7/25/11

Old Friends and Purring Zoomy Breifcase Cars

“Who runs out of milk”, she asked.


Facebook. Keeps you in contact with old friends. Keeps you up with the drama. Allows you to spend hours goofing off without officially leaving the website.


Anyway, the answer is, Everyone.


Her teen son apparently asked this when there was not enough milk for his Jethro Bodine bowl of Sunday morning cereal. That’s the way it goes. Got the Kraft mac and cheese on the boil, got my ½ stick o’ butter (margarine, actually) and go to the fridge, not even enough drops to make ¼ cup. How sad is that? Three things to do. (a) Extra butter or butter type product (b) go to the store (c) improvise with water and non dairy creamer.


Gallagher, the watermelon smashing comedian guy, remember him? Does a bit about running to the store for milk and he and his daughter get stuck in traffic and she says “can this many people be going for milk?” Running out of milk may be the great common denominator that unites us all.




“Please send me a cold coke….you get one, too!”


Wouldn’t it be wonderful if life were like Zyngna games on Facebook? To paraphrase, ahem, “Hey, ya’ll got some extry horse beddin’s layin’ around so’s Ah kin finish muh extended coral?” And the little scribblets they come up with are naughty and hilarious. Oh, wait, I do apologize, not everyone likes to play “Frontierville” and to them, this means nothing. For that matter, not everyone Facebooks. I think its fun, and informative and I really miss it while I’m at work.




Work. My dear friend of 17 years and my boss of 11, left the mothership in search of new galaxies and adventures in information technologies. I’ll probably never see him again. I mean you live close enough to visit, but life is so fractious that you can never get around to the niceties of phone calls or impromptu visits. Someone said, “at least you can keep up with him on Facebook”. I guess that is true, but I can’t see his goofy grin and hear his “tickled” laugh on Facebook. Forever 7 months younger than me, he never let me forget that. We grew up in the same time frame. He’s a Jersey boy, I am a Mississippi girl. We knew a lot of the same trivia, but introduced each other to regional tidbits. Music and popular clichés, tv shows and cartoon theme songs. These were the subjects we loved, outside of work and information technologies, of course.



Gratuitous stroll down memory lane………
When I drive at night, I take the back roads. It’s so peaceful and serene, windows rolled down, crickets singing. It makes me think of being a kid and staying with the aunt and uncle units in summer. We would often just light out, spur of the moment, to visit one of UncaHoney’s older brothers. Sometimes it would ten o’clock at night. We’d pile in the car, in pajamas. Kat would sleep on the front seat, head on Unc’s leg, feeties in her mother’s lap. DoodCuz and I are in the back seat of the blue station wagon with woodish side panels, each at a window. DrCuz between us, leaning on me to sleep, cos I am pillowy, even back then. I watched out the window all the way. Trees whizzed by in dark shadows. I liked to rest my head on the door, hair blowing ruthlessly into the night. I looked up at the sky, gray with starlight. A lot of driving is through treeless Delta, you can see for miles, smell dewy cotton and beans. To this day, a homestead with a light pole next to a carport at night brings me back to that. Finally pulling up at midnight, waking random brother and wife up, kids spilling out to see who it is this time. We’d stay there 2 or 3 days, then head back to the farm. A few days later, we were woken in the middle of the night by one of Unc’s nephews, knocking on the door, holding a sleeping toddler and backed up by a tired wife and sleepy kids. Once they got in the house there was no sleeping, there are kids to play with and the closet in the playroom is full of Fisher Price and Tonka.


The adults gather round the dining room table, enjoying liquid relaxants and playing canasta. We don’t have computers and all you gonna find on tv at night is static. WHBQ radio out of Memphis plays from a radio on the mantle. Or maybe theres one of those state of the art 8 tracks playing one of those compilations of top 40 hits. I first heard Maggie May and Peace Train off one of those 8 tracks. I know there was some Elvis thrown in there; you can betchyer bottom dollar on that. Sometime in the wee hours, kids passed out here and yon, not me though, I am tottering on tweeness and I need to observe the adult in all activities. It’s time to break out the bread, mayo and lunch meat, sustenance is needed to properly win a canasta game. I make sammiches for the players, freshen their bevvies. I have an assembly line going of baloney and liver cheese wrapped in thick white paper from the meat counter of a nearby (10 miles) Mississippi Delta store, which catered to the farm crowd. You could also get one bee-u-ti-ful steak, Buddy. There was plenty of steak grillin’ back in those days. Fat inch thick seared and dripping onto the coals, making them hiss like kittens. I was a kid, but I could appreciate that smell, sound and…….Geez, I’m salavatin’ ovah heah.


…..later…….
Um, those there wuz good grilled steaks; I grilled them mugs in tha rain, Buddy. But I digress.





I am pissed off. Where is the George Jetson technology we were promised in cartoons? Where are my moving sidewalks? I don’t go to airports, Clever Trousers, I mean, where’s the one going from my car to my desk? In fact, where is my car that turns into a briefcase and makes that purring zoomy sound? I could handle the day better if getting up wasn’t such a pain in the badonkeydonk. I need one of those beds that tips me to my feet, conveyor belts me through a shower, dresses me, sits me in front of cooked breakfast. Wait…where does my morning constitutional fit into that?... Anyway, where’s all that stuff? Quit sending shit into space and make George Jestson Stuff for earthlings. I mean, really, what good is space travel anyway? We can’t even handle the planet we were assigned, why are we mucking about in space? At least gimme a robot maid.




***jules***ang***cheryl***scott***thx oxoxoxo

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