All the Things I Never Learned to Do
My list is embarrassingly long, but I don’t care. Anything that makes for a fun List Column is okay by me.
I sometimes make breakfast for the family. This morning, out of the blue, my wife asked me if I could make “eggs over easy.” As it turns out, I don’t even know what this style of eggs is.
“Is that a fried egg?” I asked.
Carrie at first told me “yes,” but then she checked on the Internet to make sure she was right. It didn’t matter. I had to admit to Carrie that I don’t know how to make eggs either of those ways. Chef Bill only does scrambled eggs.
This admission made us both laugh. I asked, “can’t you Google, ‘How to fry an egg?”
Carrie first replied that nobody needs to do that because everybody already knows how to do this. But, then she did the search anyway and, of course, a million tutorials popped up.
This anecdote made me think of some of the other things just about everybody else can do … but I can’t.
One thing I can do is pen a List Column. I also don’t mind making embarrassing confessions in said columns … because such admissions might amuse a few readers, plus some of these admissions prove that people really don’t have to learn many things almost everyone used to know.
So, with this prologue out of the way, now for the column proper - Things Bill Never Learned to Do …
Fry an egg
Probably before I was 10, my late mother taught me how to scramble eggs. She also taught me how to make cinnamon toast and cheese toast and fry bacon - which is really all one needs for a wonderful breakfast.
Once in a Blue Moon - I guess when Mom was sick or out of town - my late father would have to make breakfast for his three sons. Dad always made fried eggs, which we called “grease eggs” because he fried the eggs in the same skillet he’d used to fry the bacon.
Because I was hungry, I ate these eggs … often on top of the toast Dad also made. Unlike Mom, Dad didn’t even put butter on the toast before he broiled it. These fried eggs were kind of an acquired taste, but I have noted I enjoy them more the older I get.
But I never learned how to fry an egg.
Drive a car with a stick shift
I got my driver’s license in 1981, when many cars still had a standard transmission. Just about everyone eventually learned how to drive a car where you had to use a clutch and change gears. My older brother, who could even drive a gas truck for my Dad’s gasoline distributorship, tried to teach me one day in his Chevy Citation.
This experience was traumatic as I ended up getting into a fender bender - on train tracks! - because I couldn’t change gears. Rush and I eventually gave up and, to this day, I cannot drive a car without an automatic transmission.
Of course, this never hurt me as I don’t even know if they make cars without automatic transmissions any more. I do remember a few times when friends asked me to move their car - vehicles with a clutch … and I had to quickly come up with an excuse why I couldn’t do this.
“Ahm, I have to go to the bathroom right now.”
Still, if my life is ever in danger and I have to escape a group of Bad Guys and the only car available is one with a standard transmission, I’m going to be in trouble.
Check the oil in a car
My late father owned a couple of Gulf gas stations and, from time to time, as a teenager I had to work at one of them when the regular employees were on vacation or didn’t show for their shift.
This was a full-service gas station (remember those?) and about the only people who got gas at this particular station were little old ladies who had probably never pumped their own gas.
I could pump the gas and clean the windshield, but when these sweet elderly ladies asked me “to check the oil,” half the time I couldn’t find the rod that allows one to do this.
Since (most of the time) I could figure out how to open the hood, I realized these customers couldn’t tell what I was doing at the front of the engine. I’d always just return to the driver’s window and say, “Your oil is fine.”
Use a smart phone
Until three months ago, I was in the 1 percent of the population that still used a “flip phone.”
I liked the fact the phone was small and fit in my pocket easily, that my Verizon bill was at least $50 cheaper, and the only phone calls I want to take or make are to my wife.
With my flip phones, I could text but it took 20 minutes to make a one-sentence text so I rarely made any texts beyond “ok” or “tx.”
However, when I started The Troy Citizen local Substack, I realized I needed to be able to take photos with my phone and then email them to my desktop computer so I could plop these photos into my stories.
My third grade son and 7th grade daughter have been great teaching me how to do this and I do now, sometimes, make a text that’s longer than four words.
My favorite feature of my I-Phone 16 is that I can listen to any song I want with a few clicks of a few buttons. I like it when my kids are with me in the car on a trip and I can make them listen to “my music” and we can quickly find, say, Parliament’s “We Want the Funk” or Carly Simon’s “Nobody does it better.”
A lot of people do smart phones better than me, but - at age 59 - I’m catching up.
