MENTAL HOPSCOTCH IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

“Kate and Nigh-Nigh” watercolor painting by kayti sweetland rasmussen

Charlie throws himself onto our bed, snuggling heavily to gain more space between us in our antique double bed. There is no sleep from that time on till morning light, and the mind jumps from subject to subject, alighting on each for no more than a second. I am assured that 95 percent of modern society uses either queen or king size beds. I find myself needing a step stool to climb into some of these beds. A friend once asked me “how do you both sleep in this little bed?” I told her we were both little people.

As I have mentioned before, I was regularly displaced from a bed of my own as a child in my grandmother’s rooming house. Grandma felt it expedient to collect a little money for the room since I could very well sleep on a couch or large chair. I always slept with my mother while my father was at sea, cuddling a stuffed raccoon until my mother took it away from me before I left on my honeymoon. I am embarrassed to admit that I often wonder what happened to that comforting furball.

Once “bed” imprinted itself on my brain, I began thinking of various people I know and the beds they choose to sleep in.

When visiting an old high school friend, twice divorced, I noticed she had a single twin bed in her boudoir. Though she always seemed to be looking for a new boyfriend, I felt the bed was a clear signal that she chose to sleep alone and probably gave second thoughts to a prospective suitor should he have been invited into her bedroom. It reminded me of a sleepless night in Rome when the only available bed was a cot-sized single, which Dr. Advice and I shared. While he snored, I stared at the ceiling.

Another young woman of my acquaintance divorced a nasty husband who took the bed from their bedroom while she was at work. The empty space echoed her empty pocketbook, and left her with the possibility of displacing her children from their snug little beds, or sleeping on the sofa. Her older sister came to offer consolation and told her it was imperative that they buy a bed immediately, else “how did she expect to entertain?”

Many years ago my sister-in-law and I while looking for the bathroom in an older bachelor cousin’s home came upon a flimsy nightgown hanging on the back of the door. We giggled and wondered what her mother would think. She later became his seventh and last wife. No idea what size his bed was.

Once long ago on a night trip with two small children, we pulled over to the side of the road to sleep. Shortly thereafter, a tremendous roar occurred directly over our sleeping heads. Our two year old sat bolt upright in her sleeping bag, eyes as big as saucers. Unwittingly we had bedded down under a railroad track. Since then we have spent numerous nights in tents, in the back of a pickup truck and lying on the open ground under the stars with chipmunks darting over our faces. I don’t recall losing a lot of sleep on any of those occasions. Maybe I have more to think about now.

SPC 50, A HAT & SUNGLASSES

I won’t say that Dr. Advice is thrifty, but he does like a bargain. One of his most recent finds was a lovely pair of sunglasses which were tucked into a bin at a Thrift Store, much like candy bars at the check out counter at the grocery store. Through the years he has gone through many pairs of sunglasses which mysteriously disappear occasionally after a day in the garden. Now and then a lost pair will surface after a rain, having been buried under leaves, bark or soil during a garden transformation. However, since our relentless days of summer sun seem to have implanted themselves indefinitely, he is again in need of sunshades. As I waited in line at the Thrift store a few weeks ago to pay for my $.75 copy of a defunct Gourmet magazine with a gorgeous cake on its cover, he gleefully brandished his purchase while announcing that he had only paid $.99 for them! “Yes, I agreed, a grand bargain indeed, but they are GIRL’S glasses—they have diamonds on the sides!” “So what,” he replied, “they only cost 99 Cents!”

A few days later, the gaudy glasses disappeared, and a deep funk supplanted Dr. Advice’s usually cheery attitude. The search was on, and we circulated throughout the house each looking in likely spots without success. Discouraged, my dear one went to take the garden bins to the curb for garbage collection. As he checked the contents of the bin, he spied a glimmer of light flickering from between the leaves of grass and weeds. Deciding that it could be emanating from something of possible importance, he tossed the leaves aside and there to his surprise lay his sunglasses. Happiness reigned supreme once more.

Our daughter looked at the sunglasses and informed him that “Dad! They’re GIRL’S glasses!” She got the same reply “But they only cost me 99 cents!”

Today he sat on them and broke the frame, so I went to the hardware store and paid $7.99 for glue to mend them. A grand bargain.

WOULDN’T YOU KNOW IT?

