Polar bears

One day a baby polar bear approaches his mother with a confused expression on his face and says, "Mom? Am I a polar bear?"

I arrived at the campground to find my only child sprawled on the ground, surrounded by a gaggle of 7-year-olds, his sneakers smoldering.

As I carefully removed his charred socks and then applied a rag soaked in icewater to the blisters on his ankles, he sobbed out the story.

Apparently he and three of his friends had been playing by the lake shore when they saw a large depression filled with grey powder. It looked interesting -- or maybe something on the other side did -- so they waded right through it, Patrick in the lead.

Later he said he thought the stuff drifting off the top was dust stirred-up by the wind. I suppose smoke might look like wind-blown dust. Or ash.

Either way, it was the last time he was truly warm the entire weekend.

"Well of course son!"
The cub replied, "You're sure I'm not a panda bear or a black bear?"

"Pack 20 Polar Bear Campout." The title of the event alone should have warned me away.

By sundown the wind whipping off the lake was truly cutting. The "observatory," which for some reason I had imagined as a heated, domed building with a sliding roof -- maybe with an open bar and a fireplace -- turned out to be a bunch of telescopes set up in a field at the top of a hill.

Brrr.

Later, after the campfire had been lit, various adults repeatedly warned the 70-some-odd elementary kids not to stray inside the logs laid around the fire. You could see that it was probably warmer in there, but you couldn't get quite close enough to tell for sure.

"No, of course not. Now run outside and play."
But the baby polar bear is still confused so he approaches his father.
The cub asks, "Dad, am I a polar bear?"

By 9 p.m., the wine was gone and there was nothing left to do but go to bed. Suddenly the "0-degree" sleeping bags Cabela's sent me looked inviting.

I tried for a few minutes to read by flashlight, but to do that I also had to leave my arms outside the bag. No good.

"Why of course son!" the papa polar bear gruffly replies.
The cub continues, "I don't have any grizzly bear or Koala bear in my bloodlines?"

10:30: I've inadvertently unzipped my bag in my restless sleep, and the cold is flooding in across my left ass cheek. I zip the bag up again and roll over.

11:23: I awake to the wailing of some Cub Scout's little brother, somewhere on the other side of the camp. The banshee-like screams continue until 11:47.

12:13: Patrick has rolled into the tent pole and I awake with a layer of nylon across my face. Our breath has condensed and formed ice on the inside of the tent.

2:21: I awake again and realize that I have to pee. I ponder this until about 2:29, when I decide it's just not worth it.

3:40: I really have to pee. I struggle out of my sleeping bag, don my hiking boots and jacket, and unzip the tent. It's freezing, probably because the evening's cloud cover has blown away. A million stars spangle the night sky. I hear something clattering on the ground as I go about my business. I'm pretty sure it's my urine, turning to ice.

4:17: Patrick rolls over and says: "I always wake up at this time when we're camping." Patrick, I say, it's 4:17 in the morning. "Oh," he replies. The diffused starlight through the top of the tent, refracted by the ice that has again formed there, looked like the gray light of dawn.

5:10: I awake from a nightmare in which the surgeon who performed my back surgery in June is standing over me, frowning and wagging his finger. I roll over and try to ease the ache that's spreading from my lower back into my thighs.

"No son. I'm a polar bear, your mother is a polar bear, and by god you too are one hundred percent purebred polar bear!! Why in the world do you ask?"
"Because I'm freezing my BUTT off!"

6:30: I wake-up again, and hear the voices of kids running across the campground. Maybe, I think, someone has coffee on. I stumble out of the tent and head across the campground. Still rubbing sleep out of my eyes, I stop and stare at the dad who apparently is standing in the fire. Sparks swirl and dance around him. I push through the two ranks of sleepy campers who are toasting their hands over the flames and ask him if there's room for two.

7:05: Sitting in my truck with the heat on high, trying to gather the courage to get back out and pack up.

