Herb Hoffman – Page 8 – HUMOR IS NO FUN UNLESS YOU LAUGH

The Wreath

In neighborhoods of single family homes many if not most front doors sport a wreath of some sort. Double doors have two wreaths, for visual balance. Where I grew up, on the other hand, a wreath was something you ordered from the florist when somebody died. A wreath was something funereal that ended up in the cemetery decorating a grave. Certainly not anybody’s front door. So I was curious what the meaning of the ubiquitous front door wreath might be.

I have asked around but so far I have not found anybody who had a better explanation than “my parents always had a wreath on the door”. I could make a few guesses. What if the roundness of the wreath — no beginning, no end — symbolizes the home owner’s wish for permanence, the “home sweet home” idea. In the past this certainly made sense. The house remained in the family, generation after generation. When you consider, however, how common it now is to sell and buy real estate, and also how mobile the population has become, passing things on to the next generation is more of a fiction than a reality.

In Antiquity winners of sports events and emperors (being also winners of sorts) wore a laurel wreath on their heads to symbolized victory. “Hail to you, wearing the winner’s wreath”, goes the text of a German hymn. It is unlikely that this might be the meaning of the common door wreath unless the owners of the house celebrate the paying off of the mortgage, which certainly qualifies as a victory.

There is considerable variety among wreaths. Some are made from real sticks, branches, flowers, and berries. Most, I am afraid, from more durable and less wilt-prone plastic. The plastic ones in particular, if they were meant to propitiate any gods, will not do. The gods would know the difference. So whom are we kidding? Not anyone, actually. I have concluded that hanging out a wreath is just something we do. It does not mean anything beyond that. It is done by religious people as well as by more secularist folks.

Except right now, in the Christmas season, when all the regular wreaths are replaced by advent or christmas wreaths, i.e. wreaths made from green branches of deciduous trees. Suddenly a bit of religious or spiritual sentiment is injected into the practice. The evergreen material of which the wreath is made now may signify faithful endurance, no flagging or weakening, come summer or winter. The round shape of the wreath stands for life. Perhaps once around for this life, and then round and round for eternity, rather a stern warning for the faithful.

But the green christmas wreaths, as well as their plastic stand-ins, are also enthusiastically hung out by heathens who decidedly are in the majority. How else can one explain the prevalence in my neighborhood of inflatable Snoopies, snowmen, and reindeer on peoples’ front lawns and the apparently complete absence of manger scenes and shepherds carrying lambs.

And there are not many wise men in evidence, either. But I will let that go.

Larry’s Mother

If you are hard of hearing and wear a hearing aid as I do, or if you have a Dad or Grandfather who falls into that category, you may know how fast ordinary conversations can turn into comedies of error. We, my wife and I, meet some one. His name is Jim. Days later she says: “I called Tim. I liked him. Didn’t you?” My poor brain is already overtaxed because (a) I try to be responsive, to react to what she just said., but (b) I have only one phoneme to work with, “IMM”. Imm who? The J, the T, and the H did not come through and I would not know who Tim is, anyway, because I never heard of him and I already forgot the encounter. No wonder I have a blank look on my face. On good days my wife will explain. On bad days when we are in a hurry she will just say: “Oh, forget it”.

Sometimes, however, she too forgets the name of a person we both met and both of us then try to remember. We both draw a blank. A week later she suddenly, without preamble, bursts out: “Tim, his name was Tim!” Obviously this was on her mind. It was not on mine. I only vaguely remember what this was about. In such cases it is best to keep quiet and let it pass.

Many words sound alike to me. “Mary”, out of context, could sound like “scary”. A statement such as “That was Mary” comes through to me as “That was scary”. My question: “What was?” produces a blank stare on the part of my companion. At that point I had no reason to suspect that I had not heard right. She, of course, had just seen Mary walking by. Without context I was left with just the sounds produced in my inner ear by the wave frequencies that come through. But explanations don’t go far. Normal hearing people tend to listen skeptically to such discourses, vaguely suspecting us freaks of putting on a show.

Sometimes it is only one word that I do not get. “The other day when we makanashnoo…” is a phrase I could not possibly understand. I know there are no Makanashnoos around here so she could not have possibly said that. In such cases I never hesitate to ask.

This brings me to Larry’s mother, the more complicated case of a sentence of which I understood every word and of which I still could not make sense. The sentence I heard was “Her son is Larry”. I drew a blank on “Larry” and recognized “Her” only as a possessive pronoun, a kind of word that should not lead a sentence, anyway. It is amazing how fast the brain can search its store of memories. To be safe I mentally scrolled past all kinds of names and situations, things that we talked about recently, people that we met, anything that might jogg my memory as to who that “Her” may be. Nothing came up and within a split second I had convinced myself that I had heard wrong. The signal was turning green, anyway. I had to move on. Forget Larrry.

Of course I still did not know what I should have heard. In this instance, the answer to the puzzle was quite simple. My wife had only commented that “the sun is glary”. Ridi Paligliaccio sordo. It ain’t easy.

Shattering Old Truths

In September of 1862 the Southern slaves were freed by proclamation. One could say, and some still do say, that on that day President Lincoln destroyed the fabric of the established order. What Lincoln actually did is declare officially that slaves, in this case black people, are indeed “people”, not “chattel” as had been believed for thousands of years before. Yes, he destroyed that thousand year old established order of slaves and free men. Cost him his life, but we have learned to live with that truth since then, or at least 8 in 10 of us have.

Now the good Pope Francis in Rome has managed, some say, to shatter the fabric of the Catholic world order by saying or implying that a lot of what we assumed to be divinely revealed unchangeable truth was actually no more than human tradition subject to adjustments as new knowledge surfaces. If I heard it right, traditional creation stories now belong to the realm of human imagination. No god created “the heavens”, let alone earth. Even Adam and Eve are gone, replaced by the Big Bang. Too much for some to take. Good thing we are out of the Middle Ages. This would be heresy, time for a jolly good bonfire.