I woke up a month or so ago and took a good look at my thinning hair and its effect on the wrinkles on my face. It was clearly a cry for help; namely another wig/hairpiece/style. There seems to be some sort of stigma attached to the wearing of a wig, so we will refer to it as a “style”. I have no idea why this disturbs some people. Celebrities obviously would never be caught dead in their own scraggly locks. Watching an old Lucille Ball show, Dr. Advice chirped “There! You can see she isn’t wearing a wig!” Really?! I don’t think his poor old eyes were twirling in the right direction. Not only is she wearing a wig, it isn’t even the right shade of red.

Anyway, I ordered one from a reputable place in whom I placed great trust that they would choose a complimentary shade of grey from their 50 choices. Wen it came, I thought it must be wrong, because my hair is blonde-ish, not silver. Well, Dr. A. liked it anyway, so I wore it to Seattle, and first cracker out of the barrel—my daughter did not. I hung it over a door knob during my visit and vowed to try again.

This time I bought from a catalogue with a picture of my hair color. The trick to ordering from the catalogue is to cover up the faces because they use adorable young women as models, who probably don’t need a wig anyway. You have to imagine yourself wearing it and flipping it about as you would something actually attached to your head. You don’t want it to scream “WIG” do you?

I loved it immediately and plopped it on my head to show Dr. A. I got a thumbs up, so I wore it to Southern California to visit my other daughter. She loved it too, so we went out to lunch at a favorite Mexican place in Camarillo, which is conveniently next door to a wig shoppe. ( I spell it that old fashioned way because it is just on the verge of being posh.) We had with us that day our eight year old great granddaughter Savanna, who flipped out when she saw all the plastic heads staring at us from the window dressed in varying lengths and shades of blonde, brown, black and even one with purple strands throughout, (it was Halloween). Naturally we went in, and since I was wearing the new style, I asked the lady behind the desk if she thought it could use some touches. She played around with it, gave it a spritz of hair spray and off I went, pleased as a puppy with a new bone.

That evening my friend Greg said he wouldn’t have known it was a ‘you-know-what’ and I choose to believe him. Now it sits alongside all my other hair styles, some of which really are not my color anymore; there may even be a strawberry blonde one because I always wanted to be a redhead. They probably have more fun than blondes. Vanity, thy name is woman. (I read that somewhere years ago when I was first married. It obviously made no impression.) This will now give Savanna something more to dwell on along with what she calls my fake teeth and fake shoulder. The rest of her family is perking along on all fours.

Forgive the idiocy, I simply had to tell you.

WAS HUMPTY DUMPTY AN EGG?

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses,
And all the king’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.”

Humpty Dumpty has become so popular a nursery figure and is pictured so frequently that few people today think of the verse as containing a riddle. The reason the king’s men couldn’t put him together again is known to everyone.

It’s more than probable that Humpty was a parody of someone in public office who fell out of favor, and thus was beyond redemption. We have all seen a few of that sort. But how did he become an egg?

We have John Tenneil to blame for our perception of Humpty. He was an artist and political cartoonist in the latter part of the 19th century, who contributed to Punch magazine for over 50 years. He was also famous for illustrating Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through The Looking Glass”, both of which are so famous I think it’s safe to say that Tenneil’s vision of an egg sitting on a wall tickled our sense of the ridiculous.

‘It’s very provoking to be called an egg–very’ as Humpty admits in “Through The Looking Glass”, but such common knowledge cannot be gainsaid.

What is not so certain is for how long the riddle has been known. It does not appear in early riddle books, but this may be because it was already so well-known. Students of linguistics believe that it is one of those pieces the antiquity of which is to be measured in thousands of years, or rather that it is so great that it cannot be measured at all.

The Humpty Dumpty of England is known as Boule-Boule in France, Thille Lille in Sweden, Lille-Trille in Denmark, and so on throughout the different parts of Europe. All double-rhyming words, easy and fun for children to sing. The word Humpty Dumpty is given in the Oxford English Dictionary for a boiled ale-and-brandy drink from the end of the seventeenth century.

The earliest reference to Humpty Dumpty as a squat, comical little person appears in the caption to an engraving with the title ‘A Lilliputian Prize Fighting’ published sometime between 1754 and 1764. Part of the caption reads:

Sir Humpty Dumpty fierce as a Turk,
At Captain Doodle runs his fork.

There is an old girl’s game called ‘Humpty Dumpty’ described by some American writers in 1848. The players sit down holding their skirts tight around their ankles. At an agreed signal they all fall backwards and try to recover their balance without letting go of their skirts.

