Croup

Croup: (n) any condition of the larynx characterized by a hoarse cough and difficult breathing.

One of the more annoying aspects of writing a column or posting a blog on the Internet is what seems to be the incessant need to talk about life beginning with how it relates to yourself.

I will be honest—I don’t think I am as interesting as other folks do.

I don’t know whether this is even possible, but I have often felt I was boring myself.

But when I saw the word “croup” today, I couldn’t resist relating a piece of personal identity concerning the condition.

Up until five years of age, I was sickly.

Chubby, round-faced and ill. (Very attractive for young parents.)

Every time I caught a cold, it went into my chest and I mustered a hacking cough which eventually made it difficult to breathe. So my mother often rushed me into the bathroom, turned on all the faucets with hot water, and sat there with me in the steam, hoping my croup would clear.

It was so bad one night that the town doctor was called to come to our little bungalow.

He  felt compelled to give me a shot of adrenalin in the heart to keep me among the living.

Yet somewhere along the line—about the age of six—I began to improve. It was a good thing, because on top of my croup, I was festered with an inability to master swallowing pills, and the only real treatment for my condition were these huge, white sulfa tablets, which greatly resembled horse pills.

So yes—because I could not swallow them, I had to chew them up—two at a time, every four hours.

When the reprieve came and “croup” decided to become a part of my past, I was jubilant. Later on we discovered that because my dad was a cigarette smoker, the air quality in our little home was not conducive to my fussy lungs.

So even though I shared this story with you in candor, and the years have certainly passed, and I have proven myself to be more balanced for the human environment…

I still feel like a Willy Wonka Wimp.

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Crouching

Crouching: (v) stooping or bending low.

After all my years of human travel, experiences, lifestyle changes, enlightenments and detriments, I still can find reasons—new ones every day—to hate baseball.

You would think I would run out of possibilities and begin to repeat myself, but even now, as I looked at the word, “crouching,” a new manifestation of my disdain for “America’s pastime” has surfaced.

I must be candid with you.

The reason I hate baseball is because I never took the time to learn to like it. When I was young, kids divided into categories:

Kids who like to fish and kids who hated the smell of fish

There were kids who liked girls and kids who held tightly to the conspiracy theory about the “cootie” thing.

There were kids who liked baseball and kids who liked football. I was part of the latter group.

But every once in a while, I would find myself caught on a hot summer afternoon, when everyone thought it was stupid to play football, squeezed into a corner with a bat and glove, to play with my fellow-warriors.

Matter of fact, I even tried out for Little League because my friends thought I would be great, I was kind of funny and would be a thousand laughs in the dugout.

So when I arrived at the ball diamond and the coach met me, I didn’t even get a word out of my mouth before he ran over, patted me on the shoulders, looked into my face and said:

“You’re chubby. You’ll make a great catcher.”

I didn’t like being called chubby. Chubby was not a manly term. And God and John Wayne both knew—I was manly.

But I was willing to listen.

He presented me with some sort of padded vest which didn’t fit—well, because I was chubby. So he taped it onto me, gave me the catcher’s mask, the big catcher’s mitt, and led me behind home plate. I stood there as he waited for me to assume the correct position.

At length he said, “No, no. You’ve got to crouch.”

Did I mention earlier that I was chubby? When you have a few extra pounds, crouching is not a given.

But again, I was willing to try.

What I didn’t realize was that this crouching thing was not a one-time event. As a catcher, you not only need to crouch, but you need to stay that way through the entire half-inning and be able to get up on your feet quickly from that descended position so you can make plays.

Without going into a lot of painful detail, I didn’t have any of the aforementioned qualifications.

My knees kept hurting.

I got a cramp in my thigh.

I was always falling over onto my side.

And every time I tried to stand up from the crouch, I felt like Atlas with the world on his shoulders.

I lasted through two innings before the coach took me into the outfield, handed me a glove, said, “It’s quieter back here”—and relieved me of my misery.

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Crouch

Crouch: (v) to stoop or bend low.

I’m going to do what I don’t normally do—but when I do it, I feel free to do it at will.

I’m going to abandon this definition and tell you a story about a man named Andre Crouch.

It’s spelled the same.

Many, many years ago, when the United States was recovering from a war and an egotistical President who was a tyrant, and crooked (pause)…

Hmm.

Anyway, it was a while back.

There was a young, black soul and Gospel singer named Andre Crouch who came on the scene for a season and did his part to open up the United States to racial harmony and integration—taking the land of Dixie and the world of Southern music, and twirling it on its head.

For these old church singers did not want to accept a black man into the inner circle (which could not be broken) but also could not deny that this gentleman was one helluva songwriter, and an even greater performer.

