In the Before Snack Times of the early 70s, we didn’t have helicopter parents hovering over us, micromanaging our every move with a suffocating schedule of dance classes, gymnastics, karate, swim lessons, math tutors, writing coaches, soccer practices, chess clubs, computer coding, mindfulness meditation, and Ashtanga Yoga. We didn’t have smartphones tracking us like we were secret agents with microchips implanted in our necks. For the entire day, our parents had absolutely no clue where we were or what we were up to. We’d saunter off after breakfast, either on foot or aboard our trusty bicycles, and were expected to return only by dinner. During that endless stretch of freedom, we’d navigate through construction sites strewn with lumber, nails, electrical wires, and bottomless ditches, all of which screamed, “Adventure awaits!” We gravitated toward mud, streams, and rivers like moths to a flame, setting up wooden ramps to perform Evel Knievel-level stunts over bodies of water. The messier and more perilous the terrain, the more irresistible it became. These hazardous playgrounds were usually bordered by rusty barbed-wire fences and “Do Not Enter” signs, which not only failed to deter us but ignited our rebellious spirits to trespass with even more gusto. Inside these danger zones, we’d be chased by furious steers, territorial cows, and muscle-bound guard dogs. Occasionally, a disgruntled landowner would fire warning shots at us with a pellet gun, a token gesture that barely fazed us. In the ravines behind our homes, we crafted forts, swung from vines, ignited firecrackers, and leaped into piles of poison oak. We encountered black widows, rattlesnakes, bobcats, coyotes, and even the occasional mountain lion. After a day of flouting every conceivable health and safety code, we’d trudge home at night, our bodies caked in filth, bruises, and scratches. But our parents, bless their oblivious hearts, never inquired about our whereabouts or escapades. As long as we took a bath and cleaned up, they were content to feed us hearty helpings of turkey pot pies, meatloaf, chili, and tacos. They knew we needed the energy to wake up the next morning and dive headfirst into another day of mayhem. Back then, we had little time for snacking. Our days were filled with wilderness adventures, where our imaginations ran wild. This level of playfulness, chaos, and enchantment is as extinct as the dinosaurs in today’s Snack Age, where parents meticulously micromanage their children’s activities and pacify their appetites with chips, juice boxes, chocolate chip granola bars, fruit rolls, and Happy Meals.
Category: Confessions
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WALTER CRONKITE AND FRANK SINATRA WERE THE TRUSTED PROPHETS OF MY YOUTH
At four years old, a pocket-sized philosopher in footie pajamas, I’d often find myself stationed in the living room like a tiny sentinel, transfixed by the glow of our hulking television set. The air was thick with the comforting aroma of my mother’s lasagna or spaghetti, a scent that promised warmth and stability, while my father and I tuned in to the evening sermon of Walter Cronkite. Cronkite, that square-jawed oracle of truth, delivered the news with the gravitas of a benevolent yet exhausted deity. His voice—measured, slightly weary—wrapped around the day’s events like a woolen blanket, equal parts reassurance and obligation, as necessary as a nightly dose of cod liver oil or a reluctant gulp of Ovaltine.
But Cronkite, for all his journalistic divinity, did not hold the title of Supreme Voice in our household. That honor belonged to Frank Sinatra, whose velvet baritone floated from our Fischer Hi-Fi console stereo with the omnipresence of a household deity. Sinatra wasn’t merely a singer—he was a prophet, a sage in a sharp suit, the Cronkite of melody, issuing dispatches on love, loss, and longing with a conviction that made it clear: this was the stuff of life. His voice had the eerie authority of a celestial news anchor, forewarning me of adulthood’s looming weather patterns—storms of responsibility, gales of regret, hurricanes of heartbreak.
At an age when my greatest concern should have been whether I got the last Nilla Wafer, I found myself drowning in premature nostalgia, gripped by the weight of Sinatra’s melancholic musings. “It Was a Very Good Year” hit my preschool psyche like an existential anvil—suddenly, I was an ancient soul trapped in a toddler’s body, debating whether to pair my Triscuits with a port wine cheddar spread or just give in and sip on some prune juice like a man resigned to his fate. Sinatra had me feeling so prematurely adult, I half-expected a cigar to materialize in my hand or to receive a personal invitation to an exclusive stockholder’s meeting.