7:27: Packing sleeping bags and the tent one-handed, as I desparetly clutch a cup of hot coffee in the other. Nick, the Cub Scout pack's grand poobah, walks over and hands Patrick a patch.

The patch shows three polar bears walking across an ice flow with the words: "It froze in Texas."

What?! These guys knew it was gonna do this? They knew far enough in advance to have patches made?

That's it.

For the second time in my life I'm quitting Cub Scouts. After I take a hot shower. And a nap.

Photos courtesy Pack 20.

Four eyes and one big brain

In college, my roomate and I one semester waited tables at the same restaurant. Sometimes on the same shift.

One day a waitress there -- I think we both had a bit of a crush on her -- was refilling someone's Dr. Pepper and sort of sighed, as she gazed longingly across the room at my friend: "Trey's so smart."

Huh.

"I mean, he's really, really smart," she said.

"Yeah, he's a pretty bright guy," I answered, puzzled.

A little later in the day, she said it again: "I can't get over how smart Trey is!"

I was starting to get annoyed.

"Well, ya know ... Trey and I are in a lot of the same classes and we make about the same grades," I offered.

In fact, I had just kicked his hiney in the semester-long, dreaded "Junior Poet" project. But, he was my buddy, and my intention wasn't to make him look bad ... just to make me look not quite so ... not not-smart.

The waitress eyed me speculatively.

"Yeah, but Trey looks smart."

Huh?

I thought about it. And thought about it. What about Trey dressed him as a towering intellectual in the eyes of this woman?

It finally ocurred to me: the glasses. The wire-rimmed glasses he needed to do anything from read a menu to write his name.

I, on the other hand, looked like a former linebacker from Hicksville, Texas. Ironic, because Trey was the former linebacker ... but still.

Since then, I've been waiting somewhat anxiously for my eyesight to go.

For the past 16 years I've read in low light every chance I get. I frequently venture outside without sunglasses. I avoid carrots.

I've even thought about buying a pair of designer frames with, um, glass lenses. Just plain ol' glass. But it seemed a little too much like ... oh, I don't know: hair plugs; liposuction; a penile implant.

The other day I woke up and, over coffee, tried to read the newspaper. The text kept blurring. I closed my left eye: Yep, blurry. I closed my right eye: clear.

At last, I thought (monocles no longer being fashionable): Glasses!

By noon I was seeing fine. Turns out I was just hung-over.

So I'm still waiting.

Trey, on the other hand, has since moved on to contact lenses, earned his Ph.D. and is now a professor of English literature in Virginia.

Consider the lowly sea hare ...

My first encounters with sea hares came during my early childhood in Ingleside. My dad delighted in showing me the strange creatures washed-up on the shores of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway.

Even as they melted in the hot, South Texas sun, they could emit copious amounts of purple ink.

Fascinating, eh?

Much later in life, after a summer watching these critters gracefully and ever-so-slowly dodge anglers, boat wakes and juvenile sea turtles at a Gulf pass near Corpus Christi, it occured to me they look like nothing so much as ... well, camouflaged, swimming vulvas.

Sea slugs -- the "hares" (so-called for their purported resemblence to a sitting rodent) are one type -- are quite common, as it turns out. There are hundreds of species, and they are found in all the world's oceans. They also are quite variable.

Some, like the Aplysia brasiliana (mottled sea hare) pictured above are herbivores, some are carnivores and a few are even able to co-opt chloroplasts from the plants they eat and continue photosynthesis within their own bodies.

Sea hares, like all sea slugs, are mollusks -- related to clams, squid and other such critters. Sea slugs are marine snails (mostly) without shells. Sea hares, unlike their relatives the nudibranchs, retain a vestigal shell within their bodies.

Sea hares are hermaphrodites, each sporting a penis on the right side of the head and a vagina in the mantle cavity. It's a cosmic joke that the critters ... well, they can't quite reach.

