National Park Service

National Park Service 

By Charles E. Kraus

      Last night I dreamed I’d died, been handed a GPS preset with coordinates to Heaven, arrived, 

and found myself unable to locate a parking space. There were a few vacant spots but these were 

reserved for Angels. 

      

      I grew up in New York City back in the days when street parking was sanctioned. Also back in 

the days prior to power steering. My father’s two fisted manipulation of the wheel as he coxed our 

Hudson Commodore Custom into a modest opening, a mere six inches longer than our car, 

combined Jujutsu, Boatswain knowhow and Balanchiean precision. 

      Street parking in Manhattan is now a corporal offense. In other cities — San Francisco and 

Seattle for example, dealing with high-tech-low-bid parking meters often requires the deciphering of 

obscurely displayed but essential information such as how many minutes registered when you kept 

pushing that ‘add time’ button. You force your credit card into the gummy slot then pry it out using 

two hands and your teeth. Eventually, if the meter connects with your bank and they agree on a fee, 

a sticker is issued. This gets affixed to the windshield or the passenger window, placed on the 

dashboard, or Velcroed to your ear. 

      Upon returning timely to your car, you are as likely as not to find that the bumper of the vehicle 

now parked in front of you is just about but not quite touching your license plate. And behind? 

Where you’d left yourself a few feet of maneuvering room? The previous tenant, a Mini-Cooper, has 

been replaced by a commodiously cabined Land Cruiser. The super-sized transport is docked so 

close to yours that the only way you could pass a credit card between the two vehicles would be if 

you didn’t have very much credit.

      Sadly, my wife is the proud owner of an officially sanctioned Disability placard. The permission 

slip gives her the chance to park in certain otherwise restricted zones. I say “chance” because in 

most cases, handicapped parking is just as overbooked as the rest of curbside. Signage denoting 

such spots should more accurately read: Reserved for the Handicapped & Lucky.

      Has someone counseled, “leave the car over there, they never give tickets.” Have you been 

offered an event-specific permit allowing you to ignore the posted regulations? Were you 

contemplating a protective order personally signed by Judge Judy, only to be handed a scribbled 

note saying, “Board Meeting, don’t ticket. Thanks, Harvey.” Do not fall for these attempts to 

outsmart the meter-readers. 

      Such schemes only work for other people.

      There are red curbs, yellow curbs, green curbs, white curbs and just plain curb curbs. There is 

alternate-side-of-the-street parking, parallel parking, angled parking, between certain hours parking, 

three minute loading zone parking, and Restricted Parking Zone parking. After circling the block for 

hours, I’ve concluded that all of these options are theoretical. The real world offers only one kind of 

parking space, and it’s occupied. 

What If I Owned A Gun

What If I Owned A Gun

By Charles E. Kraus

published in The Oregonian and The Baltimore

You are a law abiding citizen in a world that feels less and less safe.  You have kids to protect, or a husband, a wife, property -- not to mention securing your own wellbeing.   You are trying to figure out if owning a sidearm would be a good idea. Hopefully you would never need to use it.  But knowing it was available might give you some piece of mind.

Perhaps.

In this age of terror, I’m trying to figure out when and where owning a sidearm is helpful.  If someone breaks into my house.  I confront him.  He doesn’t have a gun.  I do.  I say, hold it right there.  He does.  I call the police.  Works fine.

Or, he has a gun, sees mine and we end up in a shoot out.  Not so fine.

Cops train.  Not just target practice, they rehearse situations.  They know, or are supposed to know, when to use their weapons, how to protect innocent bystanders.  Sharp shooters pinpoint their shots.  Can you? If you had a weapon and there were lots of people around, could you cause your bullets to land where you wanted them to go?

Crowded store.  Two terrorist.  Assault weapons.  I pull out my pistol and fire back.  Assuming I don’t hit a shopper or sales clerk, I’m guessing, what with such little opportunity to take careful aim, I shoot and miss.  The folks with the AK47s are going to return my fire.  Not good.

I’m in a crowded theater, sports arena, restaurant, subway, on a bus, or sadly, at a Christmas event in a social service center.  Exactly how would I put my gun to good use?  I might shot a perpetrator.  In all that chaos?  Perhaps.  Maybe if I was in the hall, and realized what was happening, and if I didn’t run away.  If I crawled in, kept low, took careful aim.  Maybe I’d hit a terrorist and save dozens of lives.  That could happen.  Or have I been watching too many movies?

If  a guy harmed one of my kids.  I’d use the gun. If I was in a situation where I honestly believed a loved one was going to be seriously harmed, or that I was about to become the victim, I’d use what I had.

