Author: Henry O. Arnold

We received a call recently from concerned parents worried about my wife’s influence on their children. The concerned parents were our daughter Lauren and son-in-law, Erik, and the children in question were our grand children. This was not an easy thing to accept. The complaint had to do with Kay’s lullaby catalog sung to the grand kids when she puts them to bed at night. I had long since been banned from lullaby duty. When I would pinch-hit for Kay in her absence all I came up with was “Purple Haze,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Whipping Post,” and “Born to be Wild;” lullabies that were good enough to sing to my own girls when they were growing up, but now were somehow deemed questionable. I blame the “parenting” craze for that. “The times they are a changin’.” What precipitated the call was when Lauren and Erik were in the car with the kids a few weeks ago and began to hear their children singing in the backseat, “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” The lyric the grand kids were singing began with the number ten and not the compulsory number in the title (I hope there will be no copyright infringement suits after this story goes public). Just to confirm what they heard, the parents listened for a few more musical rounds until the number dropped to seven. Husband and wife first inquired of each other if one of them had taught that song to the kids, but both denied it with an emphatic “no.” Then they turned around and asked the cherubs in the backseat. “Guys, where did you learn that song?” asked both parents in unison. The singing stopped and there was a brief pause from the backseat. By the tone of the inquisition, the cherubs suspected they might be in trouble. “Kayme!” came the unison reply. The horror. The horror. And straight to the speed dial number for Kayme did the parents go. The third degree started as soon as Kay answered. The interrogation did not last long. Kay laughingly confessed. When we are with the grand kids, bedtime unfolds in two acts: they all pile in our bed and I read them a couple of books. Afterwards, I will carry them to their beds (this practice of “carry me, carry me” will either end by middle school or when my back gives out). Once tucked between the sheets, I exit, Kay enters, and the lullabies begin. She sings the standards, but on this particular night while the parents were out on a date, the kids were more amped up than usual. I get blamed often for being the catalyst for this rowdy behavior and must plead guilty. Kay had come to the end of her play list, but those crazy kids wanted more. So Kay reached back into her long ago, and “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” started spilling out of her mouth; this from the grandmother who has never consumed a bottle of…

One can find countless quotes on what it means to become a man from the humorous and profane to the solemn and profound. In my opinion, becoming a man is a process of making fewer and fewer stupid choices and putting more and more distance between each stupid choice. St. Paul said it best, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.” Transitioning from “childish” mode to “manhood” mode is not the simple flip of a switch. There is no magic age to mark manhood that come with frameable “Manhood Achievement” certificates. We get to drive a car at sixteen. We can vote and join the military at eighteen; smoke and drink at twenty-one; get an education and secure employment shortly after; eventually find a mate. None of those chronological milestones assure manhood, and the mix-messages we boys and men get from the DNA of our genealogy, culture, media, social milieu, and bad theology can end up piecing us together like an abstract painting: visually beautiful on the outside, bewildered and lost on the inside. My long slog resembles Pilgrim in “Pilgrim’s Progress”; many foolish choices and wrong turns landing me in dark places with no sense of direction and no sightings of even a flicker of light. I needed rescue, and as I look back on that phase in my life, I didn’t even recognize my need for rescue. My father did. I believe rescuing came so natural to him that he was not even aware when he activated the impulse. He probably could not articulate how he came by such an ingrained virtue of his soul, and then would deny it if you attributed that positive feature to him. We were estranged at the time my rescue began. In my underdeveloped, idiot brain, Dad’s coolness factor was low, which shows how little I was paying attention to him and to my own foundering in the “slough of despond.” As clueless as I was about my plight, I was equally clueless as to what was happening to me when the lifeline was cast. Dad was offered the role of Don Quixote in the musical “Man of La Mancha.” I was not aware of it, but my father had asked the director to give me a chance at a role, which the director agreed to as long as I went through the audition process. If I weren’t embarrassingly awful, then I would be given a shot. The bar they set was very low, but I did land the role of a muleteer, one that was a named character with a handful of lines, and not just a part of the mob. My character’s name was Paco, and I latched onto Paco as if my life depended upon it. It probably did. I showed up for every rehearsal. I was even an understudy for the role of the…

