Blog #269                                         May 5, 2022

 

Do I look Italian?  I was standing in line at Best Buy when I felt a tap on the shoulder.  “Are you Italian?” said the white-haired gentleman behind me.  I told him I was not.  For those of you who don’t know what I look like, I am a stunningly attractive man.  For those of you who do know what I look like, hi there and welcome back.  I hope you’re feeling well and know how to keep your mouth shut.  When I had finished checking out, I turned around and said arrivederci to the nice man.  Do you think I look Italian?

 

I’ve lost my wife.  I thought it would be to a rich, handsome, debonair dude with a good sense of humor, an addiction to The View and a love of round tables.  Maybe an Italian.   But no – I’ve lost her to the world of electronic communication.  Her smart phone talks to her iPad; her iPad talks to her Apple Watch and her Apple Watch talks to her phone.  Nobody talks to me.  Her triumvirate of devices tells her everything she needs.  She can talk to her friends, get the weather, play Wordle, Bridge and Canasta.  She can read books and get very important alerts, like the one we got at midnight recently.  “Cher’s Birthday” it said.  Good to know.  She has an app to tell her how many steps she has taken, where the nearest toilet is, or the nearest Vietnamese woman with a nail file.  She has a different ring-tone for every person in the Western Hemisphere.  I cannot compete.

 

It all makes me feel as useless as a snake trying to ride a bicycle.  Or a guy who is fluent in Aztec.  Or a man who repairs typewriters.  Or Donald Trump’s humility coach.  I no longer have a purpose.

 

Unless she needs a banana.  “I need a banana,” she said.  “Thou art indeed fortunate, fair Princess,” I replied, echoing Don Quixote. “I am he for whom are reserved grave dangers, great deeds and valiant feats.”  Damn, that book will take me forever.  I grabbed my sword and shield and headed out into the cruel world to find a banana.  You would think that would be a simple task, but you would be wrong.  I drove to my nearest grocery and located a suitable banana, one with a little green so that it would be fully yellow by tomorrow.  This was not my first banana!  Then it began to get complicated.  The store had very few checkers because it is apparently bad for you to actually interact with a live person, and the few checkers that were available had lines of people waiting with full shopping carts.  I had one banana.

 

I went to the self-checkout where it took me several button-pressings to convince the machine that it was indeed a banana that I was weighing and not a miniature chihuahua.  The entire purchase amounted to 24 cents.  Then the machine began to interrogate me as thoroughly as if I were a newly-arrived prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.  No, I do not have any coupons.  It’s one banana.  Yes, I have a shopper’s rewards number.  I entered that.  Yes, I would like to pay cash.  The machine did not accept cash.  I was forced to use a credit card, for which I had to enter my password, my pin number and the name of my first pet.  I could have grown a banana in less time.  Why is everything nowadays so complicated?  But I persevered, completed the valiant feat and carried the trophy home to my Princess.  “Thank you, Honey,” she said.  “Was it hard buying the banana?”  No, I said, piece of cake.

 

But that wasn’t the real excitement of the week.  The real excitement was that my 16-year-old granddaughter in North Carolina went to her prom.  This was occasion for my wife, the self-appointed Doyen of Prom, to butt in, wheedle, cajole and otherwise insinuate herself into every aspect of the event.  She wanted to know the boy’s height, weight, IQ, shoe size and every detail of his family history since the Mesozoic Era.  Her expertise was indispensable, she felt, in choosing the boy’s boutonniere, our granddaughter’s shoes, her makeup and, most important, the dress.  Being a chicken-raising family, they had chosen from the highest echelons of chicken-related designers like Oscar de la Henta, Egg-scada and Tommy Chickenfinger.  (You knew that was coming.)  They chose two dresses and my granddaughter tried them on for us at Passover upon which I gave her my frank opinion: 

 

In any dress, you are a looker

But this choice is a big pressure-cooker

In the first one you wore

You’re the Sweet Girl Next Door

In the other one you’re the Town Hooker.

 

Well, it was red, tight-fitting and slit up to her earrings.  She chose the hooker dress.  What girl wouldn’t?  She looked absolutely dynamite! 

 

The one who was the most tense throughout this whole ordeal was my daughter, the mother of the little hooker.  Henny Youngman said, “Adolescence is a period of rapid changes.  Between the ages of twelve and seventeen, a parent ages as much as twenty years.”

 

It's May already and golf season is getting into full swing.  Ah, the wonderful game of golf in the great outdoors.  The indigenous trees, the beautiful grass, the placid lakes, the mosquitoes carrying West Nile Virus, the ticks carrying Lyme Disease, the brown recluse spiders, the poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac, the pesticide coughs and herbicide rashes.  What a wonderful game!

 

Message from Shakespeare:  How hard it is to hide the sparks of nature (Cymbeline).  I never get to go outside.  Nature, to me, is looking out a window at the birds.  On the other hand, I never get too hot or too cold or wet or get hit by lightning.  The last time I went outside, I was hit by a car. I’ll be very happy to stay inside.  Purr. 

 

Oh, oh – it’s time to go.  The Doyen needs another banana.  A Doyen (Weekly Word) is the most respected or prominent person (usually a woman) in a particular field.  And bananas grow in a field.  There you go!  Oy, it’s definitely time to go.  Please stay well, count your blessings and pray for Ukraine.  See you next week,

 

Michelangelo                                     Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com