Just now I’m cruising toward the intersection of Heavy Sigh and Bless His Heart.
The daily newspaper for the metropolitan area where I live with hundred of other people ran a headline recently that shouted, “Shotgun Blast Kills Woman.”
While I shook my head at the level of violent crime in our world today, my teenaged son peered over my shoulder.
“Why did that make the news?”
What did I raise? A wild animal in the Jungle of Man? A zombie with no heart, not even somebody else’s?
I never miss the opportunity to dish up a life lesson like it was biscuit gravy. “A woman was killed. Thankfully that doesn’t happen much around here, so it made the front page.
“That’s not what is says. They’re all worked up over the blast. Are they surprised that a shotgun actually shot somebody?”
“That’s just the way they wrote the headline.”
“They should be careful what they say. It would be news if the shotgun pulled a knife, or if it popped somebody over the head for a bad joke. But a shotgun blasting somebody is like saying a woman went shopping at the mall.”
“It’s not exactly the same thing.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen you cause more damage at the mall.”
I needed to continue this discussion, but just then I spotted a coupon for a favorite department store.
“Well you should feel sorry for her family.” I reached for my scissors.
“I feel sorry for the writer who doesn’t know about the shotgun thing. He’s gonna feel mighty stupid when he finds out we knew about that cause and effect theory all along.”
I begin to clip. Twenty per cent off, even for sale items.
“Well what sort of headline would you come up with?”
“Well I would sure point out that there was somebody who pulled the trigger.” He watched me as I started to tuck the coupon into my wallet.
“See, Mom, it’s just like you and the mall. Coupons don’t save money.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“People do.”
I checked the fine print on the small slip of paper. Not good on clothing, glassware, food items, or school supplies. The thing was no more effective than an empty gun.
Somewhere the head of the NRA is weeping over the spokesman they’ll never have.
Laugh
Showing posts with label knife. Show all posts
Showing posts with label knife. Show all posts
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Friday, September 11, 2009
Desperately Seeking Something
Because I don’t spend enough time looking for things in my daily life, I bought a word search puzzle book. The idea is to find and circle words that are hidden inside a box with a bunch of unalphabetized letters, which is good because finding the other kind would be too much like filing. Word Search is like a scavenger hunt only you don’t have to go next door to your spooky neighbor’s house asking for a kitchen knife or a set of hot curlers.
My first search was for a pencil. Ever the optimist, I looked in the cup on my desk. I found four broken blue crayons, two fountain pens with no ink, and a petrified Milkbone. I briefly thought about trying to use the Milkbone, but the Dachshund is possessive and I’m pretty sure she can take me in a fight. She is not known for fair play.
I looked under the sofa cushions, in the glove compartment of the car, and in my jewelry box, where I found the safety pin I needed last week for an unbecoming wardrobe malfunction. Later that afternoon while doing the laundry, I found a pencil stub in the lint trap of the dryer. The eraser was melted, but if we wait for all our blessings to come at once there will be nothing left for the Rapture, so I forged ahead.
I sat down with my puzzle book and my pencil stub. Immediately I found several words. None of them were in the word list and I’m not sure that all of them were English. At least one of them made the dog blush. Perhaps I needed an eraser after all. I scratched out my ineligible answers with the safety pin and circled a likely looking word using all the letters on one side of the puzzle. If this were Scrabble, I could clinch the victory with a Q and an unabridged dictionary.
About that time the Dachshund tackled me in an announced Milkbone raid and broke the point of my pencil stub. So now I’m off to search for the pencil sharpener. But that’s okay. I haven’t found any more words to circle anyway. I think I’ll write to Vanna and ask to buy a vowel.
Wonder where I can find her address?
My first search was for a pencil. Ever the optimist, I looked in the cup on my desk. I found four broken blue crayons, two fountain pens with no ink, and a petrified Milkbone. I briefly thought about trying to use the Milkbone, but the Dachshund is possessive and I’m pretty sure she can take me in a fight. She is not known for fair play.
I looked under the sofa cushions, in the glove compartment of the car, and in my jewelry box, where I found the safety pin I needed last week for an unbecoming wardrobe malfunction. Later that afternoon while doing the laundry, I found a pencil stub in the lint trap of the dryer. The eraser was melted, but if we wait for all our blessings to come at once there will be nothing left for the Rapture, so I forged ahead.
