Heaven Application / short form

Heaven Application /  short form

By Charles E. Kraus

1.  Why do you want to become a member of our community?

2.  Names of three references (please, no relatives).

3.  Your Good Works history (those of the Jewish persuasion may substitute Mitzvah history).

4.   Religious affiliation(s) (those of the Humanistic persuasion may respond: Ethical Culture,      

      Agnostic, Atheist, Deist or recovering Scientologist ).

5.   Do you have a fear of heights?

6.   Will you be staying with family members?

7.   Do you sing?

8.   Name your favorite author.

9.   Will you be joining a support group, and if so, what issues are of particular interest to you?

10. Do you believe in sex after death?

11  Have you been out of the country in the last 21 days?

12.  Are you conversant with Excel? 

14.  Would you like to be put on the waiting list for reincarnation? 

15.  Do you smoke?

16.  In 30 words or less, tell us something about yourself that makes you proud to be Heavenly.

17.  Summarize your death bed thoughts.

18.  As you expired, did you see a white light?

19.  If your death was not by natural causes, explain the circumstances.  Provide names of all individuals involved, and with regards to perpetrators, indicate whether or not you have forgiven them.

20.  If Hollywood decides to remake The Last Temptation of Christ, how would you cast this feature?

21.  Rate the following people in descending order of significance:

Pope Francis, Albert Einstein, Lenny Bruce, J.D. Salinger, Ethel Waters, Norman Vincent Peal, George Burns, Mel Gibson and Brian Williams.

22.  Tell us how we can make the world a better place.

23.  Do you have an opinion about Gay angels?

24.  Favorite animal

25.  Favorite flower

26.  Favorite televangelist 

BONUS QUESTION:

Discuss — is Noah more famous for the Ark or for bagels?

Upon completing this form, please retain a copy for your records and burn the original.

Downsizing Your Life

Downsizing Your Life
By Charles E. Kraus

The kids want us to downsize.  Each time they visit, they look around – eyes landing on the books and records, the CDs, the tchotchkes lining – filling, really -- the living room shelves, and they open the overflowing hall closet.  Just curious.

Have you removed anything?  They want to know.

And my wife answers that just yesterday, she donated a box filled to the brim with ancient gloves (mostly singles, missing mates)(she’d been waiting to see if the absent partners showed up), some gently used undergarments, several combination locks for which we no longer remembered the combinations, and … they’d be happy to learn, four books – duplicate copies of Robert Crais mysteries.  That guy sure can write.  She even gave ‘em the box that held these treasures.  Goodwill is erecting a statue in our honor.

As we ease into our 70s, the kids feel we should either discard all the stuff we no longer use, or need, or we should establish a trust fund authorizing a professional estate sale service to hold a mega sale as soon as we’ve been hauled away to the nursing home, or returned to sender, which ever comes first.

I don’t blame them.  This is a large house.  And having lived here for more than a quarter of a century, my wife and I have had an opportunity to stock it with lots of interesting, useful, or potentially useful trinkets.  You never know when you are going to need a snakebite kit, or a carton of rather colorful feathers (for art projects).  We don’t do art projects, and our kids have already rejected the craft supplies.  But, when our granddaughter gets a little older, she may become interested in gluing feathers onto costumes, formulating collages, perhaps feathering the walls of her room.  Someone went to a great deal of trouble to collect these … actually, lets start even further back.

God, nature … whatever your evolutionary speculation – thought up birds and added them to the list of species.  The birds grew feathers, a few of which got dislodged during long flights.  Then a guy, or a woman, spotted the feathers on the ground, retrieved them, brought them home, collected them, and eventually got them into our storage room.  After all that effort, do we have the right to simply heave these efforts into the trash?

It is true that the storage room contains two cartons labeled “collected art work of Danielle and Rebecca.”  The masterpieces represent our daughters’ best efforts during their preschool years.   The girls don’t even want to look at this stuff.  Actually, it’s not particularly exciting.  But the samples represent a sliver of who they were back when.  They are artifacts, if not art, of personal history.

I’ve been collecting books since I was a preschooler.  That’s a lot of years, and a lot of books. Thousands, actually.  I’ve read about half of them, and have plans to get to the rest as soon as time permits.  Well, some of the rest.  Once you start calling yourself a collector, you have certain obligations.  You see yet another John Updike tome (he wrote about a trillion of them), you feel obligated to add it to your collection.  I don’t think I’ll read his book about golf, nor the art criticism. Mine is an impressive library, not easily reduced.  I’ve been meaning to find a foundation, or a university, perhaps some student with reading habits similar to my own, to whom I can bequeath these volumes.  The kids use Kindles.