Roller Skating
I can’t tell you how much I hated birthday parties at skating rinks. I tried to roller skate once or twice, but when you fall down every four feet and have to constantly cling to the guardrail, you don’t feel (or look) particularly cool. I just gave up.
Water skiing
Same with water skiing. My best friend and his father tried to teach me how to “get up” on skis one afternoon at Lake Martin, but they both gave up after about 20 unsuccessful tries.
It seems to me many more people used to know how to water ski. My parents later bought a lake house, which our family enjoyed for 19 years. It was very rare when you saw someone out on the lake water-skiing. (I was very good at wedging a life preserver between my legs and floating in our Slough as I drank a cold beer.)
Hunting deer
I grew up in a deer-hunting hotbed in south Alabama. Probably half my male friends went deer hunting every time the woods were open, including before school. My Dad, grandfather and brothers were, at one time, all avid deer hunters.
Not me. I did go on two or three dove shoots, but I always felt guilty killing the birds (which I wasn’t going to eat) and the shotguns were too loud for my sensitive ears. So I retired from bird hunting and never even tried deer hunting.
When my friends huddled together at break and told hunting stories, I just sat there silent and wished the conversation would turn back to sports or rock music or pretty girls we were too afraid to ask out.
Cleaning a fish
At one time, my late father was also an avid (cane pole) angler (he really liked bream fishing) as was my older brother, who enjoyed fishing for largemouth bass.
I would go fishing too, but I usually just caught turtles or got my line hung up in the woods or stumps.
I never once cleaned any of the fish they caught. There’s a good lesson here: Why do something unpleasant (like mess with fish guts) when your Dad or brother will do it? Still, one day I might be hungry and want to cook a bream and I’m going to have to google how to do it (if the electricity is still on).
Ballroom dancing
Just about every teenager in my parents’ and grandparents’ generations learned several popular couple dances (like the “Panama City Bop” or The Charleston. ) By the time I became a teenager, nobody knew any real dances - we just got out on the dance floor and bounced around.
When I was editor of The Montgomery Independent, I was once a (very minor) celebrity in Montgomery, Alabama. Because of this, I was asked to be a “celebrity dancer” in a “Dancing with the Stars” knock-off fund-raiser.
For two months, I took ballroom dance classes from the local Fred Astaire studio and then had to dance in front of 300 people for the big gala (which raised money for the American Cancer Society).
That was the most nervous I’ve ever been in my life. My ballroom dance was to Queen’s “This Thing Called Love.” I guess I made it through it, but I’ll never do that again. I was the worst dancer … but I did raise the most money for the Cancer Society … So I’m good at asking people for money …. a skill which still comes in handy.
Playing Bridge
Another activity just about everybody in my parents’ and grandparents’ generations learned to master was the card game, Bridge. My parents loved the game and on numerous occasions tried to teach me how to play. Alas, I could never figure it out, which confirms my theory that my parents generation was a lot smarter than my own.
Still, I can count on zero fingers the times one of my friends said, “Hey, you want to play Bridge?”
POST SCRIPT …
Before I knocked out this latest List Column, my wife fed me two fried eggs on toast … and they weren’t “grease eggs” and were, in fact, a tasty “change of pace” for Sunday breakfast. We figured it out! So maybe old homo sapiens can learn a few new tricks.
*** (Sharing content you think others might enjoy is, arguably, a skill). ***
(When it comes to the “skill” of asking for financial donations, one should always remember, “You have ‘No’ in your pocket.” )
My parents did teach me how to play gin rummy and, in fact, within a year, I could routinely beat both of them. I got kind of cocky with that game, figuring I could beat anyone. When I got married, I taught my wife how to play. Within a few months, she could routinely beat me.
Anyway, when the You-Know-What hits the fan and citizens have to rely on our practical survival skills, I’m going to be a little more nervous than many of my peers. Still, If the electricity isn’t working, we can still play gin rummy by candle light.
As an aside, just about every time I take a coffee break on my back porch, I see herds of deer in my backyard and the neighbors yard. The deer are everywhere.
This observation makes me think far fewer teenagers and adults are hunting deer than 30 or 40 years ago - probably because the sport is expensive and this is a way to save money in times of ever-worsening inflation.
It has occurred to me that if times ever get really bad and we need to hunt for food, I’m - again - going to be in trouble. Even if I could kill a deer, I wouldn’t know how to clean it and get the meat to cook.