I wasn’t just waiting for dinner. I was reckoning with life’s grand metaphysical dilemmas, wrestling with the realization that the world was vast, unknowable, and, worst of all, drenched in longing. And yet, as I sat there, absorbing the gospel of Ol’ Blue Eyes, I couldn’t help but suspect that Sinatra had the answers—the ones I wouldn’t fully understand until I was old enough to toast my regrets with a stiff drink and a knowing smirk.
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NOT THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO
When I was a nineteen-year-old bodybuilder in Northern California, I stumbled into a gig at UPS, where they transformed the likes of me into over-caffeinated parcel gladiators. Picture this: UPS, the coliseum of cardboard where bubble wrap is revered like a deity. My mission? To load 1,200 boxes an hour, stacking them into trailer walls so precise you’d think I was defending a Tetris championship title. Five nights a week, from eleven p.m. to three a.m., I morphed into a nocturnal legend of the loading dock. Unintentionally, I shed ten pounds and saw my muscles morph into something straight out of a comic book—like the ones where the hero’s biceps could bench-press a car.
I had a chance to redeem myself from the embarrassment of two previous bodybuilding fiascos. At sixteen, I competed in the Mr. Teenage Golden State in Sacramento, appearing as smooth as a marble statue without the necessary cuts. I repeated the folly a year later at the Mr. Teenage California in San Jose. I refused to let my early bodybuilding career be tarnished by these debacles. With a major competition looming, I noticed my cuts sharpening from the relentless cardio at UPS. Redemption seemed not only possible but inevitable.
Naturally, I did what any self-respecting bodybuilder would do: I slashed my carbs to near starvation levels and set my sights on the 1981 Mr. Teenage San Francisco contest at Mission High School. My physique transformed into a sculpted masterpiece—180 pounds of perfectly bronzed beefcake. The downside? My clothes draped off me like a sad, deflated costume. Cue an emergency shopping trip to a Pleasanton mall, where I found myself in a fitting room that felt like a shrine to Joey Scarbury’s “Theme from The Greatest American Hero,” the ultimate heroic anthem of 1981.
As I tried on pants behind a curtain so flimsy it could’ve been mistaken for a fogged-up windshield, I overheard two young women employees outside arguing about which one should ask me out. Their voices escalated, each vying for the honor of basking in my bronzed splendor. As I slid a tanned, shaved calf through a pants leg, I pictured the cute young women outside my dressing room engaged in a WWE smackdown right there on the store floor, complete with body slams and flying elbows, all for a dinner date with me. This was it—the ultimate validation of my sweat-drenched hours in the gym. And what did I do? I froze like a deer in headlights, donning an aloof expression so potent it was like tossing a wet blanket on a fireworks show. They scattered, muttering about my stuck-up demeanor, while I stood there in my Calvin Kleins, paralyzed by the attention I had so craved.
For a brief, shining moment—from my mid-teens to my early twenties—I possessed the kind of looks that could make a Cosmopolitan “Bachelor of the Month” seem like the “Before” picture in a self-help book. But my personality? Stuck in the same developmental phase as a slab of walking protein powder with the social finesse of a half-melted wax figure.
I had sculpted the body of a Greek god but inhabited it with the poise of a toddler wearing his dad’s shoes. In this regrettable state, I found that dozens of attractive women threw themselves at me, and I responded with the enthusiasm of a tax auditor on Xanax. Look past the Herculean exterior, and you’d find a hollow shell—a construction site abandoned mid-project, complete with rusted scaffolding and a sign that said, “Sorry, we’re closed.”
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TRAINING WITH THE WRESTLING STARS ON TV FELT LIKE A FEVER DREAM
Training at Walt’s Gym in the mid-70s wasn’t just about lifting weights—it was an unfiltered, sweat-drenched fever dream where my adolescent reality collided head first with the muscle-bound mythology of Big Time Wrestling. For two years in the early 70s, I had religiously watched Big Time Wrestling on Channel 44, glued to my TV screen, captivated by the larger-than-life personas of Pat Patterson, Rocky Johnson, Kinji Shibuya, Pedro Morales, and Hector Cruz. Then, as if fate had decided to prank me, a few years later I found myself sharing dumbbells with these very same legends as a clueless, starstruck thirteen-year-old Olympic weightlifter.
