Numb and Number

            My eldest son is wildly in love with… numbers.  From the time he learned of their existence, he ascended (descended?  side-scended?)  into a happy little world of ratios and logarithms, even sharing an elaborate equation with me one time, including lovely arcs, to prove the uselessness of cleaning his room.

            I, on the other hand, recoil mentally whenever a digit appears.  I think it started with story problems in elementary school.  Well-meaning teachers would hand out preposterous questions, I assumed, to see who could go the longest without screaming.

            “You have one apple and you want to share it equally with seven friends,” such questions would begin.  And that’s when I would stop and imagine such a ludicrous situation.  Who planned so poorly as to have only one apple when seven friends arrive?  My solution was ultimately to make a small Waldorf Salad, though I didn’t know its name at the time, and wasn’t convinced this would be anywhere near enough food for a total of eight people.  And why can’t “applesauce” be considered a correct answer?

            “You found one grape and want to share it with nine friends,” one question said.

Immediately I would try to picture this—and what are these people—street urchins from the Dickens era, covered with soot, who find one grape in the gutter, that even the dogs won’t eat, and decide to share it with nine friends?  Sounds like they ought to spend less time socializing and more time working, so they can buy everyone a grape.  I wrote, “I would not do this” for my answer.  What was next—dividing a pea into twenty pieces with a scalpel?  Were we going to be given microscopes for the next batch of story problems?

            And then along came fractions, criss-crossing operations, long division, and ultimately algebra.  Which, if you haven’t pictured a bra made of algae yet, means you haven’t given enough thought to that word.  Worst of all, they were now mixing letters with numbers, a sacrilege if ever there was one. (See my “Open Letter to You Math Types” blog of April 17^th.)

            My daughter inherited my distaste for things mathematical.  But in her case, it’s because she’s an artist.  When given a long equation with a little two elevated above the other numbers, to indicate “to the second power,” all she could think of was how stranded that awkward two looked, like a lone painting hung too high on a giant wall.  When she finally solved the equation, that’s all that was left—that little two floating up like a lost balloon.

            Numbers people have other amazing abilities as well.  They’re like savants of a sort, for whom musical training is a snap.  I have yet to meet a math wiz who is not also a gifted pianist.  And juggling!  Who would have thought juggling went along with this, but it does.  I know of an AP Calculus teacher who tells his students that whoever masters juggling will get an A in the class, and he’s invariably right.  Evidently the same gymnastics your brain goes through in order to juggle, are the same processes it needs to understand calculus.

            And all I can think about are the bruised oranges that will result as folks try this at home, dropping the fruit time and again until it cannot be shared with one friend, let alone forty-nine.

Portions of this blog post appear in “Funeral Potatoes—the Novel,” published by Covenant Communications.  There’s Jewish humor, Catholic humor, and definitely Mormon humor. Round out your collection with a bunch of my LDS books; click on their titles right here on my blog’s home page!  They’re usually much cheaper than my mainstream books (not that the content is cheaper) and you gotta like that.

Simon Says

            My cat is an assassin.  I know what you’re thinking—all cats are born hunters, blah, blah, blah.  No; this cat is different from other cats the same way Jason Bourne is different from you and me.

            We got Simon from a box of free kittens not realizing that solid charcoal cats with amazingly soft coats and gold eyes are not your basic cat.  They are trained killers in cat suits.  Here’s how I know. Now, not every husband will watch CATS 101 with his wife, which is one more reason why I call mine St. Bob, but we were watching it recently when the show began to describe an unusual cat which was bred by French monks to rid the world of mice.  Evidently these clever monks devised a gene pool that resulted in a cat with superhuman (supercat?) abilities, which—and I am a witness—include defying gravity.  It’s called a Chartreux.  Great Scott—we adopted a serial killer!

            I was in the back yard gardening when I saw a dark flash zip by, heard a thud, and then saw Bob dash into the bushes. Soon Bob came out, sputtering, “How does a cat run faster than a bird can fly?”  Simon had kept pace with a flying bird, leapt into the air to smack it sideways into our fence, and then pounced on the stunned creature once it hit the ground.  Bob rescued the bird and released it as soon as it regained consciousness.  I’ve had cats all my life and I have never seen one that zig zags through the air to follow his prey as if tethered to the actual bird.

