Memories of hijinks long ago

Johnny Carson said, "It was so hot." The audience says, as with one voice, "How hot was it?"

Johnny says, "It was so hot, I saw a dog chasing a cat and they were both walking."

Years later, Bob steals the line and says to his audience, "My wife is so fat."

The audience hollers, "How fat is she?"

Bob sneers, "She's just fat, I can't be funny all the time!"

I went to a dinner the other night with about 35 of my peers, members of the Lodi High class of 1949, and several of them asked, "Why don't you write your articles for the paper more often?"

I didn't have the heart to say, "I dunno, I just ain't funny that much of the time."

The suggestions came hard and fast: "Tell 'em about the funny stuff we did when we were school kids."

"We weren't funny, he just tells it funny," sez one young lady.

I guess I could tell about one of the fellows sitting right there at the dinner table who borrowed his dad's double-barreled 10 gauge shotgun 56 years ago and took out a 4X4 post and did a back somersault a nanosecond later when both barrels seemingly went off as one. "I don't think it was supposta do that," he said through a mouth full of sandy loam.

Later I was reminded of the evening when one of the guys and I called on a young lady and her sleepover girlfriend, hoping to talk them into a trip out to Richmaid to share a milk shake or something (mostly something.) As we were pounding on the door, the young lady's uncle — a day worker trying to get some sleep — stormed toward the door with a blunt instrument of some kind in his free hand, whipped open the door in time to see two young men running through his flower and vegetable garden, who, all the while, were trying to extricate themselves from about 30 feet of tangled chicken wire, enmeshed in which was his prize sweet pea crop, none of which made the escape any easier.

It turned out the horticulturist was a member or our church and a friend of our parents, but he was bleary-eyed enough that late afternoon to not get a good look at the churls who would sully his niece and cruelly decimate his delicate flowers.

I later managed to learn, through some clever and incredibly serendipitous eavesdropping that the culprits had committed the perfect crime, meaning simply that since CSI wasn't involved, the DNA and other evidence left behind was neither examined, nor did it result in the arrest and execution of the culprits. The law itself wasn't sufficient to bring about such a dire eventuality, but the sweet pea loss woulda done it with no sweat, he was one angry dude over the trampling of his pride and joy and would have happily strangled the perps.

Sweet peas were never my favorite flower, I liked the smell of gardenias better, but being a squarehead, I never made an acquaintance with an orchid, so the legendary blossom from Hawaii was never a part of my prom night experience.

As it turns out, there are a thousand kinds of orchids, but I only knew about the one and it looks too much like a bearded iris, a term and flower that didn't strike much of a romantic chord with me. Besides, $15 when I was in high school seemed pretty extravagant when the prom bids were only five bucks to begin with. But to a 16 year old dodo, a flower of any ilk is not high on his list of favorites, but sweet peas dove to the bottom of that list and never surfaced again.

A car, on the other hand ... .

BobBader is a writer and a chiropractor, both can be reached at bobbyo@softcom.net.

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Memories of hijinks long ago

When he rushed to the door carrying a blunt instrument, we took off — right through his prized sweet peas

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