Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

The World Cup made me thankful for foreigners. The soccer fans delighted in many of the quotidian aspects of American life that we often take for granted. It can be good to have fresh eyes looking at us.

I jokingly told my thrice-married friend that I would teach him all about women. He responded, “I know a lot about women. . . . I just don’t believe it.”

I learned at the bar trivia contest that the official state motto of Indiana is “The Crossroads of America.” That motto made sense to me. I have entered Indiana from the north, south, east, and west. Every time I continued driving straight through, wondering when I would get to the next state. I, however, have met nice, interesting people from Indiana. I met them all in New York or Pennsylvania.

I had forgotten the German-Turkish-American server’s name. She feigned, I think, that she was upset. I said, referring to the Mexican-American server/busboy standing next to her, “I have known him longer, and I forget his name, too.” She replied, “We call him Doughnut.” I looked at him and said, “Why is that?” He just smiled. She explained. “He went to a house of pleasure, and instead of giving out dollar bills, he handed out doughnuts.” The Colombian-American bartender clarified that the establishment was a strip club not too far away. The Mexican-American server/busboy had bought the doughnuts at a fancy neighborhood shop, and he had given them out to the strippers. He would not tell me what kind of doughnuts they were—I thought that they should have been Boston cream—but his English is limited, and he might not have understood the question. A few minutes later, however, he looked at me with his always sweet smile and said, “Now I am a VIP.”

The billboard from some sort of church warned “LUST DESTROYS.” And here I thought that lust led to the creation of new life.

At this time of year, I remember the country song lyrics: “There are two things money can’t buy: true love and homegrown tomatoes.”

When my young friend turned around, I could not help but notice the shiner under his left eye. Some guys tried to rob him as he got out of his car. A scuffle ensued. My friend adamantly maintained that he got in some good blows, but clearly, he also took one. The would-be robbers ran off when a shopkeeper came out of his store. My friend lost nothing. I commiserated with him and told him about various incidents involving me, the spouse, and the son. I asked him if his girlfriend had been with him. “No,” he said, but he saw her the next day. He said that she had been very sympathetic. He hesitated for a moment. A slight grin appeared—his first smile of the evening. Then he said, “Sympathetic sex is very good.”

A supposedly wise person once said, “Friends are people who dislike the same people.”

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

There was once a professional football team called the Beloit Fairies.

 

CVS gives me receipts longer than some of my golf shots.

 

At one time, you were not supposed to have sex until you were married. (We can be confident that this “moral” injunction was frequently broken, even in Puritan New England, at least as revealed by studies of marriage and birth certificates that indicate a lot of babies were born in early Massachusetts only five or six months after the marriage.) My friend was a young modern woman, and she and her boyfriend had not waited for marriage to have sex. Indeed, they were living together without an official marriage ceremony. However, even though her work allowed her to put a significant other on the health insurance plan, she told me that she would never do that unless they were married. Ah, modern romance.

 

I learned at the bar trivia contest that the official state motto of Indiana is “The Crossroads of America.” That motto made sense to me. I have entered Indiana from the north, south, east, and west. Every time I continued driving straight through, wondering when I would get to the next state. I, however, have met nice, interesting people from Indiana. I met them all in New York.

 

The Indiana state motto is better than some others. Michigan’s is “Si Quaris Peninsulam Amoenam Circumspice.” Come on. This is the USA. Speak American. I tend to believe that we should have no Latin, except perhaps for et cetera. (Remember Yul Brynner in “The King and I?) Maybe you understand that Michigan motto, but I have to trust those who tell me it translates to, “If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.” I like lots of things about Michigan, but really? How many of you have ever woken up and said I would like to visit or live in a place that boasts it is a “pleasant peninsula.” How many of you have ever thought of Michigan as a peninsula? But then again, a part of Michigan is known as the Upper Peninsula. That implies a lower one, which means that there are two peninsulas. I am guessing that the motto excludes the upper one.

 

And I note without comment that the state motto of Alabama—“Audemus jura nostra defendere”–translates to “We Dare Defend Our Rights.”

 

The billboard from some sort of church warned “LUST DESTROYS.” And here I thought that lust led to the creation of new life.

 

I put on shorts for the first time as I head into a new summer, and I look down and think: “An old white man’s winter-white legs are never attractive.”

 

“Do they lie down in soft grass

to gaze up at a sky of roaming shape-shifting

clouds? Do children still have time for daydreaming?”

Harryette Mullen, “Urban Tumbleweed”