I’m afraid of snakes.

Make that terrified of snakes.

The thought of accidentally stumbling across something slithering two feet in front of my shoes scares the fire out of me.

I was scrolling through Facebook one day and saw a suggestion to join a Texas Snake Identification page.

This is a public group with over 126,000 members. Their goal is to “provide accurate information regarding snakes that are native to our Great State of Texas.”

There’s a few rules – no selling or buying of snakes and no abuse of members. They genuinely want to help people learn how to identify snakes.

Most people post where in Texas the snake was found and ask for identification. Mostly, they want to know if the snake can kill them.

Knowledge, as they say, is power.

Intrigued, I timidly hit the follow button.

The first post was a picture of a long, thick brown snake in someone’s back yard.

I backed away from the screen in horror and clicked away from the snake back to funny toddler videos.

But later, I returned to the site, telling myself these are only pictures, not real snakes. Instead of being afraid, perhaps I could learn about the different types of snakes.

Or I’d be traumatized for life.

The more I scrolled through the site, the more I learned. People post a lot of pictures every day. Folks genuinely want to know what kind of snake they found hiding near their back door or, horrors of horrors, in their laundry room.

Administrators usually post answers within minutes. They’ll identify the snake by a common name and then the scientific name. They also include whether the snake is harmless or venomous.

Knowledgeable herpetologists explain the different patterns and what the colors mean. They often point out the size and shape of the eyes and head. They even describe the different nose holes and dispel myths about snakes.

Someone posted that they thought poisonous snakes had triangular shaped heads. Even harmless snakes – yes, there are lots of those – can flatten their heads to appear venomous and dangerous.

I didn’t know snakes were clever.

Great, one more thing for my nightmares.

I’m amazed at people who get close to unfamiliar snakes to get a better picture. I cringed when someone posted that you can tell something about a snake if you look closely at its lips.

They have lips?

Oh Lord, no.

I’d never get close enough to a snake to check to see if it had lips or eyelids. To check for eyelids, you’d have to wait long enough to watch the snake blink.

Today, for the first time, I correctly identified a snake by looking at the picture. I remembered someone posted information about the coloration and designs on a rat snake and, yep, this was a beneficial rat snake.

Recently, I spotted a small coral snake on the road when I was riding my bike. I screamed bloody murder and pedaled as fast as I could to get around it.

But I knew what kind of snake it was.

I still laugh hysterically when someone’s relieved that a seven-foot-long slithering creature in their laundry room is a good thing.

But with the help of the Texas Snake Identification page, I’m discovering knowledge can help overcome fear.

Until I come face to face with another snake.

Then, knowledge or ignorance, it’s run for the hills.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald. 

These days, it’s hard to imagine being without cell phones to send messages, check our email and, last but not least, make a phone call.

Our home computers link us to the world, whether it’s 24-hour news channels, movies, gaming or researching how to remove carpet stains.

But last week, my 9-year-old grandson and I attended Cub Scout Day Camp and discovered life without electronics is not only possible but a ton of fun.

Going to an outdoor day camp during the tough Texas summers isn’t anyone’s idea of a great time. It’s hot, the humidity’s high and breezes are almost non-existent.

But about 500 young girls and boys arrived at Cub Scout Outdoor Adventure Day Camp and discovered no matter the weather, fun could be had without electronics, television or a laptop computer.

Grandson Jason and I attended Cub Scout camp last year, so we knew what to expect. We looked forward to going this year because members of his den – Emily, Mackenzie and Edric – would also be there.

The first day was loud and boisterous as Scouts found their dens and schedules were handed out. Over the course of five days, excited boys and girls discovered dozens of skills.

Our group of 13 Cub Scouts learned how to stay healthy and fit, how to take care of animals and how to conduct a few simple science experiments.

They especially enjoyed the forensics station, led by an enthusiastic junior staffer named Joseph. He showed them how to take fingerprints which resulted in their solving a crime of who ate the cookies.

The Scouts learned how to play marbles, an almost lost art in these days of electronic games, and the Scouts made their own marble bags.

During free time, they enjoyed sno cones, walked around on stilts and played board games.

The youngsters also traded “swaps” – Special Whatchamacallits Affectionately Pinned Somewhere.” Jason loved trading his mini skateboards and pipe-cleaner caterpillars for pretend campfires, bead lizards and lanyards.

All the Scouts had a chance to learn how to shoot a bow and arrow, a BB gun and a wrist rocket. The rocket is a sling shot that straps onto the wrist, and the kids used dog food pellets as their “bullets.”

The trained range masters were patient and helpful every day. Whenever a child got a bull’s eye, they drew a picture of a bull’s eye on the back of the camper’s shirt with a Sharpie pen. That was a definite bragging point.

The highlight of the week was the last day when a fire truck from the Houston Fire Department arrived.

For over half an hour, the firefighters sprayed water over everyone’s heads. By the end, everybody was soaking wet, running around in the water puddles, laughing and cooling off.

All week, my co-den leader Julie and I talked about how this experience was an old-fashioned, back-to-the-old days adventure.

The Scouts enjoyed playing games that did not require electricity, wifi, or batteries.

They didn’t have their noses buried in an iPad or laptop.

They learned to talk to each other as they earned belt loops and badges.

They didn’t mind the heat as they played chase, looked for different leaves and plants and cultivated new friendships.

Even though temperatures were in the upper 90s and our feet hurt at the end of every day, the experience was worth every minute.

Many thanks to the Scouters who organized, planned and ran the camp. You made hundreds of children happy, allowed them to be cyberworld free and created memories that will last a lifetime.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald. 

I’m a cautious person. I drive at or under the speed limit, even when there’s not another vehicle in sight. Even if I’m the only one at the intersection, I come to a complete stop.

