Blog #98

The Harlem Globetrotters!  Do you remember them?  Meadowlark Lemon, Goose Tatum, Curly Neal, Marques Haynes.  Growing up in the 50s and 60s, I watched them dozens of times on television with a smile on my face the entire game.  They were in town last month and I went with my grandchildren.  When the players came out and started cavorting in a circle to the whistling of Sweet Georgia Brown, that same old smile came back to my face accompanied by a tear in my eye.  The tear evaporated, but not the smile, not for two full hours.  The players were different, even a female Globetrotter, but the old shtick was the same and the entire audience laughed and screamed.  Nobody had a better time than me.

The opponents, of course, were the Washington Generals, a team that has been playing the Globetrotters since 1952.  They lost.  In fact, the Generals haven’t won a game since 1971.  Forty-seven years without winning a game!  Kind of like Trump’s record at MS-NBC.  The Generals’ coach was interviewed, holding an old picture of the 1971 team and reminiscing about that long-ago victory:

A glorious win it was then

I wish we could do it again

It just makes me wince

That we haven’t won since

And lost Thirteen thousand and ten.

Hi there and welcome back.  I hope you’re feeling strong and rested.  I mentioned an “old picture” above, but really that’s incorrect.  A picture from 40 or 50 years ago, when we still had the blush of youth – we should call that a young picture.  A picture of me now, with wrinkles and gray hair – that’s an old picture.

The local forecast for last weekend was a blizzard with high winds and 4-6 inches of snow.  None of that happened.  Meteorologists have an easy gig.  They just look at the weather three hundred miles to the west and assume that’s what we’ll get tomorrow.  Then they add a bunch of colored charts we don’t understand and a bunch of fancy terms we don’t understand like wind-chill factor, heat index, Doppler, El Niño, La Niña, jet stream, lake effect, polar vortex and wind shear.  After they have us completely baffled, they terrify us.  Storm warnings, hurricane warnings, category 5, tornado warnings, winter advisory, heat advisory, thirty million people affected.  They’re like snake-oil salesmen with maps!  You know what, weather people?  Stick that El Niño up your polar vortex and just tell us what the weather is three hundred miles to the west.  Then we can flip a coin and do better than you.

I got a call last night from Parker, my 7-year-old grandson from California and the next to youngest of my eight grandkids.  He had an assignment to interview someone, so he called me.  They all call me.  This is the 7^th grandchild to interview me.  So where was I born, how were things different when I grew up, how was I different as a kid, yadda-yadda.  To answer the question how was I different (as a kid) from Parker, I said I was the youngest child in my family and he’s the oldest.  I said I didn’t have computers or cell-phones.  I’m not sure he could even understand a world that primitive.  Then I asked him what he thought were the differences between him and me.  Immediately he suggested that I was wrinkled and he wasn’t.  This is now the 7^th grandchild to call me wrinkled.  Ungrateful brats, all of them.  Next year I’m sure Lucy, the youngest, will compliment me with an interview and insult me with the wrinkle-thing.  I guess that’s what Poppys are for.

Parker is 7 and Lucy is 5.  That’s a man talking, of course.  A woman would say Parker is 7½ and Lucy is almost 6.  This is a peculiar distinction between women and men.  Women cannot seem to recite an age without some qualification.  He’s 7½.  She’ll be 6 in March.  He’s almost 43.  He just turned 73.   Pay attention next time.  You’ll see I’m right.  And, of course, an infant is never one or two.  The child is 13 months or 17 months or 26 months.  I’m surprised my wife doesn’t give my age as 876 months.  It actually makes me sound younger, doesn’t it?

I’ve got a joke you can use on your grandkids.  Maybe it’ll take their minds off calling you wrinkled.  You say, “What comes after 8Q and 9Q?”  They’ll say, “10Q”.  When they say “10Q”, you say “You’re welcome.”  The kids will understand even if you don’t.  Or how about this one?  Why does a seagull fly over the sea?  Because if it flew over the bay it would be a bay-gull.

I really don’t want to bore you with a long story.  I’ll talk fast.  Carol’s iPad has 16 Gigabytes of storage and recently has been running low.  I looked and found that Words2, her scrabble game, was taking up nearly half of that storage. Yes, I discovered that!  Did you think I was totally incapable of doing anything useful?  Well, you’re mostly right.  Anyway, I Googled and found a chat room (I actually don’t know what a chat room is, but I found one) that discussed her exact problem and gave a solution.  I told her; she ignored me.  Knowing my track record, I would have ignored me too. 

So, she visited an Apple Store and the best advice they could suggest was to delete some pictures.  Since the pictures take up almost no storage, this was akin to telling a person with an elephant on her lap that if she cut her toenails, the chair wouldn’t sag so much.  I kept telling her what to do, but she ignored me and kept trying the toenail solution.  Then she somehow got an Extra-Super-Duper Genius Apple Expert to call her and confirm that her loving and clever husband was indeed (drum roll, wait for it) RIGHT.  So she swallowed her pride, and the elephant, and everything turned out fine.  Happy wife – happy husband.

So that’s it!  I’m out of energy, out of time and out of things to say.  But I do have a Humor Advisory for you.  I’ll be back one week from today, so stay away from polar vortexes, keep your jet stream clean and don’t leave the house until you’ve read Limerick Oyster.  See you then.  Oh, and stay well, count your blessings and get that elephant off your lap.

Michael                                    Send comments to:  mfox1746@gmail.com