Robert L. Ripley ‘Believe It Or Not’, stated that the original Humpty was Richard 111, while Professor David Daube, in one of a series of spoof nursery-rhyme histories for The Oxford Magazine” 1956, put forward the ingenious idea that Humpty Dumpty was a siege machine in the Civil War!

History aside, the beloved egg-shaped Humpty Dumpty sits precariously forever on the wall, waiting to be be pushed off in historical probability.

EVERY DOG HAS HIS DAY

You know how we all love our pets, coddling them and mostly trying to make them into four-legged humans. A neighbor lady, Mrs Godfrey, was no exception with her charming chubby Chihuahua Cappucino, who was as devoted to Belgian chocolates as his owner. The local vet was a frequent visitor and regularly put Cappucino on a strict diet, but Mrs. Godfrey just couldn’t help herself, a delicious bit of cake or something wonderful off her dinner plate somehow found its way into Cappucino’s mouth as well as her own. The wise veterinarian also prescribed a regular walking schedule, which Mrs. Godfrey followed by having her gardener carry Cappucino around the garden several times a day. It was great exercise for the gardener, but little Cappy gained little from it, except more weight.

When Mrs. Godfrey finally allowed Cappucino to walk on his own, he developed a new ailment she called “flopbot”, which simply meant he sat down wherever he was and refused to walk another step. The dear lady became frantic, positive that the dog was not long for this world, and what on earth would she do without her sweet companion? So the patient vet came again and soothed Mrs. Godfrey while reiterating his advice on caring for the pup. Finally on one visit he suggested she get a companion dog for Cappucino, which would give him more exercise as they ran around her extensive grounds.

A month went by before the vet paid another call on Mrs. Godfrey, and it turned out not to be about Cappucino, but about Cedric, the new dog she had bought to be a companion dog for Cappucino. She had apparently spent most of the month finding just the right friend for Cappy. A perfect pedigree, photos were exchanged, a luncheon date set up, and Cedric filled the bill, so she brought him home. But Cedric had one fault, and it was a big one. It took some time for her to explain the problem, not being one to discuss such embarrassing episodes. Cedric suffered from an excessive amount of flatulence. Poor Mrs. Godfrey was in a state of sobbing distress even mentioning to the vet.

“When does he do this Mrs. Godfrey”, asked the vet. “Only when he gets excited,” she said. “And that’s all the time”.

The vet changed his diet and gave him some digestive pills, and assumed all would be well. however no one estimated the amount of bacterial fermentation going on in Cedric’s body, and each approach by Cedric was accompanied by an aura of unpleasant odor. The vet finally told Mrs. Godfrey that she must get rid of the dog. Thinking he meant sending Cedric back to his Maker, Mrs. Godfrey went into another siege of sobbing. “You could give him to someone else”, the vet suggested. In the meantime Cedric was banished to a garden shed, away from any excitement, until the vet found another home for him.

The following week Mrs. Godfrey was having her annual morning coffee party for the local hospital board, with many prominent people in attendance. It was a lovely morning, and the door to the house was opened to allow people to come and go. Meanwhile, Cedric became bored in the garden shed all alone with nothing to do but tip over pots and tear open bags of compost, so he pushed open the door to see what was going on over at the main house.

Silently Cedric entered the house amid the festivities, and as he moved through the room, happily passing gas as he went, the faces of the guests registered disgust and suspicion as they stepped away from conversations throughout the room. He was soon spotted by Mrs. Godfrey, who shrieked in embarrassment, and threw Cedric out of the house while shouting apologies to her guests.

“Who would want a dog that flatulates all over the place?” she cried to the vet. “Cappucino will be heartbroken, but I cannot keep him”.

When the vet came to collect Cedric, he saw a new part time gardener pruning Mrs. Godfrey’s roses. In answer to his praise of the delightful fragrance, the new gardener said “That may be but I haven’t smelled anything for thirty years!” “You mean you can’t smell ANYTHING?’ asked the vet. “Not a thing”, answered the gardener. ” Say, that’s a real nice dog you got there, always wanted one of them boxers.”

With apologies to James Harriot fo this great story. We are lovers of his wonderful stories “All Creatures Great and Small”.”

