight ahead when the red light turned green…

… and proceeded to make every single traffic signal, 17 greens in all, in a row, impossibly. (I counted the lights the next time I drove the route, faring much worse.)

Admittedly, twice I gamed the situation a wee bit by tilting the pinball machine, so to speak, slowing down noticeably so as to still be rolling along when a red light in the distance turned green by the time I reached it. All the same, it was remarkable and put a smile in my heart.

The rest of my day was similar, not because of big things worth recounting here, but rather, I suspect, simply because I was in the frame of mind to appreciate the moonlight shining upon small things.

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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.

This Rom-Com Stands Test of Time

by Woody

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

For Valentine’s Day today, here is a love story from Woody’s column archives from four years ago…

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Upon meeting a married couple, from newlyweds to having celebrated their diamond anniversary, I love to ask how they met. Blind date or meet cute or online app match, they always light up in the retelling – as do I in the listening.

In the hopes that you feel likewise, let me share a synopsis of my in-progress screenplay with the working title, “When Woody Met Lisa.” Instead of starring dark-haired Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan with sunshine curls, the leading characters will be played by shaggy ginger-blond Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams as a brunette.

Our very first date at UCSB…

The movie opens on the campus of UC Santa Barbara, in a dining hall, at dinnertime. There are three hot-food lines and Woody intentionally chooses the longest one. When he finally reaches the front we see why: the server, even with cascading locks tucked up in a hair net, is the prettiest girl he has ever seen.

“Lasagna and tater tots, please,” the freshman boy says, swallowing any attempt to flirt because the sophomore beauty is out of his league. A short montage follows showing him going through her line the entire school year without even learning her name.

Fast-forward two years to a Christmas party at the off-campus apartment of two of Woody’s wild-and-crazy former freshman dorm mates. Across the crowded room, Woody notices a girl who makes his heart play a faster drumbeat. She is wearing a light-blue sweater, and no hair net, but no sooner does he finally try to strike up a conversation than the keg runs dry and the party breaks up and everyone decides to go to another friend’s bash.

Everyone, that is, except Lisa, who has promised a different friend she would drop by her party and heads off alone in the opposite direction.

…and still feel like were dating all these years later!

“Wait up. I’ll walk you there,” Woody quickly, and wisely, blurts out and the Nora Ephron-like fun begins. At one point, Woody gets Lisa a beer while she goes to the restroom – when she reappears he has cleverly positioned himself underneath a hanging sprig of mistletoe. Lisa accepts the red Solo Cup with one hand and with the other leads Woody onto the dance floor, thwarting his kissing bandit gambit.

All is not lost, however, as Woody steals a kiss later that night – with no assist from mistletoe – and the two go on a dinner date the following evening and promptly fall in love.

As in all good rom-coms, just when things are going perfectly a break-up strikes like a lightning bolt. Both start dating others and at this low point, with Woody KO’d by the flu, Lisa brings him an Easter basket filled with a chocolate bunny and other candy, his favorite fresh bagels and cream cheese, and an array of cold and cough medicines. Woody’s fever instantly soars even higher with lovesickness and to this day he counts his lucky stars he fell ill.

Also to this day, by the way, Lisa insists she never noticed the mistletoe the night of their meet cute.

Flash forward four decades, to upcoming September 4th, when the two lovebirds will celebrate their 43rd wedding anniversary: Woody raises a glass and offers a toast at dinner, quoting a line in a novel by one of his favorite authors, Brian Doyle, where the narrator, recalling his first kiss with his future wife many, many years earlier, says: “How can you not stay in love with the girl who was with you the very moment you were introduced to true happiness.”

Our movie ends, naturally, with a kiss beneath a sprig of mistletoe.

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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.

Stung in the Heart by a Yellowjacket

by Woody

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

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Let me begin, despite eyes blurred by tears as I write this, with a laugh.

It was a hot summer day in my boyhood, in Ohio, in the late 1960s. My two older brothers and I, our younger sister too, had gone swimming in a pond.

Suddenly, on the short walk back to a weekend cabin, Jim, the eldest and five years my senior, started yelling and hopping wildly about as if dancing on red-hot coals. He was 13 or 14 years old and gangly, already his full adult height of 6-foot-3 but skinny as a brand-new No. 2 pencil with a shock of hair as red as its eraser.

