Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Kicking the Can down the Road

Kicking the can down the Road

My dad was a tough old rascal. He could really take his suffering like a man. ME? I’m a wuss and when I get to hurting it shows. For example I remember my dad had the hick-ups once for over a month. He bore it like a stoic…the Dahlia Lama would have been proud… Then he had a bad case of shingles and it brought him low but he really sucked it up. ME? I remember once beating my forehead on the wall after an impacted wisdom tooth got pulled. Then there were the kidney stones…ouch! My latest malady are hive like symptoms and I am one big ITCH…actually today has been better, maybe the Benadryl helped.

Linda tells me that having little hurts from time to time is better than having one big hurt once in a blue moon…. Like a stroke or a heart attack. It is a subset of her philosophy that having a bunch of little setbacks frequently is better than having a big one. It’s like your body vents the bad a little at a time instead of holding it in until bango you go off like a firecracker…. You know blow your cork? My wife is pretty smart and comes from a family with a lot of Voodoo in it.

When we’re driving in a car and she sees a cat (it doesn’t have to be black) she scribes an X on the windshield. Her mother is even stranger and makes Linda look like an amateur in the art of superstition. She believes in hexes and jinxes… One time she told me in the supermarket… “You see that woman over there looking at me? She’s giving me the evil eye.”

I don’t know what to make of it really. What if there is a germ of truth in it? I’d feel pretty stupid at scoffing at something like that only to tick some old crone off and have her turn me into a mushroom. So I just go along with it….not really believing but thinking its better not to tempt fate by being some kind of a wise ass.

Linda told me that I was a big disappointment to her family. I turned out to be “Normal.” Not somebody they could brag about and not somebody they could wring their hands over. Linda really makes me laugh at times, so I said, “What would they have preferred instead?” “Oh,” she replied, “A criminal locked up in the state penitentiary… someone they could have cried “woe is me” over and lamented what an SOB son in law they had…. Or someone like JR on Dallas who was worth millions and used it to make everybody else miserable. They hate it that you’re just an everyday normal type of nobody… You give the family a bad name.”

My Labrador knows when a storm is coming. She starts behaving in a characteristic manner. She slinks from room to room, follows her tail and then slinks off into the closet. She used to crawl under the bed but she got too big for that. When she starts in Linda says, “Storms a coming, get everything put up and tied down.” Sure enough the clouds roll in and we have quite a blow.

Now what you must be thinking does all this have to do with the price of eggs at the farmers market? Well here is my take….There are things in this world that can’t be explained by the wonders of our science and technology. We aren’t as smart and sophisticated as we think. There was a lot of living that went down on this earth before the invention of cell phones. The human spirit is being buried in layer upon layer of technology but it’s still there. You have to look harder and deeper to find it but it’s still there and marvelous to behold. The world might have changed but people haven’t.