Blog #417                                March 6, 2025

 

Wow!  Blog #417!  It’s really awe inspiring to have you as my loyal readers.  It’s like I am the Master and you are the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.  Wait, that’s immigrants.  Well, what difference does it make?  I don’t believe all this immigrant nonsense anyway.  They say California is overrun with Hispanic immigrants.  I’m not buying it.  I think it’s the street signs that make everybody talk with an accent.  My middle daughter lives in the Berkeley area, and to get from her house to the nearest McDonald’s I had to drive down Cerrito, left on Solano, right on San Pablo.  By the time I got to McDonald’s I was talking like Speedy Gonzalez.  “Cerrito solano san pablo.  Àndale àndale epa epa!”  They gave me some very strange looks – and a Diet Coke, so I must have said it right.

 

Hi there and welcome back.  I hope you had a nice Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday and are feeling lovely.  Don’t forget that on Saturday, you will need to change to Daylight Savings Time.  I’m not really good at either Springing Forward or Falling Back, although I am becoming an expert at Lying Down.  So when I get up on Sunday, I won’t be sure whether it’s 6:30 or 8:30 or even Sunday.  In Arizona, they don’t change the clocks.  They know how to keep time in Arizona.  And it’s a dry time too.

 

I am now back from my little trip.  Well, I can’t call it a trip.  It was a cruise.  You see, you have to learn a whole new vocabulary when you go sailing or suffer draconian consequences.  The first thing I asked was what floor we were on.  The nice cruise employee gave me an icy look and a lecture:

 

You call it a deck, not a floor

Your room is a cabin, what’s more

For the time you’re afloat

You say ship, and not boat

Or we’ll throw your dumb fat ass ashore.

 

The ship was the size of Delaware, only taller.  One morning, I watched the captain maneuver this behemoth into port in Nassau.  Now, I don’t know the actual dimensions of the ship, but one afternoon after lunch, I walked from the dining room to my cabin and arrived just in time to leave for dinner.  The captain must have owned a pickup truck, because he backed the ship into a slot between the dock and another ship and left it two feet from the dock—perfect!  I can’t parallel park my Corolla into a space big enough for an eighteen-wheeler, so I was impressed.

 

We all, our group of twenty, had a very nice time on the cruise and behaved as was expected for a group our age – no-one ever put on a bathing suit and we all were in bed by ten.

 

Our Weekly Word today is draconian which means extremely severe or cruel.  Like corporal punishment or the death penalty or being forced to watch Trump’s speech last Tuesday.

 

As I said, I’m home now, but Carol is not.  She stayed a few days extra with some friends, so for three nights it was just us boys -- a three-legged cat and a two-footed fool.  Of course I missed my wife, but it was also nerve-racking to know that if something went wrong, there was no-one there to help me.  But really, what could possibly go wrong?  I mean, was I going to break a glass on the kitchen floor? (That happened the first night.)  Or pull the faucet handle off the sink? (Second night.)  Or cut myself and start bleeding on my khakis?  (Yes, the third night.) 

 

And besides, she had the hair-dryer.  But I improvised and was very proud of my bad self.  I have a small space heater in the bathroom, so I turned it on and let it blow hot air on my head while I brushed.  Did it work?  Damned straight!  And so was my hair.

 

Message from Shakespeare:  Journeys end in lovers meeting (Twelfth Night). I’m so glad Pops is home.  I was lonely.  Now I have a warm lap to sit on and a warm body to sleep next to.  It’s too bad he had a good time.  That means he might go away again.  Purr.

 

Every week, besides the Weekly Word, I like to share a piece of fascinating and useful information with you.  Here it is.  According to Fermat’s Second to Last Theorem, it is mathematically impossible to get all of the little rings out of a can of SpaghettiOs.  No matter how much time, strength, energy and guile you apply, there will always be at least one little sucker stuck to the side of the can or dangling from the rim.  Believe it.

 

I love books and read all the time.  One morning, I was reading at McDonald’s when a woman approached me.  “Oh,” she said, “you’re at the end.  That’s always the best part.”  I don’t think the end of a book is the best part, unless you hate the book and are glad that it’s over.  The best part of a good book is the beginning.  That’s where the author grabs you and seduces you and twirls you about his finger and shows you something you’ve never seen before or never seen quite that way.  It is where you open a book, caress its pages in excitement and anticipation and read “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” or “Call me Ishmael” or “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal.”  The end of a good book is almost never the best part.  It’s where the mystery that has been tantalizing you for hundreds of pages disappears.  It’s where the characters you have grown to love or to hate or to fear or admire all say goodbye forever.  It’s where the true joy you have had for days or weeks ends.  But there’s always the next book.

 

And there’s always the next blog.  Don’t you dare miss it.  And, while you’re waiting, stay well and count those blessings. The opening lines of books I mentioned above are from A Tale of Two Cities, Moby Dick and the first Harry Potter book. 

 

Michael                                    Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com