Symphonic Sneezes

I Googled myself yesterday. I do that every few months to check on all those arrest warrants and bad credit claims that may or may not be against me, but I can pay just $9.95 for the PeopleSearch.com Premium Plan to find out for sure.

Also, as an author, I always enjoy seeing what crazy German, Arabic, and Indian book websites are selling my books, which are all in English. You can pick up a copy of Bullies & Bagels for just under 3,800 rupees. Can you believe it?

There are nine pages of me on Google, and yesterday I scrolled through all of them for fun and a couple of new items caught my eye, besides the possible impending credit and legal actions.

I am now actually quoted on wisefamousquotes.com under the “quotes about spit” category.

Men are far more likely to clean things with spit than women are. ~ Marc Schmatjen

I am definitely the originator of that quote, and while I appreciate them including me in their stable of quoted folks, I do have to take issue with the name of the website and its implied description of the website’s contents. In my opinion, “wisefamousquotes.com” should probably contain only wise quotes by famous people, or famous quotes by wise people, or some combination thereof.

My quote about spit is not wise, and I am not famous. Simply having a quote category named “quotes about spit” calls the entire “wise and famous” premise into serious question, don’t you think?

Still, it was fun to see.

The one that really made my day, though, was a calendar event at The Virginia Discovery Museum. From their website:

The Virginia Discovery Museum is proud to partner with Charlottesville Symphony to offer virtual musical storytimes and instrument demonstrations. Meet a new musician each month as we learn about instruments from the brass, percussion, string, and woodwind families.

On December 4th, 2020, Katy Ambrose, who is the Principal Horn (Brass) for The Charlottesville Symphony, located at The University of Virginia, read (and played) the kids my book, The Very Sneezy Garbage Truck, and apparently introduced them to a DIY instrument called the Hose-O-Phone.

I spit out my coffee when I read that.

What happens when Sneezy the garbage truck picks up his weekly load at a new factory? Meet principal horn Katy Ambrose, from Charlottesville Symphony, and learn all about brass instruments as she brings “The Very Sneezy Garbage Truck” by Marc Schmatjen to life through sound during a virtual musical story time.

I clicked on their link to the DIY project and I could not be more sad that I only just found out about this and I didn’t have the chance to Zoom into the reading back in December. I would have loved to see and hear a professional musician, so skilled in her craft that she is the leader for her instrument in an actual symphony orchestra, make garbage truck sneezing sounds and air horn noises with a makeshift horn constructed from a funnel, a garden hose, and a water bottle cap for a mouthpiece.

I mean, I guess she could have used her actual symphony instrument, but in my mind, she’s reading my goofy book to a bunch of kids and making glorified farts noises with a hose-o-phone.

I emailed the director of programming at the Virginia Discovery Museum, first to tell him or her that they are a genius, and second to request a copy of the recording if it exists.

You can rest assured that when I return to in-person school visits and finally get to read to kids again, the kindergartners and first graders are going to see me walk into their classroom wearing a DIY Hose-O-Phone across my chest like a bandolier!

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Magnifying the Problem

A terrible thing happened over the recent Thanksgiving holiday. It’s almost too painful to talk about, but I feel as though I can use this column as a cautionary tale, so I will press on despite the mental anguish this is causing me.

I sustained an injury just before the holiday that set in motion a chain of events that will undoubtedly end in a lifetime of trips to the doctor, and countless hours seeing a specialist.

The gruesome injury? Brace yourself. I got a tiny little splinter in my thumb.

I meant brace yourself for the fact that the initial injury was not really the problem. It’s how I handled the splinter extraction that will have me driving back and forth to the doctor for the rest of my days - if I can even drive myself, that is.

I will do my best to get through this story without any more sobbing. Here goes...

I had noticed the minuscule piece of wood in my thumb during the day, and it hadn’t really affected me much, so I ignored it. Later that night, however, the splinter was interfering with holding my beer comfortably, so I decided it had to go.

My wife had already gone to bed, so I was thoughtful enough to wake her up by thrashing around loudly in her sewing drawer, looking for a needle. She gladly jumped out of bed to help me find one. (Although she claims she thought I was a burglar and she was coming downstairs to defend her children and the house with her ninja karate skills, I know better. She loves to help me.)

Claiming that I didn’t need any more help once she had found me the perfect size needle, I sent her back to bed with a kiss on the cheek, and sat down at the kitchen counter to get to work.

There I was, in the dimly-lit kitchen, just before midnight, digging the splinter out of my thumb with a tiny sewing needle. It wasn’t working.

Then a thought occurred to me. A horrible thought. A thought that would unknowingly change the course of my life forever.

There’s something in that drawer over there that might help me get this thing out of my thumb. But should I use them? I never have for this kind of thing before, but they could help...

I thought about it for another few seconds. I should have just given up and gone to bed right then and there, but no. I am an idiot. Instead, I went to the drawer and opened it, eyeing the implements suspiciously.

Might as well give it a shot. I pulled them out and brought them back to the counter. Sitting back down, I positioned the devices over the splinter and then quickly snapped them into place.

“Ahhhhhrrrrrggghhh! Noooooo!!!” I screamed.

“What happened!?” came my wife’s concerned, almost panicked voice from the top of the stairs.

