The Vanillaroma Air Freshener

My favorite Little Tree Air Freshener is definitely the Vanillaroma. I tried Royal Pine for a while, back when I was piloting my mom's Pontiac wagon, because Chris Farley swore by the Pine Tree Perfume in Tommy Boy. One day, though, the gas station was out of that flavor and I gave Wild Cherry a spin. I had to chuck that out the window almost immediately because it reminded me too much of Luden's cough drops. Every time I steered onto Highway 13 I found myself nursing a wholly imagined, sore and scratchy throat. Blackberry Clove, Black Ice and Cinnamon all fared no better. I had high hopes for Cinnamon, I really did, but the artificial reproduction was not faithful to its source; it smelled more like shoe rubber.

I tried the basic New Car Scent for a good while, mostly because it's widely available, but if we're shooting from the hip here – and I believe we are – I find its bouquet far too bland and its whole philosophy disingenuous. It's true, everyone likes a new car, but nobody's gonna believe your rusty-dusty '94 Tempo is brand-new unless you've tied a blindfold around their head and begged them to ignore the failing muffler. As soon as your passenger spots that familiar blue tree dangling from the cracked and dented dashboard vent, the secret's out, Man.

Furthermore, we're talking about making things smell better here. Cars that smell new are devoid of odor; that doesn't mean they smell better, they just don't smell bad YET. For my money, if I'm trying to improve my automobile's atmosphere, I don't want something that's going to mask the scent of B.O and stale farts and call it a day. My air freshener needs to leave its own mark, one that's pleasant and soothing and at least as semi-permanent as the super-offensive flatulence my dad has injected into the passenger seat. That's why I reach for Vanillaroma. When I get into my hot stuffy car on a sunny day, the interior smells like Grandma's fresh, warm cookies. When I jump behind the wheel on a cold stiff morning, again, fresh warm cookies. Hungry? Cookies. Just ate? Hey! Cookies for dessert!

I can now trace my Vanillaroma lineage back four cars. First there was the Ford F150 I drove in college. Then came a Chevy 1500 that got me from St. Paul to the Mall of America where I hustled plastic wristwatches. After the Chevy, I had a sweet maroon Crown Vic I called Tubby. Tubby was the ultimate drive-in cruiser and came plush with a tape deck, leather seats and a vinyl top. Despite the car's untimely and violent death – a T-Bone collision with a non-yielding Nissan – it's the car to which I'll compare all future vehicles.

Speaking from recent experience, it's incredibly difficult to replace a car you love. Hell, it's plenty difficult to replace any car, regardless of any intense emotional attachment to the driver's seat's comfort-grooves or how the factory speakers made Conway Twitty's voice sound...well, fuzzy. You can shop dealerships and harass private sellers with low-ball offers, and you can drive rentals and borrow mom's car for weeks at a time, telling yourself all the while to be patient and sit tight, you'll find a car that measures up. But eventually your dad's advice will wear on you: "Cars are like women. You can't force it," he'll say. And then, "Don't go marrying a woman who's been married three times already. No spark left in the plug." 

The point is, you can't just wait forever. You'll long for your own wheels, for independence, for that old feeling you got in your stomach when you cranked Springsteen's "Born to Run" and intuitively knew the song was written about you. About your freeway. Your car. Your nighttime drive to Dairy Queen. Making matters worse, you'll have a once-fresh Vanillaroma Air Freshener going to waste in a totaled-out car that's parked uselessly in your driveway because you're too depressed to call a tow truck. For almost two months.

But maybe your car-buying experience wasn't like mine. Maybe you went to the dealer one day and came home with the first car you drove. Something brand-new with Sirius radio and a sexy moon roof. More power to you. I took my time, did my research, played hardball with a shrewd negotiator, and I finally pulled the trigger on a sweet used Grand Marquis with low miles and a fully functioning tape deck. It isn't brand-new and it doesn't smell brand-new either. But it's an upgrade over my past cars and all the loaners, it's gonna last me a long, long time, and I've got the glovebox packed to the gills with my favorite Vanillaroma Air Fresheners. Even if the car doesn't feel like it's mine just yet, it already smells like it is.

I'm telling you, Grandma's cookies!

