Blog #7

Do you have something named after you?  I have a cake.  Hi there and welcome back.  Are you doing ok?  I hope so!  My grandkids call me Poppy and the eponymous cake is called a Poppy Cake.  No, “eponymous” does not mean delicious; it means “named after someone”.  What a great word.  The cake is alternating layers of chocolate wafer cookies and Cool Whip Lite.  My mother used to make it and it was a favorite for me and my daughters. Back then it was called an ice-box cake and used real whipped cream, but times have changed.

The first thing that changed was the whipped cream.  It has too much fat and too much cholesterol and too much cream and too much whipped and is banned from all foods except mocha frappuccinos.  So now, instead of wholesome natural cream, we use an industrial paste mixed with air bubbles and sugar.  It’s delicious.  And we use the “Lite” variety to convince ourselves that chocolate cookies surrounded by some Noxzema-looking slime is good for your diet.  And they can’t even spell lite rite.

The next thing that changed was the name.  You can’t serve something called “ice-box cake” to people who think that “ice-box” is a Swedish martial art form.  No, the ice-box is a thing of the past, as dead as the rotary phone, the typewriter and Michael Jackson.  On my birthday I always ask for this delicious cake instead of a standard birthday cake, and somehow my grandkids started calling it Poppy Cake and asking for it on their birthdays.  Now I know for a certainty that sixty years from now, my grandchildren will be making Poppy Cake for their grandchildren and telling them who Poppy was, and each time they do, I will smile.   So go ahead, get eponymous, name something after yourself – Grandma’s cookies, Uncle George’s Secret Handshake, Sally’s Pajamas.  But don’t use the chocolate cookie and Cool Whip cake.  That one’s mine!

Retirement gives me plenty of time and I don’t mind doing errands for my wife, whose busy schedule of bridge and canasta and happy hours does not allow her the freedom that my schedule (or lack thereof) allows.  Today she needed three bananas.  Now that may sound simple to you, and if it does it only means you have never purchased bananas before.  You see, the first one has to be 80% yellow, the second 50% yellow and the third 30% yellow, and that causes me a good deal of anxiety.  I don’t want to come home with bad bananas.  Do not ever come home with bad bananas.  So I went and I bought and was so happy with my selection that I held the three yellow and green beauties up next to my face and took a Selfie.  I think they call that a Fruitie.  I texted the pic to my wife so she would know what a great job I did and immediately got this response: “Thanks, but I only wanted three, not four.”  I texted back, “That’s my nose.”

The other day, my granddaughter, Charley, gave me and Nonnie (that’s my wife) each a Hershey’s kiss.  What a sweetheart she is.  I ate mine instantly, all 22 calories.  Nonnie peeled hers, bit off the tip and threw the rest away.  Who does that?  She barely got one calorie out of it.  It’s like licking a sirloin steak and then giving it to the dog.  It’s like buying one chocolate-covered raisin.  She did that too, you know, a few years ago at a fancy chocolate store.  Not only did she ask the nicely-clad clerk for one raisin, she instructed said clerk to grab a particular one, the fat one in the back row on the left.  The clerk complied, weighed the lonely little thing and charged us eleven cents.  Who does that?

My wife does, that’s who.  She keeps herself in great shape by exercising and by eating only one chocolate-covered raisin every decade.  And she keeps her mind in shape by playing games.  She plays scrabble, bridge and Candy Crush on line and does Sudoku and crosswords in the paper.  She was doing a crossword the other day and the clue was “Court and Short” – five letters.  She couldn’t get it and asked me.  I said, “Rhyme.”  She asked, “Rhyme?  Why rhyme?”  I said because court and short rhyme.  She said no they don’t.  You see, St. Louis has this funny accent where the number 40 is pronounced farty, the opposite of tall is shart  and nobody puts Baby in the carner.  I was raised by a Chicago-an mother, so I don’t have that accent and was able to answer the clue correctly.  It is an ongoing battle between us.

I really am sad to report

That my Honey cannot pronounce “short”.

She says “shart” instead

Drives me out of my head,

But I love her with all of my hort.