I wonder, if I carried a weapon, what the chances might be that a thug could overpower me, that my gun would end up on the other side of the equation.  I wonder how many times a mere criminal, not a cold blooded terrorist, had come to rob, been confronted by an armed victim, panicked, grabbed the weapon and put it to bad use.

Guns have kickbacks, they are loud, pulling the trigger means creating a minor explosion right there at the end of your arm.  People who do target practice often wear ear protectors.  I’m not saying you would worry about your hearing while you were in the midst of a gun battle.  I’m saying the kick and the blast and the situation, the fear, the uncertainty, the activity, the tension, the confusion, these things do not contribute to a steady hand.   

  I’m wondering, in the middle of terror, if people are dying, and the police arrive.  Do they see weapons and fire at those holding them?  The terrorists and the terrorized? In their haste do they have or take the time to figure it out?  Hopefully they do.  That is their intension.
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This essay appeared in the December 15, 2015 edition of the Baltimore Sun.

WRITE THIS WHILE YOU CAN

WRITE THIS WHILE YOU CAN 

By Charles E. Kraus

There is a "2016 To Do" list on my office bulletin board, several lists really — to do, titles of books I wish to read, people I need to contact; also:  

WRITE THIS WHILE YOU CAN

Beneath the heading we find several topics I might yet tackle.

1. The Reduction of Writer Friends From My Generational Queue. The demise of

aging friends, ultimately, of me. Too grim? I’ll explore this once I am dead, an entirely

new perspective, death as seen from the point-of-view of a participant.

2. Rereading and Reevaluating — that’s a subject I might get to in 2016.   How over and over again, when returning to an old favorite, some book or film I admired back in my collective past, I am disappointed — by the work, by my having been attracted to the work, and/or for having spent years as a propagandist urging others to appreciate the wonders I now reject.  Did you know that Holden became a CPA? That the Chicago Seven opened a restaurant?  That when I first saw A Thousand Clowns, Murray was my hero, and that when I last saw it, I cried for his deficiencies?  It is impossible to reread without considering the fate of the author.  Bellow lasted too long and went to the other side of reason. Salinger became a paranoid bully.  Kerouac took the wrong road.

3. My Involvement In the War gets listed as two separate writing projects -- fiction and memoir.  Probably I should stick to the facts as I misremember them.  I was distracted when I signed the enlistment papers.  If I finally write it down, will I learn why I took the alternative route?

WRITE THIS WHILE YOU CAN is my reminder.   Whatever the topic, Charles, do some serious writing while you are still able to string words. Before stringing involves beads. Thoughts used to jump around in my head, colliding, fighting for superior position, making the cut, surviving an edit or two, ending up on a final draft. Currently, my musings resist symbolic representation.  Words no longer compete; they acquiesce.  Before my impressions get shipped off to a back burner in subsets of subsets of my mind, while they continue to be accessible, if only with great effort, dangled into consciousness on a quick peek, short term, lend lease basis, I’d like to send them into the game.

Samuel Clemens dictated reminisces long after his inner-editor ceased to function.

That’s a perfectly good way to ruin a reputation. And yet, there are, there were, there are, new

combinations I want to add to the cumulative count.  

DOCUMENTING OUR LIVES

DOCUMENTING OUR LIVES

By Charles E. Kraus

As a child growing up in the 1950s, the visual impressions that I had about how I looked, how I moved, how I appeared to others, came primarily from peering into a mirror.  Turn a bit to the left, to the right — so that’s how they see me.  A three panel mirror was state of the art insight.  I was protected from detailed analysis by the realization that restricted by my position relative to the mirror, there were limits to what got revealed.  Still, some things were obvious.  My head was small, long, more cube than sphere.  My hair!  I’d asked the barber to make me look like Presley, not Harpo. 

Our family camera was a boxy affair only retrieved from my father’s desk drawer for special occasions - celebrations, beach outings, visits from distant relatives.  The black and white results let you see images of yourself set in a variety of situations;.  Happy or sad, anxious or fearful, you were required to smile.  The photographs were an embarrassment, but also instructive.  I sure as hell was not going to be caught in that shirt again!

By the time I saw the 8mm silent film version of little old me, I was a college student, the sequence shot for a class project.  Who was the gawky kid with the Groucho walk, tipped forward bounding ahead on the balls of his feet?  In high school, we’d made fun of Brucie Babtox because he tried to prance like a hood.  Turned out, I walked the same way.  

Similar revelations occurred on the audio playing field.  In junior high, our voices were recorded by Mrs. Lascary.  I believe this had something to do with poetry.  I recognized every voice, but one.  My friends sounded exactly like my friends.  But my voice?  That’s not me, not how I talked.  I had … could it be true … a New York accent.