Why My Wife Deserves a Freaking Medal

“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”  

F. Scott Fitzgerald

My dad has this leaf blower. It's one of those high-powered jet-engine deals you wear like a Ghostbusters backpack, all 40 pounds of it, and it screams like airport noise making babies with rush-hour traffic. One afternoon last Fall, he lugged it to my house and saved me from having to spend my Saturday hugging a ladder and pulling decayed Maple leaves out of the gutter. I was too shaky to strap the blower on my back and go on the roof myself, of course – it's really high up there, OK? – so instead I held the ladder while he scampered around the roof, graceful as a squirrel. While the slope and elevation would have paralyzed me, my dad taunted gravity and pointed the air hose at the corners and joints along the roof's lip without a worry, exploding wet gobs of composted gunk up and out into the sky like tiny IEDs. As the twigs and mud landed around my feet, I noticed the leaves I had raked earlier in the day were no longer arranged in neat piles.

It took him barely ten minutes to finish, and when he backed down the ladder the leaf blower was out of gas and he proclaimed the gutters cleaner than the Roman Aqueducts. My lawn, on the other hand, was a total mess, and I pointed at all the leaves that had been scattered by his blower. "Can we gas it up and blow all these back into piles?"

"You have any gas-oil mix, Kid?"

"No. Just the plain-old gas I use for the lawn mower. Why?"

He shook his head. "Won't work." Then he asked me for a Leinie's and started on about two-cycle engines and proper lubrication, building toward a breezy explanation that sounded like it might take an hour or more. Daylight was wearing thin, so I grabbed a rake and made a good effort to listen while I worked. He sipped his beer and chatted about proper mixing ratios, and when full-on dark came, he drained his bottle and headed home with his blower. As I finished up, my knuckles gone cold and stiff, I made a mental note to, next time, blow the leaves out of the gutters before raking the yard. I thought I'd have to wait a while to give the plan a go, maybe a whole year even, but thanks to a week-long sustained wind that shoved more leaves off my neighbor's lawn and onto mine, I was out again filling lawn bags the very next weekend.

*  *  *  *  *

If you've ever spent any time looking at a bath tub drain – and I mean really looking hard, like down on your hands and knees on a wet rubber bathmat, face to face with that rotten stench of soap scum and bleach – then you may have wondered, like me, how the hell anything manages to pass through them. They're no wider than a couple of knuckles, for starters, and they're more than partially obstructed by those criss-crossed, jagged fittings meant to hold plugs in place. Whether standing ankle-deep in backed-up water or watching it run quickly down a drain, I'm amazed by bathroom plumbing each and every time I shower. It's truly a miracle.

Plumbing amazes me because, even if all the knotted, tangled hair and other foreign objects make it past the tiny drain, I know the pipes attached beneath never run in a straight line. In older homes like mine, these pipes are often a twisting mess of rusted, corroded metal, and water flow is literally choked by the internal debris accumulating at every U-joint and upside-down L. No fewer than a thousand little things have to line up and go right for a lost wedding band, bolt or washer to pass through all of these pipes and obstructions and make it out, and at any time something can gum everything up. As I've learned since becoming a homeowner, you've got to snake your drains to keep everything moving.

And so, this past weekend, while my wife and I waited for an infertility specialist to either confirm or deny the occurrence of a tubal pregnancy, snaking the drain was my job. My wife, for her part, juggles two (and sometimes three) weekly appointments with the doctors, all while remembering to always take the meds that, for us, make the dream of pregnancy even possible. She also laughs at roughly 30% of my jokes, shows me time and again how to properly iron my pants, and slow-cooks these sublime crock pot meals that, were our roles reversed, I'd be far too selfish to share. She's been persistent and brave staring down 3-inch needles and giant pills alike – pills large enough, I'm sure, to stick in the drain if only she shared my impulse to just drop them in the sink – so I was almost glad to clean our clogged drain instead of watching baseball's playoffs; I may have even considered it training for fatherhood. I know it's probably a stretch, but I like to think that if I can manage to clear a smelly old drain – if I can stand barefoot and sweaty on the slippery tub floor, snaking a rusty coiled wire that slapped my skin over and over and pulled out dozens of my leg hairs – if I can do all that without dissolving into a heap of curse words and wet sobs, then maybe one day I'll be ready for dirty diapers, high fevers or even a child who doesn't like baseball. Just don't ask me to get that kid's Frisbee off the roof.

Anyway, the drain was stopped by one hell of a hairball. Some fist-sized mutant tumor made up of equal parts hardened shampoo and greasy strands of long, dark hair that couldn't possibly have come from me or my wife. With no other explanation available, I'm left to assume that some strange hobo has been sneaking into my house while I'm at work to bathe with his mangey dog.

