I know, I know, you have seen it in movies or in cartoons, but have you ever actually seen a real live, on-the-street person do it? Or heard of a person doing it, or have actually yourself done it? No.
Well, I have slipped on a banana peel, and lemme tell you, it is NOT as portrayed since time immemorial. Your feet do not go out from under you. The foot that hits the banana peel slides forward in the direction it was going when it hit the peel, the other foot stays where it was, resulting in an unexpected , extreme, and if you are not used to it, painful, split. Like the cheerleaders do. A seventy-four year old man doing a beautiful, graceful, full split. Something to see.
My claim to fame.
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When I was a senior in High School I happened to wonder how it came to be that females were called, "women." Were they wo-men? Obvious to me that there were "men" and then therewere these other kinds of "men." How did this happen? Fortunately. in the study hall, there was this extremely thick dictionary left open on a stand at the front of the room.
I looked in the dictionary and I came across the word, "woom." And the definition of "woom" was, "One who breeds in secret." Well, that made sense. I knew that women had a thing against fornicating out where God and everybody could see them. All the women I knew had a thing against fornicating even if no one could see them. So one who "woomed" was a "wooman." Perfect.
So I go along in my bliss about education and one day I told this to someone and I looked in a dictionary to show him and Viola'! no "woom." Obviously I needed a bigger dictionary, so one day when I went to the public library, I looked in their massive dictionary, really, really, expecting to find it - and it wasn't in there! What is this? In order to shorten the story, ever since, I have frequently, when in the presence of a large dictionary, looked for my word. I looked in a Barnes and Noble dictionary just a few days ago. I have never seen it again.
Now. Did I dream that whole thing? Even the definition? I don't think so, but then how could this be? And if the definition didn't fit so well the word, it wouldn't be so bad. I could forget it. But this is a beautiful word and I want it back!
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I was in the Air Force, stationed in Sacramento for nigh on twenty years. I worked on obsolete equipment, so this was the only place - except for the training base at Denver, that used these obsolete electronic things.
Radomes on the underbelly of T-29 trainers were what housed the antennas for the radar used by the Bomb/Nav equipment upon which I worked. Sheet Metal used to remove them for repair and general inspection and cleaning.
We had a couple of gung-ho inspectors and one day they took it into their heads to start writing up the least little thing wrong with the radomes, so for that month, in the reports, the number of radomes removed increased dramatically.
There was this Sgt. I worked with - a recently converted Mormon with whom I used to argue quite a bit. He seemed pretty smart, but he had a quirk with his logic at times.
In those days, Lyndon Johnson was President and the Viet-Nam war was on.This guy worried a lot about Communists. One day he took me aside and asked me if I thought that the Communists were sabotaging the radomes. I thought he was kidding, but he wasn't. These radomes - used for obsolete equipment - on an aircraft used for TRAINING, during a violent war, IN the United States, on an Air Force base, were being sabotaged by Communists!
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I was in downtown Sacramento waiting for my 5:50 P.M. bus to take me to my home twenty miles away when I see, coming down the street, this guy dragging this little but heavy old Chinese woman. She would not take a step although he kept pleading with her to do so. All he would get by way of reply is some mumbled Chinese words.
As he finally came up to the bunch of us waiting for the bus, he began pleading with us to help him. He said he'd been carrying and dragging her all the way from "K" street - which was a distance, doing what he was doing. He looked directly at me and begged, "Please help me."
I told him that my bus was due any second and he replied, "Oh, sure. Everybody's too busy to help. Thanks a lot. Some people!" And on like that. Eventually, realizing I could catch a bus an hour later, I told him I would help him. Down the street I could see my bus coming. Shit!
So the two of us carried and dragged this heavy old Chinese lady, occasionally asking her where she wanted to go, getting mumbled Chinese words in reply, asking people around there if anybody knew where she lived, nobody knew. Somehow we wound up at the door to the building that stood on the corner where I had been waiting for my bus. A man came out and said, "Dammit, (I forget her name. Let's call her "Cherry Blossom.) Cherry Blossom! I told you not to go out by yourself! You always do this!."
He was furious. We asked if she lived in the building. He says, yeah - just get her upstairs, and as we took her upstairs, he continued to berate her.
Around this time, a miracle happened. The Chinese lady began answering our questions in English and she was able to walk unassisted. Evudently she would always find someone to carry her home whenever she was able to sneak out alone.
1 comment:
haha
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