Cut to my granddaughter, Alice.  She is two.  Like many of her contemporaries, she is extremely well documented.  Just about everything Alice does — brush her teeth, mush up her strawberries, roll in the grass — gets recorded by Mom or Dad.   Every time Alice learns a new word, it is captured for posterity.  She lives in Menlo Park.  We live in Seattle.  Daily video installments arrive, as if a camera crew has been following our granddaughter around waiting for something interesting to happen.  Remarkably, it always does.

The viewership for these recordings includes, but is not limited to Alice’s adult fan club.  She’s a fan, too.  She splits her limited screen time between viewing Elmo and watching videos of her exploits.  Her parents restrict her media adventures because they want her to play with her toys, to do art projects, interact with friends, even old fashioned stuff like going on a family walk.  This approach to growing up has my vote.  

But, there is no such thing as merely taking a walk, or drawing a picture.  The walk is memorialized.  The picture photographed, copies sent to grandparents and other cheering sections.  The documentation gets reviewed by Alice.  When we were in town, we took a picture of her standing next to Cookie Monster decked out in his Christmas best.  During our short stay, Alice retrieved that shot dozens of times.  She was obviously trying to work out some thoughts or feelings about meeting up with one of her screen idols.

Will today's youngsters, so accustomed to seeing themselves as other see them, make corrections and adjustments to perfect their worldly impact?  Is the information they receive about who and how they are going to have a positive or negative impact on who or how they will be?  

I’m old fashioned, so I’ll answer the question by saying we’ll have to wait and see what develops. 

Quaking in Place

Quaking in Place

By Charles E. Kraus

Seattle ---   I moved to the west coast just about 45 years ago.   When I think of New York, I envision the city as it existed in 1970.  In those days, if you wanted to encourage someone to talk about themselves, you said, “what’s shaking?”

Recently, The New Yorker Magazine, of all publications, told us what’s shaking here in Seattle.   According to Kathryn Shultz’s article, The Really Big One, what’s shaking, or will be soon, is a long stretch of California, Oregon and Washington coast, the Cascadia subduction zone.  She singles out Portland and Seattle for special deconstructability.

Shultz’s piece cannot be dismissed as sensationalism.  It is published in a magazine that fact checks and verifies everything from commas to continental drift.  It is not only a respected magazine, it is evidently a very well read one.  More than a dozen people, folks I met in Seattle, Portland, LA, people I spoke with from New York, Baltimore and Texas, have brought up the quake story.  Some ask, ‘so, what are you going to do?’  It’s a reasonable question, but not an easy one to answer.

Obviously, individual responses to news that staying put just might be lethal, is going to vary depending upon a person’s situation.  Single, married, employed, home owner, parent, elderly.  Part of a community, someone who’s spent a lifetime perfecting a house, a business, a reputation.  If I were 25, just getting a foothold on my future, I’d move that future to higher less potentially unstable ground.  Such a decision would be prudent.  At that age, you have less stuff, fewer commitments, and a belief in nice long tomorrows.

My wife and I are 70, or close to it.  Our home is literally on a hill.   It is unlikely that a tsunami will wreak havoc on the property.  It’s a wood frame house, well anchored, and though it might just ride out a 9+  Big One, we’d have to be home to benefit from any potential protection.  Not downtown.  Not by the harbor, not visiting in Portland, shopping in Edmonds.  Not frequenting any of the places that comprise our Seattle lives.   Now that I think about it, we are pretty close to Lake Washington, a mighty body of water.  Will it jump the shoreline?  And what would that look like?  Maybe we shouldn’t picnic down by the lake.

Evidently, many of the facts that Shultz reports are not newly minted.  Though I’d never read ­about subduction zones, seismologists are familiar with the concept, and with Pacific Northwest’s unstable situation.  OK, so why did it take a New Yorker article to bring the topic to the local dinner table discussion circuit?

Realtors tell you property value is all about location.  Evidently, so do seismologists.  It turns out that when you are trying to decide if you should move because the kids are about to enter school and you want to find a “good” school district, you need to think about more than test scores.   Have you ever even discussed earthquakes with your kids?

Years ago, when Boeing found itself in bad times, people left this city without saying goodbye.  Houses were abandoned, personal property stacked at the curb.  Leaving is an option.  It’s been done.  I suppose the question becomes, is staying an option?  And if we stick around, are we merely waiting for the inevitable?  Wondering if tonight, or next month, or perhaps not for a hundred years, this place is going to experience a massive adjustment.

Do we turn our backs on reality, just go on living our lives, heads in the sand, magical thinking a group process.  Or will our city and state governments declare a state of potential emergency, install the early warning systems, move schools to higher ground, keep the conversation going.  Will the public, you and I, treat the situation as anything more than a passing headline?   What’s shaking?