*  *  *  *  *

I looked out the window Sunday afternoon and saw yellow and brown leaves everywhere. My lawn was buried. Because the wind was calm and the sun was warm, and because winter waits for no man, I decided to finally clean it all up. Instead of grabbing a rake, though, I remembered all the extra work I had to do last year and called my dad about his leaf blower. When I got him on the phone, he was munching on peanuts and sounded thoroughly unexcited about cleaning my gutters. "Kid," he exhaled, "I'm not doing it for you again. You can use the leaf blower."

"Are you sure you don't want to, Pa? I mean, I have all this cold beer in the fridge."

"No, you're gonna have to go up on your roof yourself. Come on over and get the blower. It's all gassed up."

After a brief visit with him, I agreed to return the blower soon and headed home; apparently my dad had neighbors lining up to rent the thing. I thought briefly of asking one of them to climb on my roof for me, but instead I propped the ladder against the side of the house and threw the blower over my shoulder. Once Megan had the bottom steadied, I climbed up and made my way to the top rung, babying each step and just barely remembering to breathe. When I got to the top I felt unbalanced by the weight of the leaf blower and I clumsily flung my first leg over the gutter. I should have been more careful or set the leaf blower up there first, but I didn't think of it. Instead, before I could shift my weight off the ladder, I felt it slip and the whole thing slid down at least three inches. Each one felt like a foot, and I was convinced an earthquake had torn through the Minnesota River Valley. When I realized the ladder had stopped moving and that I was still hanging on – doing midair splits, no less – I yelled a few words about the sons of female dogs and some spiritually significant feces.

I wasn't aware of it at the time, but hanging there with one foot on the roof and another dangling off, my situation wasn't so different from that of the hairball that had been stuck in my drain or even the embryo that was possibly crowding my wife's Fallopian tube; I was in a very inconvenient place. I didn't know how I'd get out of it.

Terrified, I finally managed to look down at Megan. She was not scared at all. She was, however, doubled over and laughing her ass off. Even though I'd almost fallen and gotten hurt and wrecked a gutter and busted my dad's expensive leaf blower, she knew I was OK and she found the whole thing hilarious. And despite all that, she still had a strong hold on the ladder. I knew then that I could keep going.

Sweat It Out

One recent Saturday morning I was working out at the local YMCA. I had just finished a 2-mile run and a few stretching exercises, so I had a pretty good sweat going as I made my way toward the sit-up board to work on my invisible abs. I jimmied the bench angle to a more horizontal position and got my legs tucked into the contraption, and then I cranked out my first set of 20 with a Foo Fighters tune amping through my earholes.

After the first set, I stood up and took some deep breaths. My stomach twitched beneath my wet shirt and I got on the bench again to push through another 20. When I got to my feet after the second set, I felt fantastic. My blood was flowing, I was breathing well and suddenly I had access to a great untapped source of energy in my legs and belly and lungs. Sometimes I get this burst in the middle of a run or while squatting a new max, and sometimes I don’t get it at all no matter how hard I push myself. All I wanted at that moment was to keep the feeling going as long as possible, so I got ready for my third set on the sit-up board.

Unfortunately, someone beat me to the equipment. Instead of waiting for me to finish my sets, which is the polite thing – even if it isn’t required by the unspoken rules of weight room etiquette – a small, scowling woman wearing black denim jeans started fidgeting with the knob that adjusts the bench’s angle. Then she mopped my sweat off the bench with paper towels and some of that watered-down disinfectant spray. She shot me a look as I stood by panting.

“You know, it’d be nice if you’d wipe your own sweat off so I didn’t I have to.” She pushed her dyed-brown bangs from her eyes and got on the bench. Now, I always wipe down my equipment after I’ve finished with it – the Y posts signs all over the place asking members to do so – so I was angry for being considered inconsiderate. I was doubly angry because I wasn’t even done with my sets, and nobody cleans up their sweat before they’re going to sweat on something again. I thought about telling her she was wrong and rude and that she had cut in front of me before I was done, but I decided to just do jumping jacks until she finished. Then she did only two full sit-ups before standing up and walking away.

Whatever positive vibes I had left from my workout buzz were immediately replaced by rage and hate. She had messed up my routine for two freaking sit-ups! As she walked toward a water fountain, I shot her with mind bullets and finished my last set in record time, cursing under my breath the whole way. Then I wiped the seat down, left the sit-up board behind and got on the squat machine. I wanted to forget about the woman and murder my legs instead, so I moved 220 lbs. twelve times, reset the rack and stepped off for a breather before my next set. A familiar face greeted me and then swooped in on the squat machine to move the weight pin down to 75. As she waited for me to move out of her way and cleared her throat repeatedly, I made sure to wipe every drop of sweat and grain of dust from the entire surface of that giant machine. When I was done it sparkled like a diamond.