Downsizing requires reducing more than what you own.  It requires reducing your interests, your expectations, and hopes and dreams for the days that remain.


You get to that downsizing, dad?

Yea, I’ve started by eliminating a few items from my ‘hope to do’ list.  Crossed off prospecting, hiking the Appalachian Trail, and learning to play the piano.  I’ll donate the electric keyboard, but I’m keeping the boots.

KIDS SAID THE DARNDEST THINGS

KIDS SAID THE DARNDEST THINGS

By Charles Kraus - sometimes CharlesThe Clown

I’m setting up the last of my props at a recreation center in LA. The kids are already seated on the floor, about a hundred of them. I’ve been giving shows at this location once or twice a year for over two decades.
            “It’s him!”
            “No”
            “It is him!”
            “No it’s not!”
            Two boys in the audience are arguing about me.
            “It is him …. He got old!”
            I have a sense of humor – it’s sort of required in my business.
            Some of what kids say is constructive – “I wish you looked at our row more.” Some is mere age appropriate skepticism – (after a magic trick) – “I know how he did it! It’s a trick!”
Mostly, what I remember are the silly, funny lines offered by children who have their own ways of seeing the world.
A few minutes after a birthday party show one of the kids wanders back into the living room and finds me packing up.
"Will there be an encore?"
I put the make-up and costume on during my performances.. It’s a comedy routine where things get kind of mixed up. I have trouble finding the powder puff, which has ended up on top of my head. The kids … all of them …. help me to locate it. They shout, “it’s on your head!” so loud, it falls off my head.  

 Once, after appearing at a father-son elementary school event, I was in the men’s room washing up and changing back into my civilian outfit. A dad and his young son entered. They stopped to look at me standing by the sink removing my makeup.
            “Oh,” the kid explained to his father, “that’s Charles. He’s putting on his person so no one will know he’s a clown.”
            A woman I know gave me as a “gift” year after year for her God daughter’s birthday parties. According to this God mother, the child came for a visit to her house, roved about searching for something, then finally said, “so where does Charles sleep, in the bath tub?”
            Last week, after a camp show, a kindergartner came up to me and said, “can you please repeat the show?”
            Bones The Dog Puppet is my sidekick. It takes children a few minutes to warm up to a strange performer, but only about a second to warm up to a large, fuzzy dog puppet. Once, after a program, a mom who was gripping her child’s hand approached me. Her daughter looked uncomfortable being so close.
            “I’ll step back,” I volunteered. “Sometimes children are frightened of clowns.”
            “I’m not afraid of you,” the girl said. “I’m afraid of dogs.”
            About two days ago, after a library performance in Portland, a little guy came up to me.
            “You know that girl, Loretta?”
            “Gee, there were lots of kids in the audience.”
            “She’s the one, helped you with the balloon trick.”
            “Oh, sure I remember her.”
            “Well …. I was her brother.”
            I got my start in “show business,” back east when I was a teenage magician. At birthday party appearances, I did a magic act. Then, using 6 or 7 of those old fashioned, fat, 3 foot long balloons, I created a giant balloon dog birthday present. Upon finishing a particular show, the mom instructed me to make similar animals for each of the guests. In those days, I was lucky to come up with enough air to inflate balloons to form one dog. I had neither the air, the balloons nor the desire to provide creations for twenty guests.
            The mom said she would not pay me until I made a balloon animal for each kid. I said I couldn’t do that.
            It was a standoff.   
            Finally, my father, who was my designated driver, rang the bell. I was going to be late for another party show. What was taking so long? .
            “I’m not paying him a cent until he makes more balloons!,” the outraged mom said.
Sizing up the situation, dad told me to forgo the fee and head for the car.
            As I did this, the appalled mom shouted --- “you’ll never work again in Teaneck, New Jersey!” 

 Perhaps that is why I ended up moving to the west coast. Anyway, my point is that kids aren’t the only ones who say the darndest things.

Inside Out - Talking to My Kids

Inside Out – Talking to My Kids

By Charles E. Kraus

I’m getting along in years and would like my kids to hear my other stories, the ones about the life I’ve experienced deep within.  But I find that words are not particularly useful tools for expressing the tone and impact of events that have transfixed and altered my journey.   Some situations are so vivid it seems impossible to limit their retells to language.   

