Tag: Life’s Funny

Life’s Funny

CODE GREEN

Vegging out in the botanical ER

By Maria Johnson

“Do you know what this is?” the woman asks, holding up a pot of frosted, wilted foliage.

“Dusty miller,” I say.

“Does it have a flower?”

“No, but it’s pretty as an accent plant. It kinda shines a light on the plants around it.”

She studies the plant tag for a moment, puts the pot back on the discount rack in the big box garden center and moves on in search of more color.

Right behind her, a young couple with a shopping cart full of fading dusty miller — and minds full of landscaping plans — swoop in to snag the passed-over pot.

A few steps away, another couple, acting as a two-person bucket brigade, shuttles droopy half-price hostas from the top shelf into their buggy.

“I like your garden clogs,” another shopper tells Hosta Mama.

“Oh, thank you,” the woman says mid-handoff, looking down at her feet to remind herself of what she put on this morning: orange-red clogs made from foamy plastic.

“Are they Crocs?” her admirer asks (newsflash: Crocs are back).

“No, but they’re the most comfortable things I’ve ever worn,” says Hosta Mama, invoking the name of another discount mecca. “Seven dollars at Gabe’s.”

“Whaaaaat?” says her questioner. “Where’s Gabe’s?”

“Off Wendover,” interjects Hosta Papa.

“Go get you some,” says Hosta Mama.

For the plants and the patter — two of my favorite things — this is where I like to hang out: in the botanical “emergency room,” where garden centers large and small dispatch plants with one root in the grave.

Deathbed daisies.

Forlorn ferns.

Crispy caladiums.

Puny petunias with thready pulses.

It’s not just the low prices that draw me to the way-back, where bar codes have been slashed with Sharpies. Though I’d be lying through my lilies if I said that didn’t matter.

Inflation has hit gardeners hard. A packet of seeds can run $3 easy. Starter plants — whether destined for plate or patio — are dear, too.

Tally the costs from seed to shelf: planting materials, labor, electricity, water, fertilizer, transportation, to say nothing of the front-end display and maintenance by folks who drag around those infernal watering hoses, the equivalent of speed bumps to those of us who like to drive our carts at a frisky clip.

Ca-chunk, Ca-chunk, @&#%$.

Anyway, that’s how you arrive at $10 or $20 or more for a two-and-a-half quarts of bountiful blooms and fulsome foliage, all of which nourish the eyes and soul, but dang. Multiply that times a border or two if you want to understand why my price-point peeps and I hang out in the ER where we can lop off 20, 30, 40 or 50 percent — even more when the dog days pant their humid breath in our faces.

Last week, I snagged a few plants near the entrance of a garden center, only to find the exact same specimens — a few days older and worse for wear — on the discount racks for much less.

Bazinga. Adrenaline hit.

So there’s that. But that’s just a part of it. The other aspect is community, a feeling of kinship among the compost crowd that touches more than the pocketbook.

It has to do with promise, potential, imagination and hope.

Does a plant contain enough green in its leaves, enough spring in its shoots, enough buds on its stems, to bounce back with a little love and a lot of Miracle-Gro?

Can you envision what it could be?

Do you know how to get it there?

Often, the people who frequent plant-based ERs are good at this kind of triage. My mom, a seasoned greenie who turned me on to this niche sport, taught me how to suss out survivors by looking, touching and, yes, sometimes by talking to the patients.

“Whaddya think?” I whispered as I caressed a scorched fern just a few weeks ago. “Can we do this?”

I saw and felt the answer in the lime-green curls close to the plant’s center. But even if the answer is yes — as the fern affirmed — that doesn’t mean you can be stupid about it.

You have to offer the right place. The right soil. The right light. The right moisture. The right season. The plant will tell you if you’re on target.

As legendary Greensboro garden designer Chip Callaway once told me: “There’s a difference between thriving and surviving.”

He was talking about plants, though he could have been talking about people, too.

Another Chipism: “Don’t be afraid to fail.”

Translation: Good gardeners lose a ton of green — in all senses of the word — on the way to becoming good.

Over the years, I’ve lost more floundering flora than I’ve saved, though my efforts are bearing more fruit these days.

The most humbling thing? I’ve had nothing to do with a lot of the saves.

More times than I can count, distressed perennials have saved themselves — eventually — even if they appeared, to my eye, to perish.

I’m thinking of one particular tea olive, a flowering evergreen shrub, that was in critical condition when I lugged it home along with some sickly companions last fall. I stuck them in a favorable spot. The mates caught on. But the outlier flatlined.

I was certain of it, pronouncing the bare branches DOA this spring.

I marked the corpse for the shovel, to be pried out and cast on the fire pit of good intentions.

Then other priorities sprung up, and the shrub fell off my radar.

Finally, I got around to it. I dragged a shovel to the gravesite to exhume the body, when what to my wondering eyes should appear, but clusters of vivid green leaves sprouting near the base.

Well, snap my peas.

Add one more condition to the list of gardening must-haves: the right amount of patience.

I granted the straggler another year.

It won’t be pretty for a while.

Except in the hothouse of my mind. OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Email her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

Life’s Funny

In the Twitter Sphere

The making of a bird brain

By Maria Johnson

I keep glancing out the window, stalling over the keyboard, because I want a happy ending to this column.

Nothing earth-shattering. Just nice. Neat. Fitting.

I thought the perfect finale would have alighted by now.

It’s been more than a week. But, so far, zippo.

So, while I’m waiting, I’ll just say this:

I’m an early bird in one sense — rising well before sunrise — but I’m late to join the crowd in the “cheep” seats.

And, frankly, I’m shocked that I’ve arrived at all.

For the longest time, the word bird appeared just before boring in my personal dictionary.

Before I’m pecked to death by my beady-eyed friends, let me say that I’m migrating your way.

Perhaps it was inevitable.

My grandparents were backyard birders.

They maintained a heliport of sorts — a bulbous chandelier of whitewashed gourds atop a tall metal pole, the equivalent of a flashing “vacancy” sign for the purple martins that summered in their small Southern town.

They hosted a bluebird box (an early Airbnb?), cleaning meticulously between tenants.

My grandmother monitored a hummingbird feeder outside her kitchen window.

She watched, waited, studied.

That really stumped me as a kid — all the time spent watching, waiting and studying.

For what?

Birds. Trees. Flowers. With a few exceptions, they all looked pretty much the same to me.

The difference between a sparrow and a wren? Who knew? Who cared — except for the fact that my grandparents seemed happy to see wrens, not so much sparrows?

I hate to admit this, but I think my aversion to birding was cemented by Miss Jane Hathaway, the brainy secretary to Mr. Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbillies television show.

Miss Jane’s after-hours passion was the Biddle Birdwatchers club, and she regularly appeared in campfire attire, grasping binoculars in search of the elusive yellow-bellied sap sucker or some other rarity.

