Blog #285                                August 25, 2022

 

Shakespeare and I have developed an afternoon routine.  I sit in my favorite reading chair, put a blanket on my lap and begin to read.  Within five minutes, he finds me, jumps up onto my lap and starts to purr while I scratch his cheeks and his neck.  After ten minutes, he begins to clean his fur and I get back to reading.  He falls asleep.  I fall asleep.  It’s all very Norman Rockwell.

 

Hey, is Shakespeare the best cat in the world?  He’s missing a leg; he scratches the furniture once in a while and, every so often, he bites.  But he sits on my lap and purrs and waits for me at the door when I’m gone.  And he lets me take care of him and love him, something in the world I can keep safe.  “Fathers must always be giving if they would be happy themselves,” said Balzac.

 

Message from Shakespeare:  It is a wise father that knows his own child (The Merchant of Venice).  What a sentimental old fool he is, but I wouldn’t trade him for anything.  The chair he’s talking about is a rocking chair on my porch.  It’s old and broken.  Neither beast nor man rock well upon it.  I guess that’s what he meant by Norman Rockwell.  Purr. 

 

Hi there and welcome back.  I hope you’re feeling well and enjoying the last few weeks of Summer.  Have you noticed that on every corner, they’re building a new Senior Citizens Residence Center?  Do you know who they’re building them for?  All those people who rode bikes without a helmet when they were kids.  All those people who drank water from a hose, played outside without sunscreen, put butter on their popcorn and rode with nine other kids in the back of the station wagon with no seatbelts.  All those people who played with dirt and acorns and bugs, ate hotdogs every day and swam in the creek.  And all those people who stared for hours at Howdy Doody and Lash Larue while double-dipping their spoon in the Peter Pan jar.  I wonder how we all made it this far.

 

But we did, even though we ignored the things they warned us would truncate our lives.  And by “they”, I mean the ever-increasing accumulation of supercilious busybodies who think they know how to run my life.  Well, I have a bulletin for them – there is only one person who knows how to run my life.  Carol.   And she does not need your help!

 

Back in those old days, we had Elvis.  I recently had dinner with some friends, originally from Memphis, and she actually insisted that Elvis Presley was Jewish.  I of course found that impossible to believe, but doing some follow-up research has convinced me there may be some truth to her assertion.  You can tell by some of his early recordings:

 

·        Jailhouse Schlock

·        Don’t Be Shul

·        All Schnook Up

·        Heartburn Hotel

·        Blue Suede Jews

 

Back then we also had Geritol.  That was the 1950s product advertised to cure iron-poor blood.  It was 12% alcohol, so it really didn’t matter whether it cured anything or not.  I haven’t heard of that since I was a kid.  There was also SERUTAN, which is Natures spelled backwards.  I think it was a laxative, but I was ten then and didn’t care about such things.  Little did I know!  But I did like the backwards-spelling idea.  They should have named Viagra NODRAH.

 

In this week’s letter to my daughters. I mentioned that now that we were home from our vacation, everything was getting back to normal.  But actually, life is never normal.  Life is an ante-room where you wait for the next disaster or wonder to enter.  As we age, disaster seems the more likely, and when I ask someone, “What’s new?” I usually get a report of all the troubling medical issues in their lives.  Now, the best answer I could hope for when I ask someone what’s new is – nothing.

 

“Good morning and how do you do?

So tell me what’s happ’ning with you.”

And now that we’re old

I like to be told

“Oh thank you, but nothing is new.”

 

 

Here’s something new – another story.  You probably can tell that I love telling stories.  I told a lot of my stories to my grandchildren.  Thornton Wilder said, “The basis of the education of the very young is the expansion of the sense of wonder”.  Stories are full of wonder.  Tyler used to sit on my lap and say, “Poppy, say a onceuponatime.”   He’s sixteen now and drives, but he still likes my stories.   Over the years, I have tried telling stories to my wife, but it never really works.  She’s always busy doing something else, but still finds time to butt in and ruin my stories with comments like:

 

·        Who would name a kid Rumpelstiltskin? 

·        Glass slippers are out!

