Mickey Hadick

My house is on a wooded lot. It was a mess of cherry, ash, maple, and thick underbrush. The only way to get through it was to crawl through the poison ivy. The neighbors from the adjoining subdivision had taken to dumping trash and dog poop in the low area at the back. It was so thick I would not have been surprised to find the remains of a Union soldier from the Civil War.

The landscaper during the building process recommended that we pay someone to clear the entire lot and choose trees that we wanted, and add the necessary twenty grand to our mortgage. "Trust me," he said. "You'll be happier." I laughed at the prospect, and thought that I could do the job myself in my spare time. Two young children pretty much take care of themselves, so I would have ample time. For the next ten years, I peeled away at the mess, and twice I paid an arborist to chop down dead and dangerous trees. The remaining trees were mostly cherry and ash. Cherry, it turns out, are more trouble than they are worth as they leave a mess of inedible fruit, and, once they grow tall, they are weak in the trunk and a threat to fall. After all my efforts, it is still an unsightly mess.

The emerald ash borer wreaked havoc on the ash. I called back the arborist to cut down 40 ash trees a couple of years ago. We piled the wood in three main "stacks" in the backyard. Now those unsightly piles are far worse: the wood is rotting, there is poison ivy flourishing at the edges, and it now seems like more wood than I can ever cut, split, and burn in my life. Somehow, I had convinced myself that we would have a fun campfire each and every weekend, and the family would sit and talk and share stories. We have had two, maybe three such campfires.

Our yard still has a couple of dozen trees. One in particular annoyed me. It was an apple tree that had grown up with its trunk wrapped around the other. Part of that apple tree also grew down to the ground. It wasn't a bad tree--not in my yard, where everything is a mess--but it simply annoyed me. So I cut it down.

A twenty-inch chain saw can be a frightening thing. I haven't cut down any significant trees, so the wedge and cut method meant nothing to me. Besides, this apple tree was wrapped around an ash, so it wasn't going to fall no matter how many times I yelled "timber."

I basically scared myself pretty thoroughly trying to fell it. It stood on a slight rise on soft ground, and I had to raise the chain saw up to eye level where I needed to cut it. It's a great shoulder workout that way, in the same sense that being chased by a mugger can be aerobic.

I needed an ax to finish the job, and as I swung, I kept thinking that it was even money that the trunk was going to crash down on me. I once played Babe the blue ox in Mrs. Perkins' fifth grade production of "Paul Bunyan". Working with Nick, our performance was well regarded. That's about as much woodsman training as I've had in my life. Handling the chainsaw and swinging an ax has been self taught since that time.

One final, mighty swing cut through the apple tree, and the weight of the tree drove the severed trunk several inches into the ground. It happened in the blink of an eye, before I could move a muscle. Now I know why lumberjacks have trouble securing workers compensation insurance. If gravity and the friction of the ash tree had so deigned, that apple tree could have broken my foot, shattered my leg, or crushed my chest. And it's the last of those options, crushing my chest, that would have hurt the least, because my heart would likely have stopped in just a few seconds.

I chopped up what remained of the apple tree, and added the wood to my unsightly wood piles. I split a few logs with the hope that I might, someday, have a campfire in the back yard.

Labels: mistake, story

This past weekend, I spent the better part of Sunday at a soccer field. Not just a soccer field, but a soccer complex with eight large fields. As part of a tournament, my son was sideline judge for six games. I drove him there before eight A.M.; instead of going home to just wait to come and get him again, I decided to stay.

The weather was beautiful. That was one of the attractions. I could either spend an extra hour in the car going back and forth, or sit in the sun and read magazines and books while drinking coffee in a comfortable chair as the cool breeze wafted over me. It had every opportunity to be a wonderful day except for one small thing I overlooked: Soccer Parents.

The tournament was for younger kids. I had forgotten the insanity that takes over the minds of parents as they cheer on their children. Their voices rise and fall with the bounce of the ball. When a goal is scored, half of the parents scream in delirium; the other half groan in agony.