Miss Jane was seriously funny (actress Jane Kulp won an Emmy for her role) and the epitome of a bird nerd. The stereotype stuck with me.

Still, I found myself mesmerized by the crows that chattered in our backyard, except when they glided silently in and out of a nest they built at the tippy-top of a loblolly pine. Aha, I thought, that’s where the term “crow’s nest” came from.

At the beach, I caught myself trying to discern the difference between sandpipers and plovers, terns and skimmers, ibises and egrets.

Once, on a family walk around Lake Townsend, I was thrilled to see a bald eagle tracing a wide arc over the fish-filled water, which I was pretty sure meant at least two nesting pairs claimed Greensboro as home.

I felt a pop of joy. What the heck?

Still, when I bought bird feeders earlier this year, I did so under the cover of my husband.

I bought him a pair of tube-style feeders and a decorative double shepherd’s hooks for Christmas after he’d admired a similar set-up at a friend’s home.

For Valentine’s Day, I bought him a hummingbird feeder, mainly because it’s partly red and I was desperate for an idea that wasn’t another red golf shirt.

Also, the bird supply store was on the way home.

Also-also, my dad loved hummingbirds, and every time I think of that, it makes me smile.

He came to his hummingbird fascination late in life. In his last years, in his 90s, as his mobility waned, he delighted in watching the feeder that my mom hung on their deck, waiting for the tiny birds to arrive from their wintering spots in Mexico and South America.

“He’s here! He’s here!” Daddy would exult when he finally spotted a ruby-throated male, usually in April. “And look! He brought his little bride!”

I’m sure I rolled my eyes. Maybe I tossed the birds a token glance.

“Yeah, they’re nice.”

I mean, it was kinda cool, how they could move forward and backward and up and down so quickly. How their wings beat so fast — about 20 times a second — that they blurred. No wonder they stoked up on sugar water. They were doing some serious aerobics. Props to the hummers.

My dad is gone now. But my mom still keeps her hummingbird feeder full of sugar water, partly because she enjoys the iridescent show, and partly to remind her of his glee.

Same here. Sometimes, I wonder about the ingredients of his joy. Sure, there’s the pride of being “chosen,” though I’m sure he knew that any ol’ trumpet-shaped flower will do.

Maybe he saw the whole journey — not just miles covered and nectar drunk, but how evolution — a slow dance of time and necessity — had gifted the tiny bird what it needed to survive. He often talked about the miracles under our noses.

Thích Nhât Hanh, the late Buddhist monk, would have called this looking deeply.

Which requires a certain amount of stillness.

Which our culture calls a waste of time or, worse, sloth. That is, until we get older, and time saps our ability to flit away so quickly.

Then we call it wisdom — sitting still long enough to notice differences, getting curious about how and why those differences exist and following those questions.

And so here I sit with my volume of Birds of North America within arm’s reach, next to a pair of binoculars. There’s another window open on my laptop: a migration map at hummingbirdcentral.com, where local birders report the first sightings of spring.

This is how I know that someone in Old Starmount spotted one earlier this week.

And someone in Willow Oaks saw one last week.

And someone in McLeansville saw two males at the same time — “a double treat to see.”

Braggart.

I sigh, turn my gaze outside, rest my chin on my hand and try to forgive myself for what I’m thinking: Sometimes, this wisdom thing is for the birds. OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Email her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

2023 Department Life's Funny

Life’s Funny

Not So Fast

Old dogs learn new appliances

By Maria Johnson

I was warming up a cup of coffee in the microwave.

Bing!

I expected that.

Crack!

I didn’t expect that.

It happened when I opened the door of our built-in microwave, which required me to slightly lift up on the handle, which was necessary because the hinges were bent.

Later, I tried to remember how the hinges had gone south.

Best guess: gravity aided long ago by a young son reaching up to open (i.e. hang on) the door in the process of exploding his Easter Peeps in the microwave because he’d heard that was possible and wondered if that was really true.

The answer was yes. A vivid pink yes.

In any case, the hinges were bent but the door still worked. And, as with so many things that are damaged but still functional, we lived with it and adjusted our behavior slightly as a work-around.

So we tugged upward to open the door.

Several times a day.

For 20-plus years.

What could go wrong?

Standing there, with a detached microwave handle in my hand, it took my uncaffeinated mind a few seconds to grasp what, indeed, could go wrong.

“Oh, no,” my husband said from across the room.

He was focused on the microwave.

“Oh, ****!” I said.

I was focused on the coffee inside the microwave.

I clawed at the edges of the door.

“Stop! You’re gonna break it!” my husband implored.

“Too late!” I barked.

Always good at triage, I was on a mission to save as many fresh-ground lives as I could.

One butter knife later, I calmly sipped my coffee. We surveyed the damage.

The door handle was part of the frame, which was irreparably broken.

A few telephone calls later, we learned that a new door was not available.

The only alternative was to buy a new microwave, which meant buying a new wall oven, too, because they were sold as a single unit, and we didn’t fancy rebuilding the wall.

Luckily, a locally-owned appliance store could order a replacement that would fit perfectly.

In the meantime, we patched the microwave handle as best we could, with black duct tape, upon the advice of our Peep-wrecking son, now an engineer who specializes in — wait for it — superheated, molded plastics.

In other words, you might have to wait a long time to see the benefit of your kid blowing up his Easter candy, but, God willing, the payoff will come when you need it most.

A couple of months later, our father-daughter installers, Dave and Alison, showed up with the new combo. They were lovely, professional people with entertaining stories about Dave’s Maine Coon cat, who eats salad and relaxes in a water-filled bird bath.

Never mind supply chain delays. Those images were worth the wait.

At the end of the installation, Dave gave a quick demonstration of how to use the new appliances, which shared a banner-style control panel across the top. The microwave controls were on the left, under “upper oven.” The regular oven controls were on the right under “lower oven.”

If we were baking something and needed to use the microwave oven at the same time, we would see a split screen of cooking in progress.

Oddly, Dave explained, when the microwave was finished, only the microwave display — not the oven display — would remain on screen unless we pushed the “cancel/off” button on the left side.

“Don’t push the cancel/off button on the right side, or you will turn off the oven. That’s what most people do,” he cautioned. “Got it?”

I rocked my noggin like a bobble-head in a sort of “yes-no-not-really” motion.

“It’s really a design flaw that they should fix,” he said.

I bobbled an affirmation.

“We’ll read the instruction manual,” I said weakly.

After Dave and Alison left, Jeff and I were faced with the horrible truth.

We would have to learn something new.

Together.

At the same time.

It wasn’t gonna be pretty.

One year before, we’d reconfigured our trash can/recycling can setup in the kitchen.

Months later, we were still dropping plastic bottles into the empty under-counter space where the recycling can had been.