Around the time I turned twelve, I had an early and shocking coming-of-age moment of discovery. The whole family was at the drive-in to see “Geronimo” starring Chuck Connors, and no, the shock was not that white men, albeit, well-tanned ones, could play Indians in Hollywood movies. The recognition of that incongruity of casting would come later. The disturbance in the force was to learn that my father had drawn a line of distinction between his kids and his wife. “I love your mother more than I love you kids.” Imagine in my little mind the sound effect of screeching tires and the smell of burning rubber. The horror. The horror. The movie must not have been very good if Dad and I were having such a discussion. I may have set myself up for this distress by foolishly and perhaps smugly asking Dad to merit his love between wife and children. I was shattered, my footing lost, my foundation crumbling. Dad tried to explain that it was a “different kind of love.” How could love be different? Love is love; one size fits all, no dissimilarities or categories to my twelve-year-old mind. I was distraught, but if Dad’s analogy was true, I could only take comfort in the fact that I was the first-born. Perhaps he loved me more than my siblings or at least he had loved me longer. I could not grasp how this “different kind of love” would be applied to any perspective wife I might meet in the future. “When you fall in love, son, then you will understand,” Dad explained. In George Axelrod’s play “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” (1955), a character explains, “Dear boy, the beginning of a movie is childishly simple. The boy and girl meet. The only important thing to remember is that—in a movie—the boy and the girl must meet in some cute way. They cannot...meet like normal people at, perhaps, a cocktail party or some other social function. No. It is terribly important that they meet cute.” A pretty stupid formula, however, romantic comedies have held to that standard for decades. The way Kay and I met was anything but cute. It was on a frozen pond playing broom hockey with a bunch of singles from church, and I knocked her on her butt going for the ball. Prior to that fortuitous moment, we had spied each other a few times “across a crowded room” (thank you Richard Rodgers), on different social occasions, but the broom hockey encounter stands out as “meet-uncouth” or “meet-boorish” or “meet-insufferable.” It was anything but Hollywood genteel. I know it is hard to image me as insufferably boorish. Years later, Kay would write of that moment, “For heaven’s sake, it was an ice hockey game on a cold Sunday afternoon among friends on a Tennessee pond; it was not the playoffs for the National Hockey League. All participants were only mildly competitive, and not to win but to have fun. Chip came to win. I was not impressed with his intensity…

The early years of the six-member Arnold household were lean. Mom was a genius at devising recipes with hamburger. There was no disposable income. There were no luxuries. The bank account was like the proverbial turnip from which no monetary blood could be squeezed. Vacations were never to the beach or mountains or theme parks. Our vacation was a trip to my paternal grandparents’ home in Richmond, Virginia. The journey from Nashville to Richmond began in the predawn hours and ended well after dark. This was before the Interstate system, and two-lane highways on the map led through cities and towns and twisting through the Blue Ridge Mountains. If we got stuck behind an eighteen-wheeler, we would almost be asphyxiated by the diesel fumes before being able to pass. The fast-food industry had not yet popped up like gastronomic weeds, so Mom would prepare snacks and full meals for the drive. Our favorite was her roast beef and vegetables wrapped in heavy-duty aluminum foil. Dad would secure it on top of the manifold of the engine where it would slow cook until we got to Bristol, and we would stop at a roadside picnic area and feast. My parent’s oft repeated mantra uttered in weary sighs was, “It’s hard to get to Richmond.” But once we pulled into the driveway, our exhaustion soon dissipated. The Arnold grandparent’s home was a place of magic and mystery. A two-story house built in the 1830’s, on a couple of acres, with an expansive backyard devoted to a beautiful flower and lush vegetable garden. There was a huge oak tree in the front yard, so tall that its thick leafy crown was visible for several miles in every direction. Even holding hands and stretching our arms, the Arnold kids could not gird the circumference of the tree. At the base of the tree were several Civil War era cannonballs; the house served as a field post for a brief stint during that time. We played with the unexploded ordinance without ever worrying about its potential lethality. In the reverie of youth, I had no appreciation for the beauty of the garden or that my grandmother was a master gardener, a gift she handed down to her only child, my father. The “green fingers” or “green thumb” expression came into existence in the 1930’s and would apply to both mother and son. Their ability to grow varieties of flora or foodstuffs wherever they dug their trowel into the earth was uncanny. But planting and growing was more than a utilitarian exercise. Just as an architect would dream of spaces of beauty, so the creative natures of my father and grandmother would design unexpected pockets of beauty spaced throughout their miniature landscapes. I say "unexpected" because both mother and son enjoyed the element of surprise when they rounded a corner and came upon a beautiful cluster of blooms they had planted earlier now exuberant with color and shape. The Richmond garden had a main path running…