·        The tortoise beats the hare?  That’s stupid.  The damned tortoise is too slow.  Gotta go now.  Thanks for the story.  Next time talk faster.

 

How about a onceuponatime for you?  It’s an old story, twenty years old to be exact, and it’s about a sister and a brother who hadn’t gotten along for – well, maybe ever.  He thought she was a delusional psychotic.  She thought he was an insensitive capitalist.  They hadn’t spoken for years, and then she got cancer.  Someone told him that she was in the hospital, and he went to see.  No one named Nancy Fox.  No one named Nancy Krueger, her married name.  No one named Nancy Joyce, her pen name for all the books she never finished.  Is there anyone named Nancy?  There was a Nancy Chipprin. That was her name until she was five-years-old and her mother re-married.  She was dying and couldn’t talk because of a breathing tube.  He held her hand.  She held his.  Over the next few days, he gave her back rubs and then she died.  Sometimes, need and pity and common decency dissolve the animosities and the toxic histories.

 

Our Weekly Word is truncate which means to shorten or cut off, and I hate to truncate our morning together, but it’s time to go.  If you’re good little boys and girls and come back next week, I may say another onceuponatime.  Until then, stay well and count all your blessings.

 

Michael                                    Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com   

 

Blog #284                                         August 18, 2022

School librarians across Missouri are pulling books from shelves as they face the potential for criminal charges under a new state law banning “explicit sexual material.”  That was, word for word, the headline in the local St. Louis paper.  I have a good deal of hesitancy in writing to you about this subject.  I have always tried to stay away from prurient material and racy language, but this is the news of the day and I feel I must respond, at least by mentioning the books most likely to be banned.  Forgive me, but here they are – Great Sexpectations, Madame Ovary and, of course, Moby Dick.  I had a few others, but my censor deleted them.  She usually knows best.  Do you have any you want to add?  Prurient, our Weekly Word by the way, means having or encouraging an excessive interest in sexual matters.

 

Message from Shakespeare:  Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs (Othello).  Cats do not read dirty books or say dirty words.  In fact, the only dirty word I know is “litter”.  Purr.

 

Hi there and welcome back.  Sorry to get you all riled up.  I hope you’re feeling well.  We’re home from our family vacation on Bald Head Island already.  Boy, that went fast.  Or, as they say in Latin, tempes was fugiting its ass off.  Oh, oh – that was some more prurient stuff, wasn’t it?  Sorry.  It was a wonderful week, marred only by the annoying insect population.  The flies, sand fleas and mosquitos were ravenous and ubiquitous.

 

Even being inside was not always a refuge.  One evening, we discovered a huge and apparently annoyed wasp inside the house.  The family screamed and called for the righter of wrongs, redresser of grievances, defender of damsels, scourge of giants, and victor in battle.  But Don Quixote was not available, so they settled for me.

 

As you know, I am a nature lover.  But I only love it when Mama Nature is outside, not when she intrudes her wasp-like presence into our house.  I immediately retrieved from the closet a complete and unused roll of paper towels, and so-armed, I approached the vicious arthropod.  Now I don’t want to exaggerate how big this creature was by saying it was as big as Delaware or something silly, but . . . well,

 

While the insect was to-ing and fro-ing

I crouched watching where it was going

I was too scared to charge

‘Cause the thing was so large

On its side I could clearly read Boeing.

 

Somehow, I screwed up my courage and, while the buzzing behemoth was phoning in a lunch order to Pizza Hut, I attacked and destroyed the poor thing.  I’m sorry, God.

 

In checking my emails today, I saw one from the organization for which I used to volunteer as a teacher of English as a Second Language.  I had enjoyed that gig very much, but we were eliminated when Covid arrived.  Now they want us back, so I went online as instructed, entered my user name and was informed that I had to take an online training course about bullying and one about sexual contact between teachers and students.  What has become of our society?  How lost and perverse and wicked have we become?  Are there so many indecent and evil people in the world that the decent people of the planet, the few of us who remain, have to constantly prove it?  We have to get patted down at the airport and otherwise microscopically examined, licensed and trained.

