It is no secret that I love words. I like to articulate my responses in a way that is concise without being too verbose, but I do like to phrase my answers in a meaningful way – especially if I am replying to a significantly valuable question. I want people to know I have truly ingested the words they have spoken and taken the time to formulate a well-constructed response.
But there are those less wordy than I, those who choose to avoid the commitment of a lengthy answer and spare any unwarranted emotion by responding with a simple, one-word comment. While that single word may convey the necessary feedback to the initial query, sometimes the person posing the question is left thinking that the responder cannot be bothered to take the time to formulate a proper retort.
Upon chatting with a friend, he told his tale of how he had fallen victim to the easy out of a one-word answer. He had received a rather detailed text and he simply wrote back “Sure”. After I had admonished him for his complete avoidance of all other words in the English language, we both had a good laugh.
He was incensed by his own lack of effort and every time he repeated the word ‘sure’, we laughed even more. After we had expelled all the laughter we could, obviously at his expense, he thought it would make a great idea for a blog post and asked if I would be able to write about it. I said the only thing I could think of – “sure”.
For those unfamiliar with the bird in the above picture, this seemingly benign creature is a Black-Capped Chickadee. They are tiny in stature and extremely friendly once a level of trust has been developed. I would spend countless hours as a child sitting outside on our deck with a handful of sunflowers seeds charming these little creatures to land on my hand. I would marvel at the heat produced by their tiny claws as they gripped my fingers and admire their courage to trust a human feeder.
I became much smarter as time went on and removed the actual bird feeder altogether. I was the only source of food for these feathered friends and slowly became the Chickadee Whisperer. These beautiful little birds would jockey for positions on my outstretched hands and graze on the seeds that I willingly provided. More often than not, I would have to leave my perch to fill the supply of food but they were anxiously fluttering around the deck awaiting my return.
On one particular occasion, I had gone inside to replenish the supply of seeds and had unwittingly left the screen door wide open. One lone Chickadee flew into the house through the open door and, like a Kamikaze pilot on a suicide mission, thrust itself straight into our living room and landed squarely between the shoulder blades of our long-haired Lhasa Apso, Misty. She had been sound asleep on the couch but the shock of having a foreign object entangled in her fur was immediate and Misty leapt off the couch to shake the intruder loose. The more she shook, the stronger the bird held to her hair.
Not knowing which creature was more terrified, I watched Misty go from disbelief to panic in milliseconds. As Misty began thrashing like a bull being ridden in a rodeo, the bird held fast. The movie 8-Seconds had nothing on this bird. It was going for the World Record and the seconds began to tick on the clock. Misty, realizing that a mere shaking of her shoulders was unsuccessful, jumped off the couch, taking off like a shot into a full run. She lapped around the circuit from living room to kitchen to dining room and the chickadee hung on for dear life, riding that poor Lhasa Apso like it was going for Gold in the Olympics. (I had to stop writing for a moment because I’m laughing too hard to type)
If you’ve ever watched a horse race and really concentrated on the jockey’s hands on the reins and position on the horse – this is what the poor Chickadee looked like riding my dog through the house. I made vain attempts to catch the dog so we could rectify this unsettling but extremely hilarious chain of events but I couldn’t stop laughing long enough to focus on the task at hand.
After I finally caught up with the dog there was a great deal of panting. I was panting trying to catch my breath after laughing so hard. The dog was panting because she was probably moments away from having a stroke, and the bird was even panting – perhaps thinking a few more seconds would have garnered that coveted position in the Guinness Book of World Records.
With a great deal of wrestling, we finally held the dog still long enough to cut the hair in the death-grip of the birds feet and finally took that poor Chickadee back outside to give it the freedom it so rightly deserved. World record or not, that was one hell of a ride! After this scene, that could only be described as something from a movie, my mother and I both had to change our pants. It will live as one of the most cherished memories of my childhood and I think about that rodeo ride every time a Chickadee graces my feeder.
“I do love my toaster oven though. That’s what you need down there – heat up the meat and then toast your bun.” ~ SN
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That innocuous statement may seem like the least funny line you could ever imagine, confusing even if you have no context of conversation to be able to attach to that simple phrase. But last night, that innocent message took a turn down an interesting path and led us on a journey of uncontrollable laughter in the wee hours of the morning.
What started as a discussion about a late-night kitchen raid slowly morphed into something much more amusing after I texted the above line. It seemed to hover in cyberspace, not realizing it was soon to become the cause of a 45 minute fit of muscle spasms and tears of epic comical proportion.
He broke first. I didn’t initially see the humour in it but, as he texted it back to me over and over and continued to laugh, I could swear I heard the faint echo of his laughter in my head. Eventually I began to giggle because thinking of him finding such a sincere comment so funny made that comment start to seem funny to me too. Soon the two of us had fallen over the brink and we, in our separate houses in the darkness of the early morning, laughed like idiots for almost an hour.