The interesting thing is that all my daughters pronounce those words my way.  I guess I was the predominant influence in their lives – the strong, powerful, decisive father figure.  (Ooo, I hope my wife’s not reading this.)  Truth be told, Carol and I have had our share of arguments in almost fifty years of marriage, and I have had about as many victories as the Washington Generals.  You see, I have the undergraduate degree in Mathematics, the graduate degree in Law and the Phi Beta Kappa key – but she has the brains.  (Too young to remember the Washington Generals?  Look it up)

I’m rambling here with a lot of disjointed thoughts, but that’s ok.  Here’s another.  At the Zoo the other day I encountered a big Canada goose wandering about the outdoor food-seating area begging for scraps of bread.  This is a big animal, 15 lbs., and often testy, and I did not want the young kids getting snapped at. They can’t get bitten because birds don’t have teeth.  Did you know that?  Aren’t you glad you have me to keep you informed?  Birds do not chew, they swallow.  I had an uncle like that.  Anyway, there I was, a limping old fool trying to scare away this aggressive bird who thought I was a – well, a limping old fool.  It worked for a while but when I was gone he came right back.  I tried.  I’m not sure I would have been so brave if it had been a bear or a hyena.  A fifteen pound toothless bird is about at the upper range of my bravery.

And I think we’ve reached the upper range of your attention span, so I’ll let you go.  But I want you to name something after yourself.   Go from anonymous to eponymous.  And please come back next week.  I want you to, and that’s from the “hort”.  See you then.

Stay well,

Michael

Send comments to:  mfox1746@gmail.com

Blog #6

“My Mama didn’t raise no fools.”  Did you ever use that phrase?  “My Mama didn’t raise no fools.”  Even though the grammar is terrible, I bet most of you have said it at one time or another.  I have used it a few times, and every time I do my wife looks me straight in the eye and says, “Your mother raised three fools.”  She is right, of course.  Fool #1 was my older sister, who was nuts.  She hated doctors, didn’t trust them and never went to one.  She died at the age of 63 from a curable disease.  Fool #2 was my older brother, who was lovable, but outrageously eccentric.  He hated doctors as well and never went to one.  He died at the age of 61 from a different, but also curable, disease.  Fool #3, of course, is me.  My wife says the only smart thing I ever did was marry her.  What The Princess lacks in humility she makes up for in common sense, because she’s right.

I admit that I have filled my 71 years with plenty of foolish decisions, but ignoring and avoiding doctors has never been one of them.  Hell, I have enough doctors to fill a cruise ship.  Which, now that I think of it, is not such a crazy idea.  Hire a bunch of doctors and have a Senior Annual Physical Cruise.  You board the ship at 4:00 p.m. and immediately begin prepping for a colonoscopy which every passenger receives the next morning -- on the Poop Deck, of course.  Afterwards, you recover by the pool surrounded by a gluten-free, low-cholesterol buffet fit for a king.  Day two is your choice of a PET Scan, CAT Scan or MRI (open-sided of course so you can look out at the ocean).  Urine samples every night, physical therapy at the piano bar, walker-races on the Bridge, no-one on blood thinner allowed in the Dart Room, defibrillators in every cabin.  And there’s more:

We’ll give you a Heart-Cath in Cuba,

A Full Body Scan in Aruba.

Next day on the ship

You’ll get a new hip

So don’t bring your cane when you SCUBA.

And it’s all covered by Medicare!

Every Thursday I take my old wrinkled self down to the County Jail where I am locked into a small room with a dozen murderers, drug dealers and other assorted felons.  I told you I was a fool.  I tutor them in math so they can get a high-school degree.  This is why I post my blog on Thursday morning – because I’m never sure whether I’m coming home.  Usually it’s fine, but once in a while an incident occurs.  I won’t bore you with the fights, riots and shutdowns we’ve been through.  Well, maybe just one.  Last week there was a fight in the common area outside our classroom.  I didn’t know it until I left the room and was surrounded by a stinging cloud of  pepper spray left over from the incident.  Do I need this drama?  I should give this up.  My student that day had been Chris, and when class was over (before the whole pepper spray thing) he asked me when I was coming back because he really learned a lot from me.  I told him next Thursday.  He smiled.  Maybe I won’t give it up quite yet.

And since I tutor math, how about a math problem?  How many of each kind of animal did Moses take on the Ark?  I’ll hum the Jeopardy theme while you think.  Dew-dee-dew-dew  dew-dee-dew.  The answer is zero.  Moses didn’t take anybody; it was Noah.  But that’s just a simple children’s riddle.  (Sorry, I know most of you got it wrong.)  I’ll give you a real test.  You buy the 8-volume set of Cooking With Kale at the bookstore and place all eight books in your bookshelf in the proper order.  Each book is exactly one inch wide.  Ignore the width of the covers.  Got it?  Here’s the question:  How far is it from the first page of Volume I to the last page of Volume VIII?  The answer comes later.