The reason for the impromptu Irish jig was because, somehow, a yellowjacket had gotten inside his cutoff jeans swimsuit and was stinging and biting him, again and again, over and over, in the crotch while Jimmy frantically tried to unbutton and unzip and peel off his clingy wet shorts. For us three sibling spectators, it was side-stitch hilarious.

Today, my heart feels like it has been assaulted by a dozen angry yellowjackets: Jim died earlier this week, mid-morning Monday to be precise, a midsummer day with too much lovely sunshine for such searing sorrow. He was 14 months shy of the Biblical “threescore years and ten,” and oh, god, am I furious at cancer for stealing his wonderful life.

The heinous disease attacked relentlessly over the past seven years, but Jim valiantly kept extending the battle. He lost both his ears, literally, but never his bottomless sense of humor. At a wedding reception in a museum a few years back, Jim removed an ear prosthesis and positioned it on a tooth of a replica dinosaur skeleton that was not roped off. As he posed for a selfie, a docent materialized and gently commanded: “Sir, please remove your ear from the dinosaur’s mouth.” T-Rex-sized laughter was the norm whenever Jimmy was around.

A hundred columns would not suffice in telling all about my big brother, but this single sentence speaks volumes: Jim was more of a dad to me than my dad was. The latter was overly busy with his surgical career and so it was Jimmy who showed me how hit a baseball and throw a football spiral; taught me to play cribbage and euchre; helped with my homework.

Jim showing off his new “ear” prostheses!

When I was very young and would have a nightmare, it was Jimmy’s bed I climbed into—and he would let me stay until morning. When I was older, he gave me the sex talk and taught me to drive a stick shift with nary an angry word when I grinded the gears of his Pinto.

Throughout my adulthood, Jimmy remained a role model and was there for me in big ways and small. A small example: he would text me when one of my columns especially delighted him. How dearly I am going to miss those big-bro kudos.

A big example: during our forever-goodbye visit mere days ago, Jimbo reached for my hand and held it and squeezed it as he whispered, using a private nickname he gave me when I was maybe 5 and ever after always called me by: “Grog, you’ve been a great little brother.” Tears instantly overflooded my eyes, yet helium filled my heart.

Jim married his college sweetheart, was a Girl Dad three times over, and eventually had seven grandchildren—and his next greatest love was being a surgeon. I think his blood flowed Scrubs Green in color, not red. His patients absolutely adored him; nurses and fellow doctors, likewise.

Let me end with another summer memory, this one when Jim was in medical school, in New York, and I flew out to spend a couple weeks with him. At one point he shared that while learning to insert a catheter they each had to do so to their own self. I flinched empathetically and said something like, “Ouch! That must really sting.”

Not missing a beat, Jimmy replied: “It wasn’t nearly as bad as a yellowjacket in my shorts.”

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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 More Mess, The Merrier

by Woody

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here) and orderable at all bookshops.

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Imagine a river, much like a long-long-long run-on sentence with no periods or semicolons, only commas serving as bends in the banks slowing the flow, and you get an idea of the five days leading up to Memorial Day at Casa Woodburn, and I am most certain you have had your own wonderfully idyllic yet hectically chaotic activity-packed string of days as fast paced as water rapids where you felt like you didn’t have a chance to catch your breath, and so for the fun of it here is a Great Mississippi of a single sentence about the human floodwaters that swept through every room of our house, with toys and coloring books and crayons scattered like driftwood on the beach after heavy surf,

with baby monitors here and strollers there and diaper paraphernalia everywhere, and this was just in the family room suddenly decorated in a mix of Colonial Clutter and Modern Mayhem, yet one dares not wish, even the briefest of moments, for the messiness to miraculously vanish because you know all too well that all too soon it will all be picked up and packed up and put away out of sight, for as the philosopher Dr. Seuss, whose books were among the widespread debris, wisely said, “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened,” and what happened was our daughter and her husband and their 5-year-old and toddler daughters, both with more energy than a rooftop of solar panels on a sunny summer’s day, invaded from the north and from the south came the troops of our son’s family with an 8-month-old daughter, and instantly the empty nest began chirping happily and loudly as the large canopy of a vibrant tree in springtime, but it should be noted that armies have marched on their stomachs with fewer provisions and possessions than the two SUVs that arrived filled bows to sterns with portable cribs and an inflatable mattress, with enough clothes seemingly for a month-long camping trip and still laundry needed to be washed, meanwhile food preparation similarly appeared to be a constant occurrence for despite Thanksgiving-worthy feasts that promised to have leftovers aplenty so that no cooking would be necessary the following evening, somehow by the time the sun streaked across the sky to early afternoon the overflowing cornucopia of Tupperware was soaking in the sink, and speaking further of food, sandwiched between breakfast and post-dinner bubble-bath tsunamis were daily excursions to play parks, the beach, the gorgeous-viewed Botanical Gardens atop Ventura’s hillside, if you haven’t gone there you must, and on top of the long holiday weekend it was a combination birthday celebration for my daughter and me, on top of this too there was our father-daughter book signing at Timbre Books as she and I both have new novels out, and speaking of books I would be greatly remiss not to mention a trip to the library to get the 5-year-old her first library card which deserves its own column shortly.

