Tag: pirates

I can tell that this long quarantine has really frazzled me. I don’t feel frazzled, but I can tell by objec­tively anal­yzing my recent behavior. I attribute my state to the corona­virus epi­demic in general, and in part­icular to the the fact that, for various reasons, Kathleen, Archie and I have not been able to perform our ritual daily morning walks in the park lately.

I find my temper is short, and can be set off by the oddest in­con­sequential things. Kathleen and I have been married over 40 years, and you’d think we’d have all of our dis­agree­ments worked out decades ago. But this week, we actually snapped at each other, and had vehement arguments like brief but violent summer storms. (This is the “shocking” part of the post.)

And I can’t even remember what the arguments were about—something about whether the duvet folds on the left or on the right, I think. If I could remember, I’d be sure to tell you, because you know how I like to tell stories where I’m right and the other person is wrong.

There were other evidences of my brain being fried this week too. I’ve had inconvenient memory lapses. I’m not talking about the normal what did I come into this room for? lapses that all of us Third Agers bear as a badge of honor for sticking it out this long. No, these are weird.

For about a day, I could not find my wallet. I had a distinct memory of opening my wallet to do something, but no clue what that was, or where I was when I did it. Being painfully aware of the headache that canceling all my credit cards would be, I looked pretty hard for it, but no luck.

Night was closing in, and I was starting to resign myself to the prospect of all those cancellations. I went outside to put some yard tools away before the rain started, and found my wallet lying on the table in the back yard, with all the credit cards splayed out. Prompted with this evidence, I’m almost positive that I did that to my wallet, not some nefarious neighbor or errant gust of wind, but beyond that, it’s just swiss cheese up there.

There’s an old saying that once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action. My brain again took action against me very soon after. I woke up the next morning and found that my pickup truck was not in its normal parking spot in front of the house. I searched as best I could both my inner world (I racked my brain) and my outer one (I looked up and down the street), until I had exhausted all explanations I could think of, other than my truck had been heisted!

So I called the State Police and reported it. He asked me what must be the standard questions for such a call—When did you last see it? Does anyone else drive the vehicle? Are you sure you didn’t park it somewhere else yesterday? I assured him that no, I didn’t just forget it somewhere, this was a legitimate car theft, and gave him the identifying information.

About ten seconds after I hung up, what really happened yesterday came back to me like a movie flashback.

Frequent readers will remember that Archie is also a Third-Ager, if dogs count Ages in the same way humans do. He is getting set in his ways: he will walk with us in the park if we cajole him properly and don’t make him walk too long, but at home he’s no longer interested in a stroll around the block. Since the park was temporarily closed to us, I devised a cunning plan to get him his exercise: he and I hopped in the car as if we were going to the park, but instead I drove about half a mile down the street with a hill between us and home. I reasoned that Archie might not be willing to walk half a mile away from the house, but he would readily walk that far toward it.

I was right, too: Archie happily did the distance and got his afternoon constitutional. My plan was to walk back to the truck later and drive it home. I think you can figure out the rest…

So I called back the police dispatcher and shamefacedly admitted that my truck wasn’t stolen after all. He wasn’t at all put out. “Happens all the time,” he told me. What he might as well have said, but didn’t, was “Happens all the time to me when dealing with doddering old people.” Young upstart! I’m not in my dotage, it’s just the coronavirus!!

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Today’s post title is, of course, a play on that great adventure novel, Kidnapped! by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Before Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, before the Hardy Boys of my childhood, even long before Tom Swift of my father’s childhood, Robert Louis Stevenson was thrilling young readers with tales of pirates and buried treasures, high lords and desperate rebels.

I confess I’m much more familiar with Stevenson’s other great swashbuckler, Treasure Island, simply because I’ve watched that old 1934 movie with Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper so often.

Jackie Cooper, who played the young Jim Hawkins in the movie, was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor (for a different film) at age 9, and kept the record of youngest Oscar nominee for over 50 years.

I used to always get Jackie Cooper mixed up with Jackie Coogan, another famous child star of the 20s and 30s, who starred with Charlie Chaplin in several silent films, including The Kid. Jackie Coogan grew up to play Uncle Fester in the 60s TV comedy The Addams Family.

The other star of Treasure Island was Wallace Beery, whose interpretation of Long John Silver set the gold standard for acting like a pirate captain that was not touched again, arguably, until Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. Every time you observe Talk Like a Pirate Day, you are really talking like Wallace Beery. Aarrrgh, says I!

(Don’t forget, International Talk Like a Pirate Day is less than six weeks away, on September 19! Mark your calendars and shampoo your parrots!)

Thanks,
Dorn
8/7/2020