We saw a movie last week, The Zookeeper’s Wife.  It was great -- fabulous acting, good directing, biting and visceral story.  It deserves all the Academy Awards.  I hated every second of it.  It was Saturday.  For two days I had seen nothing but Syrian children being gassed to death on the news.  So now I wanted to get away from all that and just enjoy a movie.  No chance.  I won’t give it away, but it was about Nazis.  How many times can I watch Jewish children being loaded onto boxcars?  I can’t take it anymore.  I want music and fun and smiling.  I’m through with depression and torture and mass murder.  No more Nazi movies!  And that goes for those other wonderful slaughterers from the past like Genghis Khan or Attila.  Do you know what Mrs. Attila said when her rapacious hubby came home from a hard day of beheading and torture?  She said, “Hi, Hun.”

Some of my loyal readers, in an effort to avoid reading my latest blog, have fled the country and are currently overseas.  Buddy and Betty from Missouri are now in Cuba; Linda and Larry from Florida are in India; and Jeff from Arizona is in Argentina.  Travel well and come home safe.  And Jeff, don’t forget those pictures.  I wonder if they’re reading this now.  That would be cool, wouldn’t it?  I type this stuff and it gets read in Havana, Mumbai and Patagonia.  I know where all those places are.  I know where everything is because I collected stamps for 50 years.  Stamp collecting is the best education in geography and history that a young person can get.  I loved my stamps.

Here’s the answer to the book problem.  I know you wanted to say eight inches.  Eight books, beginning to end, eight inches.  But remember I said “the first page of Volume I to the last page of Volume VIII”.  Look at a book in your bookshelf.  Take it out.  Examine it.  The first page of the book is all the way on the right; not on the left.  So if you’re starting from the first page of Volume I, you’re not counting Volume I at all.  Same is true for the last page of Volume VIII.  It’s on the left, so if you stop at the last page of Volume VIII, you don’t have to count Volume VIII at all.  The answer, therefore, is six inches.  Got it?  Got a headache? Want to go back to the Moses thing?  My class starts at 1:00 every Thursday.  Bring a gas-mask.

I’m sorry for all the math stuff, but look at it this way – at least I’m not assigning any home work.  Except for this:

Stay well and come back next week.

See you then

Michael

Send comments to:  mfox1746@gmail.com

                   

Blog #5

Wow!  Blog #5!  It’s really awe inspiring to have you as my loyal readers.  It’s like I am the Master and you are the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.  Wait, that’s immigrants.  Well, what difference does it make?  If you can understand English, read on.  I don’t believe all this immigrant nonsense anyway.  They say California is overrun with Hispanic immigrants.  I’m not buying it.  I think it’s the street signs that make everybody talk with an accent.  My middle daughter lives in the Berkeley area, and to get from her house to the nearest McDonald’s I had to drive down Cerrito to Solano to San Pablo.  By the time I got to McDonald’s I was talking like Speedy Gonzalez.  “Cerrito solano san pablo.  Àndale àndale epa epa!”  They gave me some very strange looks – and a Diet Coke, so I must have said it right.

I have two grandchildren in California, a boy and a girl, both adorable and both with flaming red hair.  I have three grandchildren in St. Louis, but I can’t always tell you what hair color they have.  Yesterday one boy had blue hair, another had green and the girl had purple.  It’s cute and I know it’s what all the kids are doing, but when they stand together they look like a box of Fruit Loops.

I have eight grandchildren in all, and they each seem to have their own special name for me.  They call me, Poppy, Pop, Pops, Popcorn, Popsadoodle, Papa and my youngest, when she sees me on Facetime, just says, “Turn him off!”  Well, they can call me anything they want; I love it.  But there is one thing I hate being called.  It was bad enough when I got to my 50s and 60s and the young men would hold the door for me and say, “After you, Sir.”  Sir!  But now it’s worse.  I now have men in their 50s and 60s holding that same door and saying, “After you, young man.”  They think I’m so old that it’s clever to call me “young man”.  It’s like calling a really tall person “Shorty” or a really fat man “Slim”.  I’d rather they called me Pops.