I want my kids to know about, to somehow pass along to them, the electricity in the air, the anticipation, the heat, the sounds, of an armory packed to the bursting point with excited, enthralled, shrieking supporters, the night, three hours late, candidate John Kennedy arrived for a brief campaign appearance.  And a few years later, the shock and sorrow and jolting sobriety of the President’s assassination.  To know as we did, with certainty, that everyone, everywhere, absolutely everyone, absolutely everywhere, wept uncontrollably; that our anguish was magnified by its universal pervasiveness.

      Is there any way I can share the things that occurred inside my head, and then in every aspect of my perception, on that autumn day when,  as I was seated next to my girlfriend in a college auditorium, the lecturer posed a complex math problem, one far beyond my skill level, perhaps beyond those of any of us?  Yet somehow, influenced by a desire to impress, by an excitement that filled my mind, wheels and gears whizzed round within my head.  In mere seconds, almost screaming, more than declaring, I performed the uncharacteristic act of rising from my chair and shouting out with an unexplainable confidence, an answer so correct and complete that a silence composed entirely of amazement filled the lecture hall?

      Can I really use words to describe what it was like identifying with millions of kids, my generation, my peers?  How we were possessed by delusions of invincibility and altruism?  How, guided by a sense righteousness and moral smugness, propelled by hallucinogens and misconceptions, we abandoned our homes, heading for places such as Haight Ashbury?  Or a kingdom called “on the road”?  Can I ever explain how my generation created a genuine, if impermanent, festival of the ‘alternative path’? 

      I have tried unsuccessfully to describe how I felt on a certain extremely dark, fierce Rhode Island evening.  This was after stowing my gear and cleaning up, when I set out alone through the numbing night, hearing the sounds made as boots sink slightly into the crust of ice that forms on New England snow.  Alone, quietly heading for the bus stop, thinking that just a plane ride ago, I’d been experiencing the monsoon season and a military exercise called Nam.  Realizing how in the span of two days, the war had become part of my past.  The walk had a feeling.  Actually, the feeling returns whenever I recall my steps through the snow, the quietest, calmest, most serene journey I believe I have ever made.  Words cannot capture these sensations.

Such moments are extraordinary.  We all have them.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our kids could catch a glimpse of the indescribable peaks and vistas that defined our journeys?   Sons and daughters will have their own unique, remarkably vivid and meaningful moments.  If we cannot share the specifics, at least we accept the concept that our lives are lived beyond words.  Perhaps some aspects can be transmitted by the intensity of the telling. 

Continuous Positive Snoring

Continuous Positive Snoring

The Snore Looser

By Charles  Kraus

  

My father enjoyed snoring.   At least that is what he told us.  This may have been less than the entire truth.  I recall the statement, but I also remember that when we spent a night in a motel or a week in a resort, he made sure we were given a room at the end of the corridor, “so my snoring won’t bother people”

He had reason for concern, as his night orations were not only powerfully issued, they were also spectacularly inharmonious.  His repartee was vast, and went far beyond what might be considered the sounds associated with orthodox delivery  --  the ‘sawing the log’ standards used on situation comedy shows.   Those folks were amateurs compared to my father who was capable of filling the night with a symphony of rattling, rasping, humming, squealing, and even chirping noises dispensed in dramatic counterpoint.

I grew up on the other side of the wall, the bedroom wall, and the sounds of my dad bellowing forth were reassuring.  If I awoke in the middle of the night and all was quiet, I was concerned.  Quiet was an abnormality.  It frightened me.  It was foreboding, and I remained awake until once again lulled back to sleep by the next round of raspy chanting.

My children, and their mother, have not taken to my snoring the way I took to dad’s.  Over the years, I’ve been poked to consciousness, asked to roll over (as if a change in positions would start me on a better tune), roused entirely, and once or twice, recorded so that, just in case I did not actually believe the reports, I could be confronted with digital evidence. 

