THINGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME: Even Alicia Silverstone Wasn’t This “Clueless”

To say that I was naïve in the ways of women in my youth would be the understatement of all time.

As I look back, I realize that I had women basically throwing themselves at me a lot more regularly than I would have thought at the time. I have recently realized that my stupidity…er, cluelessness…was apparently endearing, if not downright sexy. I guess women love that kind of thing. There’s a certain attractiveness to innocence and naivete, I guess.

Right before I left for the US Air Force in 1986, I worked with a very good friend of mine, John Wisner. We worked at the Burger King in Barrington; John was an Assistant Manager and I was a Junior Manager. We were closers, which obviously meant it was our responsibility to get the store shut down and prepped for the next morning for the openers. Because we wanted everything to be as perfect as possible, and we wanted to be highly regarded, we would often work into the wee hours of the morning. It was not unusual for us to be in the store until 1:00 AM. I have many, many stories about that time in my life; some of them I can’t tell out of respect to John and the fact that his daughter reads my Timeline on Facebook. ;) But this isn’t among the ones I can’t tell, mostly because it’s centered on me.

Most days, when we were finally finished, we would go to a restaurant called Wags in Crystal Lake. Sometimes we would stop across the street at Country Donuts first (yes, my love of Country Donuts and Danish Twists and Boston Cream donuts goes back DECADES), and we would visit with the overnight gal there for a bit. Her name was Shawn and she was a sweetheart. But this story isn’t about Shawn…

Anyway, once we were done there – or if we skipped it entirely – we would go to Wags. Wags was a restaurant chain owned by the Walgreens people; I think it was mostly in the Midwest but it may have been National. It was an OK little place, with kind of an old town diner type feel to it. Once we started going there regularly, we started to be known. I always drank hot tea (NOT Earl Gray, btw) and John always drank coffee. We would sit there an talk, drinking cup after cup, usually for an hour or two. We were such regulars that we ended up with our very own waitress. This is where it gets interesting…and kind of sad. But “sad” in a comical, “I can’t believe this” kind of way. Lol

At this point in time, I had just turned 19. My mom had been gone less than a year. I was SO lost…and John was one of my saving graces. If not for him pulling my sorry butt along for the ride I don’t know how deep of a hole I would have dug myself into. I was still pretty young, and horribly naïve (as I mentioned) to the ways of the world. I hadn’t all that much experience reading the signals from the opposite sex, and subtlety has ALWAYS been wasted on me. If you don’t get right in my face and tell me what you need me to hear, you’ll be waiting a long time.

As I recall, this waitress’s name was Debbie. She was probably about 25. And she was blonde. And definitely pretty. She became our personal waitress – little did I realize it was because of me.

Before we were even inside the restaurant, she was watching for us every night that she worked. As we walked up the sidewalk, she would grab a table and have a cup of coffee and a pot of tea sitting there brewing for us. She was very attentive…I mean, VERY attentive. Periodically, she would come and sit for a minute or two in the booth with is. On my side. RIGHT UP AGAINST ME.

Now let’s pause for a moment here. Hm. Older woman, blonde, pretty, built like – as they say – a brick house. Super attentive. Sits in the booth right up against me. Likes to touch me every time she comes to ask if we need anything. OK, stop and think about that for a moment. How many red blooded American males would not get what was going on here…?!? Yup. That’s right. THIS guy.

I was so shy and so uncertain of myself that I never put the two things together. And John, bless his heart, never mentioned it to me. I think he was waiting for me to catch on. He may STILL be waiting for me to catch on.

We continued going to Wags right up until the end of June, 1986. We had been going there almost every night for probably over six months. When I told Debbie that I was leaving to go to the Air Force, she hugged me really tightly. I think she even had tears in her eyes. Looking back I’m a little surprised she never just took the leap, as it were – I mean, all of her forwardish behavior hadn’t worked. I remained clueless as to her intentions and her advances.

Who knows what might have happened if I had actually picked up on her signals? Or if she had just been brazen enough to just outright tell me she was interested…?

Naturally, this was not the first time I had been lost in translation. Nor would it be the last. But that, as they say, is a story for another time.

Thanks for reading, as always. Hope you enjoyed it.