 

Ok, I got over my bad self and took the training.  Now I’m ready to go, right?  I clicked NEXT on the website and was promptly swallowed into the Cyber Cellar for Stupid Old People, never to be seen again.  As much as I tried, it would no longer recognize me, so I went back to the original email and replied that I would like a phone number to call for help.  Good luck with that.  I want my world back.

 

To calm my nerves, I decided to take my two local grandsons to a movie, Jurassic Park XXXVII.  I’m convinced that when there are as many Jurassic Park movies as there are Super Bowls, the world will end.  Ok, go to the movie early, wait in line, buy the tickets, enjoy – right?  Not anymore.  No, I had to go online, sign up for some kind of Dango something, pick my seats, the size of the screen and how many dimensions I wanted.  I had less options on the last car I bought. Then I had to come up with a password, give them a credit card, pay a service fee and tell them who my fifth-grade teacher was (Mr. Diamond).  I could have applied for citizenship to North Korea in less time.  By the time I was done, I no longer wanted to see the movie, or a computer, or my grandsons!  Why is everything so ridiculously complicated?  I want my world back.

I’m so old that in my world, the dinosaurs were not on the screen.  They were sitting next to you.  Back then, we went to see two movies at once.  We sat in a seat with gum stuck to the bottom and ate popcorn with butter.  Today, the seats recline, heat our behinds, massage our feet, blow cold air on our hair, rub our necks.  In my world, there were places that did all that, but they didn’t show movies and not even my father was allowed to go there.  And now I can’t even get butter on my popcorn or the Cholesterol Police will tell my wife.  I want my world back.

 

And I want you back too, so make a note to come see me next week.  Or, if you’re such a hi-tech, modern smart-ass, put it on your Google Calendar.  However you do it, be back a week from today and see who I’m mad at then.  I hope it’s not you.  In the meantime, stay well, count your blessings and redo your Bucket List.  I used to have a Bucket List, but I’m getting too old, so I got rid of it.  I just changed the B to an F.  Oh, oh, there I go again.  I’m a baaaad boy!  See you next week.

 

Michael                                    Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com.

                                               

 

 

 

 

Blog #283                                August 11, 2022

 

Here we are on Bald Head Island, our glorious, exhilarating getaway, and the most exhilarating part of the trip is always the ferry-ride over from the mainland.  Most of us ride up on deck and enjoy the wind and the spray and sometimes even get splashed by the waves.  It’s a magical twenty-minute ride, better than anything Disney World has to offer.  The most depressing part of the trip will be the ferry ride back.  We settled into our rental house and met our nearest neighbor, a five-foot Black Mud Snake resting just outside the back door.  We, at least the nature lovers among us, cautiously approached the monstrous dragon, but apparently the snake was not woke to an inter-species relationship and slithered back into the marsh.

 

Message from Shakespeare:  How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a
thankless child! (King Lear).  Sure, he’s out there playing with some stupid snake and I, his loyal and loving cat, am home all alone.  My nice neighbors take care of me, but mostly I’m pretty much alone and pretty much pissed.  A snake!  I’ll show that old man a snake! When he comes home, I’m going to bite him in the asp.  Grrr!

 

We have been on the island less than 24 hours, and I have already lost two shirts, a pair of sunglasses and a grandson.  We’ve lost him before.  He’ll show up. 

 

Hi there and welcome back.  I hope you’re feeling well, wherever you are.  Before we left, I received an email from a high-school friend, a psychiatrist living in Philadelphia.  He told me he was writing a book about mental illness and wanted to use a poem I had written back in high-school.  Why he has saved one of my 60-year-old poems till now, I can’t say.  Maybe he had a crush on me.  I won’t bore you with the poem, but it was a 12-line rhyming version of the following joke:

 

A man took his wife to a faith-healer.  “Guru,” he said, “my wife is sick.”  The Guru looked into the woman’s tired and swollen eyes, touched her pallid, shrunken skin and said, “No, my friend, your wife is well.  She only thinks she’s sick.”  A week later the man saw the healer again.  “Well,” said the Guru, “is your wife better?”  “She’s worse,” said the man.  “She thinks she’s dead.”  It figures -- I finally get a poem published and it’s in a book about mental illness!