            And mice have no chance whatsoever.  Even though Simon’s front paws are declawed, it's as if we have merely installed a silencer on his gun.  It has not impeded his hunting ability one iota. He climbs trees and jumps over 8-foot fences as if they’re toys he ordered on the internet.  The other night we decided to dine with dinner guests on our patio.  No sooner had we started our meal than Simon came jogging around from the side yard with a huge mouse in his mouth, the rodent’s tail swinging from his jaws.   Just what you want to delight visitors.  So, amid squeals of disgust from our company, he proceeded to place the mouse on the lawn and lay on it, holding it beneath him.  Then, eager for a literal game of cat and mouse, released it, at which moment it dashed up our 9-foot arbor, which is covered with a lush grape vine this time of year.  Simon kept pace and climbed right up the arbor after it. 

            Oh my gosh; this is like Hickory Dickory Dock.  Only worse. I tried to distract our guests from the unintentional entertainment, but their jaws had dropped as they watched Simon scale the iron arbor in one second flat, then perch on top, wild-eyed and bloodthirsty.

  

            And heaven help any birds who build nests in our trees and then try to boot out their youngsters.  Those poor things will fall right into the waiting jaws of Simon, who has learned to bide his time under vines frequented by hummingbirds, and branches frequented by everyone else. 

            Disgustingly, like all cats, he brings in his catch as if it’s a gift.  But how is it a gift if all that’s left are the beak and some feathers?   If we lived in an agricultural area, he’d probably be dragging in the remains of goats and pigs. 

            Years ago Bob said to me, “If I hadn’t married you,” and paused.  I was sure he would then say, “my life would have had no meaning.”  Or “I’d have missed out on the best woman in the world.”  Or some other romantic ending.  But no.  Here is what he said in total: “If I hadn’t married you (pause), you’d be one of those women with forty cats.”  Nice.

            And maybe it wouldn’t have been forty.  Maybe four or five, I’ll admit to that.  But not if they were Chartreux’s.  One is definitely plenty.

Jury Duty Goes Awry

            I want to be a professional juror.  I am convinced my opinions can save America and I want desperately to inject them into the deliberations of people whose wide open minds are a playground for fast-dancing attorneys.  And, also, I think I’m right.  So I want to get in there and try to reason with these so-called “peers” who watch waaay too much TV.

            Let me give you an example.  I was recently summoned to join a throng of hopefuls at my nearby court house.  Most of them, I realize, were hoping to get sent home.  In fact, I sat next to a guy who proceeded to tell me exactly how to do it.  I was torn between lecturing him about his civic duty and clamming up so he’d get the heck out of there and let some solid thinkers in.

            Eventually we were ushered into a courtroom where the attorneys quizzed prospective jurors about which TV cop shows they liked, and no fewer than three women (three!) admitted they watched NCIS because of Michael Weatherly!  Really?  You are old enough to be this guy’s mother, yet you are ogling him like some teenager, and you admit this in a public setting?

            Well, it’s simply appalling.  How can the fate of the accused rest in the hands of such ninnies?  They’re likely to acquit him just because he’s cute!

            You can’t blame the attorneys; they’re just trying to stack the deck in favor of their side, and likely want these very dopes in the jury box.  They want to know which folks watch which shows, and could be overly sympathetic to the arresting officer.  I’m telling you, they need me, to remind them to look at the evidence. Or at the very least, I could inject some humor into these proceedings. 

 

            Finally my name was called to join the lineup of “maybe” jurors.  I was asked what I do.  Easy.  “I’m a writer.”  What do you write?  Uh-oh.  This could be a problem.  I want to keep my answer short and thus harder to denounce.  I took a breath.  “Comedy.”

            The lawyer stared at me.  I stared back and shrugged.  Hey, it is what it is.  At least it isn’t detective novels, right?  They should let me in there.  Comedy means nothing in the world of law, right?  Seriously, what is less funny than the judicial system?  Should be a non-issue. 

            Yes!  I was assigned to take Seat Number Five in the jury box.  I am the very juror you want.  Okay, maybe not the one you want, but definitely the one you need.  And then, the minute I sat down, the other attorney said, “We dismiss Mrs. Hilton.”  What?  You can do that?  You can get a person’s hopes up and then just fire them on the spot?  How rude.

            I sighed, picked up my purse, and stepped down into the center of the courtroom.  “Well, I guess this means I won’t get my two dollars and twenty-five cents,” I snapped.  The whole courtroom, including the judge, burst out laughing and I realized: My work here is actually done.

Oh, you can learn a whole lot more than proper courtroom decorum in this brilliant blog.  Be sure to subscribe by typing your email address into the little box on the right.  MUCH easier than serving on a jury, my friends.

What I Want for Mother's Day

            As a mother of four, I have received, shall we say, interesting gifts over the years.   From the chubby fists of dandelions, which I loved, to the flimsy pledges of peace and quiet on IOUs (with expiration dates!), I’ve seen just about everything.  But in case you are among the few (ha ha) who still haven’t purchased a gift for your mother this year, allow me to give you some ideas.  Here are a dozen things I’ve really wanted over the years:

1.      An app app.  It would deliver a mild, non-lethal shock to any child standing in my proximity, who zones out while I’m talking, because he or she has opened an app.

2.      While we’re talking apps, how about one that finds your kids’ belongings?  It would be like a homing device that could locate their shoes, their homework, or any other item they think you should keep track of.  Come to think of it, a homing device on the kids themselves is not a bad idea.

3.      Some mystery.  In this case, I would like the car radio to mysteriously break one day, without explanation.

4.      A chef to do nothing but make school lunches.  I figure I’ve made roughly eleven thousand, five hundred and eighty lunches over the years, and just maybe it’s time for a break.  And if the same chef would like to whip up an occasional dinner, I could live with that.

5.      I’d love one of my kids to say, “Mom, I’m going to do a load of wash—is there anything you’d like me to throw in?”  But this would have to be said while I’m standing near a soft chair, as fainting is a definite possibility.

6.      A call from all my kids’ teachers, raving about how wonderful my children are in class (“A joy,” one will say), and how they don’t know how they can go on, once the school year ends and my kids move up to the next grade.

7.      Bad Influence Detector Spray.  I could spray all their friends to see which kids are headed for trouble.  The ones who cough and choke would be scratched off the list, while we’d keep the ones who laugh and say, “Oh, Mrs. Hilton, you’re so funny!”

8.      Peanut butter, syrup, jam and ketchup containers that have no screw-on lids, and thus no grooves to catch drips and get all gummy and sticky.  Also, these same products manufactured to adhere to bread, but not to fingers.

9.      A surprise statement.  For example, I’d love for my daughter to say, ‘You know, I’ve thought about it, and I don’t think I’ll date until I’m 25.”

10.  Videogames that teach housekeeping skills.  “Kill those germs!” “Blast that dust!” For older kids, a money management game that could teach them how to stay out of debt.  Credit cards and flirty girlfriends would be the bad guys. 

11.  Clothes  hangers that hang onto the garments, so that only their owner can remove them. If you have the wrong fingerprint, say the print of a teen trying to borrow her mom’s clothes, they won’t come off and an alarm will sound.

12.  I’d like arranged marriages to come back in style.  Every date could be a chaperoned affair, and when it’s time for your offspring to marry, you select half a dozen prospective suitors for your kids to choose from.  Oh, come on-- every parent in the world has contemplated this with a smile on his or her face, and you know it.  If you can pull this one off, you will likely get your own holiday.  And mothers everywhere will buy you a gift. 

And now, a baker’s dozen—yet one more great idea: Give your mom a subscription to this very blog.  She’ll think of you every time one of my posts pops into her inbox.  Just type her email address into the box at the right, and you will gain instant hero status! (My books also make wonderful gifts… just saying.)

You Don't Have to Major in Drama

            What is it about college life?  You can’t go two days without High Drama in the Dorms, Drama on the Campus, Drama in the Parking Lots.  If you want to be an actor, you don’t even need to major in theatre: It’s a built-in prerequisite for every other experience offered there.

            I have to confess, it’s mostly us girls.  We trade playground swings for mood swings, and our childhood pals for people we live with who then steal everything from our groceries to our boyfriends.

            My three boys never called home with wild tales to report of elaborate schemes to hide their belongings, get even with a roommate, or to soothe a crying classmate in 4C.  But girls can multi-task and do all three of those things before 10 a.m. 

            Our daughter described a soap opera starring two of her roommates who were hiding a third from the management who had kicked Third out, that lasted until two in the morning.  There was thrashing, there was crying, followed by a sunny day of everyone getting along again.

            “What they really need to do,” I told Bob, “is get a crop duster to fly low over all our universities, and release a cloud of Valium over the dorms.”  Hey, they do this sort of thing to control mosquitoes, and I think coeds pose a far greater threat to human happiness.  With ideas like this, I am amazed that I am not on ten different advisory boards.

            Bob was working at the computer in the family room as I was in the kitchen, about  40 feet away, but still in view.  I was cooking as the phone rang.  It was our daughter.  She needed help with more drama.  This time it was a creepy student who wanted to date her, wouldn’t take an obvious brush-off, and kept showing up and standing too close.  He made snippy comments to the boy she did want to date, he came by to visit and wouldn’t leave, and turned into a stalker who didn’t understand that stalking is supposed to be secretive.  She told me about his angry outbursts, his childish whining, and some other behavior that was garnering him one enemy after another.

            I listened quietly for a while, then said, “Honey, he’s just a tormented misfit.”

            Bob swiveled around on the computer chair and said, “Hellooo?  I’m right here; I can hear you.”        

            Well, of course now Nicole and I crack up and I’m laughing too hard to be of use to anyone.  Maybe I should ask the crop dusters to swing over my house instead.

Passing Up Hawaii

            As luck would have it, and luck always does, I know a lot of crazy people.  I don’t mean crazy as in, “Oh, you should meet Jen—she’s so fun and crazy.”  I mean crazy as in diagnosed with things like “borderline psychosis” and “schizophrenia.”

            I seem to attract them.  (NO COMMENTS FROM YOU MONKEY CHILDREN OF MINE).  I find them in all kinds of places, and sometimes I’m asked to visit them as a church assignment.  And once you have a crazy person in your life, they stay.  It’s one of nature’s laws, I think.  But I’m not complaining; I rather enjoy them.  Mentally ill people are often smarter than average and they lack the annoying pretenses you have to wade through with regular people. They tell you bluntly how they feel, they’re often quite insightful, and they’re almost always entertaining.  They don’t always understand social conventions which, I believe, is why Caller ID was invented.  And, okay, yes, they are scary from time to time, but so is eating at Taco Bell, and yet we do it.

            I have a senior citizen friend I’ll call Ruby, simply because I know no other Ruby’s.  (Rubies?)  Whatever.  She is married to an equally disturbed man I’ll call Rocky, again because I know no Rocky’s. (Rockies?)  Thankfully these people come in singular, rather than plural form.

            Rocky’s story is much worse than the paranoid, multiple-personality disordered Ruby.  He’s a registered sex offender, an alcoholic, a drunk driver, and a parolee who keeps going back to prison.  He speaks LOUDLY about these things when you take the two of them to the DMV for an I.D., since Rocky is not allowed to drive.  He then causes crowds to back away, and hives to appear on your neck.

            At any rate, Rocky recently came into a large inheritance and did what any crazy man would do, thus confirming a diagnosis none of us were questioning in the first place.  Did he pay off his bills?  Nope.  Did he invest it wisely?  Nope.  He gambled away a huge hunk of it and then spent the rest on a lavish trip to Hawaii.  And, of course, he wanted Ruby to come along.

            Ruby said no.  You can usually count on crazy people to do the opposite of what you expect.  Now, Ruby has had a hard life and deserves some R & R in my opinion, so I asked her why on earth she wasn’t taking advantage of the only chance she has ever had, to go to Hawaii.

            “Well,” she explained, “every time I’ve ever gone anywhere with Rocky, he leaves me and goes off on his own.”  Excuse me?  A crazy man takes you to Hawaii and then vanishes?  Is this not the very definition of a win-win situation?  You couldn’t get the world’s best travel agent to book you a deal like that.  In fact, it’s reason enough to do the hula whether you’re in Hawaii or not.

            I tried to get her to see the bonanza right within her grasp, but she shook her head.  “You think this is a blessing in disguise,” she said. 

“No,” I told her.  “There is no disguise here whatsoever.  The entire thing is a blessing inside and out.  You go to Hawaii and then whammo—you can snorkel, enjoy a luau, you-name-it, all without Rocky tagging along.  How could it possibly get better than that?”  I didn’t say it, but I was imagining him gloriously lost for days.

But Ruby would not budge.  She told Rocky to go by himself and so he did.  When I took Ruby to her next psychiatrist appointment, the receptionist asked her how she was feeling and Ruby explained that she felt fine, now that she had decided not to go to Hawaii.

And that, my friends, is precisely how you know that someone needs their head examined. 

Don't be crazy-- subscribe to Joniopolis in the little email box on the right.  Then you can have messages like this one pop into your inbox several times a week.  Granted, it's not as exciting as tickets to Hawaii, but I'm working on it.  (And if you are going there already, grab one of my 3 new novels to read on the beach-- check out Kindle and Createspace.com!)

My Childhood Prank

            Yes, there is only one prank I pulled in childhood.  At least one that I choose to share.  And this one I pulled with my friend, Nan Slaughter, when we were both about 13 years old.  In those days, had there been personal computers and Pinterest, this idea would have been on there.  But it wasn’t.  We’d simply heard of a grand, craftsy project, which was to dye your old clothes—and even your underwear—to give them new life.  You could have a whole new wardrobe for just pennies!   The key ingredient was RIT dye.  You know the familiar little boxes, still a bargain in every grocery store.  We chose navy blue.  Then we gathered T-shirts, camisoles, slips, you-name-it, filled a sink with hot water and RIT, then squished the clothes down into the murky liquid and waited.

            Nan, to her credit, was the brave one.  She reached into the abyss, pulled out the garments, and wrung them out, rinsing them again and again with cool water.  And they were a dazzling success.  There was only one problem: Nan’s hands were now bluish gray and it wouldn’t wash off.  (We should have timed this for Halloween and she could have been a corpse in a spook alley!)  Alas, nothing would budge the tint of her newly-dead-looking hands. 

            And so the wheels began turning.  We decided to wrap her wrists with bandages, hop on the city bus, and ride around town telling onlookers about a terrible accident she’d had, to see who would believe us.  I borrowed white hankies from my dad’s dresser drawer, and we pinned them carefully to look like real bandages. Then off we went to keep straight faces as she told all inquirers (and there were many) our sad tale.  She concocted a wonderful story about helping her brother lift a heavy stereo up some stairs (yes, stereos were heavy in those days), when suddenly it fell, crushing her hands and causing the veins to burst, filling her poor hands with blood.  Then we would both look especially sad, not really sure if she would ever recover.

            Luckily our victims got off at various bus stops and new recruits boarded, giving us the chance to re-tell and embellish the story every few blocks.  I seem to recall saying that Nan was a hemophiliac and needed a transplant at one point.  Oh, the sympathy!  Oh, the shock!  People were genuinely sorry for us.  Well, sorry for her, but I chose to bask in that pity a bit myself.  Finally one woman offered us a dollar!  And suddenly we realized we were great actresses surely destined to win Oscars one day.   We also realized that maybe this thing had gone too far.  About one dollar too far.  Lying our heads off was one thing, but accepting money under false pretenses was just over the line of decency as we defined it.  So we headed for home. 

            But our creative talents kept flowing, and though we didn’t hoodwink the public again—at least not intentionally—we went on to become other things. I became a writer who, uh, accepts money for making things up (hmm…) and Nan became an amazing quilter/cook/author/artist/wedding floral designer herself.  We’ve now been friends for more years than I admit to being alive.  She's been there for me in countless ways over the years, and last August traveled from Seattle to Sacramento to help me enormously with the wedding reception for my son.  Her blog, www.potsandpins.com, has 5,200 followers and when you check it out, for you must, don’t think about my airing of this laundry, okay?  Or at least, if you do, picture it navy blue.

Here we are in a photo booth at the mall, about a year later and still-- thankfully-- not in jail:

C'mon, now, you know you're dye-ing to subscribe.  Just type your email address into the little box on the right.  I can't promise to send you my uber cool white aviator sunglasses (retro is hot, now), but I will send you brilliant comedy  several times a week, and won't even charge you a dollar.