Dull as Dish Water

Hello World, Well, I certainly can't tell you what in the tarnation is a-going on around here, but you can be dang sure I'm fixing to get to the bottom of it, and then they'll have to reckon with little old me, and be pretty darned quick about it, too. Apparently they've once again put the time-shifting foxes in charge of the chronology hen house, so to speak, and the results are about what you'd expect - or as we say at our house, "no good can come of this." Through no fault of our own, we find ourselves inexplicably at the very last weekend in February already, and that's with a whole extra day tacked on at the end, since 2016 is a Leap Year - which should have given us more breathing room, and not to mention, time and space besides. But the relentless march of time continues to march on, regardless, and no rest for the weary, that's for sure. Speaking of time marching on, the merry, merry month of March will be here starting on Tuesday, with its promise to come roaring in like a lion, but departing quietly in 31 days like a lamb, so we'll see if that hoary old chestnut holds true, or turns out to be just another old wives tale that doesn't stand the test of time anymore, and those old wives can all just pack it in and give it up as a lost cause. Say, who let those foxes in here? In local news, the time had surely come, as it must, for the government to extract its pound of flesh from our financial hides, as it were, so we gathered up all of our various documents, papers, and receipts from 2015 and hurried over to our trusty accountant for his invaluable assistance. Normally this would be a veritable cake-walk, or walk in the park if you will, since his office is in Mamaroneck, a few scant miles from our house, and we would have plenty of time to get there by 6:15 PM. Not so fast! This particular appointment happened to be on Thursday, just after our region had been pummeled with a nasty winter storm overnight, replete with pelting rain and blustery winds up to 50 mile gusts, that flooded streets, blew down trees, and knocked out electricity to tens of thousands of households. It made getting from Yonkers to Mamaroneck a virtual nightmare, with bottleneck traffic being diverted on all sides for road obstacles, high water, or electrical repairs to poles and signals. It took us all the time we had to just barely get there by the skin of our collective teeth, and lucky to make it in one piece after all that. (Although admittedly it would have been a lot easier at the very end, where the parking garage featured a giant sign with the blaring announcement NEW PAY STATIONS TODAY, without divulging which spaces were meter parking and which were permit parking, or even the whereabouts of these supposed new pay stations, thanks so much not.) Fortunately our accountant is unfailingly even-tempered and accommodating, so we were soon set to rights, and managed to conduct our business with dispatch and admirable efficiency. After the ordeal, we considered our options for dinner on the town, and decided to hop over to IHOP, just down the road, for some of their scrumptious menu choices, and not to mention, bottomless drinks. As luck would have it, Thursday is apparently Seniors Day at the International House of Pancakes, so that made it even better for a couple of old geezers out for a bite. Bill settled on their Cinna-Stix French Toast, while I tucked into one of their delectable crepes, and there were no complaints, I can assure you. Getting home was a breeze, compared with getting to our accountant from Yonkers, and there's even some left-over French Toast to look forward to later. So now at least we have nothing to fear from Tax Day when it rolls around in April, regardless of how those darned time-shifting foxes play havoc with the chronology hen house, and that's not just a lot of cock-a-doodle-doo, believe me. Also on the local scene, at the real estate management office where I'm working as an office temp now, we had some complaints about shopping carts running amok in the parking lot from one of our retail tenants, which was about as unpopular as you would figure, among the vehicle owners of the other tenants and their customers. It fell to me the task of sending out a notice to the offending retailer, reminding them of their responsibility to keep their wayward carts under control, so as not to pose a hazard to life and limb (or door and bumper, as it may be) in the wild and woolly reaches of the lot - a situation which is exacerbated by the lot being not only wide open, but hilly, so the carts can easily roll a considerable distance, and therefore build up quite a bit of momentum, before slamming into something stationary in their path, thanks not. It would quickly occur to even the meanest intelligence that if there was a place to put the carts when not in use, it might cut down on their wandering ways, so they would be less of a nuisance than otherwise. In fact, there is just such an invention for this very purpose, which they call a cart corral, as it serves the function of corralling the errant carts into one confined space, on the same principle as used for centuries with livestock, for the protection of both inside and out. Indeed, there is nothing new about corrals, and the word itself has been in use since the 1500's at least, all over the world. So it came as a surprise to find an earlier note in the tenant's folder, referring to the derelict state of what was described (apparently without irony) as the "cart corals in front of your store." It goes on to request "these corals are replaced immediately, as they present a liability to the general public, and as these corals are quite old, we recommend replacing all of them." Now, I have no squawk with corals either, and as a word, has been in continuous use since around 1275, so it certainly doesn't need me leaping to its defense at this late date, I dare say. But I will point out that a person who doesn't understand the basic difference between a coral and a corral is probably not the best choice for sending out notices to a store about their shopping carts, and it shouldn't take the Earp boys and Doc Holliday to show up at the OK Corral to know which is which. Let's face it, if they'd had that shootout at the OK Coral, it would have been underwater, and a whole chapter of American folklore would have gone right down the drain, sure as shooting. As a point of information, it's unfortunately true that the famous Shootout at the OK Corral of lore and legend, is yet another in a seemingly endless string of fanciful fabrications that have become established as fact in the popular consciousness, but which turn out to be way more fiction than fact upon examination - and which I don't mind saying, like Liberty Valance, I'm squarely on the side of leaving the colorful fiction intact for future generations to enjoy, rather than scraping it down to its humdrum drabness, and sucking all of the romance out of the thing, like that's any sort of improvement. It reminds me of a passage from humorist Patrick McManus, who was determined to tear away the cloak of hyperbole and mendacity, common among fishermen spinning yarns about their mythical big catch, without a grain of truth to be found anywhere near it. =========================================== I banged the table for attention. "Now," I said, "I'm going to tell you about a real fish, not a figment of my senility, not some fossilized hope of my gangling adolescence, but a real fish." Now I could tell from looking at their stunned faces that the boys were upset. There is nothing that angers the participants of a bull session more than someone who refuses to engage in the mutual exchange of illusions, someone who tells the simple truth, unstretched, unvarnished, unembellished, and whole. The boys at Kelly's shrank back in horror at this heresy. One of them tried to slip away, but I riveted him to his chair with a maniacal laugh. His eyes pleaded with me, "No, don't tell us!" they said, "Don't destroy the myth of the one that got away!" (which is a pretty long speech for a couple of beady, bloodshot eyes). ============================================= Of course, anyone who knows me can tell you that in cases like this, you can count on me being firmly in the camp of those beady, bloodshot eyes, and I'll take the glorious legend over the mundane reality any day of the week, and the more the merrier, my good merrie men. Give me George Washington tossing a silver dollar across the Potomac, Barbara Frietchie standing up to the invading troops, Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lantern, and Robin Hood enforcing redistribution of wealth in Sherwood Forest, rather than the insipid alternative. Why, heck, I'd even go along with an underwater shootout at the OK Coral, if it was a better story, although I suspect that successfully wearing a 10-gallon hat on top of scuba equipment would be a bit of a tricky proposition for even the most proficient gunslingers of the Old West, try as they might. But if you've got a hankering to catch a modern aquatic re-enactment of the legendary gunfight among the reefs, please remember to put your shopping cart back in the corals where they belong, and go ahead and tell them Doc Holliday sent you. Elle