My crack technical staff (my daughter Abby) has arranged for you to receive the blog by email each Thursday morning if you have subscribed.  If you haven’t already, subscribe where it says “follow by email”.  Comments are a problem.  It’s easy to comment if you’re reading on a computer; not so easy if you’re on a smart phone.  Forget about it and comment to me directly.  If you have something nice to say, email me at: mfox1746@gmail.com

If it’s something unkind, send it to gosuckalemon.ouch.

But hey, if you do like these blogs, please forward them to your friends, neighbors, children, grandchildren, cousins, sisters-in-law, lawyers, accountants and dentists.  Well, maybe not the dentists.  If you liked it, maybe they would too.  Don’t be selfish.  Share.  I try to make you smile every week, so make me smile by sending it on.

I have medical issues, of course, and last week I had a CT scan.  They used to call it a CAT scan, but somewhere the “A” got lost or erased or sent to Siberia, and now it’s just CT.  Does that make sense?  CAT is one syllable.  CT is two.  We seemed to have lengthened the word by losing a letter.  In any case, my North Carolina son-in-law, David, is a fancy kind of radiologist and he wanted to see the CT films, so I went to the hospital to grab a copy.  I was directed to a door, above which was a sign that read “Film Library”.  The door was a half-door kind of thing with the top half open, and, upon seeing me, a kid in a white coat came up and said, “Yes, young man, can I help you?”  I hated him already, and I said, “Can I have a copy of Gone with the Wind?”  Well it said “Film Library”, and I thought that was kind of funny.  He did not smile, giggle or smirk.  Nothing!  You see, I made my mistake in thinking this teen-ager had ever heard of Gone with the Wind.  I should have said Power Rangers.

I have told you that I don’t watch TV, but at dinner the nightly news is on and that’s ok.  Did you ever notice that the commercials on the nightly news are all about drugs?  Here’s a typical one I heard last night:

Do you have a tingling sensation in your head?  Ask your doctor about Ding-Dong, a new anti-tingling formula that can reduce the tingling sensation and make your life wonderful again.  Do not take Ding-Dong if you are pregnant, over four-foot-nine or have ever seen a movie by Martin Scorsese.  Side effects of Ding-Dong include death, dismemberment, hemorrhoids, mumps, suicidal thoughts, swelling to the size of a Ritz Carlton, strange cravings for kale, iron deficiency anemia and, of course, constipation.

Let me translate all that for you:

Do you have a pain in your head?

Don’t suffer – take Ding-Dong instead

A few of our pills

Will cure all your ills

You won’t be in pain – you’ll be dead.

But who cares about the side effects? I think my head is tingling.  If everybody else has it, I probably do too.  I was all set to call my doctor until I turned on the radio the next morning and heard an ad by the law firm of Fritz and Fratz:

Have you or a loved one taken Ding-Dong and experienced bananas growing out of your ears?  You may be entitled to substantial compensation.  Call Fritz and Fratz right now.  We’ll sue the bastards and give you up to 5% of the total award.

Bananas?  They never told me about bananas.

We got a Kohl’s thing in the mail – 30% off plus a $10 off coupon on any purchase of $25 made today and another $5 off coupon just for coming in this week.  So we can go in today, buy a $65 item marked down to $36, take off the 30% and apply both coupons and get it all down to $10.  Is this a great country or what?  In my math class at the jail, I shouldn’t be teaching fractions; I should be teaching the inmates something really practical like “How to Shop at Kohl’s”.  Then when I’m done, they can teach me a class called (ok, boys and girls, let’s all say it together now) “How to Shoplift at Kohl’s”.  That was mean – I admit it.  I’m ashamed of myself and I’m sending myself to my room.  Don’t worry; I’ll be out in time for next week’s blog

Stay well.

See you next week.

Michael

Blog #4

How are you all?  Everybody good?  I hope so.  I went to get a haircut today, and that always reminds me of my Dad.  My Dad was 96 when he died, and the last couple of those years he was blind and living in a nursing home.  But even blind, he knew the phone numbers of every grandchild and everyone else he needed to call.  He had a black, cordless phone with extra-large push buttons and had no trouble dialing.  Isn’t it interesting that we still say “dialing” even though no-one has dialed for forty years?  Anyway, his phone worked great until he placed the thing in a glass of water instead of its cradle.  He immediately asked me to get him a new one exactly like the old one.  I went to the store and they were out of black, so I bought the same phone in white.  When I plugged it in, he asked me if it was black.  No, I said, it’s white.  He said he didn’t want it.  I reminded him he was blind and couldn’t tell the difference.  He told me to take it back and get a black one.  Now most of you are wondering why I didn’t just lie to him and tell him the white one was really black.  I didn’t because I knew he would have asked the next nurse who came in to tell him what color the phone was.  Don’t ever lie to your dad.

