There’s something about the way she says my name.

“Bri-annnnn,” and the “n” trails off into infinity like a chain saw, or a motorcycle racing into the distance.

It was my mother, of course. It was time for her to make her 13 phone calls to me in the span of 11 minutes. There must be equipment at the phone company that burns out on a regular basis because of her quick-on-the-button redials. I’m also sure there is a man whose sole job is to figure out why it’s happening.

“We’ve tracked it to a short woman in Tampa who always remembers something she forgot to ask her sons, and calls back 1,500 times. We also suspect she caused a blackout in China.”

I was waiting for the calls, expecting the calls like you expect high tide or bills. I knew they were coming because I knew she was coming. Up to visit for the weekend, the weekend between my brother’s and my birthday. (I’ll be 32 by the time you read this.)

As we get closer to one of her voyages, it begins with messages at home, a fleet of them, and then calls to work.

The closer we get, the more frantic. The more pressing. The more critical to the fate of the universe.

So the phone rang one night.

“Bri-annnnn,” she said. “Your brother won’t speak to me anymore so I’m calling you. He’s threatening to change his number and not list it.”

No “hello.” No “how are you?” No “how’s the weather?” This is how she begins conversations. And no waiting for a response. She goes right into, “Is the bridge in the Ocala National Forest on State Road whatever taller than the Palatka bridge?”

Sometimes it’s like trivia night with my mom. Like she’s calling from some sweepstakes offering me $1 million if I can just answer a some random, off-the-wall question.

I like to throw her off. “Who is this?” I said.

“Brian!” she said, and this time my name came like a thunderclap or a slammed screen door. “This is serious. This bridge looks like it’s as big as Orlando on the map. I need to know.”

I saw where this was going … downhill on a big bridge fast. My mother doesn’t drive interstates anymore, and prefers the backroads through towns with names sounding like things you made up as a kid: Upanockee,

But she doesn’t like bridges. She’s afraid of heights, and thinks if the incline is too steep, it affects her high blood pressure, or her low pressure, or whichever a quick change in altitude messes with (which is probably neither.)

She was about to take an extraordinary chance, switch her route and possibly face a bridge so tall it brushed the beard of God, all because the cops on her other route now knew her on a first name basis.

“So is it taller?” she asked.

“Of course it’s not,” I said.

But there’s no convincing my mother. She wants to know steepness, incline and pitch, which I thought were all the same thing. Is it longer? Does it curve? Do birds fly into it? Does it have bandits.

“No!” I told her. But she was not satisfied.

“Fine. I’ll go to AAA tomorrow. I’m sure they’ll have the heights of all the bridges.”

Fine.

And she did. She came that route, and was not happy about it.

“I am so mad at you boys, and I’m canceling AAA,” she said over lunch, and that wasn’t anything new to hear. “That bridge went straight up like an elevator. I thought I was going to fly off. It was all I could do to keep the car on the road. The altitude was terrible for my high blood pressure.”

“Or was it your low blood pressure?” I asked with a smile.

What’s a good son to do?

A week-old letter to my wife on the pinkest holiday of them all.

Dear Sweet Pea,

Happy Valentine’s Day. I know you are a big observer of this holiday, and you’re shackled to a man who likens it to being pitched off a cliff into a field of sandspurs, or worse, having his toenails clipped by a badger.

But, learning to recognize fights I can’t win after 7 years of marriage, I give in and send you Valentine’s Day wishes. All the best. God’s speed. May the wind be at your back and the sun never set. All the typical loving and romantic things Valentine’s cards usually wish.

This isn’t to say I understand the holiday. Oh, to the contrary. I still find it horribly irresponsible, and that’s saying a lot coming from a guy like me. But how, as a society, can we possibly condone giving a bow and arrow to a little baby named Cupid? My brother and I each had a bow and arrow when we were kids, and family members quickly realized how foolish a decision that was when their car tires went flat and we almost pierced a neighbor’s ear by accident one day.

And even worse, we actually allow this little baby archer to run around and shoot people? Uh, hello! Maybe rob from the rich and give to the poor, but don’t be shooting people.

