Blog #303                      December 29, 2022

 

While walking from my car to the Walmart entrance a few days ago, I saw a glove nestled against one of the empty carts in the parking lot.  It was white and blue and dirty.  On closer approach I saw that it was a left glove made of white mesh with a blue wristband.  This glove must have a story, I thought.  Why was it there?  Where was its partner?  A mesh glove – not very practical in cold weather.  Maybe it was a golf glove; that would explain the absence of a partner.  Maybe it was Michael Jackson’s.  Just a lonely, abandoned piece of flotsam in a lonely and disturbed world.  It was the stuff of a Chekov story or a Poe novella or a Robert Frost poem.  Or a Limerick Oyster paragraph.  The Weekly Word is flotsam, which means something worthless, rejected and discarded. 

 

My router stopped working.  I have suffered through episodes when my heart stopped working and episodes when my eyes stopped working, and believe me, those were only slightly more traumatic than the router.  I mean what are you supposed to do without Wi-Fi?  The human race was born, survived and evolved for several hundred-thousand years without the Internet, but we have somehow arrived at a point in the history of our species where we can no longer exist without instantaneous access to everything.  I mean, how are we supposed to survive if we can’t go on Amazon and buy something we don’t need and have it delivered two weeks before we didn’t need it?

 

I remember the good old days when online was where you hung your laundry.  When spam was a canned meat spread, cookies were sweet and tweet was the sound a little bird made.  Oh well, those days are gone, and now I’m sitting at my desk surrounded by enough wires to reach Sweden and so many different passwords I have to keep a printed list of them on my desk, which sort of negates their usefulness.

 

I found a phone number for Linksys, the router company, and prepared to call them for help, a feat of communication only slightly easier than contacting L. Ron Hubbard.  Surprisingly, however, it took only thirty seconds to contact a helpful representative named Svetla who was born in Serbia, lived in Belize and sounded like Bela Lugosi on Librium.  We exchanged some information, pressed some buttons, chose some passwords and twenty minutes later had accomplished nothing except to find out that the weather in Belize was beautiful.  

 

 Vanna, what do we have as a Booby Prize for this pathetic loser?  I absorbed that failure and did what any rational seasoned citizen should do.  I called my daughter Abby and begged her to fix it, which she did.  I guess I should have thought of that first, but I didn’t want to aggravate her with my time-consuming, childish problems.  But then I thought -- Hey, I’m the guy who changed her diapers and told her stories and sang her songs (even at her wedding) and helped her with all her childhood problems. What goes around comes around; do unto others; cast your bread upon the waters, and all those other Golden Rulish phrases.  The least she can do is repay the effort.  Except the diaper thing.

 

And speaking of songs, when my grandchildren were little, I used to sing to them.  I even wrote two songs for them – There’s A Dinosaur in My Diaper and A Pirate Has Stolen My Cookie.  Where’s Casey Kasem when you need him?  And I told them stories I would make up on the fly.  Naturally, I was their hero:  Look, it’s Poppy Man – faster than a rhyming dictionary; able to tell tall tales in a single night.  And who, disguised as a mild-mannered Jewish husband with no closet, fights a never-ending battle for fun, pirate stories and Scooby-Dooby-Doo.

 

Now my grandchildren are older, and they have no time for stories.  But I still have you.  You like my stories, don’t you?  I guess you do, because this is Blog #303 and you’re still here.  Hi there and welcome back.  I hope you are feeling well and staying warm.  We had some major cold here last week.  It was so cold I saw a politician with his hands in his own pocket.  The news media, of course, were absolutely euphoric with the dangerous cold spell, almost as much as a school-bus accident or a lost puppy.  They spent hours telling us to stay indoors because the cold was so dangerous.  Then they switched to one of their reporters standing outside telling us how cold it was.  They got even more excited when someone actually died of the cold.

 

We warned the poor schmuck it was cold

But he didn’t do what he was told

He collapsed and he froze

From his head to his toes

He was either too dumb or too old.

 

My oldest, Jennifer, came to visit us on Christmas Eve, which reminded me of a Christmas Eve 13 years ago.  I was visiting her that year in North Carolina and using her house and hospitality to recover from bypass surgery, when my heart started to behave as dysfunctionally as Southwest Airlines.   At the emergency room, they shocked me back to life which is why I always consider Christmas Eve as a second birthday.  Thirteen years.

 

For a week, my house was graced with Carol and my daughter and granddaughter Alyssa, all of whom are exercise freaks.  Every morning, they’re running and stretching and crawling and lifting and jumping and stomping.  It’s like three generations of Richard Simmons.  It tires the hell out of me just to watch.

 

Message from Shakespeare:  He’s all my exercise, my mirth, my matter (Winter’s Tale) Those three women surely do flop and bop and climb all over my house.  And they all look alike. The only exercises I do are limping and hiding.  I’m very good at hiding.  I don’t like anybody in my house except my two pet people.  Purr.

 

Time to go and also time for New Year’s resolutions.  If you resolve to come back every week, I’ll resolve to keep up this lunacy.  How’s that?  2022 is over now.  I hope you have a peaceful, healthy and happy 2023.  Stay well and count your blessings.

 

Michael                                             Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com