In the early 1970’s both my sister and I heeded the call to “head west.” I was fleeing multiple failures in my attempts at higher education; a hippie lifestyle did not make for academic discipline or offer much professional opportunity unless you were a rock star or a cannabis farmer. I was neither. Most of my peers were closing in on a college degree by the time I was just getting started. My sister’s reason for fleeing was less complicated…a bad boyfriend. Pepperdine University had recently opened its Malibu campus, and through family connections, Nan and I had received music scholarships. My scholarship was based solely on the connections. Nan’s was that, but also merit-based. In that coming year, she sang in operas, musicals, choirs, an ensemble group, and for private fund-raising events. I schlepped choral risers, moved pianos, and drove the truck. We boarded the plane to L.A., wiser for our failures, and with the immigrant’s heart for a new start in a new land. Once we reached cruising altitude, I ordered bourbon on the rocks. At some point while sipping my drink, Nan asked me for the time. I turned my wrist, the one wrapped with the watch, and yes, the same one connected to the hand holding the bourbon, and spilled the drink into my lap. I was not then nor am now a sophisticate. But from that moment on we began to laugh, and we did not stop laughing the entire academic year. Nan and I had some money saved from different acting and performing gigs that we were able to take with us for “extras.” Our parents had little money to send, so pennies were counted and purchases were scrutinized. On Sunday nights the school cafeteria was closed and we had to adjust. At home, the Arnold's followed specific traditions after returning from church on Sunday nights: sandwiches made of the leftover roast beef from lunch, a tray of raw veggies, tea punch, pickles, and chips…Charles Chips, of course; we ate the cheaper brands during the week and saved the Charles Chips for Sunday night. And for entertainment it was Ed Sullivan, Bonanza, and Mission Impossible. There was no way to carry on that tradition at Pepperdine, so Nan and I improvised. We would borrow a vehicle from a fellow student (they were never invited to join us), and we would head into Malibu to a burger joint for takeout sandwiches and chips, poor substitutes indeed from the culinary bounty of our Sunday night leftovers, and then go to the drugstore to buy a couple of cheap cigars. We would drive Pacific Coast Highway to a spot on the beach, eat, smoke our stogies, and laugh, always laugh. The boys were falling over themselves for Nan’s attention. One guy gave her an opal necklace in hopes of turning her head. However, Nan saw the gift as an economic opportunity. We went to a pawnshop in Santa Monica, and Nan asked the owner how much it…

A few Thanksgivings ago the Arnold clan made up of the four families, plus guests (no we’re not a part of the southern mafia), gathered under one roof to celebrate the day. The weather was mild enough to enjoy being outside, so when not feasting around the tables, many folks chose to move outdoors. The patio fire pit was blazing and many of us clustered around it. I was standing in close proximity to the fire when someone in the crowd asked the question, “What is Boxing Day?” A smug look of “I got this” came over my face, and I proceeded to offer an explanation. I did sprinkle my history lesson with a little humility by interjecting that I was not sure of all the facts, but I believed Boxing Day to be a celebration of an uprising of Chinese nationalists against colonialism at the turn of the 20th century. That was about as far as I got before my youngest brother began to laugh and said, “You are such an idiot.” Right uprising/wrong holiday. Many Western countries including America and Japan wanted to reconfigure China, slicing up pieces of the country for themselves. These greedy nations referred to the Chinese militants as Boxers since many of the rebels practiced Chinese martial arts. I should know never to argue with or pontificate before my Mensa Society, big-brained, youngest brother whose encyclopedic knowledge of history, both foreign and domestic, is worthy of a professorship in the Ivy-Leagues. It was the perfect setup. I lobbed him an easy softball pitch and he knocked it out of the park. Now mind you up to that point, I had the crowd in the palm of my hand with my assured answer to the Boxing Day question. My confidence was worthy of a contestant on the game show, “What’s My Line”, where celebrity panelists question three contestants to determine which one was the true professional, thus the title, “What’s my line…of work?” That Thanksgiving Day for a fleeting moment, I proved my acting ability was superior to my historical knowledge. I embraced the family motto, “Often wrong, but never in doubt,” years ago. Facts? Truth? Who needs facts and truth? Facts and truth, as Twain said, should never get in the way of a good story. And while I attribute Mark Twain with that proverb, if truth is what you want, then there are no reliable sources that solidifies the maxim to him. However, if Twain didn’t say it, he should have said it. I ought to have known the Boxing Day origins and purpose. I had to sit through enough episodes of “Downton Abbey” with Kay. While some of the storylines held my attention, after the car wreck that killed off the character of Matthew Crawly so the actor could pursue fatter paychecks from Hollywood, my interest waned. I don’t blame Mr. Dan Stevens who played Crawly for seeking greener pastures; an actor’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. Boxing Day. What a…