Heaven forbid a boy is not paying attention. The parents exhort and cajole, encourage and chastise. In one game in particular, the parents of the team from Fowlerville were berserk. By my estimation, every single one of them was crazy. They screamed for the coach to bench their own children. They coached from the sidelines, moving players back and forth. They threatened their own children while on the field, during the play of the game, for not paying attention to the game.

I struck up a conversation with another dad who was waiting for the next game. We shared a glance as the shouting became frenzied amongst the parents when a goal was surrendered for no reason other than a child's lack of drive and initiative. He blurted out, "I'm an older Dad, so I cherish all these moments. But I try not to get too wrapped up in it."

I admitted that I had cheered mightily in the past, but I didn't remember ever cheering like this, yelling at the kids for not performing, or berating the referee. In fact, just a couple of days before, I stumbled on a team photo from one of my sons early teams. It was at least eight years old, and I had been the coach. At that time, urging six and seven year olds to play took quite a bit of effort from the parents. I was fairly certain that out of those twelve children on that team, only my son still played the game.

There's nothing wrong with kids trying out various activities until they find something they really, really like. To find passion in life is what gives life meaning. For so many parents, their children, and whatever the child happens to be doing, is the passion for the parents, and it's very easy to lose sight of an appropriate perspective to the situation. The child is competing against other children; if they are better than the others, there's hope that this might be a thing in which the child is gifted. Or the talent pool may be so shallow that, in fact, everybody stinks at it. You don't know that as a parent; you only see your child struggling, and your blood begins to boil.

I played hockey in my youth. I really, really loved it, and even dreamed of playing professionally. I got fairly good at it, but at the age of nineteen I quit and never played again. It has crossed my mind occasionally, and mostly out of curiosity, to play again; but what once seemed like everything in the world to me I lost.

Before that happened, however, my mother sat through numerous games, and I saw a side of her I had never, ever seen before. Hockey brings out the very worst in parents. They scream at the players, they scream at the referees, and they scream at each other. I would not be surprised to hear one day that the fans watching a hockey match became so enraged at each other that a hockey match broke out in the stands. My mother understood little of the game, but she understood that her son loved playing, and that other boys were trying to smash his skull out on the ice. I received stitches to the face (scary) and stitches to my inner thigh (very scary). I had the wind knocked out of me several times, and even had a stick broken over my helmet in anger. It seemed I might be severely hurt at any moment, but the most surprising thing was that my mother survived without having a nervous breakdown.

I'm not happy or proud that I lost hockey. It's a great game, and I would have done well to have made the effort to keep at it. Maybe it's not the game itself, but the exercise and the comradery I miss. I hope that my son, if he takes nothing else away from soccer, takes the feeling of team play with him, and continues that yearning desire throughout his life. We are mostly a social animal, and my life has not been social enough.

Back at the soccer field, the older dad took up a position on the sideline to watch his son play. I was still enjoying the sunshine and the cool breeze. I was also enjoying the sound of children at play, and their parents cheering the game. At one point, the older dad's son misplayed a ball, and the dad did not yell, but he did complain to the person sitting beside him.

The boy misplayed another, and the dad could not contain himself. He shouted to him without anger. A few minutes later, though, the older dad seemed on the verge of losing that control, and he walked away to watch the game from farther away, lying on a grassy hill, away from the chatter of the other parents. His son's team was out matched, and would suffer a 10-1 loss.

I am not holier than thou or thee. When my son was that age, I shouted, cajoled, and cheered. I struggled to contain my anger when his teams played poorly, and was giddy with delight when they won. I offered the older dad a knowing smile in the hopes that he and his son would both find the correct perspective for that game. It was, after all, only a game; and it was a beautiful day, regardless of the score.

Labels: memoir, mistake, personal growth, story

I splurged on myself once, and spent a week in Iowa City at the Iowa Writers Program Summer Workshop. Very different from the famous one, but it was very good, and the class was led by Robley Wilson, then editor of the North American Review.

The workshop was about a dozen people, and it was fairly diverse. Working people, a doctor, therapists, and a guy from Ireland. The common factor was that we all had a screw loose, and were trying to doing something about that with our writing.