We finally we caught on. Though in times of omelet-induced stress, I have been known to toss egg shells into the recycling can, which stands where the trash can used to.

Brain experts would explain this in terms of neural pathways. The more a behavior is repeated, the stronger the nerve connections leading to that behavior. Unused pathways disappear.

That’s why learning new tricks is the best way to slow down mental decline, according to scientists who probably croaked with their microwaves still in boxes.

That night, Jeff and I stared at our new brain trainer.

We wanted to warm up some leftovers.

It took us twice as long to figure out the correct order of steps — five in all — as it did to heat the food.

But we’re gaining on it. We’ve hacked the zapping down to two steps not found in the instruction book.

Turns out, old dogs aren’t half bad at learning new tricks.

And hungry dogs are even better. OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Email her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

2023 Department Life's Funny

Life’s Funny

A Little Lesson in Fame

The Greensboro connection to pop culture icon Meinhardt Raabe

By Maria Johnson

The emails landed in my inbox a few days apart.

The authors — who didn’t know each other — had read my February column about riding in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile (www.o.henrymag.com/lifes-funny-76/) and wanted to know if I’d run across any mention of “Little Oscar, The World’s Smallest Chef.”

Bob Sandberg, who lives in Colfax, wrote that while growing up in Madison, Wisconsin — the headquarters of Oscar Mayer — he’d encountered the wiener-on-wheels several times, and that “Little Oscar was a huge draw wherever the Wienermobile went. He was this ‘little person’ dressed in a white chef’s jackets and slacks and a white chef’s toque. He would mingle with the crowd and hand out the Wienermobile whistles.”

No, indeed, I had not heard about Little Oscar, but I was happy to add this to my stash of wiener trivia.

Then came an email from Diana Wold of Browns Summit, also by way of Wisconsin. She, too, wanted to talk about Little Oscar.

At this point, I’m thinking “What’s up with Little Oscar?” But I’m glad Diana reached out because I learned some juicy facts.

One: Little Oscar’s real name was Meinhardt Raabe (pronounced Robbie), and he was her second cousin, her father’s cousin’s child.

And two: Raabe’s bigger claim to fame was his role as the Munchkin coroner who pronounces the Wicked Witch of the East dead in The Wizard of Oz movie.

Whoa.

It’s a globally recognized scene in which Raabe — in a bright orange wig, waxed beard and mustache, along with a dark purple cape and huge hat with tightly curled brim — stands beside Dorothy and unfurls a Certificate of Death. (Heʼs the third from the left in the poster pictured.)

He then warbles this 13-second line in front of the Mayor of Munchkinland:

As coroner, I must aver

I thoroughly examined her

And she’s not only merely dead

She’s really most sincerely dead

His announcement sets off the Munchkins, who break into jubilant song — “Ding, dong, the witch is dead . . . ” — which gets the attention of the squashed hag’s sibling, the Wicked Witch of the West, who appears in a puff of red smoke.

“Who killed my sister?” WWW demands.

Game on.

My heart leapt to know about the Greensboro connection to this classic snippet of moviedom, and I made a beeline to Diana’s kitchen, where she and her husband Russ shared stories and documents that told more about their esteemed cuz of Oz.

Born to German immigrants in 1915, Raabe grew up on a dairy farm in Watertown, Wisconsin. He was the only little person in his family — indeed, in the whole area — something he was painfully aware of.

“He wanted to be a minister, but the story went back then that he was not tall enough to see out of the pulpit,” says Diana.

So Raabe went to a local college to study accounting. In the summer of 1933, his parents took him to the World’s Fair in Chicago. They’d heard about Midget Village, a scaled-down replica of a German town populated by small adults.

It was a life-changing experience, Raabe told interviewers, to see people like himself. They lived, worked and played together. He’d found a community.

He worked at Midget Village the following summer and used his earnings to help pay for school. He finished his accounting degree at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and looked for white-collar work. He was 3-foot-4.

“The accounting companies couldn’t see me for dust. Prejudice was very outspoken at that time,” he told the Lutheran magazine, Correspondent, in 1992. One manager suggested that he work in a carnival sideshow.

Raabe finally landed a job with Oscar Mayer. Soon afterward, in 1936, the company christened the first Wienermobile, a novelty car for promotional appearances.

Years later, Raabe suggested to an interviewer that he’d come up with the idea for Little Oscar after noticing a small chef pictured on the company’s packaging.

“I said, ‘Well, look, I can be a little chef and a sales promotion person,’” he told Correspondent. “I could speak fluent German and probably 70 percent of their customers at that time were butchers of German parentage.”

Raabe suited up for the part-time Wienermobile gig in addition to his sales job.

In 1938, he heard about a little-people casting call for an MGM movie. He hopped a train to California and auditioned. His speaking ability landed him the part of coroner in The Wizard of Oz. He took a leave of absence from one cultural touchstone to work on another.

When the film wrapped, Raabe, then 23, went back to the Wienermobile. Wizard was released in 1939. Gone with the Wind hit big screens the same year, and Wizard lingered in the shadow of the Civil War blockbuster until television boosted its profile.

Even as a child in the 1940s, Diana Wold says no one in her family talked about Raabe being in the Wizard. He was celebrated as Little Oscar. It wasn’t until Wold became an adult that she realized the movie’s status.

When she and Russ lived in Appleton, Wisconsin, a neighbor found out that Raabe was Diana’s relative. He was overjoyed to meet the one-time actor.

“So help me, I thought he was going to wet his pants,” says Diana, now 80. “People are like that about The Wizard of Oz.”

Yep. The movie has so many rabid devotees that Raabe and his wife Marie — also a small person whom Raabe met when he was traveling with the Wienermobile and she was working as a cigarette girl in an Akron, Ohio, hotel — traveled the country attending Oz-related events after his retirement from Oscar Mayer in 1971.

Raabe, who continued growing to 4-foot-7 after the movie, relished mingling with fans, signing autographs and repeating his lines from the movie, even though it was later revealed that his speaking part, and those of other Munchkins, were altered and dubbed.

“It’s been a lifetime means of making a living,” Raabe once said. “You can’t get sick of something that keeps you going.”

At times, he still felt the sting of disrespect — he reported that people fronted him in lines and reached over his head to grab items in stores — but he also understood that his stature was key to his security.

After the Wolds moved to Greensboro in 1994, Raabe and his wife drove their custom RV to visit the couple several times, usually between fanfests.

“Meinhardt could talk about anything,” Russ recalls.

“A mile a minute,” says Diana.

“He could talk your arm off,” Russ adds. “He seemed like he was in his teacher mode a lot of the time.”

Raabe, also a pilot, taught navigation and meteorology as a member of the Civil Air Patrol in World War II. He earned a master’s degree in accounting and studied horticulture. He liked to walk around people’s yards, identifying plants and giving instructions on how to care for them.