If this makes me sound like a goody-goody, I’m not. I simply don’t want to take unnecessary chances.

But the demon voice in my head whispers temptations. It’s a good thing it’s getting harder to hear or I’d scribble outside the lines a lot more than I already do.

So often, there’s a conflict between what I look like and what I feel. On the outside, I have wrinkles earned over the years, and I proudly tell anyone who’ll listen about my amazing grandchildren and how things were 20, 30 and even 40 years ago.

I wear prescriptive lenses, color my gray hair and, when shoe shopping, I look for comfort and practicality before fashion and style.

In many ways, I’m getting more like the people I used to call old geezers.

But that’s not how I feel on the inside. My mom, who’s an active 91, said when she looks in the mirror, she still sees a young girl.

I know exactly what she’s thinking.

What’s on the outside, especially as we get older, often differs from what goes on inside our heads.

There, it’s a different story. I’m bold and brave. I drive without a care in the world, pushing the speed limit. The windows are down and the air conditioner’s off.

The older, cautious me drives with the air conditioner on from April to October and the heater on full blast from January through March.

In November and December, the windows are down, and I feel 15 years old again with a brand-new driver’s license in my wallet.

However, I still obey the speed limit.

The young girl inside only goes to the express line in the grocery story because she’s the only one she’s shopping for.

Instead of low-fat yogurt, fruit and chicken in the cart, there’s chips and dip and bags of sugar. Filling out the cart is full-calorie Coca Cola and ice cream.

That could be the reason the older me is having so much trouble losing those extra inches on the hips.

There are some areas where the young person inside of me and the aging person on the outside intersect.

When I’m alone in the car, the music’s blaring. I could chalk that up to the above-mentioned hearing loss, but music is and always has been the background in my life.

Back in my teens, it was rock and roll. These days, there’s some rock and roll but Broadway tunes and hits from the 70s are at the top of the playlist.

The old me also can swear like a sailor. In all honesty, I’ve always used colorful language, starting when I was 18 years old.

I went away to college for a couple of years, and the girls across the hall in our dorm were hippies.

They smoked cigarettes, wore hip-hugger jeans and bandanas over their unwashed hair. I thought they were the coolest girls I’d ever met.

They also swore, and I don’t mean the little words.

They used the big ones.

The ones my mother would’ve washed my mouth out with soap if she’d heard me use them.

Of course, I immediately added them to my everyday vocabulary. That still hasn’t changed although I do refrain when I’m around children and relatives.

I question every single stupid bureaucratic rule put in front of me. “Why” and “who says” are part of my regular word list along with a shrug of the shoulders. Then I go right ahead and do what I want to do.

Even though there’s quite a few differences, there’s a lot that’s still the same. Geezers and the young can share mutual interests and benefits.

And if that means we’re occasionally ordering a Coke float from the drive in and drinking it on the way home with the windows down, then that shared space is heavenly.

 

  This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald. 

When I was a teenager, we didn’t have individual phones. We had a solitary wall-mounted phone in the kitchen. Somehow, we managed to get along with one phone.

There were drawbacks – we shared a party line, dialing a call took forever if most of the numbers were nine, and long-distance calls cost a fortune. That old-school technology, though, offered some advantages.

We had to memorize phone numbers which kept us on our toes. I still remember our home number – 775-7993. There was no need to dial an area code because they weren’t required.

Nobody knew how many times you called or if you’d even called them. That subterfuge came in handy with boys I liked.

I could call their house to see if they were home. If someone answered the phone, I could quickly hang up and they had no idea who called. Now, there’s no hiding – you can’t hang up fast enough to hide the fact that you called someone.

With cameras on every building, corner and house, it’s rare to do anything in secret.

Almost every intersection has a camera filming around the clock. Stores and malls are nothing but cameras in every nook and corner.

On social media, if a house is broken into or suspicious activity occurs, most of the neighbors will post feed from their home monitoring system on social media.

It’s not like in the old days when spy equipment was only affordable to James Bond types. Today’s home security systems are less than a hundred bucks, so everyone has them.

Somebody’s always watching.

Retailers know all your buying habits.

Forget trying to hide those Oreo cookies. The store already knows if you like double-stuffed Oreos or if you’re a traditionalist, preferring plain Oreos in the blue and white bag.

Credit card companies know everything about you, and I mean everything. They know where you buy gas for your vehicle and the size and brand of shoes you like.

“Based on your browsing history…” is a frequent phrase the bots send me. Once I was reading a murder-mystery book, and I Googled a phrase about blood types. For months, I got all kinds of information about blood testing kits.

All from one search to understand what I was reading.

The Amazon people know more about me than my husband. They know the kinds of toys I like to buy for my grandchildren, the kinds of vitamins I take, and they know what brand of home perm kit I prefer.

Same goes for the brick-and-mortar stores. No more secretly throwing a few extra candy bars in the grocery basket, taking them out of the bag in the parking lot and eating them on the way home.

Even if you throw away the wrapper to deny accountability, the grocery store computer knows you’re a sucker for Hershey bars in the check-out lane.

I often think about the things we did as teens that would get us busted these days. More than once, I was in a car with friends late at night, all of us carrying rolls of toilet paper, and laughing as we rolled somebody’s front yard.

At slumber parties, we made crank phone calls – “Is your refrigerator running?” and calling radio stations, begging the all-night disc jockey to play our favorite song.

Now we’d be busted for criminal mischief and reach a recording instead of a real person. And every call would be recorded.

Technology is great, but there are days I long for the anonymity of days gone by.

Maybe I’ll spring that line about the refrigerator on my grandchildren and see if they get the joke. It’s not the same as making an anonymous prank call, but a laugh is still a laugh.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald