Blog #103

Africa, the Dark Continent, home of the hippo and the rhino and the tsetse fly, land of the zebra and the eland, the ostrich and the lion, the cheetah and the dik-dik.  Yes, the dik-dik.  The birthplace of mankind and the worldwide center of poverty, cruelty, AIDS and genocide.  Sounds like a lovely trip.  And it is!  You should go.  We were there a dozen years ago and it was magnificent. I have some friends who are thinking of going, and I have told them what a wonderful and uplifting adventure they have in store.

Africa’s what you should choose

To cure your depressing old blues

A ten-foot giraffe

Might just make you laugh

And zebras might bring you good gnus.

I’ve told them to practice up on their Swahili.  I only remember two phrases.  Dinka mbeke na momo is Swahili for “Does your elephant play Candy Crush?”  And ungala mambo didi uru is an old Zulu proverb which means, “When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.”

Here is an entry in the Men Are Different from Women Manual.  I showed these friends my Africa picture album.  The man’s reaction was – wow, look at the hippo and the beautiful leopard!  The wife’s reaction was – look at what Carol’s wearing; I’d better take an extra sweater.

Hi there and welcome back.  Hope you’re feeling well.  If you are, stay away from Florida.  We left North Carolina a few days ago and are now in beautiful, sunny Florida.  I don’t know why anyone would want to live here.  If it’s not hurricane season, when just walking outside could cause your remains to be washed up in Morocco, then it’s Red-Tide season when the act of inhaling within ten miles of the ocean can cause your lungs to explode.  We are lucky enough to have missed both of those, but have arrived in the middle of coconut season when the palm trees shed their coconuts – from thirty feet up.  It’s like walking down the street while it’s raining Buicks.

Plus, Florida is full of old people.  We went to dinner with two other couples, and it seemed that all we talked about were health issues.  Have you noticed that we don’t call them diseases anymore?  We call them conditions.  I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in (The First Edition, 1968. Tell me who the lead singer was.)

Florida!  You come here for the sunshine and Dr. Skin tells you to stay inside.  You come here for the food and Dr. Heart tells you not to eat it.  I’ll have the hamburger but I can’t have any salt, cheese or bread.  And salad with no oil, extra vinegar, no salt, extra pepper, no olives, extra tomato, no onions.  And I can have the vichys but not the soise.  It took six of us forty minutes to order.

Part of what made this difficult was that it was a “New Age” restaurant.  On the menu, right in the column of things that were supposed to be edible, was the following: Deconstructed Vada Pav with Chutney in a Molecular, Edible Plastic Pouch.  There is no purpose in listing anything else; that was enough to convince me that NEW AGE food is not for OLD AGE people.  We should open a restaurant that serves old, standard, comfort food specifically for the elderly.  We’ll call it Food You Remember -- To Eat with People You Don’t.  Pot roast, macaroni and cheese, rolls with butter, fried chicken, Jell-O, apple pie.  Reservation for two, please.  Me and Whatshername.  5:00 is fine; we have to be back by 7:00.

You come here for the friendship only to find all your friends have grown old and sick.  You come here for the healthy air, and the minute you cross the State Line, your health begins to seep out of you.  During the meal we talked non-stop about our health or lack thereof.  The procedures and the doctors and the side-effects were flying so fast and furious, the waiter actually thought we had ordered an enema for dessert.

And when we weren’t talking about procedures, we were talking about pills.  One of my friends has every condition, symptom and reaction that he has ever read about.  When a doctor prescribes a medicine, he looks it up on Google and reads all the side effects.  Then he refuses to take the medicine as being too dangerous.  If they force him to take the medicine, he immediately develops every side effect he can find on the internet.

You come here to get away from the cold and find cockroaches and alligators.  I saw one yesterday that was as big as a pony.  And that was the cockroach!  But I love Florida, don’t you?  We come every year.

  

Did you watch the Academy Awards?  It’s so uplifting to watch a bunch of people who just made $20 million on their last movie tell me how much inequality there is in the world.  At least I paid for the clothes I’m wearing.

When something happens that touches my sensibilities, my thoughts, my inner musings– when something like that happens, I run right to you to tell you about it.  Thanks for being there for me.  An incident happened while I was sitting in my daughter’s den in North Carolina.  I was alone with Grandchild #3, Alyssa (13).  We were both engaged and the only sounds were the rooster on the henhouse and the woodpecker on the roof.  No fiddler.  I was reading a Robert Frost poem with the line, Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.  It was an opportunity to talk with my Granddaughter, to discuss the importance of family and to pass down some knowledge from my generation to hers.  I raised my head and said, “Alyssa, have you heard of Robert Frost?”  No answer!  Then I saw the wires hanging from her ears.  She couldn’t hear me. 

In the 60s, Timothy Leary told us to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”  We didn’t exactly know what it meant back then, but it’s finally becoming clear now that we realize our grandchildren have turned us off, tuned us out and lost our number.  Oh well; their loss.

Don’t turn me off or tune me out.  I’ll be back next week.  Stay well, count your blessings and join me.  It’ll be fun.  Oh, the lead singer of The First Edition was Kenny Rogers. 

Michael                          Send comments to:  mfox1746@gmail.com