PHILAGELOS, THE WORLD’S OLDEST JOKE BOOK

Sculpture by KSR

Laughter is good for the soul, and it sometimes keeps you out of a lot of trouble. People have been laughing at one thing or another for centuries. Robert Frost wrote “If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.”

Philagelos, a composite collection of 260 or so gags in Greek probably put together in the 4th century, is the oldest existing collection of jokes, but not the oldest collection ever heard of. In the 2nd century Athenaeus wrote that Philip II of Macedon paid for a social club in Athens to write down its members’ jokes. Apparently the early jokes were similar to the jokes of today, which throws out any thought that we may have evolved to a higher standard.

Do we all laugh at the same jokes? I think not. Things that I find hilarious, frequently bring a shake of the head from Dr. Advice. Contrarily, his idea of funny usually leaves me a bit chilly and wondering if he needs his head examined. The fact that we all find something to laugh at is the more important.

Laughter was always a favorite device of ancient monarchs and tyrants, as well as being a weapon used against them. A good king, of course, knew how to take a joke. One of the most famous one-liners of the ancient world was a joking insinuation about the paternity of the Emperor Augustus. The story goes that spotting a man from the provinces who looked much like the himself, the emperor asked if the man’s mother had ever worked in the palace. ‘No’, came the reply, ‘but my father did’. Augustus found that quite humorous.

There were many well-known philagelos ‘laughter-lovers’ in the first century, some of whom enjoyed seating dinner guests on ancient ‘whoopi cushions’ and then laughing as the air was gradually let out, proving that schoolboy pranks existed even then

Democritus, 5th century philosopher and atomist

Democritus, renowned as antiquity’s most inveterate laugher, was a stumpy little thumb of a man, who not only loved laughing but making others laugh as well. From Democritus to Whoopi Goldberg, the laugh instigators who grace our world keep the serious stuff at bay, and enable the sick, the lazy and the lame to face the perils of daily living.

THE PLUM BEAR OF RANCHO SAN JULIAN

THE ROAD HOME

On the rancho, grizzly bears were considered the outlaws of the animal world. They lived in the nearby foothills, too close for anyone’s comfort, especially since it was easy for them to pay a call at the back door or saunter down the main street of the then pueblo, looking for snacks. When they were hungry, almost nothing stopped them from plundering. Grizzlies were frightening and scary, but no one had been eye to eye with one until the Plum Bear came along.

A plum tree right next to the kitchen adobe was so heavy with fruit its boughs were hanging near the ground, where the bear could have picked all the plums he wanted. But no, our bear climbed the tree, not an easy task for a bear. The Plum Bear decided that he wanted the plums on the end of the bough on top of the roof. Anyone who knew anything about fruit knew that the ripest ones were at the top. Our bear was a fruit expert, and his only choice was to climb the tree and climb onto the roof of the adobe so he could get the best plum. The roof of the old adobe was not made to support bears.

HOUSE TODAY

Some women were busy cooking when the bear fell through the roof. His descent into the adobe must have surprised him as much as it surprised the women making tortillas. They ran screaming out of the little house, leaving it to the perplexed bear.

Horses were always kept ready, with riatas coiled at the saddle bow. Upon hearing the screams of the women, several men jumped on their waiting steeds and surrounded the Plum Bear, who had made his way out of the house. He was swiftly lassoed and tied up to a nearby sycamore tree, the best kind of tree for securing bears.

Whenever I heard this story as a child, I felt immensely sorry for the bear who had only wanted to get the perfect plum at the top of the tree. I wondered then, and still do today, if he ever got the plum.

CATTLE GRAZING IN PEACE

Today, instead of Grizzlies, the rancho is home to wild boar, wild turkeys, and white tailed deer. My grandson, a wildlife biologist, takes care of the wild boars, and takes paying customers to cull the deer population when necessary.

OATMEAL SCHMOATMEAL

Oh I know you expect me to launch into a glowing account on the virtues of a bowl of hot oatmeal. Well, forget it. I hate oatmeal.

You can tell me how life-enhancing oatmeal is, and how warm and satisfied it keeps you until it’s time for the lunch hour hamburger fix. Acclaim its time-tested qualities, and how your grandmother dolled it up with brown sugar, raisins or bananas, and how it reminds you of being young and carefree again.

Well, I’m not convinced. I still don’t like it.