In the place he lived, there was a barber shop and beauty salon in the lobby for the convenience of the residents.  But every three weeks my Dad called a cab and travelled fifteen miles to his barber.  When I asked him why, he said he liked the way his barber did his hair.  I reminded him once again that he was blind and could not see his hair.  “But I can tell,” he said.  And so getting my hair cut reminds me of him.  By the way, I travel about twenty miles to the same barber I have used for decades.  When I worked, I was in a hurry and he was near my office.  Now I’m retired and not in a hurry one bit, so I get in my car and drive past 897 other hair-cutting establishments just to go to my same guy.  He does a good job.  I can tell.

You know, everything I tell you here is the truth.  Sure, there is an obvious joke here and there, but the stories, like the one above, are true.  And I know you can tell they are.  There is something about the truth that makes itself understood.  I don’t have to make up funny things; much of life is funny.  You just have to listen.

For instance, I heard a funny thing on the TV the other day.  It was Princess Kate advising other women how to be a good mother.  We all love Princess Kate, don’t we?  She’s pretty and the kids are cute and – they’re Royalty.  Here in the Colonies we love the English Royalty.  I mean -- Downton Abbey!  We loved Princess Di; we adored her as if she were our own Princess.  And now we adore Princess Kate.  But not satisfied with pretty little princesses from across the Pond; we try to create our own royalty.  When I was growing up we worshipped Elvis Presley, so we called him The King.  And John Wayne – he was the Duke.  Even today, well, would you go to see a singer named Stefani Gaga?  Of course not!  But call her Lady and she’s a star.  How about Dana Latifah?  No chance.  But call her Queen and she makes the big bucks.  And who did we mourn the most last year?  Prince!

The Brits actually have an official who is charged with keeping track of all those Royals.  Here’s his latest report:

I give you the Royal Account:

Of Dukes we’ve the proper amount

Prince Consort is there

And Queen’s in her chair

But somehow I may have lost Count.

But I digress.  I passed up the major point which was:  Princess Kate is telling us how to raise our children!!!  Are you kidding me?  Her kids’ only problem is that on Tuesdays and Thursdays they have to share the same palace.  Raise her children?  She doesn’t raise her children; they have nannies, maids, tutors, riding coaches, voice coaches, piano teachers and, of course, royalty coaches.  And besides, they’re great-granny is the damn Queen.  (Sorry, Lizzy.  I still love you.)  She is the only person in the world whose father-in-law, husband and son are all in line to be a King, and she is presuming to “relate” with the common woman?  The whole idea makes my back hurt.

I have a bad back.  Do you have a bad back?  I hope not, but if you are vertical long enough, your back gets messy.  So I looked on Amazon for books about bad backs.  Here’s what I found:

Back Beauty                                      Up the Down Steroids

Moby Disc                                         Frankenspine

A Farewell to Backs                           Bonfire of the Vertebrae

Atlas Limped                                     The Pain Mutiny

Fifty Shades of Ouch                         The Andromeda Pain

You are already used to seeing a limerick every week.  Now you’ll need to get used to a funny list every once in a while.  That was one.  I thought it was funny.  I love books and read all the time.  In fact, every morning I go to McDonald’s, drink a Diet Coke and read my book. One morning I was reading when a woman approached me.  “Oh,” she said, “you’re at the end.  That’s always the best part.”  I don’t think the end of a book is the best part, unless you hate the book and are glad that it’s over.  The best part of a good book is the beginning.  That’s where the author grabs you and seduces you and twirls you about his finger and shows you something you’ve never seen before or never seen quite that way.  It is where you open a book, caress its pages in excitement and anticipation and read “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” or “Call me Ishmael” or “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal.”  (Do you know what books start with those lines?  I’ll give the answers at the bottom.)  The end of a good book is almost never the best part.  It’s where the mystery that has been tantalizing you for hundreds of pages disappears.  It’s where the characters you have grown to love or to hate or to fear or admire all say goodbye forever.  It’s where the true joy you have had for days or weeks ends.  But there’s always the next book.

And there’s always the next blog, ‘cause this one is “outa here”.

Stay well

See you next week

Answers:   A Tale of Two Cities, Moby Dick, the first Harry Potter book