The Theory of Early Silliness Education

The Theory of Early Silliness Education
By Charles Kraus


I've been performing comedy routines for children since .. oh, let's not go back prior to 1957.   Initially, I was a kid magician attempting to project a very serious attitude.  I wanted audiences to take me in ernest --  Boy Wonder and all.  But it turned out, I was funny, so I went with it. Eleven thousand shows latter, I'm still performing.

People often ask if audiences -- meaning the kids -- have changed, if children laugh at different things.  My response is that what was funny "then" is funny now.

Entertainers, philosophers, scientists, psychologists, essayists -- Aristotle to Steve Allen, (from A to A) -- have all taken stabs explaining "funny."  Their conclusions are more complex than mine.  If it makes you laugh, it's funny -- that's mine.

Round about 1958, there was a gag in my routine where I tried to 'magically' link two solid steel 18" rings together -- stop me if you've seen this -- and by "mistake," one of the rings fastened itself to my suspenders.  Being twelve, I looked quite out of place in my boy-sized tux, more like a short head waiter than a child magician.  Freed from the right suspender, the ring ended up stuck on the left suspender.   My audiences were composed of five and six year olds.  They loved the foolishness.

Laughing and pointing, the boys and girls found my unfortunate situation hysterical.  The kids were laughing at a classic comic moment -- when a person who thinks he knows what he's doing gets himself into harmless trouble.  From time to time, I dust off the old rings and put this routine back into my act.  I've embellished it -- after the suspenders, the ring now gets linked to my wristwatch. Brings down the house.

Kids like it best if the person who mistakenly proceeds against his own interests happens to be an adult, perhaps an authority figure. There is an unspoken agreement between the entertainer and the audience -- comedy situations are not dangerous. Odd behavior and absurd situations don't lead to real-world consequences.  There is no humor in a slip and fall routine if the fallee bleeds.

Audience's love it when I'm baffled by something and the solution is obvious to everyone but me.   They chuckle if a word has two meanings and I'm operating with the wrong definition.  And mostly, they laugh if I am about to get myself into a silly jam.  Anticipation can be very humorous.

More and more young children are being exposed to foreign language immersion classes.  There is some evidence that introducing dual fluency early on sets up high end brain patterns that are uniquely formed at this stage of development.  I hereby submit my early silliness education theory.  Learning to laugh when you are a toddler sets up brain patterns that will upgrade the quality of your entire life. They will help you cope, teach you to see the big picture, and produce endless joyful interactions.

Getting the joke feels good.  When I perform at bedside in a hospital, my puppet begins speaking with the child long before I do.  "Listen, I'll tell you why I'm here," Biscuit The Dog Puppet says to the kid.  "You're a doctor, right? And I happen to have a head ache in my tummy ... once I had a tummy ache in my head instead.  Should I eat chocolate pot pie, or do you think that'll make me cry?"

Somewhere during Biscuit's soliloquy, we can expect a little gleam to appear in the child's eyes. Sickness has been momentarily subdued, crowded out by an attack of funny.

If you've ever looked into someone's eyes to sharing a joke -- communicating soul to soul, you know certain joyful interactions are spiritual.  Helping a child to realize he or she has the ability to experience delight in this very natural way opens a door to options that will come in handy.

Even the most enlightened people fall back again and again into stereotyping others.  Color, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, accent, regional bias, financial or educational stigmas.  But fill a room with every variety of individual, then introduce an outrageously funny joke.  Not political.  Not intellectual. Something basic to the human condition.  For a moment, but with traces that last forever, everybody is infected by the humor bug, everyone is connected.

I ask Bones The Dog Puppet if he can count, and he tells me he can count all the way to one.   "Of course," he admits, sometimes he forgets how to do that.  "You forget how to count to one?"  "Yep, so I skip it and just do two."

That joke worked both before and after New Math.

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Watch Charles The Clown videos online at charlestheclownvideos.com

BY A SHADOW

BY A SHADOW

By Charles Kraus

It is possible to find the view inconsequential, when the next mountain is a problem that reaches beyond the sky.

Even in the bright light, this peak of burden casts a shadow.  And so we are sad, and we do not bother looking out from picture windows.  Some mountains can not be climbed, or moved, or circumvented.  Some are walls, cages, barriers of intensity standing as tombstones, marking our place in the story.

Into this, see a rabbit -- swift, surefooted, small, unimposing.  It rushes forth, fighting its way past troubles that would still some of us.  Under.  Over.  Around.  He does not know the trip is impossible.  He carries my lament in the quickness of his heart.  

I am here, beneath tomorrow, awaiting my cue, poised on a hill, the sun ablaze, the breeze a chorus, the view a dream dashed by a shadow which is the sum of my future, until now.  Listening for the call of a rabbit who races infinity.