The Meaning of Life,
Growing Up in the City & Fun with Snakes
Plus Texas bull, talking frogs and the continuing battle of the sexes.
Pondering the imponderables. . . More of the mysteries of the cosmos, courtesy of Doctor Diane:
"On the first day God created the dog. God said, 'Sit all day by the door of your house and bark at anyone who comes in or walks past. I will give you a life span of 20 years.'
"The dog said, 'That's too long to be barking. Give me 10 years and I'll give you back the other 10.' So God agreed.
"On the second day God created the monkey. God said, 'Entertain people, do monkey tricks, make them laugh. I'll give you a 20-year life span.'
"The monkey said, 'How boring! Monkey tricks for 20 years? I don't think so. Dog gave you back 10, so that's what I'll do too, okay?' And God agreed.
"On the third day God created the cow. God said, 'You must go to the field with the farmer all day long, and suffer under the sun, have calves, and give milk to support the farmer. I will give you a life span of 60 years.'
"The cow said, 'That's kind of a tough life you want me to live for 60 years. Let me have 20 and I'll give back the other 40.' And God agreed again.
"On the fourth day God created man. God said, 'Eat, sleep, play, marry and enjoy your life. I'll give you 20 years.'
"Man said, 'What? Only 20 years? Tell you what--I'll take my 20, and the 40 the cow gave back, and the 10 the monkey gave back, and the 10 the dog gave back. That makes 80, okay?'
"'Okay,' said God, 'you've got a deal.'
"So that is why the first 20 years we eat, sleep, play and enjoy ourselves; for the next 40 years we slave in the sun to support our families; for the next 10 years we do monkey tricks to entertain the grandchildren; and for the last 10 years we sit on the front porch and bark at everyone.
"Life has now been explained to you."
The yellow roads of Texas. . . In our continuing cross-cultural exchange with our Lone Star neighbor, Aironot offers this yarn:
"A Texas lady named Nancy married a New Mexico rancher. One morning, before the rancher took off to feed the cattle, he said, 'Honey, the artificial insemination man is coming over this morning to impregnate one of the cows. I put a nail in a two-by-four over the right stall. Please show him where it is.'
"When the man arrived, Nancy led him down the row of stalls until she saw the nail. She pointed to the stall and the man remarked, 'Are you sure?'
"'Yep, it's the one with the nail,' said the Texan.
"'What's the nail for?' inquired the artificial insemination fella.
"'I don't know,' the Texas lady replied. 'I guess it's there to hang your pants on.'"
The good old daze. . . Bert of the Burros reveals the secrets of his past in an extended contribution to our ongoing invitation to reminisce, which he calls, "A City Boy Fesses Up":
"Now that I'm firmly settled as a retiree in the middle of Southwest New Mexico, I periodically think back on my roots. I guess it's part of getting into the golden years, and being glad that my memory is still good enough to recall my youth.
"I grew up on Manhattan Island, smack dab in the middle of the Big Apple, New York City. When people hereabouts become aware of this fact, they usually ask two questions: How bad was it growing up there? What brought you way out here from New York?
"To the latter, I merely say, 'The Witness Protection Program,' which usually results in a moment of silence. Even after I tell them it's just my dark humor, they are never quite sure, and it gives me a measure of respect around town.
"My basic answer to the first question is that I had a ball growing up there, and don't regret one bit of it. Thinking back on that periodically brought me to the writing of this little memoir.
"Once I started public school, my parents stayed in the same neighborhood in upper Manhattan, called Washington Heights, moving three times to better apartments but just a few blocks away each time. These were comfortable but small apartments, and I, being an only child, slept on a day bed in a foyer area. I commuted a fair distance using public transportation when 1 went to the Bronx High School of Science. (I was called 'the Brain' by my neighborhood friends, and sometime I was called many other things.) I even commuted to Manhattan College and didn't leave home until I started working for a defense firm on Long Island.
"But back to growing up. I figured it out once: Most apartment houses in my neighborhood were six stories high, with about eight apartments per floor and four apartment houses per block. Assuming an average family of three and a half people, a square mile in our neighborhood housed over 200,000 people! That number, now that I'm out in the wide open spaces, amazes me, but I never felt crowded growing up. I don't believe we ever knew even the people who had apartments on the same floor as us; saying 'good morning' or some other greeting usually was about it.
"Most of our parents didn't own cars. Trolley cars, buses and the subways provided excellent transportation to get you almost anywhere in the city comfortably and safely, and at that time cost a whole nickel! Regardless of our ages, the whole city was our playground, regardless of the restrictions our parents tried to place on us. They never knew where we were! Sometimes we would go down to Times Square just to walk around and then head back home. At that time Times Square was OK; it had penny arcades, flea circuses, freak shows, hot dog stands and movies, but none of the sleazy stuff that came later (and is all gone again, thanks to Rudy Giuliani).