Dr. Advice loves oatmeal. He loads it up with bananas, prunes, raisins and brown sugar. I’m sure it is all the fruit which makes him think it is so good. Or maybe it is because it is one of the few things he has mastered as a culinary novice. What’s wrong with bacon and eggs?

A long time ago, before I became a charter member of Oatmeal Haters of America, I touted the appeal of Scottish oats to my friend Corrine. They come in a nice time box you can use for storing something else after you enjoy the oats, and besides they take up far less room than the large boxes of flakes. I even bought her a can as an introductory present as a dinner guest, and took it as a gift instead of the same old bottle of wine.

She returned them the next day unconvinced and told me she still hated it.

In addition to the taste and texture, the cleanup is gummy and if it happens to boil over, forget it. They were passing out free samples of the stuff at a local grocery store recently, so I bought some thinking perhaps it had improved over time.

It had not. It still tastes like wallpaper paste. I’ll take a “proper English breakfast” consisting of eggs, bacon or ham, hashed brown potatoes, and a nice hot cup of tea thank you.

THESE BOOTS NOT MADE FOR WALKING

“Dressed In Her Best” oil painting by KSR

On a cold rainy day some years ago, we sat with our daughter in a charming small Mexican restaurant in Malibu, Ca. Malibu is notable for Pepperdine University and the Colony, which is a collection of homes on the expensive sand of the Pacific Ocean where many luminous or formerly luminous movie stars dwell. Sorry, but those who are star-struck or who merely wish to dip a quick toe in the ocean are prohibited.
They say that one of Johnny Carson’s prospective wives walked in front of his house a number of times until she was noticed. You see what persistence can bring?

On the particular day we were dining, my eyes were attracted to a pair of boots on a man who had just entered the restaurant. I did not look further than his legs which were bare. He was wearing a short raincoat over a pair of shorts even though it was raining. They were great boots and I remember that I had seen them on someone on TV awhile back. I guess I was staring at the boots, wondering how I could find a pair, when my daughter told me to stop staring; it was Larry Hagman!

It was the end of football season, and the USC-UCLA game was on the large TV in the back of the restaurant, so Dr. Advice went over to watch it. Our daughter assumed that he was on his way to talk to Larry Hagman and was horrified. “Oh no, he’s NOT going to talk to him is he?” Let it be known that though my husband is an energetic conversationalist, he would never be so crass as to purposely engage a local movie star in anything more than a nod of the head.

However, Mr. Hagman had chosen to watch the football game at the same time, and the two men had a grand conversation, mostly about their mutual love of fishing. His wife was also an artist and had painted fish scenes all over the plastic raincoat he had purchased at L.L.Bean. When he found that I was an artist, he came and insisted that we join him and his family and discuss my furnishing my husband with the same raincoat.

I found out that his very attractive boots were UGG boots which I had not heard of 15 years ago. The men traded good fishing spots, Dr. Advice sent him ajar of our fine smoked salmon, and we returned to our daughter and our lunch. Who said you shouldn’t speak to local celebrities?

OCTOPI

I have long been an admirer of the octopus. As a small child in Long Beach, playing daily in the breakwater, my mother warned me against the unassuming creatures, telling me to stay away from the rocks where they lived. She had taken me to a terrifying movie where the antagonist was a giant octopus who took over a lighthouse, and I envisioned giant octopi waiting patiently to grab little children who didn’t mind their mothers. I think she was more afraid of them than I.

The cephalopods are very old and have slipped through many shapes through their history. They are the wisest of the mollusks, and I have always felt it to be just as well that they never came ashore. Just think of the havoc they would cause running around in downtown New York with all eight arms signaling for a taxi.

It is true that the animals are rather odd looking, but then many of us wouldn’t win a beauty contest either. It gives one a feeling of confidence to see that Nature is still busy with experiments and is not satisfied because a Devonian fish managed to end as a two-legged character with a straw hat.

Ringo Starr of Beatle fame, wrote a charming little song called “The Octopus Garden”. The truth is that the octopus slides along the bottom collecting pebbles with which it builds underwater gardens. Perhaps this is an ancient memory guiding us to tend our human gardens.

Other than that, what has the octopus actually done to better the world? Its body looks like a bag and its feet are on its head, and it has no bones. On the other hand, it has three hearts which could prove advantageous to those of us whose single heart proves unreliable. It also has excellent eyesight and a well-developed brain both of which could have been an improvement in the human species.

It pays to know that Nature is not finished and that there is still hope for the human race.