At first, it was thrilling—until my big mouth turned the dream into a farce. Despite carrying a respectable amount of muscle for my age, I had the survival instincts of a gazelle on tranquilizers. Take, for example, the time I was doing cable lat rows next to Hector Cruz, a man whose forehead looked like a war zone of scar tissue. In a stunning act of idiocy, I casually mentioned that I’d heard rumors that wrestling might, gasp, be fake.
Cruz, mid-rep, snapped his head toward me with the kind of stare that could curdle milk. “Look at these scars on my face! Do they look fake to you?” he growled, his voice carrying the weight of a man who had spent years being thrown into turnbuckles for a living. I nodded solemnly, silently wondering if plastic surgery had advanced to the point of replicating decades of chair shots and steel cage matches.
Then there was the Great Towel Incident, in which my ignorance of gym etiquette nearly got me suplexed into another dimension. Spotting a towel draped over the calf raise machine, I assumed—like a naive idiot—that it was communal property, perfect for mopping my sweat-drenched forehead. A fraction of a second later, a mountain of muscle erupted from a nearby bench press, veins bulging, eyes locked onto me like a heat-seeking missile.
“That YOUR towel, kid?” he snarled, his biceps twitching in a way that suggested he resolved most disputes with his fists. Before I could sputter out an excuse, he made it abundantly clear that swiping another man’s gym towel was the equivalent of stealing his car, his wife, and his dog in one fell swoop. Lesson learned: gym towels are sacred artifacts, and touching one without permission is an offense punishable by immediate death or, worse, public humiliation.
But the crowning jewel of my social missteps at Walt’s Gym was my commitment to primal, theatrical grunting—a misguided attempt to add some dramatic flair to my workouts. I thought my earth-shaking screams made me sound like a warrior; in reality, they made me sound like someone having an exorcism mid-bench press.
One day, my sound effects finally pushed a competitive bodybuilder—who looked like a bronze statue of vengeance—to his breaking point. He pulled me aside, his stare filled with enough hostility to burn a hole through my skull. “Kid,” he said, his voice dangerously low, “if you don’t cut the screaming, someone’s going to shut you up permanently. And trust me, they’ll get a standing ovation for it.”
That was my wake-up call. Surviving Walt’s Gym wasn’t just about lifting heavy—it was about mastering the unspoken social codes that separated the seasoned warriors from the clueless rookies. The iron jungle had rules, and I was learning them one near-death experience at a time.
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DREAMING OF BARBARA EDEN
I grew up in VA housing, transplanted army barracks rebadged “Flavet Villages,” in Gainesville, Florida. The barracks were close to an alligator swamp and a forest where a Mynah bird was always perched on the same tree branch so it was a favorite pastime before bedtime for my father and me to visit the bird on the edge of the forest and converse with it. At dusk, there was a low tide so the alligator dung was particularly pungent. While the smell repelled most, I found the strong aroma strangely soothing and stimulating in a way that made me feel connected to the universe. One evening while my father and I visited the Mynah bird, we could hear a distant radio playing “Bali Ha’i,” sung so beautifully by Juanita Hall. From the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, “Bali Ha’i” is about an island paradise that seems so close but always remains just out of reach by those who are tantalized by it, causing great melancholy. But I suffered no such melancholy. Paradise was in my presence as my father and I stood by the enchanted forest and spoke to the talking Mynah bird.
The ache of an elusive paradise didn’t afflict me until I discovered I Dream of Jeannie in 1965. The blonde goddess Barbara Eden lived in her genie bottle, a luxurious enclosure with a purple circular sofa lined with pink and purple satin brocade pillows and the inner wall lining of glass jewels shining like mother of pearl. More than anything, I wanted to live inside the bottle with Jeannie. To be denied that wish crushed me with a pang of sadness as deeply as Juanita Hall’s rendition of “Bali Ha’i.” That Jeannie’s bottle was in reality a painted Jim Beam Scotch Whiskey decanter speaks to the intoxication I suffered from my incessant dreams of Barbara Eden.