“He was going to tell you what he knew,” says Diana, laughing.

Retired to a senior community in Florida, Raabe continued traveling after his wife died of injuries from a car wreck that hurt both of them in 1997.

He came to Greensboro in 2001, at age 86, to attend the Community Theatre of Greensboro’s seventh annual stage production of Wizard, a local tradition.

He recalled his time on the movie set to Cathy Gant Hill of the Greensboro News & Record.

Judy Garland, he said, was not quite 16, but sophisticated for her age.

“She’d come in the morning and say, ‘Hi, gang!’ We got the impression she enjoyed working with 124 little people as much as we did with her,” he said.

Raabe kept going.

He appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2005, the year he released his autobiography, Munchkin Memories.

In 2007, he attended the unveiling of the Munchkins’ star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In 2009, he was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday.

“He enjoyed the limelight,” says Russ Wold.

Raabe died in Florida in 2010. He was 94. He and his wife had no children. His estate gave $1 million to Bethesda Lutheran Communities, an organization based in his hometown. He had previously given the outfit $3.5 million. Now known as AbleLight, the nonprofit helps people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

“Because he experienced discrimination based on his appearance and perceived ability . . . he gave with an open hand and an open heart,” the organization’s annual report said in 2015.

Sitting in her kitchen, Diana Wold shakes her head in amazement.

“He had quite a life, with the Wienermobile and The Wizard of Oz, and everything in between,” she says. “He’s my claim to fame.” OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Email her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

2023 Department Life's Funny

Life’s Funny

HOUNDGATE

Document reveals the influence of canine special interest

By Maria Johnson

Recently, I found a sensitive memo mixed in with some other papers on my desk.

I swear I don’t know how it got there.

The document — written for our dog sitters — contains some incriminating information. It outlines just how looney my husband and I have become in accommodating our little hound, Millie.

They say the hardest thing is to see yourself as others see you.

Well, after rereading this report, that’s no longer true.

I hope history will not judge us harshly. I doubt dog owners will. Cat owners probably will blink their eyes slowly. And we all know what that means.

In the interest of transparency, we’re disclosing the content. Sensitive parts (i.e., the names of anyone crazy enough to go along with this) have been redacted.

Dear ————-, ————- and ————-:

First, thank you for tending our sweet Mills while we are gone.

She’s a wiggly, kissy, zippy, barky, cuddly girl, and we hope you will love her as much as we do. Here are the basics:

CHOW

Mills eats twice a day, one cup of food in the morning and one cup at night.

Rather than leave her food prepackaged in a zillion Tupperware containers in the fridge, we’re leaving a silver food dish on the kitchen island.

Each time you feed her, please put half a cup of dry food (in plastic bin under the laundry sink) plus half a cup ground turkey and brown rice from the green box in the fridge. Mix well.

You can splash that with a little bone broth (top shelf, fridge). Please microwave the broth for 25 seconds in the little dish beside the broth.

She’ll inhale the chow and act like, “Food? What food? You haven’t fed me. You must be thinking about the last time.” Do not be alarmed. (Hereafter abbreviated as DNBA). You DID just feed her.

I think.

WALKIES

She luvvvs to go for walks in the neighborhood. You can suit her up with the harness and leash on top of the dryer. If you have probs understanding the cinch-style harness, look up the YouTube video titled “Sporn Stop Pulling Mesh Harness,” which is worth watching just to hear the narrator describe the armpit pads as “Sherpa sleeves.”

If you want to drive Mills to a park, feel free. She’s a good car rider. Sometimes she will try to jump into the driver’s seat with you, which I discourage because she does not have her license yet.

Once at the park, feel free to wear my stylish fanny pack, which contains a tiny spray bottle of water. If Mills barks incessantly at other dogs, spritz her in the face and say, “Shh!” Sometimes, a “shhh!” alone will work. Pavlov was right. When she does well, say “Good girl.” Four times. In baby talk.

Mills also enjoys exercising at home. As you might know, she takes after her mother in exhibiting strong OCD tendencies toward tennis balls. If you have time, please take a ball from the ball hopper in the laundry room, grab the tennis racket next to it and hit the ball across the backyard for her to chase and retrieve a few hundred times. Joke. A few dozen times will suffice. She will promptly return the ball to you and BARKBARKBARK for you to do it again.

Once she drops the ball, tell her to “lie down.” Sometimes she will. Sometimes she looks at you like, “Let’s just say I did.” In either case, she will back off long enough for you to pick up the ball. Probably.

Her retrieval process is not exactly . . . linear. Once she finds the ball, she often meanders. She backtracks. Sometimes, she detours to a shady spot, collapses and pants excessively, giving every indication that her heart is about to explode. DNBA. That’s her way of saying, “Gimme . . . a . . . minute.”

If she appears to have trouble finding the ball, don’t worry. She ALWAYS finds the ball, even if it’s on the other side of the yard. Sit down and enjoy the break.

The hardest part of this activity is stopping it. To break the spell, pick up the slobbery ball, carry it inside and put it in the cabinet above the dryer. See space marked “tennis ball.” Then close the cabinet. Yes, this is gross, but she will accept this as “game over.” Oh, and don’t say the word, “ball,” unless you’re ready to start this game again.

CHILLING

Mills is a great loafing companion. She likes to curl up next to you, always touching you. She’s especially fond of lounging on the couch, on a crocheted afghan made of granny squares. Everyone knows this is her afghan, but Mills is very generous. She doesn’t mind if you use a couple of granny squares to cover yourself.

Be advised: If you’re lying on your back, there’s a good chance she’ll walk up the length of your body, as if you’re made of cobblestones, stand on your chest and stick her nose in your face like, “Hey, whatcha doin’?” She weighs 32 pounds, so it’s not too bad. You can use this time to check her for ticks. As far as viewing goes, Millie likes to watch Harry & Meghan, especially the beagle parts.

OTHER MILLIE-NUTIA

Don’t be surprised if she springs up, barking insanely around 5 a.m. She’s reacting to the newspaper hitting the driveway. Really.

She will beg for your food. Don’t give it to her. Even when she rests her snout on your thigh and looks up at you like Olive(r) Twist, “More porridge, please, mum?”

Periodically, she rests her head on coffee tables and chair seats while standing. Big brain, I guess.

Sometimes, when she lies down on the hardwoods, it sounds like a bag of bolts hitting the floor. DNBA.

Sometimes, when she’s relaxed, she honks like a goose. DNBA.

In short, she’s a gem. And so are you, especially if you’ve read this far. OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Email her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

2023 Department Life's Funny

Life’s Funny

HOT DOG!

Our intrepid reporter goes for a whirl in the Wienermobile

It was the perfect evening for a winter festival.

