Blog # 12
My wife likes to keep up to date with all the new
technical stuff. I’m just the
opposite. I use a paper calendar, not my
phone. I use scratch paper for notes,
not my phone. The highest technological
level I have ever reached is changing to Daylight Savings Time. And you know I was dragged kicking and
screaming into this blog thing. But, to
be honest, I’m glad I did it. I like
talking to you. You must like it too, because you’re back. Welcome.
I hope you’re all doing well. So,
my wife now has different sounds on her phone for different things. When she gets a text, the phone makes a
doorbell noise. Ding-Dong. That’s annoying. Now she has an ap that reminds her to
drink a glass of water every two hours.
That noise is the sound of gushing water. I can be reading in the evening and these
ding-dongs and waterfalls are going off in the room. I don’t know whether I have visitors or
diarrhea.
Now she has an Alexa.
Great – another woman’s voice I have to listen to. I’d really like to have the voice changed to
sound like an English butler. Carson,
call my daughter in California. “Yes,
Sir, I will make that connection expeditiously.” Wouldn’t that be great? I love that old style English. That’s why I have read all of Dickens’ books.
Where I said in the first paragraph that
I like writing to you, Dickens would say, “If my readers have derived but half the
pleasure and interest from its perusal, which its composition afforded me, I
have ample reason to be gratified.” Ooo, talk British to me!
I know that Dickens is hard to read because the
language has changed so much since the 1840s.
Heck, the language constantly changes.
The way we spoke in the 1950s isn’t the same as it is now. There are new phrases and meanings and
usages. Some are great, but there are
some of them I don’t like, like “like”.
Teens seem to use the word “like” as every third word of their
vocabulary. Give me like Dickens like
any time. Like.
I’ve figured out why I love working at the Zoo. It’s the only place I’m not lost, it’s the
only place where someone actually listens to what I have to say, and it’s
quieter than it is at home. Last week I
found a kindergarten class sitting on the ground, each child studying the
brightly-colored Zoo map. I asked the
teachers what they wanted to see and two little girls screamed “flamingos”. So I gave them directions to our lovely pink
birds, then asked, “Do you want to hear a story about flamingos?” I instantly had 14 cherubic little faces
staring up at me and I proceeded to tell them my flamingo story, which,
although possibly apocryphal, is cute.
The brief version is that when pink flamingos were first brought to the
Zoo, they were fed fish and grain and normal bird stuff and after a while they
turned white. Nobody wanted to see a
white flamingo and the zoo people were puzzled.
Finally they discovered that flamingos are pink because they eat shrimp
and absorb the red coloring from the shrimp shells. When they don’t eat shrimp they turn white,
and sure enough, when their diet was changed to shrimp they turned pink and
beautiful and everybody was happy, except the shrimp. I finished the story and the little girl
closest to me stuck her smiling gap-toothed face two inches from mine and said,
“Can we just stay with you?” I guess I
just have a knack.
And speaking of kids, Austin, my 7-yr-old grandson,
had a baseball game this week. There I
was, in the first inning, sitting in a comfy chair next to the bleachers when a
99-year-old woman in a wheel chair was rolled up next to me. I guess they thought I was the geriatric
section. She sat there giving her best
imitation of Mt. Rushmore until her grandson, or maybe great-grandson came up
to bat. The first pitch was called a strike, at which point this ancient woman
snapped out of her catatonic stupor and yelled, “Strike my butt!” You’re always a kid at a baseball game.
And speaking of baseball, I’m a Cardinals fan. The St. Louis Cardinals, not the Vatican City
Cardinals, although they might have a baseball team too. Who knows?
Wouldn’t it be fun to have the two teams play each other? The Pope could throw out the first pitch,
bless the umpires and sell Pope-Corn and indulgences in the stands. I think the Pontifical Cardinals would be
pretty certain of victory:
The
St. Louis Cardinals? Who cares!
They
sin and they make lots of errors.
They
don’t have a hope
Cause
we play for the Pope:
Lots
of hits, lots of runs, lots of prayers.
Wow, I had to work pretty hard to set that one
up! Sometimes, when I’m writing and
looking for the right word or phrase, I get up and begin to pace forth and
back. It’s impossible, of course, to
pace back and forth. To go back,
you must already have left the place you are going back to. And that act of leaving is what is called
going forth. So you have to go
forth first. In a similar vein, no-one
can jump up and down. Once you jump up,
you cannot jump down – you can only fall down. So people, when excited, are actually jumping
up and falling down. Or running forth
and back. Got it?
Time for a mystery.
I ran into a woman today who has a twin.
She said, “My twin sister was born at 1:15 a.m. and I was born at 1:55
a.m. of the same Autumn morning. But I
am the older.” How can that be? Answer later.
Another grandson, Tyler, graduated 5th
grade. The ceremony highlighted 72
little 11-year-olds, each giving a four or five sentence speech. Was I bored!
No, I was amazed. They were
bright and poised and happy and ready to take on the world. They
were black, white, Hispanic, Indian, Chinese, Korean. After hearing all of
them, I actually felt better about the future of this country than I had
before. Of course, then I came home,
turned on the news and lost all hope.
Ok, here’s the answer: it was the night that Daylight
Savings Time ended. The speaker was born
first at 1:55 a.m. Daylight Time, then at 2:00 the time reverted to 1:00
a.m. Then the sister was born at 1:15
a.m. Standard Time. And speaking of
time, I can just see you pacing forth and back so it must be time to end. A friend of mine, Francie, told me that she
loved my blog, but it was long. Well, maybe it is, but stay with it,
friends. Everything that’s really good
is long. But this one’s long enough, so
thanks for coming. See you next week.
Michael
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