Living in the bottle with Barbara Eden was my unconscious wish to never grow up, to live forever in the womb with my first crush. I realized I had the personality of a man-child who never wanted to enter the adult world in 1974 when as a thirteen-year-old bodybuilder, I had started my training at Walt’s Gym in Hayward, California. Converted from a chicken coop in the 1950s, the gym was a swamp of fungus and bacteria. Members complained of incurable athlete’s foot and some claimed there were strains of fungus and mold that had not yet been identified in scientific journals. Making a home in the fungal shower stalls was an oversized frog. The pro wrestlers had nicknamed the old-timer frog Charlie. The locker always had a bankrupt divorcee or other in a velour top and gold chain hogging the payphone while having a two-hour-long talk with his attorney about his bleak life choices. There was an unused outdoor swimming pool in the back with murky water black with plague and dead rats. A lonely octogenarian named Wally, who claimed to be a model for human anatomy textbooks, worked out for several hours before spending an equal time in the sauna and shower, completing his grooming with a complete-body talcum powder treatment so that when he spoke to you, he did so embalmed in a giant talcum cloud. The radio played the same hits over and over: Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” and The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town.” What stood out to me was that I was just a kid navigating in an adult world, and the gym, like the barbershop, was a public square that allowed me to hear adult conversations about divorces, hangovers, gambling addictions, financial ruin, the cost of sending kids to college, the burdens of taking care of elderly parents. I realized then that I was at the perfect age: Old enough to grow big and strong but young enough to be saved from the drudgery and tedium of adult life. It became clear to me then that I never wanted to grow up. I wanted to spend my life luxuriating inside the mother of pearl bottle with Barbara Eden in a condition of perpetual adolescence.
Wanting to live in Jeannie’s bottle wasn’t just about being joined to the hip with the one I loved. It was about protection from evil. This became apparent in 1972 when I was ten, and I watched an ABC Movie of the Week, The Screaming Woman. Based on a Ray Bradbury short story, the movie was about a woman buried alive. Her screams haunted me so much that I could not sleep for two weeks as I imagined the mud-covered lady under my bed crying for my help. I swore I would never watch a scary movie again, but a year later when my parents had left for a party, I was bored, so I watched Night of the Living Dead. What I learned from watching these scary movies is that when you see depictions of evil, you can’t “unsee” them. Those visions leave a permanent mark so that nothing is ever the same again. What was once the happy, innocent sound of the neighborhood jingle of the ice cream truck is now a jalopy full of devil-clowns ready to exit the vehicle and kidnap me from my room. I tried to remedy my trauma by watching The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie, but these wholesome depictions of family life could not bring back the innocence that was lost forever, so at age eleven, I was already conceiving my elaborate bunker for the Great Zombie Apocalypse. And that bunker, of course, was Jeannie’s bottle.
In my early teens, my life became a futile quest to find substitutes for living inside Jeannie’s bottle. For example, in 1974 I visited several friends and neighbors who had recently purchased waterbeds, tried them out, and became convinced that waterbeds would afford me a life of luxury, unimagined pleasures, and relaxation that life had so far denied me. I persuaded my parents to buy me one. My love affair with the contraption proved to be short-lived. Its temperature was either too hot or too cold. It leaked. It often smelled like a frog swamp. I remember if I moved my body, there would be a counterreaction, like some invisible wave force fighting me as I tried to get comfortable. One day the waterbed leaked so badly that the floorboards were damaged and my bedroom looked like something out of Hurricane Katrina. What was supposed to be a revolution in sleep proved to be a nightmare, and my quest to find a substitute for Jeannie’s bottle had to be started afresh.
The longing to be inside Jeannie’s bottle is a regression impulse, and I can’t talk about regression without mentioning Cap ‘N Crunch. My mother indulged my appetite for this sugary cereal and bought me all its variations: Cap ‘N Crunch with Crunch Berries, Peanut Butter Cap ‘N Crunch, and then the renamed versions of the same-tasting cereal: Quisp, Quake, and King Vitamin. Quaker cereals took their winning formula of corn and brown sugar flavors and sold several variations with different mascots and names.
As a kid watching these cereals being advertised on TV, it was clear that too much of a good thing was not a problem. On the contrary, I felt compelled to taste-test all these cereal varieties the way a sommelier would taste dozens of Zinfandel wines from the same region or a musicologist would listen to hundreds of different versions of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony.
Eating six versions of Cap ‘N Crunch afforded me the illusion of variety while eating the same cereal over and over. I was a seven-year-old boy who wanted to believe I had choices but at the same time didn’t want any choices.
You will sometimes hear about the man who is in his sixth marriage and his wives in terms of appearance, temperament, and personality are all more or less the same. The man keeps going back to the same woman but wants to believe he has “found someone new” to give him the hope of a new life.
