Old Men Joking

En garde! Right Guard! Someone has questioned my humor, besides, that is, some people who claim a kinship relationship with me.  

With kids, my humor is performance (I hesitate to call it) art. I am Melmo ... or "I, Melmo" ... if one listens to Masterpiece Theater and all that highbrow stuff. Melmo is 5 going on 6 .... "when I'm gonna be big." Now that my grandchildren are older, they rarely make pilgrimages to the 7 foot totem carved in the back yard on the stump of a felled Black Cherry. Especially, the three of them who are 10. The older ones? the younger one? they're cool with making space for Melmo, as long as he doesn't come to their school or appear in a pizza shop. A 15 year old waxing writer wants Melmo sentenced to lethal injection for his half hour appearance while waiting for take-out  at our local Palestinian Pizza Shoppe. 

On line? It's been the kind of doggerel that I've let Clio's Psyche and Arnie Richards' International Website publish. Old guy .... ... trying to figure things out as he's looking retirement in the face. Tragico-Comedy? Maybe.

What to say? The spices I use in my cooking? some like ... some don't. I did have one visitor to my office, a Norwegian, who really didn't like my rare moments of humor. I referred her out to a guy named Sven, whose humor, as far as I knew, always involved drunk people. I figured if I didn't get it, the Norwegian might. Tell me a joke and I'll tell you whether I get it? whether it moves me? whether I can get in your laughing boat and row-chuckle with you? 

There was a study done on parents and children that, in part, concluded that it was the synchrony of one person's needs and the other person's gifts that was most predictive of a healthful development. A low-energy child born to a high-energy Mom -- or vice versa -- leads to frustration and disappointment.

Zo, there's a 6 foot fence boundarying my office path from the back yard .... If my visitors peer through, they can make out two geodesic swing sets (a rarefied form of whimsy, I admit)... a children's slide that uses the 8 foot stump of a pear tree carved into the Great Australian Pig God, Baalum, and if they just look far enough ... Melmo is looking back at them. (A boy and his chain saws .... one never knows what grotesquerie he might carve on a rainy Sunday) ... 

So anyone got something to say or a good joke? As my Mom heard me say to Margaret in the back yard more than 60 years ago: You show me yours, and I'll show you mine. 

That having been said ... My mom left quite a while ago, Margaret and her drunken sailor father hasn't been my neighbor since 1954, and while my head-cold feels a good 25% better (I bow to you, Anima Mundi, Great Primal Mover of the Universe), it has been joined by one of my arrhythmias. 

An the (erratic) beat goes on. 

So, Ho-Ho-Ho and warm regard from icy Philadelphia and a one who is grateful that his office hasn't taken a major hit since 28 September 1993 at 305 PM. 

(Wanna hear a joke that I didn't consider funny, my youngish physician visitor wanted to finish the the last 50 minutes of our meeting even though a 50' Beech Tree had planted itself through the roof vertically into the far corner of the office.)

I began calling him "Tornado Albert." .