ARCHIVED POSTS
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March 25, 2024
Cereal Killer
I have almost given up on cereal. As a younger man, I loved a sugary treat. As an old man, who has to watch his diet, I find myself checking labels on everything. Sugar is the enemy. For instance, Cap’n Crunch – a former favorite of my wife – contains: Corn Flour, Sugar, Oat Flour, Brown Sugar, Palm and/or Coconut Oil, Salt, Reduced Iron, Yellow 5, Niacinamide, Yellow 6, BHT, Thiamin, Mononitrate, Pridoxined Hydrochloride, Rioflavin, and Folic Acid. My choice: plain old Shredded Wheat. Ingredients: wheat and BHT (a harmless preservative). Not a taste treat, but at least I’ll live to tell about it
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Highway Memorials
Driving across country nowadays, we notice a growing number of roadside displays – flowers, crosses, and ribbons – marking the sites where people apparently died in traffic accidents. I do understand mourning the passing of somebody you love, but I’m not sure I see the point of putting a display at the place along the road where they died. Even sadder is the fact that flowers wilt and highway trash piles up around the displays, making them just another sad reminder of life cut short.
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March 24, 2024
HAVERING A GOOD AND MAGICAL TIME
HAVERING IN THE TWILIGHT
My wife Carmela has never really understood me. Like most females, she remains very practical about the literal meaning of many things.
For instance, if I say, “You know honey, I would really like to move to Alaska and build a log cabin.”
Then she would say: “Where exactly are you going to get the logs, how are you going to buy the pipes and install the plumbing, where is the running water going to come from, what about the disposal of sewage, and where is the nearest grocery store going to be?”
Now that I have been challenged, I end up making some crazy off-the-top-of-my-head comments about buying an axe, cutting down trees, building a log cabin, diverting a nearby stream for water, and somehow digging a hole in the frozen tundra to install a septic tank. As far as nearby grocery stores, I would go out and catch some fish in the stream, snare some rabbits and birds in traps, and once in a while shoot a moose. She could gather wild berries in the summer to can for later and collect eggs from the chickens we would take with us.
Of course, the more I talk, the more ridiculous it sounds, and she would just shake her head like I’m an idiot, and declare she was not moving to the middle of nowhere and living on berries and moose meat. End of subject.
My mistake, of course, is trying to defend what I am saying. But recently, I have learned a new word that describes exactly what I am doing.
It comes from a Scottish duo named the “Proclaimers” in a song titled: “I would walk 5oo miles.” The song describes a man who is totally devoted to a woman and vows in the chorus:
“I would walk 500 miles
And I would walk 500 more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand
Miles to fall down at your door.”
I like the song, mainly because much like the lyrics, I am also devoted to a woman – although sometimes she clearly does not understand me.
The magic word, I’ve finally found, comes in one of the verses of the song, in which the singers proclaim.
If I get drunk, well I know I’m going to be
I’m going to be the man who gets drunk next to you
And if I haver, yeah, I know I’m going to be
I’m going to be the man who’s havering to you.
So, we’re listening to the song, and Carmela asks, what is “havering?”
I have no idea, so I look it up on the internet. It turns out that “havering” is a Scottish term for talking nonsense.
And just like that I have found the perfect word to explain the kind of things I often say to my wife that make her think I’m not quite all there.
A few days later, we’re driving through the desert in New Mexico, just after sunset, and the whole twilight world turns soft and fuzzy in the afterglow of the day. The time between sunset and darkness has been a bit magical for me ever since I was a child, chasing fireflies before being ordered to bed.
So, I say to my wife, “You know, I would like to pull over, grab a light blanket from the back of the truck, walk a couple of miles into the desert and lay down in the soft sand and spend the night.”
And right away, she starts talking about rocks and thorns, spiders and snakes, and other little nasty creatures that will crawl into our ears and fly up our noses.
“Honey,” I tell her, “I know all that, I’m just ‘havering’ because it looks so magical driving through the desert at this time of evening.”
I wasn’t trying to be practical. I was expressing how the beauty of what we were seeing made me feel.
And best of all, I think she finally got it too.
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