Days of Wine and Roses, and Vasectomies

  • Have you ever been mistaken as possible food by a predator?

    Erin was about 5, and sitting with me on our deck on a summer evening in Takoma Park. By and by she spotted a very large praying mantis, four to five inches long, slowly creeping down a railing post. She moved closer for a better look, and when her face got within 6 inches or…

  • Baseball

    The longest game ever played by the Rochester Red Wings was against the Buffalo Bisons at Silver Stadium sometime in the ’60s.  I’ve not been able to confirm it, but my memory is that it lasted 26 innings.  Steve and I were there with Uncle Ron and Don King.  In front of Steve and me…

  • Obituary

    Elden Carnahan of Laurel, Maryland died at the age of 71 on June 13, 2023, after a long illness. Elden was born in 1952 in Potsdam, New York, to Doris and Roy Carnahan.  He was a precocious and intellectual child, eschewing the ball field for his books and his writing.  The son of a preacher,…

  • Did you ever ruin somebody else’s joke in public?

    I 1965, first day of seventh grade, new teacher, Mr. Pappert. He was deciding what to give us for homework: English or Math. He settled on English. Our assignment was to find an English word of eight letters that had only one vowel. In my best Jerry Mathers voice, I said, “Sir, is it strength?”…

  • Clara the bull

    1973, Student Mission Corps, our one-week training in San Antonio. This day we were doing puppetry. One of the instructors came up with a big hand puppet, the kind that covers your whole hand and extends down halfway to your elbow. Holding the puppet up, he exclaimed, “This is Clara! Clara is a cow.” “No,…

  • Hoppy Things Buffet

    We’ve had a wintertime mouse problem in this house for years.  They live in the basement and come up into the house into the first floor any way they can.  We’ve also had a camel crickets problem, but they mostly stay in the basement.  April and Erin call them “hoppy things,” and they can jump…

  • The Buick and the Beetle

    One Saturday afternoon I and seven other teenagers traveled to Baltimore from some event in York. I took three favored passengers with me, definitely Matthew, maybe Becky and Samantha, while the other four piled into Warren’s father’s late-model Buick sedan. My Beetle was by far the cooler car, all did agree, but in horsepower was…

  • A Note from Grace Fuller

    Editor’s note: What follows is Dad’s account (under the pen name Grace Fuller) of his own involvement with the Style Invitational, a weekly humor contest in the Style section of the Washington Post. The contest ran for nearly 30 years until it was unceremoniously axed by the powers that be at the Post in January…

  • What is the best job you’ve ever had?

    Best job ever, well.  I exercise my right to interpret this assignment broadly. I am happy to be retired now.  I was never a good fit with my federal employer, for a lot of reasons.  However, it was stable, relatively well paid, and I never could not find a parking place, especially in the last…

  • The dog and the pig return

    For many years, I stopped at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Route 1 before work.  I stopped doing that when I started to go to the gym before I went to the office.  However, there are other Dunkin’ Donutses in the world.  In particular, there is one in Littleton, New Hampshire.  I stopped there for some…

About THE BLOG

Thanks for making your way to the The Days of Wine and Roses, and Vasectomies, the personal blog of Elden Carnahan. My dad has been composing these stories as long as I can remember, either on paper or aloud around the dinner table. “You should put all your vignettes together into a book so we can sell it,” my mother would suggest from time to time.

For Christmas 2021, my sister gave Dad a Storyworth account–an online writing platform that sends you a weekly writing prompt in the form of a question. After a year or so of questions, the responses are all assembled into a hardback book. Dad took on the challenge with gusto, answering scores of questions, which often lent themselves to retellings of some of his favorite vignettes.

We’re using this blog to deliver the stories to a broader audience. Some of the posts are direct answers to Storyworth’s questions; others are stories that he wrote for other purposes. I’ll try to provide context and explanation where appropriate. Many of the images accompanying these stories were produced using DALL-E artificial intelligence, using prompts related to the stories.

Please feel free to engage with us by leaving comments, and enjoy!

-April (daughter of Elden)

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