Being Nice

I got bawled out because I wasn't nice to grandpa. The fact that I never met grandpa, who was an engineer on the Nickel Plate Road (that was a railroad and an engineer drove the trains), didn't save me from a scolding.

Grandpa, whose name was Brick Butler, had a clock that sits on a shelf. It tolls the hour and sounds a single note on the half hour. Jackie inherited it. For years it rested quietly atop a living room bookcase, but then a few months ago Jackie had it fixed for a fee slightly less than my yearly income.
I have nothing against this clock except when I happen to doze off in my chair, something that always seems to happen about ten minutes before the hour. When that hour arrives, the sound is similar to having a 500-pound bomb explode in the room.

So I happened to be walking by the clock when it announced the arrival of 11 a.m. When I came back down from an unplanned trip to the ceiling I turned to the clock and said, "Shut up!"

Jackie took umbrage with that. "Don't you talk to grandpa that way!"

I hadn't. I had talked to his clock. Well, a few more things were said, all of them by Jackie. I think I would be found innocent in any court of law. On that subject, Jackie often says, "You weren't innocent the day you were born."

Last night I watched a few minutes of a PBS pledge drive in which a Las Vegas female comedian was saying the sort of things most females, comedians or not, say about men. She said that her husband goes suddenly blind whenever he opens the refrigerator door. In other words he can't find anything. When she wants to hide something she just puts it on the middle shelf of the refrigerator.
I'm glad Jackie wasn't watching because she says the same thing about me. That's because whatever I'm looking for is hidden behind eight other items, usual on the lowest shelf. I don't find it easy to bend down to the lowest shelf. Actually I can bend down, but straightening up again is a problem.

Then, just to top things off, I told Jackie a joke I had read on a messageboard, one concerning the British view of a woman's bra and American soldiers: "One Yank and it's off."

She didn't get it. Oh, well, it was just one of those days.

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