Still, the arrangement leads sometimes to a rather freewheeling sex life, with male-female pairings, male-female/male-female ménagerie à trois, female-male/female-male ... oh, you get the picture.

Anyway ... very beautiful animals, especially as they glide through the water.

The name game

Getting ready for work this morning, I tried desperately to remember the last name of a colleague, TPWD's aquatic education coordinator. I know her well, work with her frequently, but found myself muttering: "Ann .... Ann ...."

Just wouldn't come to me.

Our email address list at work -- the "global" we call it -- is artfully arranged and alphabetized by first name. Purposeful? I'd like to think so. I' d like to think one of our IT whizzes consciously decided to humanize our bureaucracy by forcing us to correspond with our colleagues on a first-name basis.

That's probably wishful thinking on my part, though a sort of collegial informality does reign in my workplace.

There are, I think, cultures of address; ways of naming and addressing the people with whom we come in contact that vary widely based on history and tradition, relationship and age, geography and status.

In my youth, I "sirred" and "ma'amed" anyone old enough to vote. My parents insisted on it, as their parents had taught them, ad infinitum into the dim mists of history, I suppose.

Friends' parents were always addressed by their last names preceded by an honorific: "Mr. Sbrusch," and "Mrs. Friebele." Never mind that they may have been so familiar with us, known so long as to be nearly surrogate parents.

That became something of a sliding scale; as I grew older, the minimum age of an individual deserving of formal address also shifted. Though old habits do die hard; I would still find it difficult, I think, to call Mr. Sbrusch "Frank," or Mrs. Friebele "Betty."

In some distinct social milieu, even within this broad "culture" we mistakenly assume to be monolithic, forms of address are quite different from what I sometimes expect. An elderly black couple I once knew referred to each other -- in each other's presence -- formally: "Mr. Jones crushed his foot under a refrigerator," the wife might tsk.

I don't know enough to divine whether that is a "black" thing, an old-fashioned thing, a southern thing, or just some thing my particular white trash background didn't adequately prepare me to recognize.

In the Rio Grande Valley, hard on the Mexican border, formality also is the rule rather than the exception. Office workers dress like professionals and supervisors and strangers often are referred to -- and addressed -- by title and last name.

Spanish and other Latin languages of course allow a little more room to maneuver. In both the second and third persons, one may signal the nature of a relationship by the use of the proper pronoun.

English, on the other hand, has largely divested itself of the formal and respectful "thou" and "thine." We use the all-purpose "you" for everyone from the President to the kitchen help, for siblings and strangers alike.

In the military, informality trickles down the chain of command, but rarely up. A major might call a captain or even a sergeant in his command by his first name, but barring a pre-existing relationship (say, for instance, they were Cub Scouts together) or a whole lot of off-duty fraternization, it's unlikely the subordinate will call his superior by his first name; certainly never in public.

The Commander-in-Chief, of course, can call anyone anything he likes, and frequently does. Pres. Bush has dubbed poor Karl Rove, alternately, "Boy Genius" and "Turd Blossom."

This week, I suspect, he's answering to the latter.

Former FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh was "Big Country," and the president's own father was dubbed by his son "Forty-one." Michigan Republican Rep. Fred Upton, to the president, is "Freddy Boy;" Rep. Dennis Hastert, until this past Tues. third-in-line in presidential succession, was simply "Speak."

Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, a long-time critic of the Bush administration, allegedly is referred to by the chief executive by a name Milbank says is "unprintable in a family publication." Some reports say the president calls Milbank "Chickenfucker."

Ouch.

Reportedly, "Forty-three" refers to the president of Russia as "Pootie-Poot." That's almost mind-boggling to me; that the head of state of one nuclear nation refers to the head of state of another in baby-talk.

But I suppose you can do that when you lead the sole remaining superpower. And that's probably the point.