Finally, after years of putting up with complaints and nasty comments, I begrudgingly agreed to consult a Sleep Specialist.  Sleep Apnea, my wife insisted, might cause, or more likely had caused, permanent brain damage.  If I got diagnosed with that, I’d have an excuse for my unusual spelling and for my inability to distinguish pastels.  The corrective for those cursed with SA is a CPAP – Continuous Positive Airway Pressure device, a pump that sends air and moisture through a long hose to a snorkel-like mask affixed to your face by head, neck and chin straps.  Tethered to the mechanism you sleep peacefully dreaming about elephants, Jules Verne and being hung for a crime you probably didn’t commit. This contraption is counterintuitive to getting a decent night’s sleep, if you ask me.  I could foresee myself becoming tangled in the tubing, and as you may be aware, strangulation often creates even grosser sounds than extravagant snoring.

But, OK, OK already, I’ll take the stupid test!

            Not something performed in a doctor’s office, the Sleep Apnea Gold Standard assessment, a polysomnography study, involves an overnight at the Sleep Clinic.  Bring your own PJs and a good book.  More reluctant than ever, and somewhat resentful, I showed up at 7:30 p.m.   I was assigned an agreeable room, clean, neat, and similar to a Motel-Six built back when the “Six” stood for $6.00, the original price for a cubical.  The Sleep Apnea stay, including all tests, plus cable television, costs about $3,000.00.  Motel-Three-Thousand.

After I changed into my night clothes, the very efficient technician began shaving selected body hair from various parts of me.  He glued minute microphones and sensors to my legs, chest, neck, head, face, to any place his eyes seemed to land.  Wires attached to these sites were run up and down my pajamas, then off to a small transponder suspended around my neck. Later, from the distant vantage point of his observation booth, an adjoining room, the technician would be able to tell every time I blinked, every time I breathed (or didn’t breath – failure to breath is either a sign of SA, or that you’ve expired).  If you wiggle a toe, he knows about it.  If you fall out of bed, he’s your witness.  You wouldn’t dare pick your nose.  Probably, if you had lewd thoughts, he’d tell your mother.

There is an expression – “I’m wired.”  The conventional use of this term does not apply to victims of SA studies.  When they say they are wired, they mean, THEY ARE WIRED.   When the time came for the technician to tuck me in, he removed the transponder necklace and affixes it to a hook on the headboard.  Wires from various parts of my body now formed a slightly taut canopy, sort of a cross between snarled spaghetti al dente and a web spun by an inexperienced spider.

It’s lights out, time for a good night’s sleep.  That is, if you don’t mind sleeping while impersonating a marionette, and while someone is watching your every twist and turn.  Listening, too.  Unlike the hospital setting where you have to repeatedly press a button to get an aide’s attention, all you have to do now is shift your elbow and a voice comes over the loudspeaker, “ you ok, Mr. Kraus?”  If Orwell only knew.

Snoring is but one of my medical aberrations.  I have a prostate situation that causes me to visit the bathroom several times during the course of the evening.  This becomes particularly challenging if I happened to be wired to a transponder that is affixed to the bedpost.

“Excuse me,” I say to the dark room.

“Can I help you, Mr. Kraus?” comes the amplified response.

I suppose having to share my bathroom needs with a stranger is no big deal, but it certainly felt awkward, especially when I knew someone was ‘out there’ in the obscure beyond, waiting for me to finish up.  That as soon as he heard what he believed to be the last drop hitting the bowl, long before I flushed, or was even sure I’d completed my assignment, I would hear the voice:

“Ready, Mr. Kraus?”

One of the pages I’d filled out when I arrived for the study was a pledge.  I promised that in the morning, I would not pester the technician by trying to get him to reveal the results of my test.  He’d counted my twitches, noted my limb movements, the gaps between inhalations.  He’d calculated my statistics on his snore-o-meter, arriving at my sleep efficiency score.  He knew what was going on.  I could tell by the gleam in his eyes. 

But, I have to wait until my consultation with the Sleep Doctor next Monday.  Do I or don’t I have SA?

My guess is the testing will have proved inconclusive.  That is because of the IE complication.  I just made up the IE complication, and though no scientific experiments have confirmed my hypothesis, it sure sounds like a reasonable theory.   The basic principle is that in order to test a person’s sleep behavior, you have to let him get some sleep.  And that if someone is out there lurking in the mist observing your every physical adjustment, you might just spend the evening in a state of hyper consciousness.    I did.  It seemed very similar to the way I felt when I was on watch in the military.  

“Halt, who goes there?”

“Is everything OK, Mr. Kraus?”

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Charles' new book, The Teen Magician .. That's You! is on the Kirkus Review Recommended list.
theteenmagicianthatsyou.com