Arguably, it could be stated that he was the father, or at least uncle, of contemporary Christian music.

He was my friend.

I had a puny little group from Central Ohio. We were desperately seeking some attention from the marketplace when I met Andre Crouch. He did something he should never have done. He took us in—pale though we were—and allowed us to be the warmup group for his large concerts.

Even though he was gradually integrating, most of his audience was of a darker skin color. Why he thought he could get away with having a white warmup group when there were probably hundreds of black brothers and sisters in the audience who sang a “choir’s-full” better than us, is a mystery.

But it’s what Andre wanted to do—his way of integrating his race—by using us.

He was an unpredictable, never-on-time, kind, flakey and humorously fussy individual.

He helped me.

I got to see firsthand how an audience is to be gently handled—loved to life.

I got to climb onto his tour bus and drive around with him, seeking good barbecue in Toledo, Ohio. (We failed).

And I was shocked one Saturday morning when he arrived at a tiny gig I had—a breakfast for about forty people. Andre decided to drive up some 150 miles from Detroit, where he’d been in concert the night before, and surprise us.

Needless to say, that itsy-bitsy audience came alive once Mr. Crouch entered the room, and soon forgot I was even there once he walked over to my Wurlitzer electric piano and banged out some tunes.

Andre died several years ago.

But as is the case with all of us, he lives on because one of the people he loved and helped is here to tell a good story.

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Crotchety

Crotchety: (adj) given to odd notions, whims, grouchiness, etc.

There are three words that seem to travel together. Buddies, if you will.

I don’t think you can see “crochety” without the word “old” hanging around, accompanied in the back seat by the word “man.”

Crochety old man.

Women aren’t crochety—women are bitchy.

Men, on the other hand, get a “cushioney” word, perhaps pulled out of a hat owned by Charles Dickens: “’Tis crochety, old boy.”

Also, men are old. Women, on the other hand, are decrepit.

At least with the word “old” you have the possibility of “wisdom” traveling alongside. But decrepit immediately conjures a vision of an old witch with a fondness for dining on the carcasses of little children.

The gentleman in the story gets the advantage of maintaining the word “man” to describe him, while the woman would be a hag.

So if you have a penis, you get to be a “crochety old man.”

Absent that appendage, you are a “bitchy, decrepit hag.”

After all, what does it mean to be crochety? It means that nothing is going your way anymore because your way is so old it’s covered with dust.

What can one do to age and still be a person who isn’t crochety?

I think there is a three-step process, whether you’re male or female:

  1. Shut up.

No one wants to hear all your stories.

  1. Listen.

And as you do, learn some of the lingo so you don’t talk like you came out of a 1970’s movie.

  1. Think funny things, think serious things—share the funny ones.

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Crotch

Crotch: (n) the human body between the legs.

For all those people in the world who think there’s nothing new under the sun, or that all the great inventions have been explored and exposed, I offer to you on this fine day the concept of coming up with an proper name for the region between one’s belly button and upper thigh.

Yes, a name that is not gross, inappropriate or makes little kids giggle.

It is hard to believe that the word “crotch” is probably the most acceptable term for this skin space.

Stop and think about it. You’ve got…

Genitals

Pubic area

Penis

Vagina

And groin

Do you see what I mean? If some ingenious soul would just conjure some pleasant term to share when identifying this area other than the odd phrase, “private parts,” he or she probably would receive eternal gratitude from the world of grownups, teetering between prudishness and naughtiness.

Suggestions?

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Cross-road

Crossroad: (n) a road that crosses another road

I’m desperately trying to remember the formula. I’m sure it’s age-old—but one night I convinced myself that I came up with it on my own.

Having some time on my hands, I got in my car and started driving, attempting to get lost.

I wanted to see how much fun it would be to find my way back home. (This was long before GPS and also long before I had so much shit on my plate that I had free time.)

So I set off driving, tried to ignore the signs or the names of towns and made sporadic turns. Unfortunately, my internal GPS naturally had me drive in boxes, and eventually I ended up right back where I started.

So I put on my thinking cap (which, by the way, is much too large for the surface it serves) and I tried to figure out how to pull off getting lost without it becoming manipulative but also having a spontaneous feel to it.

I came up with a simple concept:

Drive one mile, turn right, drive another mile, turn left, another mile, turn left again.

Then drive another mile, turn right, and repeat the process.

After about forty-five minutes of this endeavor, I ended up not knowing where I was.

To discover what crossroad would take me back to my destination, I just kept turning left. Then I saw something I recognized, and in no time at all, I was back at home with people who recognized me.

