Tag Archives: love

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.

Valentine’s Day Is More Than Candy

by Woody

It is easy to view Valentine’s Day – which will once again sneak up, on tiptoes, on a lot of forgetful boyfriends and husbands a few days hence – through jaundiced eyes as a holiday contrived for selling greeting cards and flowers, fancy chocolates and fancier restaurant dinners.

Looking through long-stem roses colored glasses, however, Cupid’s big day always reminds me of weddings. This of course includes my own, although admittedly the ceremony and reception – held before nuptial videography became en vogue – are a blur. Forty years later, I wish we had a videotape to fill in our memories.

Indeed, after watching my beautiful bride walk down the aisle to meet me at the pulpit, everything else – the verse readings, the minister’s words, our vows and our first kiss as husband and wife, the giddy walk on air with helium in our shoes back down the aisle together, the reception line, toasts given, our first dance, even how in the world one of the groomsmen wound up in a swimming pool in his tux – is pretty much all lost in the fog of time.

Given a time-machine trip back to Sept. 4, 1982, I would make a concentrated effort to stop and smell the bridal bouquet, so to speak, and savor more specific moments from the whirlwind day.

The next best thing to a time machine, for me, is going to weddings. Sitting in a church pew, or nestled around a gorgeous garden spot or gathered together overlooking the ocean, allows one to experience the pomp and circumstance much more clearly than can the two people standing front and center – and excited and overwhelmed – taking their vows.

Being a wedding spectator offers the chance to vicariously be the groom or bride again, this time with the advantage of not being bowled over by the occasion, and woos you to silently renew your own vows and commitment as you watch the marquee couple do so.

To be certain, it is almost impossible not to have your own heart chirp in song while watching two lovebirds join The Matrimony Club. The next time you are at a wedding, when the bride and groom are saying their vows, slyly peek around and notice how many married couples in attendance reach down and squeeze each other’s hands; after their big kiss, see how many little kisses among wedded spectators follow.

Another thing I like to do, if it hasn’t been mentioned among the toasts, is to ask the bride and groom how they met. Even if their “meet-cute” was not the stuff of a Nora Ephron movie, the blissful couple will always light up in retelling.

Meanwhile, listening to their tale always lightens my heart and reminds me of my own enchanted first encounter that led to “for better, for worse, in sickness and in health…”

Valentine’s Day, like weddings, affords a similar opportunity to be inspired by love. If you go for a walk along the beach this February 14th, or out to a restaurant, you will have no trouble picking out the dating couples and newlyweds and recently-weds.

Equally heartening are the couples you can tell have been together for a long, long time yet still glow like they are newly in love. If there were a polite way to do so, I would love to interrupt these veteran darlings and ask how they met – and their secrets to keeping the magic alive.

I have a strong hunch some of them might mention that going to weddings always results in being struck by a rejuvenating arrow from Cupid’s bow.

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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.

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Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and

This Rom-Com Stands Test of Time

by Woody

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 dating 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 Billy Crystal (dark hair, not the required shaggy ginger-blond) and Meg Ryan (blond, not brunette), the leading characters will be played by Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams.

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 her cascading locks tucked up in a hair net, is the prettiest girl he has ever seen.

Our first date, the very next evening after meeting at a party…

“Lasagna and tater tots, please,” the freshman says, choking on any attempt to flirt because the sophomore beauty is far out of his league. A quick montage follows, showing him in her line all year with similar failed results.

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 sees a girl who makes his heart pick up a faster drumbeat. She is wearing a light-blue sweater, and no hair net, but no sooner does he 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. Alas, their romance seems derailed before it has even begun.

“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 – and when she returns he has slyly maneuvered himself underneath a hanging sprig of mistletoe. Lisa accepts the red Solo Cup and then unexplainably pulls Woody across the room, thwarting his ploy before he can act on it.

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

All is not lost, however, as Woody and Lisa do kiss later that evening – with no assist from mistletoe – and then 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 crushed by the flu, Lisa brings him an Easter basket filled with a chocolate bunny and 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 got sick.

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

In two days – on September 4th – the two lovebirds will celebrate their ruby wedding anniversary of 40 years. Woody already knows the toast he will give her 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 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.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

 

E-ticket Ride of Happiness

by Woody

With apologies to Disneyland, it seems to me “The Happiest Place on Earth” is a wedding. Any wedding and every wedding, extravagant or simple, grand or intimately small. Attending a wedding always puts helium in your heart.

And so it was two Sundays past that my spirits soared skyward on a cloudless blue spring day that felt like summer when my princely son married the princess of his dreams in the wedding of her childhood imagination. If any detail was overlooked, any expense spared, I cannot imagine what it was. No white doves were released, I suppose, nor did the couple depart in a hot-air balloon.

The happy newlyweds, Jess and Greg!

