Tag Archives: love

Sweet Treat After Halloween

by Woody

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“Woody’s Holiday Ball Drive” is underway! New sports balls can be dropped off through Dec. 8, or online orders delivered to, Sanbell at 1672 Donlon St. in Ventura, 93003. Please email me about your gifts at woodywriter@gmail.com so I can add your generosity to this year’s tally and acknowledge you in a future column.

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This column from my archives five years ago gave me a smile anew and I hope it will you as well…

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Out of precaution, but with small expectation, my wife bought a single bag of candy bars in case any trick-or-treaters came by Halloween evening. In years past we have handed out upwards of 20 bags.

But coronavirus kept our doorbell silent as a tombstone all night.

It is easy to jokingly snicker, “Great! I’ll just have to eat all these Snickers myself.” Truth is, instead, I felt empty because autumn’s annual parade of kids singing “Trick or treat!” as their goodie sacks and plastic pumpkin buckets fill up, fills my heart.

Imagine, long after turning off your porch light, unexpectedly hearing a knock on your door and being greeted by the cutest costumed child of the evening. That’s kind of what happened to me. In this case, it was a day after Halloween and two young girls were dressed up as themselves – as the most adorable siblings imaginable.

Their ages were 3 and 5, and they were at a local park with their parents enjoying a late-afternoon picnic. Meanwhile, I was on my daily run and seeing them time and again as I circled past put a smile on my face and helium in my stride.

I wish you could have seen them. The girls played catch with their dad, then tag with their mom; played by themselves while their parents snuggled on the spread-out blanket; joined mom and dad for a snack, and a hug, before racing off to pet a passing dog on a leash; and on and on went their fun.

Just as Halloween is a time machine transporting us back to our own childhoods, these two children sent my mind racing in reverse a quarter century to when my daughter and son were about their ages.

Instead of on a blanket in a park, our young family of four was on vacation having dinner at a charming Italian restaurant. After the spaghetti and meatballs disappeared, and scoops of ice cream too, our waiter vanished. The kids grew antsy as we waited for the check. Ten minutes became thirty and my wife and I became increasingly impatient as well.

“Where’s the check?” I grumbled softly.

“Where’s our waiter?” my wife mumbled.

“Can we go yet?” the kids pleaded.

Our waiter remained AWOL. Eventually, finally, at long last, I caught the attention of a different server and asked if he could please have our check.

No, we could not.

Instead, our original waiter brought us a heartwarming explanation: Two elderly gentlemen at a table across the room had surreptitiously paid for our dinner, but requested the waiter not let us know until after they left – hence the long delay.

The Samaritan pair had seen a happy young family, our server shared with a smile, and simply wanted to anonymously do a random act of kindness. Now and again since, I have tried to repay those benevolent men when I see happy young families in restaurants.

I wished I could have paid the dinner check for the two girls and their parents at the park. Instead, all I could think to do was stop by before leaving and tell them something they already knew – what a lovely family they are!

This led to a brief social-distanced visit where I learned the sisters are inseparable, even sharing a bed by choice, and a third sibling is on the way.

As I jogged away into the early arriving darkness, the two girls sang out in sweet harmony: “Have a nice day!”

“Thank you!” I shouted, turning back. “You, too!”

Thanks to them, mine already had been.

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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.

An Evening Of Silver Linings

by Woody

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

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

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

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

Serendipity brought us to Robert Louis Stevenson’s former residence.

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

This date almost didn’t get out the front door to begin. A tearful two-year-old, with her daddy out of town, did not want her mommy to also leave. A delay that would surely make us late could have been frustrating; instead, it was actually a joy to watch my daughter soothe her own daughter with love and patience.

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

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

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

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

Joining in, I was 10-years-old again and transported back to elementary school when Mr. Hawkins, my beloved fifth-grade teacher, would play guitar for sing-alongs.

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

Our Jekyll-and-Hyde evening continued on the drive home with badly congested freeway traffic from an accident, but this, too, proved to be a silver lining because it wonderfully extended our time together.

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

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

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

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

A Tale of Two Handmade Quilts

by Woody

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

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Imagine a painting by Monet of a pond shimmering with a hundred shades of blue, deep ocean to summer sky, on a canvas larger than a king-size mattress.

Now imagine a different masterpiece, every inch as large and lovely and beautiful and blue, but instead of oil brushstrokes on stiff canvas its medium is five-inch squares of age-worn denim sewn together and framed by a twill border.

“Priceless” is a greatly overworked word, but it is rightly employed to describe the patchwork quilt my mother, gone 33 years now, made for me before I headed off to college.

To begin, Mom surreptitiously saved my old blue jeans, Levi’s mostly, for a number of years. From these she harvested enough squares, or “blocks,” to build a quilt of 19 rows by 13 – 13 being a lucky number in her heart because she met my dad on a blind date on the thirteenth of October – measuring an oceanic six feet wide by more than seven feet long.