Alas, I won’t discount a holiday because its symbols are a bit violent.

But a little explanation: My dislike of Valentine’s Day probably stems from my days spent at the all-boys Academy of the Holy Names in Tampa. Do you know what it’s like to be a fourth grader required to give out Valentine’s to your schoolhood chums? And Valentine’s cards that read something like: “John, on this day I want to express my dearest love for you. Your secret admirer, Brian.”

Ouch!

But, that aside, I do want to take a moment to impress upon you your importance in my life … for who else is going to make me take out the garbage. Ha ha! A joke. Just kidding.

You see, and you’ve probably noticed this, a guy like me is not so easy to live with. (In fact, a guy like me is lucky to even have a woman who speaks to him.) Sure, it would be easier to get a herd of elephants to do laundry than me. And sure, you can still see the outside world through holes in the walls of our house that I haven’t patched. But the reason I don’t do these things is so I will have more time to devote to loving you. It’s true!

Yes, I know I don’t come off as a romantic guy. But that’s the irony. Deep down, I’m Mr. Romance. I just don’t show it. Deep down, I shower you with kisses, buy you roses until federal law makes me stop and worship the ground you walk on, even if it’s a cow pasture. Granted, that’s only in my imagination and I would never do these things in real life, but doesn’t it feel good just knowing that I want to? You must be swooning right now, so sit down for a moment.

And I guess I don’t show it because society frowns upon it. I blame football. Football and beer commercials. If not for that, I’d be a different man. I’d be the kind of romantic guy every girl dreams about. I would probably grow my hair long, start riding horses without a shirt on and say things like, “Mi Amor, would you like more mashed potatoes with your pork chops?”

Oh, if I only I was that man. (Sigh)

Anyway, just thought I would take the time to express my undying love here on this very special holiday that I can’t appreciate, or stand. May it truly be wonderful, but if I see that little kid with the bow and arrow, I’m calling the cops.

Love,

Brian

Super hype. Super hoopla. Super shindigs. Super headaches.
Whoo! Thank goodness it’s over.

The Super Bowl blows in and out like a hurricane, folks, and the good thing is there are no tree branches left to pick up.

Has it already come and gone? All these years of preparation, and it’s over like that? Little left to show for it but stale beer cups and pins that didn’t sell.

For me it was not successful. My attempts to rent a room at the last minute to some needy celebrity pretty much went down in flames. Amenities! It all comes down to amenities. And when all you have to offer these people are overdone poached eggs, a bowl of Special K, slightly worn slippers, whatever beer’s in the fridge and the promise that you will be woken up in the morning by a dog sitting on your face, it’s a tough sell. Real tough. And my asking price — $100,000 or a part in their next movie — was a little steep.

Alas, my room went vacant.

There weren’t many celebrities that I could tell. No shortage of sightings. Everybody had a sighting. Vin Diesel spotted at the drive-thru at Chick-Fil-A; Brad Pitt shopping for art; Celine Dion staying at a B&B downtown and breaking glass with her singing.

A few you may not have heard:

• Hugh Heffner and a couple of the Playboy Bunnies enjoyed a bag of pork rinds at a Jiffy Mart before heading for the airport.

• Donald Trump was seen firing a homeless man who he didn’t think did an effective enough job begging for a quarter.

• Charlton Heston coming to see the Castillo de San Marcos because he couldn’t believe there was anything older than he was.

I think it’s best that I don’t see or meet celebrities. I wouldn’t know what to say, yet something about me always feels I must say something. And it’s usually ridiculous because I can’t help myself.

If I met Donald Trump I would probably ask him whether he has someone warm up his deodorant in the morning before putting it on.

“If I were rich as you, Mr. Trump, no more frozen shocks to the arm pits,” I would say with a shiver.

My wife would clutch her head like she had an ice cream headache.

If I met Brad Pitt I’m worried I would — like a pig-tailed fifth grade girl — tell him I thought he looked really “hot” in “Troy.” Why would you say that? But my brain, it just can’t be contained.