My ribs ached, my stomach muscles felt like they had begun to seize and my sleeve was soaked with tears that would not stop staining my cheeks and my pillowcase. But at the end of suffering through the side effects of our mutual breakdown, I felt wonderful. That silly string of words had made us both laugh harder than either of us have laughed in years. It made us temporarily blind to all of the life outside of that moment, allowing us to truly enjoy an escape from reality that will forever be a memory we will both treasure.
Sometimes the things that aren’t funny really do make us laugh the most. And if you can share that laughter with the right person, for a brief period of time, the rest of the world ceases to exist.
I used to love carving pumpkins. I was one of those weirdos hoping to have the most creative pumpkin on the block, so I bought a carving kit and some patterns and locked myself in a room to avoid distraction.
Walls were spattered with stringy pieces of eviscerated pumpkin. Elongated strings of profuse verbiage slithered under the doorway, assaulting the ears on the other side of the door, and small drops of minor arterial spray infused themselves into the paint on the wall. But at the end of the painstaking process I achieved success! The copious amount of band-aids, blood loss and light-headedness were worth the effort. My pumpkins were the talk of the town. My then-boyfriend’s children (who I still refer to as my step-children) were even proud to acknowledge the creativity on our front doorstep.
After my first attempt, I became a little less guarded when it came to the carving process and the whole family would get involved. Where there were originally only two arms covered in pumpkin guts, eight sticky arms reveled in the joy of dissecting the large gourds and separating the seeds from the gooey mess. Each of us skilfully created our masterpieces and sat back with a smile as the toothy pumpkins returned our stares.
The house would begin to smell of the roasting pumpkin seeds and, after a massive clean up, we would light our pumpkins and snack on the seeds in the darkened living room. The memories of those nights of laughter and camaraderie are the ones I still hold close.
As the eve of Halloween approaches, I am slightly saddened that those years are so far behind me. I live on a street where no children trick-or-treat so there is no need to create any more scary faces. Perhaps this year I should take advantage of the fact that my digits are all still intact and drag out the carving tools once again. I’m sure my dog would like to sit in the dark with me staring at faces like these:
Stealthily, they weave among the crowds, always maintaining their position slightly below the radar to avoid drawing attention to themselves. They seamlessly blend into their surroundings, appropriately smiling and nodding when they deem a response is necessary, but never actively participate in the live conversation swirling around them. They are the oblivious – they are the relatively small number of people who just – don’t – get it.
By any standards, they would most likely maintain a moderate intelligence quotient, function well at a full-time job and perhaps even procreate to pass the torch of their DNA on to the latest members of the human gene pool. However, in what may well be a fleeting moment of idiocy, they lose their grasp on true logic.
There are websites dedicated to this phenomenon and the stories are, not only hilarious but, astounding. One of my true favorites, which may be a complete fallacy, or not, is a group of friends walking along a beach when one friend cries out “look at that dead bird” and his friend looks up in the sky and says, “where?”. They do walk among us.
This post was not inspired by the nameless, faceless many who have undoubtedly experienced this factual anomaly, but by a phone call to a radio station in Fargo, ND that I had long since forgotten, until now. If this whole call was fabricated, congratulations to the people who thought up this gem. If was an actual call (and apparently it was authenticated as an actual call) this woman truly believes she has the answer to a safety issue for drivers. Please be advised Fargo, ND – she walks among you. (although her name may have been changed to protect the idiot)
After being ignored by local television stations and newspapers, a woman took her cause to her local radio station. In a very decisive and articulate argument, she was very concerned and somewhat shocked that the government transportation agencies would choose such heavily trafficked areas to post the standard issue deer crossing signs. She firmly believes that, after obtaining their passing grades from primary school, the deer would have the wherewithal to comprehend the meaning of the sign and change their crossing patterns to coincide with the location of said signs.
In a moment in which she seems irretrievably misguided, and there were several, she had not only convinced herself but tried to convince the world at large that the deer would heed the wishes of the transportation agency and only cross at the location of the signs. Since she has been involved in three vehicular incidents with these highly educated creatures, her argument to move the deer crossing signs closer to a school zone frightens me immensely. How many children will she hit before the government has to relocate the school children crossing signs to a near-by freeway?
Please listen to the following and weigh in…..do you think this call is real and, if so, has she changed her name and moved to a state where the deer are just as clueless as she is?
There are a very rare number of glimpses into a perfect juncture in time. Those precious gifts are brought at unsuspecting moments but, when the mood catches you at the right time, laughter becomes unstoppable to the point that tears begin to roll down your cheeks, your ribs ache and your stomach muscles become constricted.