Oh how we love to look at ourselves. We keep returning to any available mirror to be sure that what we judged acceptable at the start of the day remains in place until we collapse into bed at night exhausted from self-criticisms or fears of judgment and scorn of others. Most of us don’t have a magic mirror that will speak to us the disingenuous words we want to hear: “Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” A dangerous and invariably damning question. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there will always be one fairer than you. It must be disappointing not to find your name and image on the celebrity list of most handsome/beautiful people year after year. The magic in the mirror must be running on empty. Mirror Mirror illustration by Joseph Jacobs; 1916 But we keep going back to the mirror, and whether or not we verbalize the famous question, our actions betray us. Each new day the process begins in our pursuit to be “the fairest.” And now that modern technology has given us so many social outlets, we can post our fair likeness as often as we please. We can compare our images to those male and female models on the covers of magazines; bodies free of wrinkles, liver spots, or errant facial hair. The message is not so subtle; never go out in public without your silicone airbrush to remove the imperfections and enhance the attributes. Lest we forget, the wicked Queen in Snow White considered her mirror her slave and expected her mirror to always flatter. Stalin and Commissioner Molotov Such technology is also handy in removing the obnoxious person who insists on ruining any photo by making a stupid face or a person unacceptable to the elitist. Back in the day of the Stalin purges the process of eliminating the unwanted person was called “object removal.” Today it is referred to as “Photo shopped.” With our personalized magic mirror we can remove whatever or whomever we choose. Oops! The fixation with oneself and our public facade is nothing new. Narcissus had a similar infatuation with his “Selfie”, only this Greek demigod took it one step further. Narcissus never took his eyes off himself once he caught sight of his beauty. Unable to embrace his watery reflection, he lost his will to live. It was not a happy ending. We humans expend a great deal of time and treasure devoted to our self-obsession to transform ourselves into superior beings, though a little lower than the Marvel Comic gods. We read volumes of self-help literature, we join Wellness Centers, we drink all sorts of concoctions, we apply all sorts of goop, we Cross Fit and cleanse, we spend hours in the confession booth or a therapist’s office, and we emulate the habits of the titans of achievement. Because we believe our bodies and personalities are upgradeable like our iPhones, we doggedly pursue the quest of…

The world needs saving, and not by a conglomerate of handsome and beautiful super heroes as appealing as they are to behold. Have you ever noticed how much destruction goes into saving the planet whenever the super heroes marshal their powers to vanquish evil? Could this be the meaning of the phrase, “Omelets are not made without breaking eggs?” This quote is not original to your grandmother or some celebrity chef touting the casualties of broken eggs in the making of an omelet supreme, but to a French general, Francois de Charette, when put on trial for his war crimes during the French Revolution. Draw your own conclusion. I prefer my heroes, or in this case, heroine, to come in smaller more petite packages like my mother, Bernie Wyckoff Arnold. Armed with only a mixing bowl, a whisk, some wooden spoons, and a curious mind, she saved the world one recipe at a time. This did not come easy. She confessed that her biggest fear in getting married was not what one might naturally believe, but her incompetency in the kitchen. “I couldn’t make a glass of tea,” she often said. The pressure was on to develop her culinary skills, and fast, for a new husband who had been raised by a mother and grandmother with mythic talents to turn a peasant meal into a kingly feast that brought all five senses into a sharp focus of delight. Mom’s first job out of college and in her first year of marriage was with The Frank School of Music who published a special announcement of her employment: “We are proud to announce the engagement of Bernie Arnold as head of our Speech and Drama Department.” She had completed a B.A. in Theatre Arts from Lipscomb University and was working on an M.A. at Peabody at the time. She had judged many city and statewide speech and drama contests and performed numerous roles in her early career as an actor, but then I came along and spoiled everything. My three siblings followed in little over a decade, so Mom put aside her theatrical aspirations (she would from time-to-time co-star with my father in several productions when scheduling permitted), to become a full-time wrangler of four kids and a husband. In the early 1960’s she entered a Mrs. Nashville contest and won. She had barely caught her breath from her victory lap when the Nashville Tennessean offered her a job as the Food Editor in 1965. She served in that position for eight years and then jumped over to the Nashville Banner, and remained at that newspaper until she retired in 1992. For someone who could not make a glass of tea in 1948, she faked it until she made it, conducting hundreds of interviews, publishing thousands of articles and recipes, and winning awards along the way. Our family had the benefit of Mom and Dad’s ability and curiosity to try many of the recipes she wrote about in her articles. We kids…

