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Tales from Exit 22 by Al Batt

You have enough things to worry about.

You should stop worrying about achy-breaky earworms, fake funeral processions, treehouse fires and pop machine avalanches.

“You never know,” my elders often said to me. Yours probably said the same thing. “It’s always something” was frequently added as a non-explanatory explanation.

I’d just spent a week in an aging hotel meant for peasants like me in Alaska. The desk clerk told me that Billy Ray Cyrus had stayed in my room. I believed her. I heard “Achy Breaky Heart” in my sleep and woke up with an achy-breaky headache. Thankfully, it didn’t become a chronic earworm.

Not long after that, I found myself in southwestern Minnesota in a procession of a dozen cars. No, it wasn’t a funeral procession. All roads lead to either Rome or the airport, but this was a group of birders searching for winter birds — red-breasted nuthatch, common redpoll, purple finch, rough-legged hawk, snowy owl, pine siskin, northern shrike, crossbill, snow bunting, Lapland longspur and others. We were birdbrainers in search of wonderment. Looking at birds is never not good enough. Through the miracle or the curse of communication devices, each car (none of which had only a single occupant) kept in touch with the others. We used to stay in touch with smoke signals, which required driving convertibles equipped with fireplaces. We moved at a glacial pace down a rural road. A hulking pickup truck sat at a stop sign as we went past. The driver pulled out and T-boned the only current model-year vehicle in the pack. He was a big man in a big vehicle who apologized profusely and admitted he couldn’t tell us what had happened. He was off to a meeting with his crop insurance agent when he saw our group. As he sat at the stop sign, he thought we were a funeral procession, and he was trying to think of who had died. The stop sign hadn’t changed colors because it was a stop sign, but his confuser had overloaded. That was as good an excuse as any. There were no injuries, information was exchanged, and the caravan moved on, albeit with one car limping along.

On another day in another year, I was talking on the phone while seated at my desk. The caller was a friend who informed me that one of my trees was on fire. I thought I’d misheard and asked him to repeat his assertion three times before I looked out my window and saw a tree was on fire. Another friend was under the tree, yelling his son’s name toward the dancing flames. I called the volunteer fire department, good souls doing yeomen’s work. They arrived on the scene pronto.

There had been a treehouse built in the tree. Neighborhood boys had asked if I minded. Why would I mind? It was a clandestine operation away from the watchful eyes of adults. They’d used it for secret meetings and idle speculation about the future. The weather had cooled and they’d equipped the treehouse with a camp stove powered with the wrong fuel. This led to an explosion and an ensuing treehouse fire. Incredibly, no one was seriously injured, even though a boy’s eyebrows had been singed off. The friend shouting at the fire was his father.

Another young man in the neighborhood, one who still had his eyebrows, found that if he caused the pop machine to wobble, he was rewarded with a free soft drink. Thanks to consistent practice, he became very adept at acquiring pop gratis. One day, the vending machine was reluctant to dispense its products. He rocked the pop machine like he was a rock star of the highest magnitude. His energetic rocking caused the machine to topple over onto him. He became trapped under a pop machine and couldn’t free himself. No free soda materialized. This wasn’t something covered in school.

He produced muffled yells for help. He was freed by a good Samaritan who had ridden in on a white horse.

The hero might have been singing “Achy Breaky Heart.”

But I doubt it.

Did the young man give up his pursuit of free pop? Maybe.

But I doubt it.

You shouldn’t worry about it.

Al Batt’s columns appear in the Tribune every Wednesday.