I sat down with my puzzle book and my pencil stub. Immediately I found several words. None of them were in the word list and I’m not sure that all of them were English. At least one of them made the dog blush. Perhaps I needed an eraser after all. I scratched out my ineligible answers with the safety pin and circled a likely looking word using all the letters on one side of the puzzle. If this were Scrabble, I could clinch the victory with a Q and an unabridged dictionary.
About that time the Dachshund tackled me in an announced Milkbone raid and broke the point of my pencil stub. So now I’m off to search for the pencil sharpener. But that’s okay. I haven’t found any more words to circle anyway. I think I’ll write to Vanna and ask to buy a vowel.
Wonder where I can find her address?
Monday, April 6, 2009
Is The Shoe on The Other Foot?
Our postal workers are off the hook. Apparently the going occupation for the overstressed and ethically challenged loner career person in the South these days is mortician. I’m not talking about the solemn, well-dressed individual always ready to pull out one of the appropriate condolences he keeps handy in the breast pocket of his morning coat, and who is associated with a fine institution that has served us faithfully since the days when our granddaddies perished from reckless driving in the family wagon.
No, I’m referring to the type of guy whose day is so full of drinking clear liquid out of a mason jar and cleaning his ear with his pocket knife that he just doesn’t get around to cremating that day, so, as we all do, shoves his work aside says “to heck with it” and goes out to play in the sunshine. Unfortunately his work, having been dead for an uncomfortable length of time already, gets pushed to the corner of his desk and forgotten.
What’s a poor mortician to do? Why he simply pops the customer in a convenient hole out back until he gets a chance to do the proper thing. Sort of like filing, funeral director style. That’s what a mortuary in Georgia did a while back, and although it made the news when it got around, it sure saved a ton of money on matches.
The newest headliner is a thrifty South Carolina mortician who was faced with an untidy problem of a too-tall customer. Or a too-short place of eternal rest, it’s hard to say. Anyway, our handy free-thinking guy took matters into his own hands. He sliced the final resting feet off just above the ankles, tucked the whole package neatly inside the casket. Sort of an assembly-required overnight express delivery for the Pearly Gates.
The whole thing would probably have disappeared over the horizon like flexible bangle bracelets, Earth shoes, and any television program I vow to watch regularly, but in a small town a tale of removable tootsies is going to travel like it has winged feet, which is probably what this guy had once he got to heaven.
The rumors flew, authorities got involved, and the body was exhumed. There inside the casket, like a Mr. Potato Body with interchangeable parts was the customer. And available separately, were his feet.
Now that’s what I call thinking outside the box. From the inside.
No, I’m referring to the type of guy whose day is so full of drinking clear liquid out of a mason jar and cleaning his ear with his pocket knife that he just doesn’t get around to cremating that day, so, as we all do, shoves his work aside says “to heck with it” and goes out to play in the sunshine. Unfortunately his work, having been dead for an uncomfortable length of time already, gets pushed to the corner of his desk and forgotten.
What’s a poor mortician to do? Why he simply pops the customer in a convenient hole out back until he gets a chance to do the proper thing. Sort of like filing, funeral director style. That’s what a mortuary in Georgia did a while back, and although it made the news when it got around, it sure saved a ton of money on matches.
The newest headliner is a thrifty South Carolina mortician who was faced with an untidy problem of a too-tall customer. Or a too-short place of eternal rest, it’s hard to say. Anyway, our handy free-thinking guy took matters into his own hands. He sliced the final resting feet off just above the ankles, tucked the whole package neatly inside the casket. Sort of an assembly-required overnight express delivery for the Pearly Gates.
The whole thing would probably have disappeared over the horizon like flexible bangle bracelets, Earth shoes, and any television program I vow to watch regularly, but in a small town a tale of removable tootsies is going to travel like it has winged feet, which is probably what this guy had once he got to heaven.
The rumors flew, authorities got involved, and the body was exhumed. There inside the casket, like a Mr. Potato Body with interchangeable parts was the customer. And available separately, were his feet.
Now that’s what I call thinking outside the box. From the inside.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Miss Manners Fights Back
While I’m not considered a prude by anyone except the examples of the species to whom I have given birth, I’m altogether a poor sport when it comes to food I will consume in public.
Unless I am in the company of dear friends who have known me long enough to identify the stains on my Riverbanks Zoo T-Shirt right down to the unsightly spot from the day we learned that the output of Lorikeets is greater than the input, or of family who is bound by the courts and/or the church to love me for better or for Waldorf salad, in sickness and in Heath bars, I’m not ordering anything that displays unlikely tendencies toward flinging sauces at random passersby.