The air was pleasantly chilly — or perhaps I should say chili — and spiked with the smell of fried dough and the bump of live music.

Revelers lined up to try their luck aboard a mechanical, bucking Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. In another particularly American display of affection for the holiday, children in padded red suits and headgear tried to knock each other down in spirited rounds of Sumo Santa.

Yes, it really was shaping up to be an ideal Festival of Lights as my husband and I threaded our way down Greensboro’s Elm Street, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but curvilinear gleams of orange and yellow.

“Wait, is that . . . ?”

“What?”

“Oh, my God.”

“What?”

“It is!”

“What are you looking at?”

“It’s the Wienermobile!” I said, breaking into a trot.

I stopped in front of a bubble-shaped windshield, giddy at the fact that I was in the presence of an American icon.

I can’t say for sure when the Wienermobile first entered my consciousness. As a child of the ’60s and ’70s, I’m sure I saw it on TV, in holiday parades and Oscar Mayer commercials.

I have a vague memory of our family car passing a huge rolling wiener on Interstate 75, but I could be confusing that with a colorful tanker. Or it could be the result of wishful thinking and an excellent jingle.

Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener,

That is what I truly want to be—ee—ee,

‘Cause if I were an Oscar Mayer wiener,

Everyone would be in love with me.

Obviously, all these years later, seasoned by life’s experiences, I believe . . . that’s still true.

Everyone loves a hot dog, even a mostly plant-based foodie like myself. Wave a Carolina dog — slaw, chili, onions, extra mustard — in front of me, and I cannot be responsible for what happens next.

And now? There I was, standing next to the Wienermobile, all 27 feet of it, parked curbside with its gull-wing door lifted so that gawkers could marvel at the luxurious interior, which included six bucket seats upholstered in bright red and yellow, as well as a squiggle of yellow painted on the floor.

In Wienermobile culture, red equals ketchup. Yellow, mustard. That’s why the keepers of the wiener, two young dynamos named Keagan Schlosser and Chad Colgrove, were dressed in red and yellow pullovers. They invited the crowd to stick their heads inside the Wienermobile, pose for pictures and take home individually packaged, red plastic Wiener Whistles.

I asked Keagan if I could, for journalistic reasons, arrange for a ride in the Wienermobile during their stay. She said that would be “bun-derful.” Two days later — after the Festival of Lights and the Christmas parade — I climbed aboard for a Sunday morning spin.

Keagan asked where I wanted to go.

In a perfect world, we would have picked up my 90-year-old mom from church, the Wienermobile’s jingle-horn tootling just as the postlude faded.

My mom would have been slightly — OK, a lot — aghast, but also flattered. Ultimately, I thought, she’d cave to peer pressure from church pals who would want a ride, too.

As it turned out, my mom stayed at home with a mild illness that morning. Damn it.

My second choice was the Guilford Courthouse National Military Park because it, too, represented a significant piece of American history. Plus loads of people walk there on Sunday mornings. Off we went, as Keagan and Chad, both 23, shared how they became regional wiener drivers.

A native of Carbondale, Illinois, Keagan — who is no relation to the Greensboro Schlossers, sorry, guys — was about to graduate from the University of Wisconsin last spring with a degree in journalism. She’d interned at a local TV station. But the news biz was too serious, she felt, so she started looking into Hotdogger jobs, one-year gigs offered to recent college graduates by Madison-based Oscar Mayer.

Her journalism professors encouraged her to go for it. I repeat: Her journalism professors urged her to shun the Fourth Estate in order to pilot a giant fiberglass wiener around the country for a year.

I could not argue with their advice.

Chad, on the other hand, had known about the Wienermobile from the time he was a tyke in Boise, Idaho. Every year since he was 6, his family would sniff out nearby Wienermobile appearances and snap a picture of Chad grinning beside the seven-ton sausage.

As a teen, Chad rolled his eyes at this tradition, but his mom insisted, saying, “You never know. You might want to drive it one day.”

Naturally, Chad submitted all of those pictures with his job application, and he was chosen as one of 12 Hotdoggers from among 2,000 applicants.

“My mom literally started crying,” he said.

“I think my family was a little more confused,” said Keagan, explaining that they’d been pulling for graduate school, but they softened when she told them that it was harder to get into Hot Dog High than to be accepted at Harvard University.

Among the things Keagan and Chad learned in weenie school:

*The original Wienermobile was created in 1936, in Chicago, by Oscar Mayer’s nephew Carl. The open-cockpit novelty car gave out samples. After a fleet of Wienermobiles was deployed in 1988, they stopped dispensing free hot dogs.

*There are six Wienermobiles cruising America’s “hot dog highways,” stopping for gatherings such as car shows, sporting events, parades, festivals, as well as promotional appearances at stores that sell Oscar Mayer products. (Track the Wienermobiles at https://khcmobiletour.com/wienermobile)

*Built on GMC cab-forward truck chassis, Wienermobiles are powered by 8-cylinder gas engines. They get roughly the same gas mileage as a large SUV. The bodies are fabricated 40 miles from Greensboro at a Pfafftown company called Spevco Inc.

*Jay Leno drove the Wienermobile for a 2017 episode of Jay Leno’s Garage. Actor Tim Allen blew a Weiner Whistle in the 1994 movie, The Santa Clause. Bible-thumping Ned Flanders, of all people, drove the Wienermobile in a 2019 episode of The Simpsons. Inexplicably, Jerry Seinfeld has not asked to borrow the Wienermobile for Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.

*The best place to wash a Wienermobile is a fire station. “We ask them if we can use their scrubby brushes and water to clean our wiener,” says Keagan. So far, they have not been refused. “Firemen love the Wienermobile,” she adds.

You could argue that a Harvard degree would better prepare a young person to serve the world than a hitch in the Wienermobile, but after tooling around the military park with Keagan and Chad, I’m not so sure.

You’ve never seen such immediate and whole-hearted smiles, followed by cell-phone fumbling and picture taking.

By the older guy in the San Francisco 49ers sweatshirt.

And the supercool driver of the Tesla stopped at the crosswalk.

And the young guy with the topknot. And the middle-aged couple walking two big white fill-in-the-blank-a-doodles.

And by 11-year-old Layla Jordan and her mom, Mojgan, who quickly waved her daughter into a photo beside the Wienermobile when we stopped at a light.

Keagan and Chad popped the hatch, jumped out and handed Layla a plastic Wiener Whistle.

“Your brother is going to be so jealous,” Mojgan said.

They handed mom another whistle and invited Layla to pose for a picture with them.

“Say ‘Cheeeeeeesy Wieeeeener!’” they coaxed.

Back inside the Wienermobile, Chad and Keagan mused about what would come next for them. Chad hopes to land a corporate wiener job with Oscar Mayer. Keagan, who has successfully driven the Wienermobile around Manhattan several times — and therefore feels, justifiably, that she can do anything — dreams of a big-city job with one of the marketing firms that contracts with Oscar Mayer.