Posh as it was, what made the occasion truly special was what also makes a shoestring wedding equally special – the gathering of people. Indeed, as I stood as a groomsman beside my daughter, the Best Matron, who stood next to her kid brother as he and his bride exchanged personally written vows, all with the Pacific Ocean as a breathtaking backdrop behind us, I looked out at the sea of moist-eyed faces and was inspired to add this opening to my prepared dinner toast:

“Jess and Greg, it has been a whirlwind day for you both, so I want to ask you to pause and take a deep breath and take moment to look around at all these faces gathered here. Really take them in. They aren’t just faces, they are your favorite people.

“Some of us have known you since the days you were born. Others came into your lives a little later; some later still; some much more recently. Some came here today from near; many from further away; and more than a few traveled great distances. But we are all present for the same reason – because of how amazingly special you both are.

“Look around, we’ll wait…

“Okay, now I ask the rest of us to all look at Jess and Greg and take a moment to silently recall one of your favorite memories of them. Maybe it was the first time you met them or perhaps it was last night’s wonderful Ghanaian Engagement Ceremony.

“As you fondly reflect back, know this – these two people that we all hold so dear are amazingly special thanks to each and every one of you.”

This wedding-day thought, it strikes me now, applies to all of us. We, too, are the product of our favorite people – and they of us. Alas, too often it takes a wedding, graduation, or other special occasion blessed with a vast constellation of our star supporters as rare as the planets aligning to appreciate the roles they have played in our lives. Wise it would be to occasionally keep this in mind on the small days between The Big Days.

Continuing my toast, and this theme, I next shared that at Mark Twain’s home in Hartford, Connecticut, the great writer had a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson engraved in brass and prominently displayed above the main fireplace: The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

“I love this sentiment and think it extends beyond the walls of a house,” I explained. “After all, as the late, great poet Maya Angelou said: When you leave home, you take home with you.

“It seems to me that having the treasured friends and family who ornament the lives of Jess and Greg here today makes this beautiful site their ‘home’ away from home and makes their wedding day a true masterpiece day.”

In nostalgic Disneyland parlance, it was truly an E-ticket ride of day.

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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.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

 

Sailboat Pic Sets Memories Afloat

by Woody

Just as I savor listening to the ocean’s waves as a nighttime lullaby, so too do I love gazing out to sea under the light of day. Such was I doing recently, playing hooky from all responsibilities, when my phone pinged with a text.

Tempted to ignore it, I was glad I did not for it was from my son. He had sent me a photo, taken just then 70 miles south of Ventura, that was a matching bookend to the postcard scene I was simultaneously enjoying, except for one small addition: a sailboat in the distance.

This was extra special because “sailboat” has long been a cipher between the two of us that means “I love you.” He came up with it, for reasons unknown even by him, at age 5 or 6. All these years later, whenever either of us sees a sailboat – on the water, in a painting, on bookshelf, et cetera – we text the other a photo, no words necessary.

This small sailboat in my son’s texted photo gave me a very big smile.

As always, the tiny picture on my phone screen gave me a big smile. As sometimes, it also sent my mind sailing over the deep waters of past ocean memories.

First, I mentally returned to the gorgeous waters of Peggy’s Cove, a quaint fishing village in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where my wife and I traveled a few years ago. In addition to seeing myriad sailboats, we saw “The Titanic Grave Site” where 121 victims of the infamous sea disaster are interred. They found their final resting places there because two ships based in Halifax – the Mackay-Bennett and the Minia – assisted the search for bodies.

Later on our same trip we visited Plymouth Rock and I could only marvel at how the Mayflower, a wooden ship that was far less “unsinkable” than the great inch-thick-steel-plated Titanic, had survived its perilous journey. I marveled anew at this now, which led to another thought…

… how the sea gods, or perhaps just old-fashioned good luck, smiled on a very sinkable wooden ship that set sail from Ireland in 1792 for the faraway shores of America. Had that sailing vessel suffered a Titanic-like fate I would never have been for my great-great-great-grandfather James Dallas, then only 14 and traveling alone, was onboard.

I imagine James was fleeing famine or other hardship. His voyage must have been far more difficult and dangerous, and his bravery greater, than I can even imagine.

Heritage is a funny thing. I feel proudly lifted by James’s steely mettle as if it is magically my inheritance, yet had he been a thief or murderer I would not cling to that as an anchor pulling me down.

Buoyed by my roots, in my mind’s ear I have often heard my distant forefather inspiring me to be braver, take chances, pursue my dreams even if rough seas must be sailed. Such feelings have seemed amplified when I am at the Ventura Pier or beach, touring the lighthouse at Peggy’s Cove or two dozen similar beacons I have traveled to see, on a cruise ship or sailboat.

By coincidence, or perhaps by godwink, the very morning I sat down to write this column the front page of The Star featured a story and photograph of a replica 19th-century wooden tall ship. The Mystic Whaler, an 83-foot-long schooner with twin 110-foot tall masts, had arrived at its new home in Channel Islands Harbor.

You can be sure I am going to visit this “floating museum” upon its official opening and let my imagination set sail. And, naturally, I will text a photo to my son.

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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.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com