One of my co-workshoppers made it kind of big. Abraham Verghese went all in the following year. He didn't just return to the workshop, he got a job nearby and applied for The Writers' Workshop program at the University of Iowa; he was accepted, and, frankly, he's been notably successful ever since. You know that saying: it's not enough to succeed, but your friends must also fail? Well, he should have kept me close, because I'd be making him really happy about now.

The first time I stumbled upon his name while reading The New Yorker, I was like, "Wow, cool; I know him!" The most recent time, when his new novel was briefly noted and mostly raved, I was more like, "Come on already; this sucks being me."

While at the summer workshop, I really liked him. I really liked everything about the workshop, especially the chance to write within a community of like-minded people that cared about literary art forms. That week, I wrote this story. I was never able to do anything with it, but there's a certain something about this story that I love above all the others.

I hope you enjoy The Cardboard Box, which is inspired by aspects of my own childhood.

Labels: memoir, story

I have just added an article that was a speech I delivered for Toastmasters. The speech is called: "The Black Dog Shall Have His Day," and is memoir-ish and the kind of thing I like to blog about. It's about an aspect of my emotional intelligence that was, heretofore, only privy to my classmates from Mrs. Dale's afternoon kindergarten class. That was a long time ago, and maybe I just remember too many things; nevertheless, give it a read.

Labels: memoir, toastmaster

The estate sale started at eight a.m. on a Saturday morning. Things had been pulled out of the house and arranged on tables. People from all over the neighborhood came to see what was there, the things from the house that no one visited. There were other people, too, just for the sale. But those of us that lived near the old couple were curious what might have been inside. I was probably the only child in the neighborhood who had visited their home.

Mrs. V. was confined to a wheelchair. If the adults in the neighborhood knew why, the kids most certainly did not. The most that we knew is that she was sometimes on her porch sitting with her husband, but even that was a mystery because they had an awning, shrubs, and shades arranged to keep the sun off of the porch. At most we would catch a glimpse of them sitting there late in the afternoon, or early in the evening.

The most interaction we had was when Mr. V. had their dog, a chihuahua that barked incessantly at any movement, outside, walking in circles around the yard until he did his business. Occasionally, Mrs. V. would call out a greeting to me as I went past. What I saw of her was an older woman with white hair sitting in a wheelchair. She wore glasses and a dress. She smiled as she waved.

We lived in a suburb of Cleveland. Our neighborhood was older and had been built up shortly after World War II. The homes were small and packed in fairly close. The lawns were neat and tidy. Some yards were strictly off limits because of the angry people that lived there. Mr. V. was not angry, as far as we knew. He and his wife were just old and quiet.

I was invited into their home once, by Mr. V., who told me that Mrs. V. wanted to give me something. She was in her wheelchair in their front room. The room itself was impeccably neat and clean. The furniture was nice. That was a thing in all of those small homes: there was a room full of nice things. Mrs. V. smiled at me, and beckoned me to come closer. Their little dog sat in her lap, and, for the first time, I was able to pet that annoying little dog.

She handed me a small toy. It was a windup seal that clapped it's fins together and made a noise. It was made of metal of some kind, and was painted. The seal sat upon a round platform, like at the circus. It was very nice, but was not my sort of thing to play with in 1972. I thanked her and left. Unfortunately, I lost that toy at some point. It's possible my older brothers messed with it, and it's possible I was a typical stupid kid that couldn't keep track of things; regardless, it was lost, and I wish I had it now.

Mrs. V. died. I don't know when, exactly. I did not understand, at that point, what death was. No family members had ever died during my short life. She was just gone, and no one said hello or waved to us from their porch when we walked past.

For the next year, Mr. V. kept up the yard, and walked the dog around in circles to do his business. Even I recognized it was a quiet existence. One morning, there was an ambulance and a police cruiser in the driveway. The rumor spread through the neighborhood that Mr. V. had shot himself. His dog had died a few weeks earlier, and he couldn't go on alone.

