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

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