Mis-communication

This morning I went to McDonald's for a dollar sausage burrito and a fifty cent senior coffee. Gabriella waited on me. She is from Mexico. I have known her for several years as a waitress in another restaurant. English is her second language; she speaks it very well.

"I want a sausage burrito and a senior coffee."

Gabriella said, "That will be $3.50."

"No, it should be about a buck and a half plus tax."

She asked me what I wanted again--and I told her. "A sausage burrito."

She came up with the same amount.

We went back and forth--and kiddingly, I said, "Gabby, we are't communicating."

"It's your language," she said with a bit of frustration and a smile.

Who killed Ronald Reagan?

On June 5, 2004, my wife and I attended a BBQ at a friend's home. Their son Jim was there along with his friend Pedro. They had been friends in college. As we sat on the patio dinking beer, the subject of daylight savings time came up.

Pedro said, "It was Ronald Reagan who forced daylight savings time on us."

"Well, this is what you get from a liberal arts education," I thought.

Discussing politics at a party is dicey.  I proceded gently to set the record straight with the truth as I knew it.

"When Benjamin Franklin was the American envoy to France, he send a letter to the editor of a Paris newspaper,  that if the city would set clocks back an hour in the summer that thousands of candel tallow would be saved."

[I checked Wikipedia and found that Franklin anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. This 1784 satire proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. Franklin observed that tallow could be saved but he did not propose DST.]

I continued,"During WWI and WWII the country went on daylight savings time. I was raised in Butte, Montana, which continued honoring daylight savings time after the WWII, even though it was an island of a different time in the state of Montana.

"When Reagan was in office, congress tried to standardize some of the problems with DST in the country. In Indiana, one could drive thirty-some miles and change timezones and in and out of DST five times. States could sign up for standardized rules for DST (or opt out of it--like Arizona)."

That was the end of my lecture. We talked about guy things, drank more beer and ate brauts.

When the party was over, and my wife and I were in the hallway ready to leave, Pedro entered my space and said out of the blue, "Reagan was evil!"

We talked about this weird happening as we drove home. Then we heard on the news that that Reagan had just died!

Wow, that was spooky. As I remember from Psychology 101, there are only  five possibilities for relating events A and B ("Reagan was evil'" and Reagan's death :

1) A causes B
2) B causes A
3) A causes X causes B
4) X causes both A and C (epiphenominalism)
5) A and B are not related.

It is obvious to me that possibility 5) needs to be eliminated. This is far more than just synchronicity. The two events were synchronous. The only possibility then is that Pedro killed Ronald Regan.
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[Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally un-related. In order to be synchronous, the events must be related to one another conceptually, and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity]


[June 5, 2004 President Reagan died of pneumonia at his home at 2:09 MDT.]

Close Call

Two days ago, my wife Lois and I decided to drive down to Pueblo for lunch. It was going to be in the mid seventies--very warm for mid November.

After arriving in the historic part of Pueblo, we walked up and down Union Street, passing the Branch Inn twice. We then decided to eat at Magpie's Restaurant which was across the street from the Branch Inn.

After eating, we walked down to the river walk. We heard a large blast, followed by the sirens of many emergency vehicles. We went back to where we started and found that the Branch Inn had blown up; it was completely leveled. There was lots of smoke, dust and fire.

Eight people were injured. One of them, a 22 year old woman and nursing student, died shortly after arriving at the hospital.

So many good and bad happenings in life are being (or not being) there at the right moment.

Frank Talk

When I was going to college, I had a summer job with a plumbing shop. One day a man in his eighties walked in and told me that he wanted to raise up his toilet seat by an inch.

I suggested ten chrome washers for each of the two bolts on the back of the toilet seat.

"These will be great," he said. "Frankly, my balls have been hanging in the water."

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O the joys of solving a customer's problem.

Mistaken Identity

Standing in my florescent yellow long-sleeved running shirt, I was finishing fueling my car.

A woman in a car driving by, opened the window and yellowed out, "Hey, you look like you are with the Tour de France."

Perhaps she thought I was Lance Armstrong. :-)

Some people's dogs

As I walked in the park, I overheard a woman talking to her dog.

As if self-conscious, the dog sat staring at the grass. She grabbed him by the chin, moving his head until they were eye to eye.
"You look me in the eyes when I talk to you!" she scolded.

True Love

While visiting my father in a nursing home, I watched an old couple in the dining room. The wife, slumped in a wheel chair, comatose; her eyes toward the ceiling; her mouth gaped open. Her husband fed her baby food with a trembling hand. He wiped off her lips with the spoon and a napkin.

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I read a story by a woman who told of meeting an eighty-year-old man. He said that he had to get to the nursing home to have breakfast with his wife, who had Alzheimer's disease. The woman was surprised at his loyalty--that he would return every day to a wife who no longer recognized him.

The old man told her, "She doesn't know me, but I still know who she is."

The woman thought: I had to hold back tears as he left, I had goose bumps on my arm, and thought: That is the kind of love I want in my life. True love is neither physical, nor romantic. True love is an acceptance of all that is, has been, will be, and will not be.

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I know my wife would take care of me in such a condition. I would like to think I would do the same--but I feel trepidation...