"The great transportation system meant that we could go to museums, planetariums, zoos, libraries, baseball parks (I was a rabid Brooklyn Dodger fan, but rarely got to see them) and many other attractions whenever we wanted.
"I had the same basic friends for a long time, up through our teenage years, and although we called it a 'gang,' that was strictly cosmetic. We were all devout cowards, but put on a good front, especially for the girls. Strutting was required. We would go to dances in various parts of the city, pre-qualifying the area for unfriendly locals. We had a criteria for meeting girls, especially at dances: You tried to determine early in the encounter whether the girl was GU. That stood for Geographically Undesirable. None of us had cars, and there was a code of honor that if you squired a girl for most of the evening, you were obligated to see her home. That meant you had better find out where she lived early on, unless she was a knockout and you didn't care! The solo ride back home late at night was not great.
"One great thing about New York was the ethnicity (though we didn't know that word existed). Nobody was an American (although we all were); our group consisted of Jews, Italians, an Armenian and a Scot, while I represented the Latino faction. It was like most of our neighborhoods, a little bit of everything. The 'foreigners' were just people who lived in another neighborhood. That's not to say that there weren't what are called 'ghettos' in the city. There were Italian, Greek, Jewish and Spanish communities, and so on. I remember that the city not only had about 10 daily English newspapers, but numerous ones in foreign languages. Along with this also came uncounted restaurants with great ethnic food; sometimes the menu was in a foreign language. Of course as kids our budgets usually forced us to buy food from street vendors, but it was great food.
"I had a Saturday routine as a kid. My mother would give me enough money to buy a lunch and go to a movie. I would walk about 10 city blocks down to a shopping area that had many stores and five movie theaters, all within a few blocks. And each movie had a double feature, cartoons, coming attractions, a weekly serial ("Come back next week to see if the hero escapes the burning stagecoach falling over the cliff while he and the heroine are tied up!") and even Movietone News. (Remember, this was before television. ) When you came out of the theater, you had to wait till your eyes got adjusted to the daylight. The there were the matrons! These Brunhildas of the movie business roamed the aisles of the theaters with flashlights to keep us juvenile delinquents from throwing stuff off the balcony and putting our feet on the seat in front of us. (Not that WE did that.) Recalling them still sends a shiver up my spine!
"My Saturday lunch before the movie was so routine, I can still remember it. I would go the Horn and Hardart Automat, a landmark chain of restaurants that no longer exists. It was a marvel of technology. They had a traditional hot food counter where you could pick up a full meal, but they also had the neatest wall full of little glass windows, inside of which you could see sandwiches, pies, deserts and all sorts of goodies. A few coins in a slot, and the window would pop up and you could reach in. I always wondered whether aliens were in the back preparing the food, since we never saw them. The main act at the automat was the Change Lady. The first thing you did when you came in was go to a cashier's desk, where you would give the Change Lady your paper money. In a blinding flash she would throw out a an array of coins on the wooden counter, which always were the exact amount. I never saw one make a mistake!"
More next month, in which Bert fesses up to how he got in trouble way back when. In the meantime, why not share a bit of your own youthful memories with Desert Diary? Send to Desert Diary, PO Box 191, Silver City, NM 88062, fax 534-4134, or email diary@desertexposure.com.
The joke's on us. . . Frequent correspondent KC of Santa Clara returns with a favorite joke to share (you know where to send your favorite ha-ha, don't you?):
"A very old man was walking along the banks of the river when he was approached by a talking frog. 'Give me a kiss and I'll become a beautiful young woman. I'll grant your every wish,' said the frog.
"The old man reached down, lifted the frog and placed it in his pocket. As the old man continued on his walk, the frog said, 'Aren't you going to kiss me and get all your wishes granted?'
"The old man replied, 'At my age, I'd rather have a talking frog.'"
Life in a state of nature. . . Further thoughts on the perils and possibilities of coming into contact with critters, this from BD, who entitles his tale "Sneaky Snakes and Such":
"I was talking to my younger brother the other day, the one that was so full of mischief when he was younger and hasn't changed all that much, and we got to bringing up snake stories. He said he had a rattler on the front porch the other day so he got the 'ole shotgun and was gonna make a daylight snake out of him--you know, the kind you can see daylight through. He said he almost turned the ol' greener loose on the dog as he didn't bark or growl, just let the snake have the porch and he decided to lay in the sunshine.
"We got to tellin' stories--you know, the ones that start out, 'remember back when we were kids. . . .'
