Blog #226                                July 8, 2021

 

There are four places I remember where I have experienced a sense of mystic and glorious wonder.  One was on the uppermost deck of a sailing ship in the Aegean Sea at midnight staring at a cloudless sky filled with stars and imagining Odysseus using those same stars to lead him home.  One was in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris where I sat one afternoon and stared upwards in the reverential silence with the almost palpable expectation of glimpsing Quasimodo scuttling among the beams.  Third was a boat trip on the Zambezi River surrounded by hippos and crocodiles and the legend of Dr. Livingston.  And fourth is at Frying Pan Shoals on the tip of Bald Head Island where the warm Gulf Stream current blasts into the cold Atlantic Ocean and where you can stand or sit in two feet of water being pounded by waves from two directions.  The Island issues warnings against walking out there, but that’s part of the thrill.  Everything will kill you; you might as well do something fun.  Besides, my daughter and granddaughter were on the beach keeping watch over me so they could report my being washed away toward Morocco.  I just outright loved it.  Besides, I hear Morocco is nice this time of year.

 

You might have been to some of these same places or have your own special experiences.  Hi there and welcome back.  Where’s your favorite place?  I hope it’s here with me every Thursday.  And I hope you are feeling well and had a nice Fourth of July, which soon will be changed to Cuatro de Julio.  We celebrated at an outdoor gathering that was loud and crowded and filled with mosquitoes – everything you look for on the 4^th.  Fun! 

 

 I had a spooky experience here on the Island.  I was in a long line at the Shop-And-Don’t-Save waiting to check out when I noticed the man behind me was carrying a 24-pack of water bottles and his wife was carrying a big watermelon.  The simple concept of carts had obviously escaped these people, so I offered to ease their burdens by sharing my cart with them.  Naturally, we started to talk.  Where are you from?  St. Louis, and you?  North Carolina, but I grew up in St. Louis.  It turned out that not only had we both graduated from University City High School, but both in the same year.  Is that not spooky, that I should be on a remote island 900 miles from home and run into a high-school classmate, Fred Teitelbaum, that I didn’t even know?  Carol, also a member of that class, remembered going to Grammar School with him.

 

We went to Grammar School; my daughters went to Grade School; my grandchildren went to Elementary School.  Isn’t it interesting how the term has changed?  And that’s not all that has changed.  Our high-school teams were called the Indians.  That had to disappear, of course, and now they’re the Lions.  Plus, back then the worst thing we could bring to school was chewing gum.  Not anymore.

 

When I was attending sixth grade

For recess we went out and played

Now Tommy and Susie

Are packing an Uzi

And three different kinds of grenade

 

The trip to Bald Head Island is over and we are home.  Shakespeare was very happy to see us.

 

Message from Shakespeare:  That is my home of love; if I have ranged, like him

that travels, I return again (Sonnet 109).  Well, it’s a-meowt time they came

home.  Ten days is a long time without my People.  I think I’ll keep them

up all night just to punish them.  Purr.

 

With all the pickle-ball and the pounding of the ocean surf, my body is bruised,

bedraggled, beaten, battered, besotted, broken and besmirched.  And that’s only

the Bs.  I need a vacation!  Do you know what you call the sport when four Jews

play pickle-ball?  Kosher Pickle-Ball, of course.

 

I’m going to get myself into trouble now but, like I said before, everything will kill you.  When my first grandson was born twenty years ago, I thought how wonderful it would be to watch him grow up and become – well, whatever he wanted:  a lawyer, a doctor, a tinker, a tailor.  Not once, I promise you, did I consider the possibility that he would grow up to be Miss Nevada.  Yes, friends and enemies, the new Miss Nevada is a trans-gender woman (not my grandson) named Kataluna Enriquez, who will now compete in the Miss USA contest. 

 

Listen, I don’t care what you want to be or who you want to love.  I’m all in favor of accepting everyone in whatever package they arrive.  Or should that be “he or she arrives”?  In this world, I no longer think it matters.

 

But acceptance doesn’t seem to be the goal anymore.  The goal seems to be to destroy and ridicule every institution in sight.  Now the road to destroying beauty pageants has begun.  That’s ok, why should we reward someone for being attractive and ignore those who are average?  Why should we reward anyone who is smart and ignore those who are not?  Goodbye Jeopardy.  Why should we reward someone who can run fast and ignore those who can’t?  Goodbye Olympics.  Why should we reward people who write limericks and ignore those who can’t?  Because maybe these endeavors bring some happiness to those of us who like to escape our daily commonness to enjoy something beautiful or entertaining or amazing.  You know where to send the hate mail.

 

The Word of the Week is palpable which means so intense as to seem almost tangible, touchable.  Kind of like the intense wish you have right now that I would stop.  Ok, I will.  That’s called making fun of oneself.  Epictetus said, “He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.”  You remember Epictetus.  I think he was Miss Parthenon of CXII.  Ok, it’s a Greek guy with Roman numerals, but I was too lazy to look up Greek numerals.  Stay well, count your blessings, send me your hate mail and don’t forget tomorrow is O. J. Simpson’s birthday, better known as National Get Away with Murder Day.  See you next week.

 

Michael                                    Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com