"But Dude, My Ice Cream is Melting."

On nights and weekends during the Major League Baseball season, I stand by a stairway and direct traffic at a certain downtown Minneapolis ballpark. I watch baseball, cheer for the home team, and help guests find their way around the stadium. People pull on the sleeves of my light blue uniform shirt and step on my clean white sneakers, they spill beer when they try to sip and walk at the same time, and they ask me for directions to the bathroom or the Ice Cream Stand. I smile and offer my help, and all I ask for in return is that they wait to go down the stairs until the batter at the plate makes an out or reaches base. I do this because:

• People complain when other people block their view of the game;
• People balancing hot dogs and dripping ice cream cones rarely see the foul ball coming their way before it leaves a bruise on their forehead; and
• It leaves the stairs clear in case I need to run down with an ice pack for someone’s forehead.

When I say, “Please wait,” some people stop at the top of the stairs and glare at me, waiting for an explanation. Others walk down four or five steps and then stop in front of an occupied seat so they can look at their ticket and figure out where to go, all while blocking another guest’s view. Others yet – the most frustrating of all – blow right past, too hurried to stand around waiting when a perfectly empty seat waits for them down in the front row.

I can’t lump every impatient person together, because their rudeness varies by degree and there are countless reasons to ignore an Usher; we don’t exactly intimidate people with our khaki shorts and sunburned forearms, after all. Since I don’t always know their motivation, I like to imagine as they walk past me and my calm voice that there is a sick kid waiting for them or that they’re dreading tomorrow’s performance review at work. I pretend some of them are deaf or have a poor understanding of English. It helps me remember they are real people with real problems, and that there are things in this world much more important than the stairway at Section 125 of Target Field.

More calming and helpful than this perspective, however, is the occasional guest who, after hearing my explanation, nods in agreement and says, “That makes sense.” This person is my friend.

Getting Leaner

Like many people, I go through stages ranging from one extreme to another. Binge or purge. Busy or bored. CBS or NBC. And because I eat what I like and can't always find the time to stare at my sneakers on the treadmill, I also fluctuate between heavy and healthy. Well, the good news is that I've joined the Y and I've lost some weight. The better news is that I haven't yet lost my motivation to continue. While my bookshelf and liquor cabinets are still far too crowded with unexplored treasures, each sagging from excess weight, my wedding band at least is getting a little looser. And all those size large Metallica t-shirts I acquired during high school and college once again fit appropriately.

There is something to be said for the idea that Less is More. Even though the philosophy is commonly applied (to the point of excess) to luxury cars, paperless bank statements and small plates at expensive restaurants, I'm buying into it right now and enjoying the results. I recently worked up a good sweat tossing out crap piled in the corners of my garage. Last weekend, I un-followed a bunch of uninteresting, inactive twitter users. And this morning, I even joined Tumblr.

I don't know much about the Tumblr world. People tell me it's the next big thing. Maybe it is already the current big thing. I've heard it described as Twitter-Plus and Blogger-Lite. So, since I like social media and I like blogging, I'm giving it a try. I don't see this as a violation of the "Less is More" credo, even though I'm adding yet another social network to my Safari Bookmarks tab; instead, I consider it an opportunity to post shorter, leaner pieces than I do here. If you've read any posts on this blog, you know I run windy and long, routinely surpassing 1,500 words on subjects as varied as Street Musicians and DVDs. On Tumblr, I'm going to keep it short and sweet, and I'm going to narrow my focus, too. While things won't change around here, if you follow me to Tumblr you'll be able to read my improvised takes and variations on the theme of Patience. Instead of explaining that choice here, I'll ask you to check out the new blog to learn more.

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UPDATE: After two weeks, I am proud to report I am still going hard at the gym. Running is getting easier, and all the crazy things I do to my abs are causing intense pain whenever I roll over in bed in the middle of the night. Must mean something is working. The same cannot be said, however, for the Tumblr; I managed only two posts on the site before losing interest. Or patience. Whatever. Instead of trying to keep two rarely-updated blogs alive, I'm just going to move the Tumblr posts over to this site and try to keep things simpler from here on out. Hope you'll stick with me.