Weird Memories and Recent Thoughts

As I write the installments of The Muffin Saga I usually find myself simply sitting, picturing the memories in my mind’s eye, and often smiling and even laughing. Living with a dog (or a cat) as a primary housemate can make for some weird situations. I believe that I have survived such years by always remembering the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shall not take thyself seriously.

When I was a state bureaucrat supervising social services in what was then the fastest growing county in the U.S., I came to believe that the primary purpose of people working in our central office was to telephone us to demand that we stop whatever we were doing, and provide them with some inane information so that they could justify their existence.

So, one day after a crazy conversation with some pencil pusher in central office, I buzzed my primary secretary and said, “C.O. wants to know how many children we have in foster care with one blue eye and one green eye. Please collect the data for me.”

A couple of minutes later I walked out of my office and my secretary asked, “Do they really want that info?”

And I replied, “No, but sooner or later some idiot will ask for it, so we may as well be prepared.”

We both got a chuckle out of it.

A week or so later I walked by her desk and saw that my secretary had a new poster on the wall. It was a huge photo of the head of a cat that had one green eye and one blue eye. When she saw me smiling, she said, “I’m prepared. When C.O. gets around to asking about foster kids with one blue eye and one green eye, we can tell them we have none, but that we do have a cat with one blue eye and one green eye.”

Have you ever tried to belch and yawn at the same time?

I tried to eat a ham and cheese on toast for lunch today. In defense of my sandwich, I sliced a few bits of ham as an offering for the furball. It worked for a while, but then he dashed by my defenses and attacked the quarter sandwich on my plate, so I added that to the offerings made to his highness. Of course, Alex rapidly consumed the ham; but then, to my surprise, he also gobbled up the cheese.

Tonight I’m grilling a New York cut strip steak for dinner. I may have to lock myself in the bathroom to enjoy it.

Recently I have been remembering my seminary friend from Japan, the Reverend Takia Nishazawa. We had many adventures together that I must share someday.

Takie, as we called him, had difficulty with some English words, mostly those with an “r” in them; the “r’s” usually came out as “l’s”. I remember once when we ate at a Chinese restaurant in New York City Takie ordered “flied lice.”