The items in the estate sale were a snapshot of the century up to that point. He had served in World War I, and had a German Wermacht helmet with the spike on top. He had washboards and kitchen implements from the early 1900s. He had signs, posters, and calendars from the 1950s.

What interested me most was the collection of military surplus from World War II. He had diffused grenades, 80 mm shells, and ammo clips for an M-1 rifle. Nothing would still explode, but I thought it was the coolest stuff in the world regardless. He had belts, canteens, ammunition boxes, bayonets, and swords. It was a true warriors collection, but he was old enough to have been in the Great War; was he also in the Second World War?

I begged my father to buy me some of those mementos, which he did. We were outbid on the helmet, but we got several lots of diffused munitions. My mother focused on kitchen utensils, most of which were older but in like-new condition.

Unfortunately, so much of our lives come down to a collection of things. There were things that belonged to Mr. V., and things that belonged to Mrs. V. If you knew all the details surrounding the things, or at least how the person related to them, you might be able to piece together their life story. Lacking that detail, the things almost immediately begin telling their own stories.

The one thing that had an emotional attachment was the mechanical seal Mrs. V. gave me as a gift. I squandered that connection when I lost the toy, and I'm only clinging to the memory. I don't have the thing to cement those feelings. I still have some of the ammo clips in my collection of things from childhood. I played with the cartridges and shells, marveling at them, and wondering about their secrets. How many men had Mr. V. killed in his wars? What was he thinking when at last he was free, and how lonely was he that he had to end his own life?

At some point in the future, perhaps someone will purchase some of my things at an auction. Will they know the history, and how it came to be in my possession, or will they immediately invent their own story, and begin a new history as they add the silly item from the previous century to their own collection?

Labels: memoir

The first short story I ever got all the way through and kind of liked was "When It Rains". I had written a few others before then, and even entered one of them in the Hopwood Awards annual contest at the University of Michigan, but I didn't win. At the time, I was very hopeful: Arthur Miller had won that contest many decades before I tried, and I thought that it would be a great way to break into the business, by bursting onto the scene from the College of Engineering. Now they limit the contestants to those taking a course in writing.

I had to settle for the engineering degree. My final semester at Michigan, I took a course in creative writing at Washtenaw Community College. It was cheaper than taking a similar course at the U of M, and I could not take such a thing as an Engineering student. I was allowed to transfer the credit in, however.

I spent the better part of that summer writing this story, along with the other exercises. It appeared in Passages North, the journal of Washtenaw Community College, but was not officially published. I submitted this story to many other journals, and it was rejected, with prejudice, by all of them. You may now be the judge.

What I got out of that course was a great friendship with Brian, and this story. I still love them both.

Labels: memoir, story

When I was but a boy, the West Side Market in Cleveland was a place of great mystery. My mother spoke of it in hushed awe as if it were sacred, or at least nearly sacred. The vendors there carried the run of the mill produce and meats of any market, but also some of the more exotic combinations that reflected the Eastern European heritage of many of Cleveland's neighborhoods. Kielbasa, Blood Sausage, and Head Cheese, to name a few items, were the things that made my mother's eyes sparkle just a bit.

She did not go to the West Side Market very often when we were young, and so its status grew in my mind as my mother schlepped herself to the A & P, and had to make do with the butcher there. She told stories of how her father, during the Depression, would take the cable car from their neighborhood of Tremont to the the market, and bring home a live chicken. Then her mother would pluck it in their tiny cellar so that she could cook it. There would be feathers, and blood, and filth all over the cellar and the kitchen, and her father would sit proudly in his chair smoking and reading the paper because he had done his part in bringing it home.

I remember going to the West Side Market once and seeing a whole pig in the glass display of the butcher. It looked far bigger than me, and probably was, given that I was only eight or nine. I had never seen such a thing. Eyeballs, snout, ears, and curly tail—it was all there.

The next time I saw such a thing was thirty years later when my neighborhood wanted to have a block party. We wanted to "do a pig roast", and I was naive and foolish enough to retrieve the roaster because my van had a hitch on it. I was immediately promoted to chief cook considering that I lived on the cul-de-sac and we wanted to have the neighborhood party there, as well.