“We’re relishing this while we can,” said Chad with a face as straight as a foot-long. OH

Applications are now open to become the next hotdogger. For more information, visit oscarmayer.com/wienermobile.

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Contact her at
ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

2023 Department Life's Funny

Life’s Funny

Resurrecting Hope

A new way of thinking in a new year

By Maria Johnson

I like a soulful story.

So even though this piece will sound like a news story in places, hang on, and I think you’ll catch the spirit. Maybe even The Spirit.

Recently, I heard from a woman named Joyce Powers. Never met her, but I’m a sucker for a woman who tells you that she’s 80, that she does 80 “very well,” and that she wakes up thinking about her current project, like a kid at Christmastime.

The thing that excites Joyce is the fresh approach that her Greensboro church, Presbyterian Church of the Covenant, is taking in response to decades of declining and aging membership, a challenge for many flocks.

The folks at PCOC — they affectionately call the place “peacock” — are chucking the church.

The brick-and-mortar part, anyway.

But they’re hanging onto their idea of what the sprawling Neoclassical Revival building near UNCG should be: a place to meet, to cultivate benevolent ideas and make those ideas real in the community.

Back in October, the church released a request for proposals, calling for detailed pitches on how to convert the 50,000-square-foot structure, which dominates a block of South Mendenhall Street, into a hub of live-work-play.

Joyce and other church members can picture the current sanctuary as a performance space. They see room for nonprofit offices, a restaurant-pub. Maybe senior housing.

And yes, a smaller space that the church can lease back for worship.

They aim to sell the property, with stipulations, to the developer whose plan they like the most.

The deadline for proposals is January 27.

“We think this is unique,” Joyce says. “We haven’t heard of anything else like this.”

She credits church member Jim North for seeing what could be. After reading about the Brooklyn Arts Center — an event center and bourbon bar occupying the former St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Wilmington — North visited the site earlier this year. (A story about the BAC appears in the November 2022 issue of this magazine: ohenrymag.com/the-creators-of-n-c-23.)

North told his brethren that he believed a similar transformation was possible here. That’s when Joyce invited input from Dennis Quaintance, who, along with his wife Nancy King Quaintance and developer Mike Weaver, founded one of Greensboro’s crown jewels, Quaintance-Weaver Restaurants & Hotels. Nancy’s parents were married at PCOC.

Joyce also reached out to David Kolosieki, who heads the local Habitat for Humanity and understands both the nonprofit and for-profit worlds.

Kolosieki became a paid adviser to a church committee that harmonized the vision with PCOC’s history.

From the git-go in 1916, the church — the building was designed by famous Greensboro architect Harry Barton — has been action-oriented.

The congregation hired a nurse to deal with the flu pandemic of the late 19-teens. They fed soldiers who passed through the city’s Overseas Replacement Depot in World War II.

Later, they housed a childcare cooperative, a counseling center, and a preschool for blind children.

Currently, PCOC hosts a day center for physically and mentally disabled adults. It also provides a meeting place for the Greensboro Mennonite Fellowship, as well as Unity in Greensboro.

Thinking outside the box is a PCOC specialty. Church members — about 30 of them show up on a typical Sunday — include a couple of homeless people.

“If someone needs us, we’re here,” Joyce says.

She concedes that church members can’t control everything that happens to the property down the road. Neither do they know whether the changes will draw more people into the fold, or if their numbers will dwindle and die.

Not to worry, she says with conviction.

The congregation likely will use proceeds from the sale to create an endowment that will nourish local service projects aligning with the PCOC ethos.

So either way, the church will live on, just in a different form.

And what could be more Spirited than that? OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Contact her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

2023 Department Life's Funny

Life’s Funny

Stranger Things

Samaritans on the way to Summerfield

By Maria Johnson

It sounds weird to say, but I honestly don’t know how the accident happened.

I remember rolling down the Atlantic & Yadkin Greenway on my mountain bike that Friday afternoon a few months ago.

I remember coming up on the tunnel under U.S. 220, near Summerfield, and noticing that the inside walls had been painted with a bright mural. It looked like something kids had done. Was it flowers in a field?

I remember thinking it was going to be cool to pedal through the artwork and get a closer look.

But I didn’t get that far.

The next thing I knew, I was losing control of the bike and veering off the path.

Had I hit a patch of gravel where the surface changed?

Had my chain slipped?

I have no idea.

I can still feel the sickening realization that I was going down; then the shock of impact followed by a burst of pain in my shoulder; and the instant knowledge that something was broken — but not my head, thanks to my helmet.

My next memory is of three people moving toward me: a young man and woman, and, behind them, an older man with a big black-and-white dog.

The young man helped me up and allowed me to lean on him, which was a good thing because my legs were shaking. I could not have stood on my own.

He walked me over to the tunnel and suggested that I sit with my back against the wall. He asked several questions, which, even through my daze, I could tell were designed to assess my mental and physical state.

“Are you a medical person?” I asked. “Because you talk like it.”

He smiled and said no. But he’d been a lifeguard at YMCA camps and knew a lot about first aid.

The young woman pointed out the bloody scrapes on my right leg and arm.

“It’s her shoulder that I’m worried about,” he said, staring at my right collarbone.

I tried to glance down. I couldn’t see much. I didn’t really want to.

He asked if there was someone he could call.

“My husband, Jeff.”

“Do you know his number?”

“Yeah, I know his number.”

Looking back, I think it’s a small miracle that the young man — whose name I later learned was Jacob — did not call my husband and say, “Your banged-up, coherent, smart-ass wife just wrecked her bike on the greenway. Please come get her.”

Instead, Jacob told Jeff where to park and went off to meet him.

Meanwhile the young woman, Joan, and the older man, Robert — along with his dog, Pepper — stayed with me and chatted. It was amazingly amiable, considering the circumstances.

I turned to Joan: “Are you connected to the Y, too?”

No, she said. She had finished her master’s degree in counseling at UNCG and was getting ready to start a new job with a family-focused practice inside a couple of old homes on Spring Street in Greensboro.

“That’s funny,” I said, explaining that this magazine’s first office was in one of those homes.

In that moment, I could see the front room where our young editor hung her dream catcher, the wonky, windowless room that connected the front room to the kitchen. I could see the staircase, the landing, the upstairs room where our crew draped ourselves over armchairs and a futon to laugh and curse and argue and conjure a never-ending stream of story ideas.

Soon, Joan would come to know the same spaces through her work with young children.

A feeling hit me. It was more woo-woo than woozy.

I turned to Robert.

“What about you? Are you retired — to be walking your dog in the middle of the day?” I asked him.

Yes, he said, from the old post office on Banking Street.

Again, the small-world feeling washed over me.

