heavy, salty old ladies softens most orange bulldozer passport
“Ah ah!” I thought. “The water is hard because the softener is hardly working.”
Accordingly, Nazy and I drove to Ace Hardware to pick up a ..
“.. 40 pound bag of very heavy salt,” I thought as I joined the queue behind a probably deranged, (but cleverly disguised) little old lady.
“And would you like to add 15 cents (15¢
to the Teddy Bear Foundation for sick children?” The clerk asked.
“Yes, of course,” the lady replied as she began to look for her debit card.
There was a substantial delay as she excavated items from her purse before finally locating her card which, miraculously, she managed to insert into the chip reader. But..
“… now I just have to find my secret PIN code,” She muttered to herself as she began unfolding little pieces of paper.
(My salt was now sitting on the ground.)
Eventually she found the secret (1234) code and entered it correctly (on the third try. The sales clerk thanked her. She started to walk away and I picked up the salt. But then (gasp!): She turned back.
“I already gave 15¢ to the Teddy Bear Foundation,” she said. “Can you redo the receipt?”
I looked in my pocket to see if I had 15¢ in exact change. I was, in fact, willing to give her as much as a full quarter. The sales clerk, quicker, tried to hand her 15¢.
‘Oh, Thank you, dear,” the lady said. “But, that would mess up my records. I need an accurate receipt.”
My salt got heavier and my mood darker, as the clerk cancelled the previous transaction and reworked the corrected one. Finding the debit card and the PIN code took just as long this time as it had taken earlier.
“Maybe I can just live with hard water,” I thought as I watched the debacle s-l-o-w-l-y unfold.
“What took so long?” Nazy asked as, bedraggled, I met her at the car.
From there we drove to Kinko’s to get new passport photos. (Well, we actually drove to the hair dresser to get Nazy’s hair done before the photo session.) Our expiring passports are the ones we got following a…
Flashback Sicily
35th Wedding Anniversary
We were attempting to find the airport to complain about a defective navigation system. I was circling a roundabout while Nazy consulted a map.
Note to younger readers: A map is a static piece of paper that diagrammatically represents the features, e.g. roads, of a geographical area.
As we were circling — i.e. while the car was moving — someone opened the back door and took out Nazy’s two purses. He smiled at us, tipped his hat and took off, the wrong way down a one way street, on a motor bike. He left the back door open. Among other things, our passports were in Nazy’s purse. Sicilian police were uninterested in filing a report (which was needed to get new passports.) We eventually had to fly to Naples to get a temporary replacement — a task that was completed within 30 minutes.
“I guess this is not the first time they’ve dealt with stolen passports,” I said, marveling at the efficiency of the State Department’s outpost in Italy.
End Flashback
Non-expedited, our new passports will take six to eight weeks for processing — assuming that his orangeness allows people born outside the USA to renew their passport.
An extremely loyal reader noted that last week’s issue of The Weekly Letter did not contain a comment about the current occupant of The White House, eh, Mar-A-Lago. It has, of course, become a bit too easy to complain and too hard to make up jokes that are funnier than the disasters that he creates in his normal flow of work, eh, activity. He said that ‘no one knew how complicated health care was’. In a rare instance, he was right — explanations were cunningly hidden in things, like books and white papers that have words.
Young Arrow, now mobile, is unsatisfied with crawling. He wants to stand up, but he hasn’t mastered balance. As a result, his latest speciality is the face plant. And, because of his consistency, he always hits his head in the same place.
But, after a short cry, he gets up again, turns on the smile and try again. He’s not easily discouraged.
The day after my trip to the hardware store, I was at the grocery store. I got in the express (15 items or less) line right behind a (sigh) little old lady who had 8 items.
“Simple enough,” I thought, in err.
It turned out that she was buying for three different people, with different debit cards. And, as luck would have it, she mixed up some items, a fact that she realized after they had been rung up. Two previous transactions had to be cancelled and redone. And then, when she was finally done, she wouldn’t leave. She stood, blocking the checkout lane while..
Reader interrupt: “You said she was a little old lady. What didn’t you just push her out of the way?”
Author Answer: Correction — she was a large, ungainly, ancient lady.
She was reconciling the receipts and making notes on each one of them.
And, finally, recently Melika stopped by Tiger’s school for an early pick-up. She had booked him for a haircut. When she arrived, Tiger was playing in the sandbox with a friend named Ryan and a new toy bulldozer. They were burying the bulldozer in the sand. Tiger was reluctant to leave.
“Reluctant?” Melika corrects.
“Disinclined?” I ask
“Totally unwilling.”
Accordingly, Melika’s attempt to pry him away met with some disappointment.
“Disappointment?” Melika asks.
“Dismay?”
“Anger, Dad.”
In short, Tiger was livid and seething. Ryan, seeing the direction this was going, helped out by saying:
“You have go now, Tiger. So I can stay here and play with the bulldozer all by myself.”
“Furious, Dad.” Melika concludes.
(This issue has included photos of both Arrow and Tiger — who was picking 'green flowers' from his blue car.)
For last week's letter, please click here
Mitra and Stefan came to visit this week