Which brings me back to my brother and sister.  Some of you have doubted the veracity of my stories about them, but I assure you they are 100% true.  Let me finish up by telling you that when my brother died in 2001, aged 61, he owned a large old mansion near Washington University.  Although there were four stories and 7 or 8 bedrooms, he slept on a couch on the landing between the first and second floors.  The bedrooms were used for storage.  One bedroom was filled with nothing but magnificent, elaborate bows for wrapping presents.  He had made them all and saved them.  Another room contained nothing but empty, cardboard toilet-paper rolls.

My brother left no will, so his estate, minimal after creditors’ claims, went to me, my sister and my father.  By the time of the distribution in 2002, my sister had died at the age of 63 and some lawyer showed up claiming my sister had a will leaving her assets to a trust to take care of her 14 cats.  Her only asset was her share of my brother’s paltry estate.  I didn’t care; good luck to her cats.  The cats and I had had previous dealings.  More than once, I had received a call from a frantic motel owner claiming my sister had stayed a single night and her cats had destroyed the room to the tune of thousands of dollars.  How they found me, I don’t know, and how they thought I was responsible for a 60-year-old lunatic, I know even less.

 

My brother was buried in our family plot, although it turned out later that he was buried in the wrong place.  Don’t get me started.  I had nothing to do with my sister’s funeral.  Her ashes were scattered as fertilizer on a tree in an arboretum.  The ceremony was arranged by that same lawyer and attended by her friends, a group of obsequious sycophants who looked like they had just arrived from the Star Wars Cantina.  The ceremony was bizarre and included sage, a turtle and a bag of chigger repellant.  Don’t get me started.  Someday, I might tell you all about it.

 

Weekly Word:  What do want, obsequious or sycophants?  Let’s do obsequious which means obedient or attentive to a fawning degree.  Sycophants are just people who are obsequious.  There’ll be a test.

 

Our marsh-house on Baldhead contains twelve people, three dogs and enough food for the Turkish army.  There are bags of keto bark, organic peanut butter, cases of beer and kale everywhere.  Did you know that kale, by weight, is the largest food in the world?  Ten pounds of kale could fill the Grand Canyon.

 

Some days before we arrived on the island, apparently, a general call went out to every flying, crawling and slithering blood-sucking creature on the Atlantic Coast that I was headed their way.  They wasted no time crawling from the sand, oozing from the mud and dive-bombing from every direction to feast upon the tasty smorgasbord that my unprotected body provided.  By the end of the week, I was one big mega-bite.  And sunburned and exhausted besides.

 

I’m tired and bitten and achy

My skin is all burnt up and flaky

But we’re having such fun

In the sea and the sun

Though I do miss my little boy, Shakey.

 

Another Message from Shakespeare:  My tongue will tell the anger of my heart (The Taming of the Shrew).  Aww, he wrote me a limerick.  Well, it won’t work, Big Boy.  You think you’re bitten up now?  Just wait till I get a hold of you.  Meow!

 

You’ll be happy to know that my grandson showed up.  And you’d better show up next week, or I’ll sic my cat on you.  Stay well, count your blessings and enjoy the summer.  There isn’t much left of it.

 

Michael                                             Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com

                            

 

 

 

Blog # 282                               August 4, 2022

 

Everybody says that retail is dead, but I’m not so sure.  Now trending are small stores that specialize in only one or two items.  Just read the name of the store and you’ll know what to do.  It makes life so simple.

If you need bags, go to Sacks.

If you need bagels or donuts, go to Hole Foods.

If you need dice, go to Seven-Eleven.

 Or,

If you’re depressed, go to Lows.

If you want to buy marijuana, go to Quick Trip.

If you want to take your first wife to lunch, go to Fed Ex.

 

And,

If you need cheap landscaping, go to Dollar Tree.

If you need help in doing a blog, go to Write Aid.

Or if you’re looking for boorish, insulting and obnoxious men, go to Dicks.

 

Message from Shakespeare:  And if you’re looking for a cat, get a catalog.  If you want a dog, get a dogalog.  See, I can make stupid jokes too.  Did you laugh?  Purr.  Present mirth hath present laughter. What’s to come is still unsure (Twelfth Night).