Lucky for me, I don’t get the chance to meet a lot of celebrities so I minimize the depth of my embarrassment.

I did see an extreme number of limos, and in fact on some of St. Augustine’s tightest streets, they’re still trying to pry a couple loose.

It appears they will stretch anything into a limo these days. Stretch Ford Expeditions and even the .20-mile-to-the-gallon stretch Hummer. But you never see any originality. Where’s the stretch Pinto? Has there ever been a convertible limo? What about the stretch VW bus?

Plenty of stretch yachts, my eyes did see. Boats worth more than most buildings in town. Oh, there was money around. Champagne flowed until the gutters were full. Furs, Ferraris and food that would make you wonder, “Do I eat it, frame it or beat it with a mallet?”

And all the while poor Jacksonville got skewered by the national media because the city’s idea of an expensive night out is a can of Cheese Whiz and a six pack of Miller Lite.

Be glad we live in cosmopolitan St. Augustine. Things will get back to normal here, just as soon as they get those stuck limos out.

A Good Newsroom …

It doesn’t matter if it’s the New York Times, The St. Augustine Record or the Flagler College Gargoyle. As far as I’m concerned, a newsroom is a newsroom is a newsroom.

I’m thinking this because I spent the past week working with the “kids” of the Flagler paper.

They listen to alien music and talk in a strange free-flowing language I can’t seem to understand.

I’ll say it: I think I’m getting old.

But it was a blast (even if they did call me Old Man Magoo.) Sure, no police scanner, AP feeds or people yelling, “I brought pruning sheers if that page isn’t down by six,” but it was the same old thrill.

I always loved newsrooms because you never knew what was going to come your way. And you never knew what was going to be thrown your way.

I’ll tell this little story since I don’t work at the Record anymore, making it a little harder to fire me. One day someone threw a ball in my direction (I swear I was not participating) and it ricocheted off my computer. Now, a ball has 20 million places it can ricochet to, but this one decided to pick a full glass of water. It toppled in a giant flood, and despite the 20 million places it could have spilled to, it drowned my keyboard instead.

I stared in shock expecting sparks to fly. When they didn’t, I turned the keyboard over to drain it and fish fell out. I swapped it with another, left it upside down overnight and was amazed to find the next day it actually worked. To this day I’m sure someone at The Record still wonders why there are high-water marks on the keys.

These are the kinds of things that go on in newsrooms. And I’m hoping to bring more of what I learned over the years at The Record to the Gargoyle.

There are a few criteria (ingredients you might call them) that I think are highly necessary to make a successful newsroom, and some of these have already been mastered:

• Food needs to be ground two floors deep into the rug. It should never be identifiable — not even as liquid or solid. A good newsroom floor should be covered in great stains covering vast sections of the floor.

In slow times, you can use them as ink blot tests, or pretend they’re chalk lines for bodies. “What happened to him that he’s shaped like this?” And if anyone high-up asks, you blame it on someone from the pressroom with ink on his shoes walking through.

“Honestly, I know it looks like pepperoni, but it’s red ink!”

• There should be a map the size of a basketball court on the wall with every street in the county on it. Forget the fact that no reporter dashing out the door to a fire or some breaking news event will ever check the map, and inevitably will call 10 minutes later lost and out of gas.

• There needs to be a stack of newspapers piled up so high (no one claims ownership of the pile, yet it grows higher every day) that it causes the steel supports in the floor to sag so much that chairs roll downhill toward it.

• There must (despite rules strictly forbidding it) be some kind of food source kept in a Tupperware container that (despite the fact it could be either three weeks or 11 years old) everyone eats.

And the Tupperware will never be cleaned, meaning leftover petrified bits hard as marbles get mixed in, chipping teeth and lodging in throats.

• A newsroom should never be clean. It’s a sign that work isn’t getting done. Journalists don’t clean. They wallow in their own slovenliness. Like packrats, they store everything ever given to them for the simple reason that it’s much easier to fill up file drawers with pens, magnets and handfuls of candy than actual files.

• And finally, various projectiles should always be nearby. I learned very little from that spilled glass of water.