That was essentially my relationship with Cap ‘N Crunch. Not only was I stagnant in my food tastes, but I was also regressing into sugar-coated pablum. My love of cereal, which endures to this day, was the equivalent of finding comfort in Jeannie’s bottle.
In addition to sweetened cereal as evidence of my emotional stagnation was my choice of damaged role models. While I was fixated on I Dream of Jeannie, my bodybuilding partner Bull was fixated on Gilligan’s Island. Choosing Bull as my role model must have prolonged my delayed development. Bull was not known for his social decorum and gallantry. One example that stands out is that one night we were swimming at the Tanglewood apartments swimming pool when Bull found a giant orange fluorescent bra hanging by its strap on the diving board. It practically glowed in the dark. Bull grabbed the bra and twirled it above his head as if he were going to fling it. Then he stopped and said it was his sister’s birthday the next day, and he had forgotten to buy her a present. He didn’t even wrap it. He just gave his sister this orange bra, and she wasn’t even shocked. For her, it was just another day in the life of having a crazy brother. When I think back to my delayed development in the world of dating and relationships, I have to attribute much of that delay to my misguided choices of male role models. It would be unfair, after all, to lay all the blame on Jeannie. The fact was that I was in love with Jeannie as a fantasy, but as a real woman she terrified me.
This was evident on one warm California spring afternoon in 1973. After sixth-grade classes were over and the bus dropped us off at Crow Canyon Road, we would often walk across the street to 7-Eleven to get a Slurpee before trekking up the steep hill that was Greenridge Road. I was standing inside 7-Eleven with my friends listening to “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl” playing on the store radio when the Horsefault sisters, both freckled with long blonde hair and beaming, mischievous blue eyes, came into the store and asked me if I wanted to see a rabbit inside their cage. One was an eighth-grader and the other a high school sophomore. They lived in a farmhouse behind the 7-Eleven. I had no interest in seeing a rabbit inside a cage, but the girls had high cheekbones and figures that reminded me of my first crush, Barbara Eden, so I told them I was very interested in seeing their caged rabbit. I exited 7-Eleven with the girls, and we walked about a hundred yards on a trail that was covered with dry horse dung and surrounded by a field of grass before we reached the outskirts of their farmhouse. Behind a thicket of bushes was a large cage, with the door slightly ajar. A heavy chain lock hung on the door latch. I looked inside the cage, but I saw that there was no rabbit. At this point, the sisters, cackling like witches, grabbed me and tried to drag me into the cage. It was clear that they were attempting to prank me, put me inside the cage, lock the door, and make me their prisoner. But I was too strong for them, and as we wrestled outside the cage and rolled on the grass, we became enveloped in a cloud of dust and hay. In a nearby coop, chickens were clucking and flapping their wings with great alarm and alacrity. When the sisters, now covered in sweat, realized they did not have the strength to carry on with their mission, I fled them and rushed home. I was outraged that they had tried to steal my freedom, and I diverted myself by watching my favorite TV show, I Dream of Jeannie, starring the gorgeous Barbara Eden, who played a lovelorn genie trapped in a bottle except when summoned by her master. Clearly, I was still too young to understand the exquisite pleasures of irony.
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THE TRIUMPH OF CAPTAIN KANGAROO
I was five years old when I learned my first brutal lesson about the arms race of dominance. It happened in the treacherous, high-stakes jungle of the Flavet Villages Apartments in Gainesville, Florida—more specifically, in my treehouse. It wasn’t much, just a few wooden slats nailed to an old tree, but I ruled it like a king. One day, hoping to impress Tammy Whitmire, I dangled before her what I believed to be the ultimate prize: a box of Sun-Maid Raisins.
And not just any raisins—these came in that iconic red box featuring the beaming Sun-Maid girl, her cherubic face framed by a halo of golden light, a bonnet perched on her head like a saintly crown. She cradled a bounty of grapes in her arms, promising sweetness, purity, and divine nourishment. I flashed that box like a high roller showing off a wad of cash. “Come up,” I told Tammy, “and these are all yours.”
She was halfway up the wooden slats, eyes locked on my offering, when the unthinkable happened. From a rival treehouse, Zane Johnson’s smug little face emerged from a cluster of leaves. “Raisins?” he scoffed. “I’ve got Captain Kangaroo Cookies.”