 

Hi there and welcome back.  I love it when you come back.  I hope you’re feeling well and enjoying the Summer, although the Summer of 2022 has truly been a challenge.  Gasoline is high, inflation is higher, crime is even higher still, and now we’re in a recession.  And the weather!  Last night on NBC News, they said “Thirty million people are under a heat advisory.”  Have you noticed that they never say, “Three-hundred million people are not under a heat advisory?”

 

If you can avoid the heat advisories and the flood warnings and the car jackings, then summer is a perfect time for outdoor activities, especially golf!   I used to play golf three times a week.  I was never great.  I was never horrible.  But as the years go by and my various body parts get older, I play less and worry less about my score.  My friends are the same.  Why worry about pars and birdies when you can worry about tripping over your putter and breaking a hip.  Or being thrown from a cart and gouging your leg.  Or having a heart attack from the heat.  It’s a par-72 jungle out there!

 

Another summer annoyance has been the overabundance of political ads.  I voted on Tuesday.  Thank goodness the primary season is over.  Too many candidates, too many ads.  The worst are the radio ads for a local candidate: he loves puppies, eats Mexican food, watches Denzel Washington movies and when they say he supports the police, a police siren wails in the background as if they needed to remind us what the word “police” meant.  You’re driving your car.  You’re not really listening to the ad, but suddenly you hear a siren and instinctively slam on the brakes as if you had been doing one-twenty and had Jimmy Hoffa’s body in the trunk.  It’s dangerous.

 

And dangerous summer activities include boating.  Riding in a boat is great fun and brings out, mostly in men, some instinct, ancient and genetic, that has come down to us from Ulysses and makes us believe we actually know how to tie a knot and steer a water-craft.  I, of course, cannot do any of that.  I’m Jewish!  If Jews could operate a boat, God would not have had to part the Red Sea.

 

A lady comes home from the plastic surgeon.  “The doctor told me I had the breasts of a sixteen-year-old,” she tells her husband.  “What did he say about your 75-year-old ass?” the husband asks.  “He didn’t mention you,” she replies.

 

Getting old is an exercise in compromise.  There are new regimens and schedules that you must pursue.  There are old habits and pleasures that you must abandon.  Growing old is made easier, however, when the person living with you doesn’t seem to age.

 

I ought to be thankful a lot

For the wonderful treasure I’ve got

The treasure’s not gold

It’s the thrill growing old

Next to someone who clearly is not.

 

When I mention that to my wife, she scoffs.  “You only think that because you’re a sentimental old fool whose eyes are getting worse.”  Maybe, maybe not.

 

I get a lot of feedback from my readers.  I like the feedback.  I was at a gathering last week with about twenty people.  They’re all about my age and read my blog.  We spent some time counting how many of us had pacemakers and comparing Eliquis and Xarelto.  Then several wanted to know when I would mention them in my blog.  I get that a lot, so I told them, “When you say something hilariously stupid.”

 

As you are reading this, I am wending my way to Bald Head Island, a tiny, remote island off the coast of North Carolina.  You must reach it by ferry and traverse it by golf cart.  There are no cars allowed.  It is there that Cape Fear pokes its tip into the Atlantic current creating thirty miles of treacherous sand bars that have been the bane of Atlantic shipping over the centuries.  These sand bars are called The Frying Pan Shoals and, if you stand on one of the close-to-shore sand bars in a foot or two of water, you will be pummeled by warm Gulf Stream waves on one side and cold Atlantic waves on the other.  It’s magical.

 

The island was the home of Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard the Pirate, in the early 18^th Century and will be the home of the Fox family for the next week.  My California family cannot join us this year – my daughter, her companion and my two beautiful red-headed grandchildren.  I love them all and will miss them a great deal.  So that leaves twelve of us.  Wish us well.  I’ll be writing to you from there.

 

Weekly Word:  A bane is a cause of great distress or annoyance, and if this blog has been a bane to you today, you’ll be happy to know that it’s over.  I have to stop now because I have so many other things to do -- count all the bees in the hive, chase all the clouds from the sky.  Come back next week.  I might mention your name.  Until then, stay well and count all your blessings.

 

Michael                                    Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com

                                                Go ahead, say something stupid.