We started the charcoal briquettes at 6:30 in the morning, and the pig arrived at seven. I didn't take time to marvel at the poor beast, but I should have, because I doubt that I'll ever be foolish enough to roast another pig. By 7:10 A.M., the pig was settled in the roaster, and I sat in a chair on the lawn with two of my neighbors and we began to drink beer.

Less than an hour later, disaster came to visit. I had put too much charcoal in the roaster (our crime scene investigation revealed), and the pig caught fire. When a pig catches fire, it's like something out of a movie. Flames fly out of the roaster like napalm, and the heat forces you to cringe and back away. Near panic, we tried to lift the pig out of the roaster, but no one could maintain their grip long enough to carry it to safety. We considered hosing the damn thing down, but instead one neighbor pulled the charcoal tray out of the back. We snapped the lid down, and hoped the flame would extinguish itself.

It turned out to be only a minor blemish. Part of the flank was charred. There was worry that more of the pig may, in fact, be ruined, but not having a lot of options, we decided to tone down the heat and see what happens.

Eight hours later, the pig was fully roasted. Having been snacking and drinking all day, I was fully toasted. I don't think I even tried the pork. I wasn't hungry.

Labels: memoir, story

I have never had good luck playing practical jokes. They generally backfire, and I feel awful. I feel awful right now.

When I was four years old, my mother took me along shopping. I thought it was great sport to hide from her while she shopped. I would duck in and out of the clothes racks, crawling along as she moved through the ladies department. One day, I stayed out of contact too long, and I frightened myself. I burst out from under a rack and directly into the path of a middle-aged woman. She tripped and fell on me, and we both were banged up a little.

This particular day, my paternal grandmother was along. She was quite a feisty woman, in her mid-fifties, and she gave that poor woman a great deal of grief for having tripped over me. I felt quite bad, though, because it was totally my fault. I didn't tell that to grandma, but let her tear into this innocent woman instead.

Not long after that incident, I decided to hide from my mother. This was before I had started school, and so she was a stay-at-home-mom at that point. I hid in the living room underneath one of the end tables next to the sofa. I thought it was rather obvious, and that I'd be discovered shortly. I also thought it was funny that she enlisted my brothers and the ten or so other boys in the neighborhood to find me.

I had no idea how frightened she was for my sake, and that somehow she imagined me drowning in the creek that flowed through the park behind our house. When the search party didn't find me, she started to cry. I became scared. Now I was worried that she'd be mad at me for causing such a stir, and now I didn't want to reveal myself.

However, when my mother phoned the police, I could no longer contain my emotions, and I began to cry. I still did not crawl out from where I was, but instead sobbed and cried out for help like the pathetic, naughty boy that I was.

When I was twenty-five, I went to a restaurant with my father and mother. We had to wait for a table. While we waited, I noticed that someone got into a car exactly like my father's. It was parked just three spots from his car—same make, same model, same year, same color. I thought this was funny, but what I said to my father was: "Hey look, someone is stealing your car."

My father, being a former jet pilot, feared little. Even at the age of fifty, he was going to stop this crime. It took all my strength to restrain him, and I had to shout to get past his rage and make him understand that it was just a joke. He never laughed at that one.

Today I noticed that my next door neighbor had a new television in the back of his pickup truck. He had pulled up close to his house, but had not unloaded. I went in for a closer look and saw that he also had a new sound system to accompany the nice, fancy television. The door of his truck was open, so I knew he had just stepped inside before unloading. I thought it would be funny to hide the box with the sound system.

I placed the box on the side of his garage out of sight. I then sneaked back to my house and waited near the door for him to discover that it was missing, planning on sharing in a great laugh. However, my daughter needed me at that precise moment, and called me away. I then forgot about my little joke.

Poor Tom, unfortunately, thought that somehow the expensive component had bounced out of the truck, and raced off. I am lucky that his wife discovered the missing box a few moments later, and luckier still that Tom did not get hurt during that wild goose chase.

I should really just get myself a very comfortable chair, sit the hell down, and never get up.

Labels: memoir, mistake, story