Stuff - Just Some Things I Felt Like Talking About

On Sunday, September 23, we experienced the magnificent Autumnal Equinox, one of the two days out of every year when we enjoy exactly equal amounts of day and night. It also marks the beginning of Autumn, or Fall, the favorite season of football fans and leaf rake manufacturers.

The other day of the year with exactly twelve hours of daylight is the Vernal Equinox, which, of course, marks the beginning of Verne.

The onset of Fall means different things to each of us. To parents it means that the kids are going back to school, to learn, to grow, and to develop eventually into happy, productive, well-educated citizens of our great land. To kids it means struggling to stay awake through Social Studies, then having the big kid in your gym class administer your bi-weekly wedgie.

My friend Mary recently showed me a photo she took on vacation. It's a close-up of a blue sign with white letters, painted on steel and a little rusty around the edges, nailed to the wooden siding of a cabin. The sign says, "Hippies Use Back Door - No Exceptions." There's also an arrow presumably pointing to where the Hippies might find the back door, letting us know that the sign means to provide navigational instructions rather than a lifestyle suggestion.

I'm not sure whether to be amused, insulted, or maybe just a little bit flattered. Having spent my teen years wandering through the 1960s, I'm not ashamed to admit that I was a hippy then, and that and I am still an unreconstructed hippy at heart.

Of course, the same might be said for pretty much everyone my age who is not a Fox News personality or serving somewhere else in the Bush administration.

Last week we began an excursion into the wonderful world of watercraft, exploring my deep knowledge of boats, boating, and the dislodging of women's bathing suits. Here, as promised, is the second installment of:

Bilgewater Ball's Guide To Stuff You Might See Floating On A Pretty Good Lake

Sail Boat - There are a wide variety of "Sail Boats" indigenous to Pretty Good Lakes. Among the smallest of these is the Sunfish, which is essentially a pointed plank with a "Sail," a "Rudder" and a "Center Board." The Sail catches the wind and moves the boat, the Rudder steers the boat, and the Center Board shoots up and hits you in the chin to let you know you've reached shallow water.

Ever since my remote ancestor Oog Ball sat by the water in front of his cave and used his stone axe to hack a birch log into a 21 foot  Mastercraft, my family has been involved with boats. Over many thousands of years the Balls have enjoyed a proud tradition at sea, from Titus "Blisterfingers" Ball, the famous galley slave, to "Bilgewater" Ball, who served as ballast with Admiral Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar.

Of course, all of my ancestors who came to this country arrived by ship - although since they were Irish, they traveled 5th class, which is often playfully referred to by the other four classes as "freight."

As some of you know by now, there is a benefit concert coming up at our house on Labor Day. If you haven't heard about it, you can get all the details at www.lostvoices.org. To give you the short version, Josh White, Jr., Kitty Donohoe, Robert Jones and some other friends of mine are going to join me to make music to raise money for Lost Voices, a group that works with incarcerated kids. We'll use our deck as a stage and perform for a whole lot of people on the lawn and on boats.

I discovered that the one problem with having a party for, say, hundreds of people, is that my wife is not necessarily all that keen on the idea. I discovered this when she handed me my pillow and suggested that I sleep in the shed for the next few months. She apparently feels that the house should be tidied up a bit before all those people get here. I tried to calm her down by putting on my best Johnny Cash voice and saying, "What's the big deal, Baby? It's just a little old concert."

When I came to, I was sort of folded up on a pile of gas cans in the shed. And my wife had apparently changed her mind about letting me have the pillow.