And just like that, I was dethroned. Tammy froze mid-climb, her expression shifting from hopeful delight to naked contempt. My raisins, once a gleaming beacon of temptation, now looked like a sad handful of shriveled failure. I watched, helpless, as she abandoned my tree and scrambled toward Zane’s perch with the urgency of a stockbroker chasing a hot tip. Within minutes, she and Zane were nestled together, giggling and feasting on his double-fudge, cream-filled cookie sandwiches—confections so decadent they made my raisins look like rations for an ascetic monk.
As they licked chocolate from their fingers and cast pitying glances in my direction, I slumped in my treehouse, a rejected monarch in exile. At some point, I drifted into the sleep of the vanquished, only to be jolted awake by a fiery agony. Red ants—drawn, no doubt, by the scent of my untouched raisins—had swarmed my body, turning my sanctuary into a writhing hellscape. Screaming, I fled to my apartment, where my mother plunged me into a scalding bath, drowning dozens of ants still clinging to my welt-covered skin.
As I soaked in that tub, covered in welts and drowning in existential despair, the brutal truth smacked me harder than a Captain Kangaroo cookie to the face: I was a loser. Not just in the Tammy Sweepstakes, but in the grander, merciless war of seduction and social dominance. The game wasn’t about charm, wit, or even strategic treehouse placement—it was about bait. And I had shown up to the high-stakes poker table of childhood courtship with a pathetic handful of raisins, while Zane waltzed in with a royal flush of double-fudge, cream-filled supremacy.
That was the day the cold, reptilian logic of the universe seared itself into my brain: Raisins are for chumps. Cookies are for kings. And in the arms race of attraction, Captain Kangaroo doesn’t just win—he conquers.
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THE ALPHA MALES OF COLD WAR TV
As a small child, I had a surprisingly sharp grasp of the Cold War, thanks in no small part to my relentless viewing of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Russian spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale were my first introduction to geopolitical villainy, their cartoonish skullduggery revolving around stealing U.S. military secrets and pilfering jet fuel for nefarious purposes. These two Soviet saboteurs lurked on American soil, risking their lives for the Motherland, making it clear to me that the United States and Russia were locked in a high-stakes global chess match—one where espionage, sabotage, and suspiciously bad Russian accents were the order of the day.
But it wasn’t just Rocky and Bullwinkle feeding my young mind a steady diet of American military might. TV shows across the board hammered home the same lesson: the true Goalkeepers of Dominance weren’t politicians or businessmen; they were highly decorated military officers, soaring through the skies and beyond. Exhibit A: I Dream of Jeannie.
Major Anthony Nelson, astronaut, and all-American heartthrob, was living the dream—piloting spacecraft, rubbing shoulders with generals, and, most importantly, stumbling upon a genie in a bottle who just happened to be Barbara Eden in a sheer harem outfit. As far as my prepubescent brain was concerned, this was a direct confirmation of how the universe worked: the smartest, most disciplined men—those with military and scientific prowess—got the most beautiful women. If you weren’t a decorated officer or a NASA golden boy, good luck summoning a blonde bombshell out of a lamp.
This hierarchy of Alpha Males wasn’t just something television taught me—it was practically family doctrine. My father, an infantryman turned engineer, was living proof. In fact, without his sheer resourcefulness and competitive streak, I wouldn’t exist.
In the early 1960s, my father was stationed in Anchorage, where he and another army suitor, a certain John Shalikashvili (who would later become a U.S. General and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), found themselves locked in a battle for the romantic affections of my teenage mother. Their duel was temporarily paused over Christmas—Shalikashvili went home to Peoria, Illinois, while my father visited his family in Hollywood, Florida. But my father, ever the tactician, decided to cut his holiday short, determined to beat Shalikashvili back to Alaska and win the girl.
The problem? His cream-colored 1959 Morris Minor was suffering from a faulty Lucas fuel filter, and the auto parts store was fresh out of replacements. Undeterred, my father—who would later become a top engineer at IBM—rigged a temporary fix using a prophylactic and a paperclip, fashioning a makeshift spring to keep the fuel pump from locking up. It was a ludicrously desperate, MacGyver-esque solution, but somehow, it worked. He made it to Seattle, caught the ferry to Alaska, and reunited with my mother a full 48 hours before Shalikashvili arrived.
Nine months later, I was born. In the great Cold War of romance, my father had won the ultimate victory—not through military rank, but through sheer ingenuity, timing, and, apparently, latex-based automotive engineering.
Cinemorphosis 