Rock a Bye (BYE!) Baby

Rock a Bye (BYE!) Baby

Hello there!! I have decided to try the whole "blog" thing again after being prompted by numerous people to do so. My content will also appear on Facebook for the moment, or until I decide that this is a better forum for my stories. Until then I will be posting both places. If you've read my stuff before, then welcome back. If you haven't, then welcome aboard, you're in for a wild ride. That being said...on to Story Time!

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I’m writing this story as a birthday gift to my sister Barb McDannell. She wanted me to tell a different story that I can’t for various reasons, and this was her second request. And since it’s her story, I’m doing it for her. (Mind you, my take on the story may not be the way she would tell it, but who’s sitting at this keyboard? That’s right, I am!)

I was born on a farm in Hebron, IL. It was located between Hebron and Woodstock.

When I was about eight months old, we moved from the farm into Woodstock, to the house that I grew up in (and that my father owned until his death in 2002).

We grew up with the kids in the family next door, The Fergusons. The Ferguson kids ages roughly mirrored ours; for the purposes of this particular story, the most important part is the Ferguson child that was Barb’s age: Michael.

Michael S. Ferguson was a tremendous guy. He had a HUGE influence on my sense of humor; probably the single biggest influence outside of my own family. He was a truly funny guy, and it came to him really naturally. I have always had a lot of admiration for Mike, and looked at him like a big brother.

This being said, it bears explaining that Mike and Barb were INSEPERABLE. I mean, for real. Two better friends have probably never been put on this Earth by God. They spent every moment that they could together. They walked to school together and they walked home together. If one of them had detention, the other one would wait dutifully, pacing outside of the classroom until their partner was released on their own recognizance back into the general population, free to run and play once again.

Barb (who is two children older than me), John (who was between Barb and me) and I all went to Dean Street Elementary. It wasn’t really a long journey; the school was only five blocks away. And yet we found ways to make the journey more interesting. We discovered various shortcuts and would go different ways home. You wouldn’t think that five blocks would hold a lot of secret passages and whatnot, but we managed to find them, and what we didn’t find we created.

The main path home, though, was a block and a half down Dean Street, up Freemont three blocks, down Madison one block. On the way, we crossed the corner of Freemont and Jefferson. On the corner of the cross street is 303 Freemont. Which you may not think is a dangerous fact, but in point of fact, we would find out just exactly how dangerous…DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUN…

So one day the Twosome is walking home together. As they walk, they pass the rock wall. Mike stops because he spots an interesting, rather large rock on the ground. Barb continues to walk. Mike crouches down to more closely examine the rock. He likes what he sees. Barb keeps walking. Mike yells for her to come back; he wants to show her this highly interesting rock. She gets to him, and begins to bend down closer to see as he begins to stand…and…

*KA-POW!!*

As they say in the wrestling business, he busted her open hardway. That is to say he cracked her in the forehead with the rock with sufficient force to lacerate her forehead.

Now she is bellering loudly enough for it to echo off of the rock wall. At this point they are just over two blocks from our house. Mike runs and frantically bangs on the front door. No answer. He calls into the screen door (the inner door was open). My mom comes to the door, and Mike manages to stammer out, “Mrs. McDannell – I’m so sorry – the rock…and she bent over…and then…there was so much blood…!”

Which of course sent my mother into a full blown panic attack (which of course nobody knew existed then, even though she would tell us regularly that we were “giving [her] a nervous breakdown”).

Barb, of course, had not sat idly while her partner in crime / assassin in waiting (more on this in a minute) had run for help. She had gotten up, and hollering all the way, made her way to the corner of Madison and Freemont. In the meantime, my mother had managed to split the difference and meet her there.

The ending was relatively happy: as it turned out, head wounds bleed more than any other wound, so the gash was relatively small. And of course there was no brain damage apparent (?!?). Barb survived and I’m not even certain she had a scar from the incident.

So what, you may ask, is up with the “assassin in training” above? Well, my  brother John – ever the cynic, rest his soul – was convinced that this was Mike’s clumsy attempt to get out of the relationship. The facts never proved it to be true, although no real investigation was ever launched.

The actual death of my sister’s romantic aspirations is a WHOLE different story. That I’m not sure I’m able to tell…but is REALLY entertaining. To me at least.

And that’s story time for today. Hope you enjoyed it, thanks as always for reading.