Honestly, I do not know if this is an actual plan of action, or even if it’s worth this small essay.

All I know about crossroads is that they offer you another direction.

The power of this? If you’re tired of where you’re going, you have the option of getting lost for a while, until you can find yourself again.

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Crossly

Crossly: (adj) in a cross or angry manner

In a normal school day of, let’s say, seven hours, may we conjecture that fifteen percent of the time is spent shifting from one class to another, ten percent having lunch, another fifteen percent on history or social studies, fifteen more percent on English and grammar, and then another fifteen on the sciences, while a whopping thirty percent is invested in mathematics.

I am not trying to editorialize on school subject matter—measuring its height, weight and depth in value.

But I will tell you:

Most of adult life is spent trying to learn to communicate.

You will notice that on the average school day, communication is not a primal concern. It is expected that the students will figure it out for themselves and give reasonable honor to the teaching staff.

But without learning communication, we are unfortunately destined to continually say things that are offensive and find ourselves called on the carpet for it, apologizing in such a manner that nobody in the room—including ourselves—believes it to be sincere.

When too much knowledge mingles with too much ego and is accompanied by too much stress, it makes us begin to speak crossly.

We may not even be aware that our tone of voice has changed from relaxed to strained. But everyone who hears us immediately pulses the fury, sarcasm and despair that lurks behind each syllable.

You would think, since most of our lives is spent communicating, that some training might be in order.

But even in our homes, once a reasonable peace and quiet has been achieved, we don’t necessarily care how it was acquired.

Until we grasp that human beings don’t hear words, but rather, absorb the vibrations of emotions, we will insist that everyone is too touchy because “we never meant anything” by what we said.

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Crossed Eyes

Crossed eyes: (n) a condition in which one or both eyes turn inward.

Today’s essay is very simple.

Wordings that grownups find clever often terrify children.

Let’s start with:

“Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

Or:

“I’ll leave the light on in the hallway so the monsters will be scared away.” (What if the bulb burns out?)

Or the one I always hated:

“Don’t cross your eyes like that or make that look. Your face might freeze.”

At this point, the grownup turns his head and giggles.

But terror fills the soul of the young child.

Face freezing—a whole new idea.

Is it possible that this respectable adult is sharing a truth which needs to be harkened to, or one might find oneself going through life becoming the frozen-faced monster, with crossed eyes, that children fear coming in the middle of the night to torture them?

 

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Crossed

Crossed: (v) to move past

The quality of your life is determined by how quickly you learn the lessons of life.

They happen quickly and after they’re done and the immediate classroom has been shut down, you have to decide whether you believe what you just experienced to be true, or if you thought it was a fluke and next time it might be better.

For a pessimist becomes so negative that he or she won’t even try something new, fearing that all conclusions in Earthly life are doomed.

A pragmatist has favored ideas to pursue, but once those are worn out, he or she is a little bit depleted in hopefulness because there doesn’t seem to be fresh things on the horizon.

An optimist holds to the “bad day” theory.

In other words, there was nothing missing with the plan, nothing wrong with the planners, nothing askew with the organization. It was just poor timing or a little “fritz in the glitz.”

There is another choice, you know:

I tried it; I gave it my best shot. It didn’t work. This is what I learned from it.

If you do this, once you’ve crossed a certain rickety bridge, you don’t ever have to try it again later to see if it’s gotten sturdier. You can trust your instincts, respect your emotions, listen to your spirit, remember the previous encounter in your mind and don’t take your ass anywhere near that defeat.

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Cross-Reference

Cross-reference: (n) a reference from one part of a book, index, or the like, to related material, as a word or illustration, in another part.

I think there are three.

Yes, there are three books that I feel are necessary to be used to cross-reference one another.

In doing so, they help us to land on common sense and some measure of universal truth.

Unfortunately, people normally revere only one of these books–or might include two.

But it is the enjoining of all three that gives us the perspective, the insight and the balance to understand where we’re going and why each one of these volumes was written in the first place.

For me—in no particular order—for me this trio of books is:

1. The history book

2. The science book

3. The Bible

Rather than trying to find out where these particular collections of knowledge contradict one another, I think the wise human journey is finding out where they coincide.

What part of our human history helped us discover a scientific fact that can be cross-referenced in the Bible?

I will go as far as to say that if these books do not cross-reference each other, we should look at the situation with suspicious eyes. For just as the history book certainly needs to be updated with events, and the science book needs to be refreshed with available data, so the Bible needs to have inclusions enlightenment that is everlasting instead of temporary, acquired from a former time.

But if history, science and the Bible all agree on a matter, it is pretty safe to chase the dream.

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