"Mother opened up the dresser once and found a snake in one of the drawers. Mom got on the bed with a hoe and one of my sisters was doin' her best to imitate being a hat for mom until they finally fished that bull snake out of that drawer.
"Mother would get really ticked off at us kids when we went to gather eggs and wouldn't grab one of those ol' red-eyed sittin' hens off a nest. Those ol' gals would peck the dickens out of you. Well, mom went out there to show us how it was done, ran her hand under that ol' hen, and came out with another bull snake. Mom didn't take long inspecting that snake but put it down directly. I said she put it down but I never seen it again. I always wanted to check with those astronauts to see if they had seen a snake out there anywhere.
"The neatest thing I seen done was Dad putting an oblong glass doorknob in a nest that was being frequented by a bull snake. We called all snakes that didn't rattle 'bull snakes.' Anyway, everyone always said that they would swallow eggs then constrict themselves around something to break them so that whatever they swallowed could be digested. Well, to make a long story short, that snake died of a bad case of indigestion due to that doorknob.
"Before we got into baling cow food, we bundled it. You know, you put the bundles into little teepees like it looked in pictures of Halloween; it's called 'shocking' it, why I don't know. Anyway, you could bet that out there in one of those bundles somewhere, a rattlesnake was going to try to winter in one of 'em. We had about 13,000 of those bundles in the field so we hired a couple of fellows to help us get 'em shocked. One of these guys was a big 'un and could pick up four bundles at a time. Well, he drew the lucky card and found the one with the rattler. I guess instead of one bull snake I should tell NASA to be on the watch for one bull snake, one rattler and one bundle."
Your own tales of all creatures great and small are of course welcome at Desert Diary, PO Box 191, Silver City, NM 88062, fax 534-4134, or email diary@desertexposure.com.
The joke's on us (Wild West Division.). . . Putting an appropriately Western spin on our call for your favorite jokes, RH of Silver City writes:
"A rather drunken outlaw in an agitated state enters this saloon, calling, 'All you dirty rats get outta here!' and waving his firearms in the most menacing way. Needless to say, everyone in the saloon is most eager to comply--except for one Englishman remaining at the bar, calmly sipping his drink. The outlaw sidles up, hissing in the Englishman's face, 'I said, all you dirty rats get outta here!'
"'Yes,' says the Englishman, 'so you did, and they did, didn't they?'"
Losing the battle of the sexes. . . Sandy sends along this latest volley in the gender wars:
"Several men are in the locker room of a golf club. A cell phone on a bench rings and a man engages the hands-free speaker function and begins to talk. Everyone else in the room stops to listen.
"Man: 'Hello'
"Woman: 'Honey, it's me. Are you at the club?'
"Man: 'Yes'
"Woman: 'I am at the mall now and found this beautiful leather coat! It's only $1,000! Is it OK if I buy it?'
"Man: 'Sure, go ahead if you like it that much.'
"Woman: 'I also stopped by the Mercedes dealership and saw the new 2005 models. I saw one I really liked.'
"Man: 'How much?'
"Woman: '$60,000'
"Man: 'OK, but for that price I want it with all the options.'
"Woman: 'Great! Oh, and one more thing: The house we wanted last year is back on the market. They're asking $950,000.'
"Man: 'Well, then go ahead and give them an offer, but just offer $900,000.'
"Woman: 'OK. I'll see you later! I love you!'
"Man: 'Bye, I love you, too.'
"The man hangs up. The other men in the locker room are looking at him in astonishment.
"Then he asks: 'Anyone know who this phone belongs to?'"
While we're on the subject of men and women, let's also pass along this from Toni in the Vet's Office, who presumably heard it from a man bringing his dog in to get fixed:
"This morning on the highway, I looked over to my left and there was a woman in a brand-new Lexus doing 65 mph with her face up next to her rear-view mirror putting on her eyeliner. I looked away for a couple seconds and when I looked back she was halfway over in my lane, still working on that makeup.
"As a man, I don't scare easily. But she scared me so much, I dropped my electric shaver, which knocked the donut out of my other hand. In all the confusion of trying to straighten out the car using my knees against the steering wheel, it knocked my cell phone away from my ear, which fell into the coffee between my legs, splashed and burned Big Jim and the Twins, ruined the damn phone, soaked my trousers, and disconnected an important call.
"Damn women drivers!"
Send your submissions on the differences (or similarities) between guys and gals, along with your favorite jokes, reminiscences and heart-tugging anecdotes to: Desert Diary, PO Box 191, Silver City, NM 88062, fax 534-4134, or email diary@desertexposure.com. Remember, the best submission each month earns a piece of spiffy Desert Exposure gear. Be the first in your neighborhood to wear an exclusive Desert Exposure polo or to sip your morning java from a Desert Exposure mug!
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March 2005