Musings after a trip to Maine

What? You say you’d rather hear about what I did on my vacation? Why, I’m flattered.

Here’s what I didn’t do. That book of Edmund Burke essays? Not one page.

I did, however, watch Clint Eastwood’s “Pale Rider’’ on the VCR. Has anyone noticed it’s a lot like “Shane,’’ that classic western from decades ago? Hmmm. Looking at Google, I see that hundreds - maybe thousands - have.

Well, um, I agree.

Still, if my own self-improvement plans fell short, I’m proud to say I transmitted some important lessons to my niece and nephews. Like how to do the various voices and impersonations that drive my wife bonkers.

It’s hard to describe the sense of coaching accomplishment that comes from watching one’s 5-year-old niece intone, in a raspy Don Corleone voice and with a Godfatherly flutter of the hand, “Aunt Marcia, you show me no respect.’’

Now, I’m told that what Cardinal Wolsey once said of Henry VIII is also true of kids: You have to watch what you put into their heads, because once it’s in there, you’ll never get it out.

The way I see it, though, once your pint-size guests leave, that’s their parents’ problem.

But not always.

Some years back, Miles, the then-elementary-school-aged son of some close friends, wanted a fruit juice from the fridge. Struck by a mischievous impulse, I confided that when I found myself in need of libation, I simply bellowed: “Marcia, BEER!’’

Bold ideas have an appeal all their own, and so it was that on a return visit several years later Miles asked, in a tone both admiring and hopeful, “Scot, do you still say, `Marcia, BEER!’?’’

A throat cleared in the background.

“I really wish you hadn’t told him that,’’ interjected Miles’s mother, her tone so clearly unadmiring and reproachful that I meekly brought the curtain down on my Walter Mitty-esque fantasy.

This year, in addition to my valuable work as a voice coach, I also saved a dozen chipmunks from a certain feline huntress, who, after capture, likes to bring them in through the cat door, the better to practice her soccer skills in a hard-to-escape indoor arena. Or perhaps it was the same dim-witted little fellow who lives under our steps, liberated over and over again, because by the end of vacation, he seemed awfully nonchalant about the catch-and-release routine.

I say dim-witted because, if a ferocious tiger lay in wait on my doorstep, pouncing each and every time I ventured out for air, I’d pack up and move. But then, I don’t pretend to understand chipmunks.

Or, for that matter, flies. A few weeks back, after the same felonious feline apparently brought in a bird, whose stray feathers were found but whose remains were never located, there appeared a plague of those droning terradactyl-sized flies whose presence seemed to signal a murder most fowl.

Rolled newspaper in hand, I was about to have at them when a guest of Buddhist convictions asked if we couldn’t coax them outside instead. Problem: Flies, like chipmunks, don’t always act with their long-term interests uppermost in mind, which renders fly-herding a tedious and time-consuming exercise. Thus it was that after our Buddhist friends had departed, the gentle fly-shooing hand quickly gave way to the newspaper-wielding fist.

But I’m hoping my vacation put my household back in karmic clover. Surely in the great cosmic ledger, a dozen chipmunks pried from the jaws of an indignant - and sharp-fanged - cat counterbalance a like number of flies hastened to their end.

One last vacation thought. That UFO-style floating saucer in the Overton’s water-sports catalog? Worth every penny of the $39.99 I paid. With its radio remote, one can position it far enough out in the lake that it looks like a toy that’s drifted away. And the glee a kid gets from activating its three squirter jets when an altruistic kayaker paddles over to retrieve it?

Priceless.

I heartily recommend it to uncles everywhere.

Scot Lehigh can be reached at lehigh@globe.com.