I had one of those moments last night. I was watching a show where an actor was doing an impression of Christopher Walken – not an easy feat but he did it with such impressive articulation it spurred me to go to YouTube to find more impersonations.
I must preface my evening’s lunacy by announcing my love for old musicals. My Fair Lady was a favorite to watch with my parents. It is a treasured memory of a time gone by that will remain with me throughout my life. When our leading lady is learning proper diction, the phrase “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” is uttered continuously to help her ease out of her Cockney accent and pass as a well-bred lady. So when I stumbled on what I thought was a depiction of Christopher Walken, this gem of humor surfaced and had me watching it over and over until I couldn’t see because I was laughing so hard.
Moments like the one I had are hard to come by. There are so few times that we allow ourselves the reckless abandon to be able to laugh the way I did. Life hits us with a barrage of reality and it is so difficult to give ourselves permission to be silly but those moments make it possible for us to deal with the hand that life has dealt.
Today will be a bright day for me because I go into it knowing I still have the capacity to let go, to laugh at something so inane but something that was able to break the constraints of my day-to-day existence. I let everything else go and, just for a moment, laughter riddled my body with the kind of pain I wish I experienced more often.
Allow yourself that moment. Give yourself permission to throw every responsibility on the back burner and just enjoy life, even if it’s only for that brief moment. These are the rare glimpses of your life that you will carry with you and the pain you will want to remember.
My friend Sandra passed away tragically in May of 2003. It was such an extreme shock to get the phone call that she never made it home from her vacation in England. She had been infected with the Streptococcus bacteria that rapidly turned into the Flesh Eating Disease. In a few short hours after getting on the plane to return home, she was gone.
Her laugh still echoes in my head sometimes. She had a wonderful sense of humor, a biting wit that matched well with mine and she was just fun to be around. We both loved to cook and there were many food experiments done in our kitchen when we shared an apartment in Halifax. We enjoyed cooking together so much that we eventually started a small catering business.
Recipes were followed or created, heavenly smells wafted under our door into the hallway and many bites were nibbled in order to perfect those recipes. As we noshed on the fruits of our labor, scattered bits of food would inevitably fall onto Sandra’s chest. She was a well-endowed woman and she always referred to her cleavage as the “continental divide” because everything would end up there eventually.
As I was making my coffee this morning, I casually looked down at the sweatshirt I am wearing and noticed the stain directly at the entrance of MY continental divide. I heard Sandra’s laugh before my laugh passed my lips.
Some memories will always find their way back to the present and those are the ones you never want to forget.
I hope you will all indulge me this week. March 7th looms and I would like to keep as many happy memories as I can at the forefront of my brain. Since my mom can no longer comment on what I post, her ethereal embarrassment shall be something that will hopefully make us all smile a little. Some of my best memories are of the funniest times in my life – the memories that made me laugh until I cried and that same laughter that made my mom wet herself. This is one of the memories I love.
We have always been a family with pets. Dogs have been a strong presence in our lives and in the early 1980’s mom and I would walk the dogs down the back road that was close to our house. On one of our walks, our Golden Retriever, Brandy, decided to take it upon himself to walk our Lhasa Apso, Misty. He took her extra-long leash in his mouth and proudly sauntered down the road, not looking back. Only mom and I could see the leash wrapped around Misty’s body and, when there was no slack left in the long leash, Brandy dragged Misty down the road backwards for about half a kilometer. That moment wasn’t just funny, it was absolutely hysterical and mom and I laughed so hard she peed her pants.
Now, in the 80’s velour was all the rage. Mom sported many matching leisure suits. They were comfortable, they were stylish, and they were surprisingly absorbent. But the variation in color could not hide the fact that my mom had peed her pants. After we collected ourselves, we made our way back to the house. We had a crowd of friends over and, knowing that, Mom was in stealth mode, maneuvering out of anyone’s peripheral to sneak in the back door and head for the laundry room in our basement.
She quickly changed her outfit and headed back up to the living room, thinking she had averted humiliation. What she had NOT counted on, was that her traitor of a daughter had already broadcast the episode to anyone who would listen and had even thrown in some play-by-play action in slow motion. Not only was I laughing but everyone in the room joined in, even my mom.
That day I learned one of the greatest lessons she ever taught me, even if by accident – if you can’t laugh at yourself, you will miss a great deal of enjoyment in your life.
It is no secret that I love words. I like to articulate my responses in a way that is concise without being too verbose, but I do like to phrase my answers in a meaningful way – especially if I am replying to a significantly valuable question. I want people to know I have truly ingested the words they have spoken and taken the time to formulate a well-constructed response.![IMG_1903[1]](https://polysyllabicprofundities.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/img_19031.jpg)
polysyllabic profundities 