I told him that O.Henry’s second office was in the Dutch-barn-shaped building next door. I used to mention the old post office as a landmark when giving people directions because everyone seemed to know where it was.

“That was a great post office,” I said sincerely.

Robert nodded.

It occurred to me that there must have been times when we were working within Bluetooth range of each other.

So far, only a few yards and years had separated me, Robert and Joan. And now, here we were, the three of us, hanging out under a highway on a Friday afternoon.

It was as if time and space had folded so that we finally met face-to-face just when I needed them most.

“Well,” I said to my tunnel peeps, “I hope no one else shows up because I’m running out of former workplaces to have in common.”

They stayed with me until Jacob returned with Jeff, who whisked me to an emergency room.

Joan and Jacob took my bike — they had a rack on their car — and dropped it off at our house.

Five hours later, an emergency room doctor confirmed that my collarbone was broken in a couple of places

A few days after that, an orthopedist assured me the bones would knit without surgery if I kept my right side quiet for eight weeks.

That was 12 weeks ago.

The road rash scabs have been replaced by shiny, pink skin.

My sling is folded up in a closet.

I’m doing physical therapy to regain strength.

The bone-deep ache is fading.

What persists, though, is the memory of three strangers who ran to my aid. They knew nothing about me — where I lived, how I voted, what I believed, whom I loved.

None of that mattered. They saw I was hurting and — maybe because my need was so obvious — they responded with care.

Once they came closer, we found we had things in common.

It sounds weird to say, but that gave me hope — in the midst of pain.

And for that, I am thankful. OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Contact her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

2022 Department Life's Funny

Life’s Funny

Homeward Bound

The answers to lifelong questions are writ in stone

By Maria Johnson

“Let’s go for a little drive.”

My dad said this on Sunday afternoons when I was a kid.

It was more gentle command than invitation, but I don’t remember anybody balking.

So the four of us — he, my mom, my brother and I — piled into whatever American-made V-8 living-room-on-wheels he was driving at the time and went along for the ride.

Usually, the excursions involved looking at other people’s houses, rolling through more expensive neighbors at a speed that would get you flagged on NextDoor these days.

Sometimes, the objects of our gawking were for sale — often my parents had seen them advertised in that day’s newspaper — but most of the places we ogled were not on the market.

What was the point? To drive. To dream. To discuss.

In hindsight, it’s tempting to say that Daddy — a civil engineer with a lifelong love of architecture, especially the work of Frank Lloyd Wright — was pushing us toward a sense of aesthetics there in his rolling salon. I honestly doubt that’s what he set out to do. But that’s what happened.

We followed his lead. As a naturalized U.S. citizen, he spoke better English than most of his fellow Americans, but he lapsed into his native Greek to praise some homes with a hearty “oraio” (nice) while discounting others with a sad “po-po-po-po.” (What a shame.)

The winners, in his opinion, shared a few traits. They had clean lines, proportionate features and they harmonized with their surroundings. Size had nothing to do with it. Ostentatious homes were kicked out immediately.

I suppose that’s how he could call our modest ranch home in Lexington, K.Y., in the heart of horse country, “a beauty.” He also praised my mom’s childhood home, a two-bedroom bungalow in Spencer, N.C., where we visited my grandparents every summer.

I never saw my father’s boyhood home in Greece, but I wondered if it molded his way of seeing.

“What was it like?” I asked him.

“Rock,” he said with a smile.

“Do you think you could find it now?”

“I don’t know, honey-mou,” he said, using the endearing suffix. “It might not be there any more.”

“Do you remember what it looked like?”

“I remember there was a crack in the wall from an earthquake,” he said.

“Well,” I teased. “That narrows it down.”

He chuckled and added a hopeful line.

“One day, I’m taking our family to Greece.”

He never did. But I was still curious about the house.

One day, I thought, maybe I would find it. My chance came earlier this year.

My husband, our two grown sons and I were headed to Greece. We would spend most of our time in my father’s village, Lagadia, which clings to the side of a mountain in the Peloponnese, the paw-shaped peninsula that claws at the turquoise seas west of Athens.

More than anything, we wanted to absorb the culture: to feel, hear, see, smell, touch and taste what shaped my dad. Finding his boyhood home would be a bonus. And a miracle.

I had no address, no picture no known relatives living in Lagadia, and no guidance from my dad, who died in 2015 at age 95. All I had were several downsized paper copies of a family tree that he had mined from his parents’ memories when he was 18. The handwritten chart went back to 1821, the year Greece launched a successful war of independence against the Ottoman Empire. Would that be enough?

Hope came in the form of Dora Tasiopoulou, who, with her builder-husband Takis, owns the inn where we stayed, Agnantio Studios and Suites.

On our third night, Dora, who speaks excellent English, assembled a few of the village elders in the family’s restaurant, Aroma Café, which is captained by Takis’ brother, Christos.Dora, who also runs a middle school in the nearby city of Tripoli, summarized the family tree to the old heads. She occasionally turned to ask me a question in English, then slid back into Greek. When she ticked off the names of my father and his siblings, one of the men perked up. Was my dad’s brother, Apostolos Yiannacopoulos, a doctor? Yes. Uncle Paul, as I knew him, was a professor of radiology at the University of Athens. Heads nodded. More words flowed. Dora turned to me with a smile and said, “We found your house.”

One of the men, Mr. George, lived two doors down from Uncle Paul’s family home, which would have been my dad’s family home, too.

Together, we made a plan. The next morning, Dora’s father-in-law, Mr. Dimitri, would take us to Mr. George’s cousin, who would take us to Mr. George, who would take us to my dad’s childhood home.

What else could we say but “OK”? It was the only way.

Historically, Lagadia — once home to more than 10,000 people, now inhabited by fewer than 300 souls — is known for its stone masons, so most of its structures are fashioned from native rock and knit together by a web of mortared walkways, alleys, walls and stairs. There are no street names, house numbers or formal property records.

You want to find a place? You rely on word-of-mouth and memory.

What were the odds that we would find both in the four days we happened to be there? A hundred years after my dad was born?

Statistically speaking, we had just won the lottery — in the warmth of the people.

The next morning, Mr. George led us through a labyrinth of walkways to my Dad’s home.

The first thing my eyes fell on was a burst of fuchsia roses in a stone planter beside the front door. My grandmother, Maria, loved roses. I looked at the luscious petals as a greeting: “Welcome to my home.”

The L-shaped home hugged a slope. Imagine a house with a walk-out basement. And the front door on the side. A walled garden was on the low end. The garden was overgrown. The home’s red-tile roof had fallen in. The tops of the upper walls had been chewed off by time. The floors between stories had collapsed. Plants and small trees sprouted from debris inside.

No one had lived there for decades. It was, as the locals would say, “a ruin.”

But not to me. My dad’s stories came to life in front of me.