I answer to a couple of nicknames, "Schlop" and "Running Dog" among them. Neither arose out of particularly flattering circumstances, but as they were assigned by my friends and peers -- who bear their own, equally laughable appellations -- it's okay.

Boston psychiatrist Ronald Pies, M.D., makes a persuasive argument that George W. Bush's penchant for assigning nicknames to friends, foes and staff members is much more than good-natured frat boy ribbing. It is, Pies argues, an assertion of dominance. It's Alpha male behavior, dick-measuring taken to an extreme.

On the one hand, it's flattering to be close enough to the president of the United States that he calls you anything more than once; on the other hand, who can possibly gainsay the leader of the free world when he calls you something outrageous?

"Nicknames," Pies writes, "serve an important function of dominion for all of us ... they define and delimit another's powers and status. Nicknames put people in their place(s)."

Littlest friends do the most amazing things

[This story first appeared as a newspaper column nearly four years ago. Since it first was published, Gumbo again went on walkabout. When he came back, he'd grown (see the second picture, below) -- but so had Patrick.]

A giraffe called Gumbo is my 4-year-old son's best friend. They're inseparable.

Well, almost.

A couple of months ago, Gumbo went missing. Patrick was sure he was in the car or maybe under the bed or at school. When the 10-inch-high stuffed animal didn't turn up, Patrick's mother assured him that Gumbo was likely on a trip - perhaps visiting relatives in another city.

"Missing" signs went up around her office, at our son's day care center, even around the neighborhood.

Gumbo didn't come home.

A few weeks went by and Patrick still asked after his giraffe every day. Patrick's mom implemented a contingency plan; she had located an identical giraffe at a toy store across town and one day at lunch she bought it.

When she presented Gumbo to our boy, he hugged the animal and then said: "Why is he so clean?"

Well ... he must have taken a bath.

My boy didn't like the clean Gumbo quite as much as the well-worn version that had disappeared. A conversation ensued about liking our friends no matter how they look.

Once over that crisis, Patrick decided Gumbo must indeed have been visiting family somewhere. The giraffe's parents live in France - Gumbo was born there, but has lived in this country for quite some time.

He simply forgot to call or send a postcard and let us know where he was. Gumbo has two brothers, as it turns out, who look just like him.

That's handy, because if the "real" Gumbo ever turns up, someone will have some explaining to do.

It's amazing what these little animals are capable of. In addition to being able to navigate long distances, my son's giraffe talks (sign language, don't you know - apparently hooves are no impediment to communication) and even has distinct preferences when it comes to things like peas versus spinach, and what video he'd like to see next.

He likes to be hugged and kissed good night, and has to have the covers tucked up to his chin when he goes to sleep.

Even though he'll always be too little to drive, Gumbo plans to be a fire fighter when he grows up. Not coincidentally, so does Patrick.

A co-worker's son, about the same age as Patrick, had a bad night last week because his plush "Puppy" kept him up all night barking.

Bad dog.

Madeleine, a calico cat that was once my boy's constant companion, now spends most of her time snoozing in a corner of his room. She's not nearly as playful as when she was a kitten but I suppose that's only natural for cats as they grow older.

The aptly named "Pony," like Gumbo, is a traveler. Pony rode off into the sunset about the same time as Gumbo and hasn't been seen since.

Lately, Gumbo sports a snug-fitting, green kitty collar with a tag etched: "Gumbo" and his home phone number. Given his penchant for wandering, it seemed prudent.

Last week, Gumbo disappeared again after a trip to Walgreen's. A return visit turned-up nothing and it appeared he may have been giraffe-napped while my son's attention strayed. Or, perhaps, he had gone visiting again.

A couple of days after Gumbo's most recent disappearance, the phone rang.

A kindergarten teacher at a nearby school had purchased a number of stuffed animals for her class. As she was sorting them she noticed that one had a collar. An odd touch, she thought, and checked her receipt.

No giraffe listed there, so she called the number. And Gumbo came home.