One day when I was in high school I saw a truck pull into our driveway. The body of the truck was well used: coating of dirt, rust spots, some dings and dents. A guy got out and started ambling up the brick walkway to the front door. I recognized him as a fellow student though we did not run in the same circles at school. He was quiet, did not attract attention, and thus, kept a low profile. When the doorbell rang, I opened it and stepped out. “You and the others at school have been calling me ‘farmer,’” he said, his voice clear and steady, his eyes a pinpoint focus on me. It was true. I had been calling him “farmer,” and not out of respect or kindness or even interest in what he and his family did for a living. I said it like the others said it, in a cruel, derogatory way. I wanted to be a part of the “in” crowd, and to be a part of the “in” crowd, I had to go along with a teenage boy’s fondness to encourage and use disparaging terms to demean another human being. To be cool in this “in” crowd one had to look down on others and coin insulting names to describe them, and then use those insults in such a fashion that would amuse the other members of this “in” crowd. For the truly sinister mind, one would craft scenarios for how the victim might live under a cloud of deprecating monikers, so in this case a lot of agricultural jokes were created. We never thought ourselves cruel. Those who indulge in such behavior never do. “If I hear you call me ‘farmer’ again, I will beat the hell out of you.” He did not wait for a reply. After making his proclamation, he returned to his truck and drove away. He had come alone. What courage it took for him to come to my house and face me. He had also been wise to separate me from the pack. What a coward I was for being a part of this pack that had driven him to take such a bold step. I went back inside and shut the door, and then heard Mom’s voice coming from the kitchen. “Honey, was that one of your friend’s from school?” I don’t remember my response to her question. I’m sure it was cagey if I answered at all. I was naked and ashamed and needed covering. I don’t know if the young man made the rounds to the homes of the rest of the “in” crowd facing each one mano a mano and shutting down their cowardly natures with a single threat. If he did, I don’t remember any of us talking about it. We would never admit our spinelessness to one another, a pack of cowards would never do such a thing. That’s why they run in packs. What I do know is that I stopped…

I love it when I make Kay laugh. When she laughs, all’s right with the world. Kay has what I call the pratfall sense of humor. She can watch a collection of videos on AFV where people are engaged in all sorts of shenanigans and end up falling on their bums, and her amusement will ascend with each humorous consequence. The sound of her laughter is much like that of the old cartoon character Muttley the Dog with her face turning red, the tears rolling down her cheeks, building and building until at any second one expects a lung to be expelled. And who among us does not secretly enjoy the humiliation of others? Which brings me to a story of my humiliation; one that has brought her much enjoyment in the countless retelling. I love riding a bicycle. By age twelve, when I got my first official job as a paperboy, and for the next four years, I perfected my bicycle skills by riding my seven-mile route twice daily slinging newspapers, dodging traffic, and outrunning dogs intent on taking a bite out of my leg. That is why when we moved to Kay’s family farm, one of the first things I did was purchase a mountain bike. I could ride a ten-mile loop from my driveway and back through the countryside. I stayed on the surface streets, no off-road riding, with a nice mixture of steep hills and straight stretches. It was not an Ironman training route, but for thirty-five minutes, it doubled my heart rate. On the back half of the loop there was a long stretch of road where I could really get up some speed, and I would try to go as long as I could without touching the handlebars; either leaning forward to reduce the wind resistance, or leaning back, arms outstretched, creating the sensation of flying. I rode this route nearly every day, rain or shine, the exception being in conditions of ice and snow, and in Tennessee, that was a rare exception. The Fourth of July, 2001 was a day filled with heat and sunshine. We spent that 4th as we had done for years: attending the Whitland Avenue block-party celebration with thousands of other people singing patriotic music, hearing speeches, and listening to my father dramatically recite a portion of the Declaration of Independence while members of the Nashville Symphony played Aaron Copeland’s “Fanfare For The Common Man.” But before that event, as always, I rode my ten-mile route. When I hit the long, flat stretch of road and had built up sufficient speed, I released my hands from the handlebars. About halfway along that straight section, I heard a snap of metal. I could not immediately identify the source. I thought it might be a break in the link of the chain or a rock slung against the metal frame. Then suddenly my whole world shifted into slow motion while my whole life passed before my eyes. The seat dropped as…