On the lower level, I saw the low vaulted ceiling of the kitchen where he would have begged the family’s young housekeeper, Christitsa, for fish. I could make out the remnants of the fireplace where my grandmother scooped ashes to smudge behind my dad’s ears to make him imperfect, thus warding off the evil eye.

I saw my grandfather sipping stout Greek coffee from a tiny china cup, sliding the saucer across a tablecloth to hide burn marks left by the falling ash of his unfiltered cigarette.

I saw my dad as a child, wearing what he called “short pants,” walking to church just 50 steps away, and to his school another 25 strides beyond. I saw him chasing a soccer ball on the stony landings around his home.

Right here.

He drew his first breath.

The high, innocent notes of his little-boy voice filled the air.

His mother watched him through these windows.

And now, a century later?

Bees buzzed around the salvia, thistle and sage that sprang from crevices in the tightly-stacked stone walls.

A fig tree growing inside the walls was setting fruit.

Roses beamed at us.

We stood in the morning sun, blinking through tears.

We had come 5,000 miles to look at someone else’s house.

It was, we agreed, handsome. Natural. Simple. Well-built. Suited to its place.

Oraio. OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Contact her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

2022 Department Life's Funny

Life’s Funny

By Maria Johnson

Eric Trundy is pacing around the stage, doing a bit about the grief he felt after his friend, Rene Luna, another comedian, died of testicular cancer last year.

Trundy confesses that he was sobbing as he was cleaning house, begging God to let him see Luna one more time. In the middle of his mourning, he saw a fly on the wall. He snaps a rag at the wall behind the stage to demonstrate what happened next: The fly dropped.

At that moment, he tells the crowd, it occurred to him: What if reincarnation is real?

What if God heard his prayer and . . .

The crowd laughs. They get it.

Trundy is a funny guy.

Not just because he’s a professional comedian.

And not just because of his hair, sort of bouffant mohawk that rides high on his white-walled head. It’s a very stand-up cut. Cough-cough. And not just because — but honestly, largely because — of port-city mouth, which spits f-bombs and carries an implicit challenge: “You-lookin’-at-me?”

It’s not even because he once worked as a professional wrestler named Rage.

Fact.

No, Trundy — a fireplug of a guy who grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and looks like he’d just as soon slug you as hug you — is funny because he describes himself as “a crier.”

Meaning that he cries. Easily. With tears.

“I just love feelings, you know?” he says as he reaches for another tissue. Of course, the tissue box holder looks like a Rubik’s Cube because we’re sitting on the intentionally gaudy set of his YouTube talk show, a place that looks like your grandmother’s house. If your grandmother ran a bordello. In Vegas.

The point is, Trundy loves emotions. All of them. Not just the happy ones.

“It turns out, happy is shit without sad,” he sniffs.

Now feels like a good time to say that you should catch Trundy — and a raft of other comics — at the North Carolina Comedy Festival in downtown Greensboro this month.

Why? Because they hold up a mirror with their stories. If all goes well, you laugh at them — and yourself.

“It’s why people watch comedians,” Trundy says. “There’s more vulnerability.”

Trundy is one of the most vulnerable, and funniest, guys around.

He’s a regular at The Idiot Box Comedy Club, the epicenter of the comedy festival, which will use six stages across the city. Idiot Box owner Jennie Stencel started the festival in 2018. This year’s lineup is the biggest ever, featuring 300 comedians from all over North America.

Trundy has been a crowd favorite every year.

“Eric lights up a stage and a room,” says Stencel. “He draws the audience in and gets them to laugh at life’s difficulties and his own struggles, but sometimes it’s just plain joy and silliness . . . He could be headlining all over the country.”

That’s not hype. Trundy, 45, played coast-to-coast, at some of the nation’s biggest comedy clubs until about six years ago, when he was leveled by depression, a blue note that has been sounding since his childhood, which was marred by many forms of abuse.

As a teen, Trundy soothed himself with alcohol and comedy. He devoured cassette tapes of his favorite comics: George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Rodney Dangerfield.

“I listened to comedy like other people listened to music,” he says.

The habit persisted for years, even as Trundy held down a successful career servicing industrial wastewater treatment systems in Virginia and North Carolina.

When podcasts became popular, he heard comedians talk about getting their starts at open mic nights.

That’s why he stepped on stage at The Idiot Box one Thursday night in 2011.

“I got a few laughs, and I was hooked,” he says. “It’s a small dose of what it feels like when you fall in love …except it’s a whole room full of people understanding you. It’s intimate.”

He quit his job and hit the road, which brought a new round of pressures. When Trundy and his wife divorced, a friend, comedian Anthony Lowe, let him stay at his family’s cabin in the woods.

“I don’t think I would have survived had Anthony not helped me,” Trundy says.

As partial repayment of the kindness, Trundy recently produced and directed A Bee in a Bird Suit, a comedy special for Lowe, now Annie Lowe, a transgender woman.

“I’m very lucky that one of my best friends is who she’s supposed to be, and I know for a fact that someone will watch that special and an opinion will change,” Trundy says. “The more you listen to people, the more empathy you have.”

Trundy’s developing new projects for himself, too.

He hosts a YouTube talk show called NBH, short for the ironically titled Never Been Happier. In a recent episode, he and comic pals Nick Ciaccia and DeJahzh Hedrick make fun of machismo by kicking around the idea of a birth control pill for men.

“It would need a masculine name,” says Ciaccia.

“It’s gotta be tough to swallow,” says Hedrick.

“They’re not like little pills,” Ciaccia imagines. “They’re big pills.”

“Lots of jagged edges,” Hedrick adds.

“They taste bad,” Ciaccia says, lapsing into a deep voice. “But I gotta take it.”

“Take it with a beer,” Trundy chips in. “It’s shaped like a pretzel.”

He’s also shaping new bits for the stage, unafraid to show the, um, cracks in his life.

He tells the story of rock climbing at a waterfall with a friend. On the way out, Trundy bent down to play with a cairn, a stack of rocks that marked a trial.

“This lovely, tender gentleman — I think he was Hispanic — walks up to me and says ‘Excuse me. Your pants is broken.’”

Trundy had split the seat of his pants while rock climbing.

“I had been showing my ass to everybody for a good four or five minutes. This guy was so polite. He was letting me off the hook. He said, ‘Oh, you know, it happened to me one time, too.’” Trundy, who’s planted in a wing chair on the empty set of his talk show, giggles about how a stranger tried to ease his embarrassment by sharing that he’d shown his ass to the world, too. It worked.

Trundy shakes his head. “F****in’ adorable.” OH

Trundy will headline a show Sept. 9 at The Crown at the Carolina Theatre. To learn more about the festival, which is scheduled for Sept. 2-12, go to nccomedyfestival.com.

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry.

2022 Department Life's Funny