Salads are particularly offensive in a social setting and should be regulated to over-the-sink binges indulged in while wearing particularly offensive pajamas destined for cleaning canary poop from the birdcage or grimy corners in the garage. Salads are filled with treacherous items that shoot streams of noxious juices into your eye when pierced with a sharp object, and difficult fibrous items that do not respond admirably to cutlery.
Likewise, I am not interested in consuming steaming dishes of noodles at, say, Sunday School gatherings because the first time an errant strand of fettuccine slaps my chin with a load of steaming Alfredo leaving a worm-shaped brand that will be with me til death do us part, I am altogether capable of comments that will guarantee excommunication on the spot. At the very least I'll be voted out of the covered dish dinner line.
On one ambitious jaunt to a local restaurant I couldn’t help but notice a young lady at a nearby table gather up more vegetation from her salad bowl than many farmers reap during a summer afternoon, and place the bales of foliage in her mouth with the same delicate flair usually reserved for swallowers of flaming swords. She was sitting with a young man who was engrossed in hand-dipping pieces of his French toast into the syrup swamp he cultivated in a nearby soup bowl. How have we raised a generation of young people who are passionate about a clean environment, but do not consider Mr. Knife and Mr. Fork their friend?
I watched in open-mouthed amazement as the girl hauled up a load of greens that wouldn’t fit into a lobster trap and crammed the whole package into her mouth. She looked like Sylvester the cat seconds before Granny rescued Tweety Bird from his jaws. She chewed contentedly for several minutes, then blotted her lips with a napkin and, looking my way, leaned over to Sticky Hands Steve and whispered through the poppyseed dressing, “Somebody should help that little old lady with her food. She can’t even close her mouth and there’s a puddle of gravy in her cleavage.”
I summoned the waitress and ordered a dessert dripping with enough chocolate sauce to cover Hershey Pennsylvania in profits and had her deliver it to the young lady and her boyfriend, Mr. Syrup Hands. Then I pulled out my digital camera with movie function.
Good manners are nice, but You Tube is still the best revenge.
Unless I am in the company of dear friends who have known me long enough to identify the stains on my Riverbanks Zoo T-Shirt right down to the unsightly spot from the day we learned that the output of Lorikeets is greater than the input, or of family who is bound by the courts and/or the church to love me for better or for Waldorf salad, in sickness and in Heath bars, I’m not ordering anything that displays unlikely tendencies toward flinging sauces at random passersby.
Salads are particularly offensive in a social setting and should be regulated to over-the-sink binges indulged in while wearing particularly offensive pajamas destined for cleaning canary poop from the birdcage or grimy corners in the garage. Salads are filled with treacherous items that shoot streams of noxious juices into your eye when pierced with a sharp object, and difficult fibrous items that do not respond admirably to cutlery.
Likewise, I am not interested in consuming steaming dishes of noodles at, say, Sunday School gatherings because the first time an errant strand of fettuccine slaps my chin with a load of steaming Alfredo leaving a worm-shaped brand that will be with me til death do us part, I am altogether capable of comments that will guarantee excommunication on the spot. At the very least I'll be voted out of the covered dish dinner line.
On one ambitious jaunt to a local restaurant I couldn’t help but notice a young lady at a nearby table gather up more vegetation from her salad bowl than many farmers reap during a summer afternoon, and place the bales of foliage in her mouth with the same delicate flair usually reserved for swallowers of flaming swords. She was sitting with a young man who was engrossed in hand-dipping pieces of his French toast into the syrup swamp he cultivated in a nearby soup bowl. How have we raised a generation of young people who are passionate about a clean environment, but do not consider Mr. Knife and Mr. Fork their friend?
I watched in open-mouthed amazement as the girl hauled up a load of greens that wouldn’t fit into a lobster trap and crammed the whole package into her mouth. She looked like Sylvester the cat seconds before Granny rescued Tweety Bird from his jaws. She chewed contentedly for several minutes, then blotted her lips with a napkin and, looking my way, leaned over to Sticky Hands Steve and whispered through the poppyseed dressing, “Somebody should help that little old lady with her food. She can’t even close her mouth and there’s a puddle of gravy in her cleavage.”
I summoned the waitress and ordered a dessert dripping with enough chocolate sauce to cover Hershey Pennsylvania in profits and had her deliver it to the young lady and her boyfriend, Mr. Syrup Hands. Then I pulled out my digital camera with movie function.
Good manners are nice, but You Tube is still the best revenge.
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