She arranged these pixels of denim with an artist’s eye and a mother’s care, forming pleasing patterns from the spectrum of faded hues and varying textures. For example, a small number of blocks have inseams running through them and a few others have front or side pockets removed, leaving behind silhouettes that resemble suntan lines.

One noteworthy square has the white frayed beginnings of a hole, probably at a knee, chosen because Navajos to this day intentionally weave a faint imperfection into each blanket to make it more human and thus more treasured.

Less seriously, near the quilt’s bull’s-eye is a signature 501 Button Fly. Naturally, one square features a rectangular Levi’s label – the waist and inseam sizes erased by age – and a trademark Red Tab tag adorns another square.

In the heart of the blue-denim field, which features nearly 300 tasseled quilting knots securing the touching corners of each and every block, is a large diamond pattern comprised of 16 squares of colorful tartan, in homage to our Irish roots, an eyesore pair of 1970s bellbottoms metamorphosed into handsomeness.

Weighing nearly 11 pounds, thanks furthermore to heavy-duty twill backing and thick batting inside, sleeping beneath this heirloom quilt feels like being hugged. In time, it hugged my daughter throughout college and then my son during his university years. No worse for wear, it now awaits four grandchildren.

Speaking of grandkids, the quilt’s four main corners each have a complete back pocket that my mom said, with a wink, were for condoms because she did not wish to become a grandmother too early.

And yet when I eventually made her a grandmother (for the fourth time) it was indeed too early, for my daughter was born three months premature weighing just 2 pounds, 6 ounces. Dallas remained in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for two months that seemed like a hundred years. If there is such a thing as angels on earth, I will tell you NICU nurses indeed have invisible halos.

September is National NICU Awareness Month, which brings me to a second priceless quilt. It is crib-sized and new and conjures a field of sunflowers painted by Van Gogh. I purchased it from an on-line shop for my granddaughter, Auden, who is named in honor of my mom.

More than being beautiful, what makes this quilt beyond special is the accompanying note from the seller, written in purple ink in smooth looping letters, explaining that her mom donates the money from her handmade quilts to NICUs.

All quilts are works of art, but some are works of heart.

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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.

Lesson From A Rocking Chair

by Woody

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

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A big-time New York City sportswriter once said, long ago, that his best pieces were when he quoted at length from columns by press-box legend Red Smith. Chuck Thomas, my esteemed predecessor in this space, humorously echoed: “Never write a bad column when you can steal a good one.”

Thusly inspired, I have stolen a new essay from award-winning novelist Dallas Woodburn, who will be a headliner at the “Books, Butterflies & Botanical Gardens” fundraiser benefiting the Ventura County Library Foundation on Oct. 15. (Tickets are available online at: vclibraryfoundation.org/events/ )

My daughter shares wisely…

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Yesterday, I sold the rocker from our nursery.

It was time. My younger daughter is two-and-a-half and was excited about putting up a “reading tent” in her room, in the space where the rocker used to be.

The woman who bought the rocker was delighted. It was for her pregnant daughter and it warmed my heart to imagine another family getting to use this item we had loved so much.

Yet still, watching the woman drive away with our rocker in the bed of her truck made unexpected tears spring to my eyes and a big lump rise to my throat.

It was a blinking neon-sign reminder that time is passing. So, so quickly.

I vividly remember when we bought that rocker, when I was pregnant with my older daughter seven summers ago, back when we were living in a small rental house. I remember setting up the nursery in what once had been my home office, a mix of excitement and nerves giving me giddy butterflies.

My baby daughter and I spent countless hours rocking in that chair. We rocked to calm her. We rocked her to sleep. In the early, early days, I nursed her in that rocking chair, listening to audiobooks and feeling like the two of us were the only ones awake in the entire world.

In those newborn days of early motherhood, time was molasses. I rocked her and rocked her, back and forth, back and forth, her head heavy in the crook of my elbow, praying for her to fall asleep – and stay asleep. It felt like she would always be tiny and I would always be rocking her.

Four years later, my husband and I were setting up the same rocker in a different house, in a different nursery, for our second precious rainbow baby.

Our younger daughter arrived and didn’t like to be rocked as much as her big sister. She preferred the standing-dancing-bouncing method. Still, she and I spent a lot of time, especially reading, in that rocking chair.

Why am I telling you all about this rocking chair? Because time is passing quickly. Children are growing up. Parents are aging. We all are aging.

And if we aren’t careful – if we aren’t intentional and purposeful and brave – time can be a cruel thief, slipping by like a cat burglar, stealing away our biggest dreams.

What were you dreaming about seven years ago? Do you hold a big dream in your heart that is older than my rocking chair? Are you still trying to “make time” for that dream? Do you tell yourself that you’ll make time to pursue it later; next season; next year; when life calms down and things are less busy?

The next piece of furniture we will likely offer away is my younger daughter’s crib, now converted into a toddler bed. I’m guessing we’ll get another two years out of it before she graduates to a full-on “big-girl bed.”

Two years from now, will your big-life dream be growing true?

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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.

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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