Carrying a tune

There are public displays of affection.

And there are public displays of singing.

I’m occasionally guilty of the former, frequently guilty of the latter.

I sing in public, and not always where and when it’s appropriate.

My wife Jane, with whom I am guilty of the occasional PDA, has an early memory of the singing me, long before we ever thought of engaging in PDAs.

I came walking into a conference room for a meeting singing the Barenaked Ladies song “If I had $1000000”.

I didn’t go into that meeting consciously singing. It was just something that was in my head that happened to come out of my mouth.

Frankly, the note doesn’t fall far from the tree.

There is a story of my Dad walking into a classroom at the U.S. Air Force Academy where he taught English through the 1960s.

He was singing “Little Old Lady from Pasadena” by the Beach Boys, with cadets joining in the “Go granny, go granny, go granny, go” refrain.

What’s odd is that I’m not much of a singer in church, however.

I like church songs, especially Christmas songs. But most are written and played in the wrong key for me … way too high for this alto voice.

I don’t want to be singing treble in church like Neil Young.

I’m most guilty of public displays of singing while working out at the gym.

I’m dialed into the music on my iPod through a set of Bose earbuds.

Running on the treadmill, seeking the help of Green Day or Mark Knopfler or the Saw Doctors to push, pull or drag me through a run, I barely have enough breath to survive the run, much less have enough breath to sing.

But afterwards, when I get into the weight machine room, I can lose track of where I am and start singing out loud.

I tell ya, within the earbuds and the music, my own voice sounds really, really good: Perfect pitch, perfect harmony.

So why is it that, when my singing is a little too exuberant, I get glances and occasional smiles from others in the room?

It’s probably one of those I’m-so-embarrassed-for-you-grins, especially if the song happens to be a show tune.

But the show must go on. I have a modest 1,480 songs to get through on my iPod.

For want of a tree to climb

After a round of golf the other day, I was having a beer and burger with some of my playing companions, Baby Boomer types who started talking about the “good old days.”

Their talk centered around the disorganized play of our youth in the 1950s:

How there was no such thing as a “play date,” how we’d leave the house, bike to the ballfield or vacant lot with bat, ball and mitt to see who was around for a pick-up baseball game.

And it got me to thinking: Does anyone climb trees anymore?

I’m not talking about climbing trees as a way of life to trim and top and cut them.

I’m talking about climbing trees because they’re there, because I remember it as being such an adventure.

When I was a boy at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado, where my Dad was an English professor, we had Big Tree.

We lived at 4509-I (38.985967,-104.863118 on Google Maps).

Just behind the house, in the woods, was a path that we used to walk to the Community Center, where the movie theater, base exchange, bowling alley, etc. were located. It’s all still there.

Just after the first fire break/flash flood ditch you’d veer off and venture in a couple of hundred feet to get to Big Tree.

It was our Empire State Building of trees. Nothing around it was as tall. Or as scary. Or as inviting.

Like everything else we did, it wasn’t announced that we were going to go out and climb the biggest tree in the world. It was just done. A broken arm. A broken leg. If they happened, they happened.

Climbing Big Tree was the Everest of tree climbs.

Your muscles ached from pulling yourself up from limb to limb, testing some to make sure they hadn’t become to brittle that they’d bust under the weight.

You tried not to look down but that was part of the scary fun.

The climate was different up there. At the top, above everything else, the wind blew where it didn’t seem to blow on the ground, and you could feel Big Tree sway -- a lot of it was particularly windy.

There’s a very real possibility that Big Tree wasn’t all that big. But everything then was big and vast.

And we’d just head out and explore. Nothing was rarely organized. Our play date was with anything we could conjure up to do at any given moment with whomever or whatever was available to us.

Does any kid have a Big Tree anymore?

Probably not, at least not without adult supervision, a helmet and government approved climbing harnesses.