But now, as you read this, the kitchen island is deserted of chaos. Fresh laundry is not piled on the family room couch, waiting to be folded. The coffee table again has books and magazines neatly stacked upon it; and also the TV remote, for it no longer needs to be hidden from curious young hands.

Too, the coffee tabletop has lingering crayon marks and a few new permanent stains where coasters weren’t used for children’s water bottles. I look at these mars and scars and my reaction is no shade of annoyance, but rather to smile.

Because it all happened.

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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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Tears and Smiles Share Same Date

by Woody

Today’s calendar page, January 26, plays Ping Pong with my emotions—tears doink-plunk! smile doink-plunk! heartbreak doink–plunk! joy.

Indeed, this date, more than any other of the year, in my family holds a story seemingly written in the stars and typed by the fingers of Fate. Coincidence alone seems overmatched in explaining it.

Coincidence, defined as “the occurrence of events that happen at the same time by accident but seem to have some connection,” is my sharing a birth date with my wife’s grandfather or my son and my daughter’s youngest daughter sharing their birthday. The odds are only 1-in-366 against these horoscopic connections.

Coincidence, mixed with healing serendipity, was my first grandchild being born on the one-year anniversary of the night, nearly the very hour, that the Thomas Fire razed my childhood home. For my father especially, who had still lived in the house, a date of gloom was turned into one of bloom in celebrating the birth of his newest great-granddaughter.

Multiple memorable events and coincidental anniversaries happen every day of the year, of course, which is why The Star and most newspapers run daily “On This Date In History” summaries. A January 26th coincidence, for example, is Michigan becoming a state (1837), Louisiana seceding from the Union (1861), and Virginia rejoining the Union (1870).

January 26, however, has surpassed coincidence for my loved ones and me.

Shuffling the chronological order, let me begin with “On This Date” in 2003 when a drunk driver speeding down a city street at 70 mph rear-ended me as I was stopped at a red light. My life, fast as a finger snap, was forever changed as I suffered a ruptured disc in my neck causing permanent nerve damage in my left arm, hand and fingers.

Still, it was not fully a tragedy. Fate, after cruelly cursing me, then smiled sympathetically and let me somehow walk away from a hunk of twisted steel and shattered glass that had seconds earlier been a Honda Civic. Indeed, two police officers at the scene told me they could not believe I survived.

The 26th of January 2015 offered no such blessed fortune for one of my daughter’s dearest friends. In India for a wedding, Celiné and her younger brother were passengers in a taxi when it was broadsided by a city bus. The brother walked away, the big sister did not, her 26-year-old life extinguished in a blink’s instant.

Two crashes on the same date can be brushed off as tearful coincidence. But there are three smiles, too. On January 26, five years before my car crash, my lovely niece Arianna was born; ten years ago, exactly one year before Celiné’s deathly accident, my daughter met her husband; and five years ago, another January 26th love story, when Holly, a college roommate and third “sister” with my daughter and Celiné, received a marriage proposal.

Holly’s fiancé, now her husband for she enthusiastically said “yes!” when he got down on bended knee, says he did not purposely choose the date for its significance in an effort to magically metamorphose an anniversary of sorrow into one with a measure of joy.

And yet it is possible that Justin’s subconscious helped guide him to the fateful date. Or, perhaps, January 26 magically chose the couple that is now a happy family of three.

I like to think the latter. As Mr. Hemingway wrote in the closing line of dialogue in his novel “The Sun Also Rises,” spoken in—oh, Celiné—a taxi:

“ ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’ ”

Yes, it is.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

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. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Make The Fresh Spaghetti Sauce

by Woody

Where I read it I cannot recall, but the lesson remains indelible: “Make the fresh spaghetti sauce.”

The anecdote was about a woman unexpectedly, and far too prematurely, widowed. Months later, she was walking in a park with a friend and, among chitchat, asked about dinner plans.

The friend nonchalantly said her husband that very morning had mentioned a craving for her homemade spaghetti sauce. But the day had gotten away from her without going to the store for fresh tomatoes and she didn’t feel like stopping on the way home. Sauce from a jar would suffice.

The two friends continued their strolling visit for a while when, out of the blue, the widow said softly, but with weighted feeling: “Make the fresh spaghetti sauce.”

As she was picking out fresh tomatoes at the grocery shortly thereafter, the friend realized the widow was not really talking about a homemade dinner. The wisdom had been about making the little extra effort for someone you love, whenever you have the chance, because that special person could disappear from you life — by death suddenly, yes, but also simply growing up and moving away.

In other words, bake a cake even if it’s not their birthday; play a board game or go on a walk when you’d rather read; take them to a concert you wouldn’t choose.

This past weekend, I made the fresh spaghetti sauce for my 33-year-old son by taking him to his first NFL game. This may seem surprising given that I was a sports columnist for three decades and you would surely imagine I had taken my son to countless pro football games over the years. As the maxim has it, the cobbler’s children go barefoot.

Truth be told, my son and daughter were so busy, busy, busy with their own sports games and running races growing up that there just never seemed time to go to pro sporting events together.

Also at play, however, is that when they were in their early teens I was rear-ended by a speeding drunk driver at the 2003 Super Bowl in San Diego. Nerve damage in my neck and hand forced me to leave sports writing. In fact, that was the last NFL — or NBA or Major League Baseball — game I attended because I have had no desire to not sit in the press box and not have the rush of deadline pressure.

What changed Sunday? The Cleveland Browns, my beloved team since boyhood and still, were playing the L.A. Rams in SoFi Stadium and for his birthday gift my son, who likewise bleeds burnt orange, wanted to go.

While I have covered a handful of Super Bowls, even more NBA Finals and a few World Series, I dare say this regular-season game instantly ranks as my all-time favorite because of my companion. Despite being conditioned to “no cheering in the press box,” I became hoarse from yelling and high-fiving and chest bumping my son through the first three and a half excitingly close quarters…

…before the Browns showed their true colors by boinking a game-tying PAT kick off the upright and promptly fell apart in trademark fashion to get blown out.

A Browns’ victory would, naturally, have been wonderful. All the same, my son and I could not possibly have had a more masterpiece day. As dyed-in-the-wool Brownies fans, there is even a certain charm in a fourth-quarter meltdown.

Indeed, I am so glad I made the fresh spaghetti sauce — even if it figuratively wound up spilled all over our brand-new throwback No. 32 Jim Brown jerseys.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

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. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

The Rest of the Story About ‘Bruno’

by Woody

And now, as radio legend Paul Harvey used to begin his popular segment, the rest of the story…           

Back in December when my second granddaughter, Auden, was born, I mentioned in this space that her older sister Maya calls me Bruno instead of Grandpa or some other variation of.

Readers continue to ask me where this nickname came from and Father’s Day weekend, since my daughter and son originally gave me this pet name, seems an apropos time to share the answer.

“Masterpiece Maya” and her “Bruno.”

To begin, let me go backwards. I had a great aunt named Wibbie – well, that is what my siblings and I called her because that is what my dad called his aunt ever since he was a little boy because that is what came out when he tried to say Elizabeth.

Another nickname from a boyhood, mine, that stuck – my oldest brother, in reference to a character in the B.C. caveman-era comic strip, began calling me Grog and still does.

Shakespeare’s Juliet famously says, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet.” Similarly, what’s in a nickname can smell as sweet as any rose.

Sweet names I call my son Greg include Little Grog or Grog, Brunjun (a contraction of Bruno Jr., stay tuned), Gregburn (a contraction of first and last names) and its abbreviation GB, Funcle (because Maya does), and Greggie, but rarely Greg.

My daughter Dallas once asked me why I have so many nicknames for her – Dally, Dalburn, Bingo-bum (a word she made up at age 4 and often called me), and Meatloaf (as obscure as Wibbie for Elizabeth) to name a handful – and I answered: “Because I love you far more than a single nickname can possibly hold.”

“Why Meatloaf?” you now ask. One long-ago day I was picking Dallas up at kindergarten and as she came out of the classroom I overheard her best friend, a boy she had gone to daycare with since age 2, tell her, “Bye, meatloaf.”

On our drive home, I asked why the boy had called her meatloaf and she giggled and explained, after very likely first calling me a “silly bingo-bum,” that he had actually said, “Bye, my love.”

I thought that was just about the cutest thing ever and my favorite private (until now) term of endearment for my daughter was born. She in turn still calls me Meatloaf and Bingo-bum and Daddy; my son calls me Big Grog and Pops; they both call me Dadburn and Bruno and, by extension, to them my wife and I are sometimes The Bruns. So many sobriquets, I like to think, because of so much love.

Now back to Bruno and its origins. When my daughter and son were quite young, about 6 and 4, there was a TV commercial for a local pizza chain that ended with the cartoon mascot declaring, “Bruno’s hungry!”

Kids being kids, they thought it was spit-your-milk-out hilarious when I began announcing dinnertime by saying in a loud mascot-mimicking voice: “Bruno’s hungry!”

They playfully started calling me Bruno and all these years later Maya now does as well; as will Auden, who by the way carries my mother Audrey’s nickname; as will their future cousin, Woodchip, which is how my son and his wife Jess – GorJess to him, Jessburn or JB to me – refer to their baby daughter due in three months, so loved that even in the womb she already has a nickname.

And now, as Paul Harvey would conclude, you know the rest of the story.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

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. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Part 2: From Cold War to Warm Heart

by Woody

Picking up where I left off last week…

“Your assignment,” Miss Bauer, my first-grade teacher, told the class while passing out oversized pieces of Manila art paper, “is to draw the most important person in the world.”

When it was time to share, my classmates showed off crayon pictures of baseball stars and football heroes, presidents and movie stars and other famous people, and I held up a portrait of a bespectacled man wearing a plaid fishing shirt, with a black doctor’s bag in one hand and a fly rod in the other.

“This is my grandpa,” I said happily, proudly.

My esteem for Grandpa Ansel, my paternal grandfather, has not diminished in the passing decades. As evidence, my son’s middle name is in his honor.

Grandpa Ansel, my two older brothers and me.

While my memories of Grandpa are about as thin as one of his fly rods, I do vividly recall the way he softly whistle-hummed when he was concentrating,such as when tying fishing flies; and also when he hugged me, the quiet lip music as soothing as a cat’s purr.

Here is something I else I have never forgotten. I was maybe 7 years old, which would mean it was the final year of Grandpa’s life for he died in 1968 at age 76, and I was playing with little green plastic army men. This being during the Cold War, my American mini-G.I. Joes were naturally shooting up evil Russian soldiers.

Grandpa interrupted my war games, getting down on hands and knees on the carpet, and told me, gently but earnestly, that Russian boys were no different than me – they liked to fish with their grandpas, ride bicycles with their friends and play sports with their brothers, and probably loved orange soda almost as much as I did. Of a hundred family stories I have heard about Grandpa, to me this one has always encapsulated the humanity and wisdom that was woven into the fabric of his being.

All these years later, I was recently told a new story from seven decades past that doubled the height of the lofty pedestal on which I view Grandpa. The gift remembrance came from a former patient of his, for Ansel was a longtime country physician in the small rural town of Urbana, Ohio.

In 1954, Suzie was a high school senior with a college boyfriend. Her mother snoopily intercepted a love letter, had reason to think her daughter might be pregnant, and took her to see Dr. Ansel Woodburn. That choice was made for two important reasons: four years earlier, Ansel had delivered Suzie’s youngest sister; perhaps more chiefly, Suzie’s family had since moved from their farm just outside of Urbana to Springfield, some 20 miles away, and her mother thought an out-of-town doctor might prevent gossip.

“Needless to say, my parents were very angry,” Suzie says, adding: “My dad was not kind to me at all and my mother was no nicer.”

While there was only icy acrimony at home, Suzie was embraced with great warmth in Ansel’s medical office.

“I have never told anyone, not even my four children, about this episode,” Suzie confided to me. “It happened so long ago and life has moved on with a great force to live each day looking forward.”

Here and now, with me sitting in her Camarillo living room, Suzie looked backward. What she saw, and shared, began with heartbreak but in the end put birdsong – no, a soothing whistle-hum as she also remembered my grandpa doing – in her heart as well as mine.

To be continued, and concluded, next week.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

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. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.