“Oh, nothing,” I said. “Sorry to wake you again. I’m just digging this splinter out of my finger and I put on your reading glasses to help me see it better. They help A LOT. When the hell did I get old?”

“About five years ago. Good night, old man.”

“Dammit!”

I can probably hold out a little longer, but eventually the eye doctor and I are going to be on a first-name basis.

They say it happens to everyone around forty. I guess that’s true, but up until that splinter I was sure it would never happen to me.

Dammit.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2015 Marc Schmatjen

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Summer Reading

We are officially on summer break. By “we,” I of course mean everyone at my house except me. The first day of summer, my three boys looked at me as I was getting ready to leave the house in the morning and asked, “Where are you going?”

“Work.”

“Oh… You don’t get summer, too?”

“Shut up.”

I’m not bitter.

In preparation for a three-month period of not being able to get away from the boys, my wife went to our local library and picked up information on their summer reading program for kids. Apparently the public library system is trying to keep kids interested in stuff like books and reading, so they are offering an incentive program. You set a reading goal of a number of books to read, and you get to come into the library and pick up a prize when you reach your half-way point, and again when you reach the full goal.

Son Number Two, who will be going into the second grade next year, heard the word “prizes,” and was immediately on board. If there is ever something to win, whether it be a prize, a trophy, or just bragging rights, he is interested. Their last day of school was on Thursday, and they were released from the hellish prison of elementary school just after noon. When I arrived home around 5:30 P.M., he was very excited to inform me that he had already read eight books.

“No, buddy, you can’t count ones you read during the school year. It has to be books you read during the summer.”

“I know. I have read eight books today, since after school. I’m on nine right now.”

“They have to be real books. Not picture books.”

“I know,” he said. “I read these.”

He hands me a stack of books. They weren’t exactly Moby Dick, but they weren’t Go, Dog. Go! either. He had read five Disney Winnie the Pooh adventures, two Magic Tree House chapter books, and Dolphin Tale, which was so good, they made it into a movie. (Actually, I think in this case, the movie was made into this book, but either way, the movie starred the handsome, roguishly charming, and multi-talented Harry Connick Jr., so you know it was good. Oh, and Morgan Freeman, too.)

“Wow, dude. That’s a lot of books to read in five hours.”

“Yeah, my goal is twenty books, so I’m trying to get to the halfway point so I can get my first prize.”

“It’s called a ‘summer reading program,’ dude, not a ‘the day school gets out reading program.’”

“Huh?”

“I think you should take a break now.”

“OK, I just need to read this one and one more, then I’ll be done. Can we go get my prize tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow is the actual first day of summer. They won’t be ready for you.”

“What!?!”

“Don’t worry, buddy. Mommy can take you in a couple of days.”

Well, that was last Thursday. In an effort to slow his pace a little, we told him he was only allowed to read long chapter books for the other ten. We went to a baseball game on Saturday, and he sat in the stands and read. My wife took the boys to the pool to swim with their friends, and he laid under her chair and read, until she had to almost throw him into the pool.

As of yesterday, five days after school got out, he was at 19. He has put us in a strange spot, parenting-wise. On the one hand, we are thrilled that he loves to read. On the other hand, we really don’t know if he loves to read, or if he just loves prizes, and would be eating live goldfish, or swimming naked to Alcatraz, if that happened to be what the library’s summer prize program entailed. On the one hand, we are thrilled to see him set a goal and work hard to achieve it. On the other hand, we have considered moving his goal from 20 books up to 2,000 in an effort to make it a “summer” program.  

We don’t want to tell him to stop reading, because that seems wrong from a good parental advice standpoint. We have to do something, though, because if we don’t, he will literally read all summer. I think we’re going to have to put him on a strict schedule, and try to balance out his activities. This is mostly a selfish thing on my part, because one of my main concerns is that he will get too smart, too fast.

He is already reading the Hardy Boys mysteries, and the Encyclopedia Brown series. At his pace, I’m really kind of worried that he will run through all of those and then graduate to the Sherlock Holmes collection. What’s next, John Grisham novels? I’m going to have to try and balance this out somehow. “Dumb it down,” if you will. I think I’ll make a rule that for every chapter of a book he reads, he has to spend at least ten minutes in the backyard banging a stick against a tree, or digging a hole with a spoon.

If we don’t do something like that, he’ll be on to The Count of Monte Cristo and A Tale of Two Cities in no time. Based on the furious book-devouring capacity he has already demonstrated, he will have read everything by the time he is 14 years old. I am well aware that when my boys are in their teens they will be convinced that they know everything, but I am not at all interested in trying to raise a teenage boy who actually does. This must be stopped!

My wife and my parents helped out the other day in distracting him, by taking all the boys on a summer field trip to an insect museum. Not only did this help by providing a four-hour window where he was unable to read, but it shed a hopeful light on our situation. He was allowed to spend some of his money in the gift shop at the end of the day, and what did my highly-educated, well-read seven-year-old son purchase? A three-inch-long piece of transparent hard candy with a scorpion encased inside. He’s currently sucking on the candy, trying to get down to the scorpion, so he can eat it.

Maybe there is hope. Maybe he’s not all that smart after all.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2013 Marc Schmatjen

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Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!