Something else was shattered in the process. When somebody questions something that is obvious, can I still ask “Is the Pope catholic” and be understood? It is going to be difficult now that some conservative theologians have brought up the question if the Pope is really Catholic. What turns this into humor is the fact that these theologians are serious. The implication is that if you speak the truth to the best of your knowledge you cannot be Catholic. In other words, if you want to be Catholic you must fake it. This turns it into an example of humor of the kind that doesn’t cause one to laugh. Takes the fun out of it. Pity.

Frontporch

Back in “old” (ca.1950) Montreal the houses along rue Cherbrooke just west of rue de Bleury where I lived all had front porches. Some of those wooden porches had low bannisters all around but most did not. They were open to view from the street. That is how I know about the Canadian rocking chairs. Few porches had less then four of those. One chair per resident, it seems, was the norm. The interesting thing about these chairs is that they were used. If you walked along Cherbrooke any evening you would see them all occupied. It was fascinating to see the good folks chatting and rocking. Some would do short back and forths, controlled with their feet on the ground. Others pulled their feet up and did deep, energetic swings. No matter when I walked by this parade of motion, however, there was never any rythm to it. I do not remember ever seeing two chairs rocking at the same clip. As a matter of fact, by the time I reached the library at the other end of the street I was sometimes a little dizzy. It was a confusing phenomenon: they rock and I get dizzy.
In Newport Beach where I now live I find myself again in a neighborhood with front porches. The houses are single family homes and the porches are mostly stone and stucco. Most of those porches are furnished with chairs and little tables. The preferred style is the Adirondack chair. Many families have cushions in their chairs and flowers on their little tables, all set up for little evening gatherings and some gossiping. Just like in the old days, you would think. But there is one noticeable difference: nobody ever sits in any of those nice chairs. There are no rocking chairs either, and nobody is chatting, let alone gossiping. In a way this town is asleep. But that is deceptive. There are people living in these houses and they are awake. But they are never seen outside unless you catch a glimpse of one of them hurrying from house to car or from car to house. Judging by the few I have seen they are like regular people except that some of them have only one arm to wrestle with shopping bags, children’s seats, golf clubs, and such. Their other arm is attached to a telephone which, in turn, is fastened to one ear.

And here, I think, we come to the crux of the matter. Things have not changed. All the chatting is still going on, more than ever probably. But people no longer take time to sit around in a group, talking. One now talks to one person at a time, and not face to face either. But one does talk, all the time, continuously, all through the day. As long as it can be done by telephone. The juiciest bits of gossip are transmitted by the local blog mothers. They show up as email messages, also on your phone.

In the process our front porch lost its function. It did not disappear. It has only been reduced to a tableau, a thing you look at but mustn’t touch. Somebody please tell me: is rue Sherbrooke at least still rocking?

Ground Level Existentialism

(Fontanae fabula similis)

The Elephant who’s usually the quiet sort / complained one day of being much too short.

He told the Donkey that it was not fair at all. / The Donkey said: “Don’t talk like that. Look in the mirror: you are tall.”

But then the Donkey thought some more about it. / Was he himself the proper size? This troubled him and he began to doubt it.

He went to see the Goat whom he considered worldly wise. / The Goat assured him that he was exactly the right size.

But then the Goat compared herself and realized that she was rather small. / (That thought had never crossed the old Goat’s mind at all).

Now she was worried and she told that to the Fox who said: “I see.” / But then just laughed: “You look the way you should, if you ask me.”

But as the Fox himself now thought some more about the matter / it came to him that as a taller fox he also would look better.

The Fox talked to the Squirrel next about his strange delusion. / The Squirrel warned: “Tall foxes would just cause confusion.”

The Squirrel, though, was quite aware that he himself was certainly not tall. / Had fate dealt him a larger size he would not have complained at all.

He talked about that to the Mouse that night. / Mouse disagreed. She thought that all the Squirrels she had met looked right.

The Mouse, like all her kind, was truly small and others often teased her. / To gain an inch or so in height would certainly have pleased her.

“If it were possible”, she said to Madam Beetle, “to grow a bit would be my next objective.” / But Beetle said Mice need not grow, at least when seen from Beetles’ low perspective.

The Beetle, though, who’d never liked her size at all, confided to the Ant / she wouldn’t mind to be a little more like yonder Elephant.

The Ant just shrugged. “I never think of size. To be yourself and free it’s better to be small. The existential question namely, since you ask it, / is simply this: how easy can you sneak into a picnic basket!”

The Book

A Story

Books are going out of fashion, I believe. At least those meant to be read. Books as commercial objects, especially old books, are still hot items in the collectors’ world. My friend George knows all about this. He loves to visit flea markets and garage and estate sales in search of literary treasures. But most of the books that catch his eye are not treasures. He will handle mostly books that in his estimation he can resell for, say, two or three times of what he paid for them. It’s a regular little business he runs there. He uses the internet to find buyers. His dream, of course, is to hit the jackpot, like picking up a first edition of The Wizard of Oz which, according to available records, would fetch more than a thousand dollars. But this would work only if somebody (a) has a first edition, (b) does not know its value, and (c) wants to get rid of it. The probability of being confronted with this combination is extremely low, obviously.

But there are other opportunities, smaller fish, so to say. One might, at an estate sale, unearth a volume of the speeches of President Coolidge, for example, a small volume, probably. Not many people would pay money for this. But there may be a scholar somewhere who would gladly give you fifty dollars for it. Which is a good deal if you got the little book out of a grab bag for a dollar. When George spots a likely find he follows a certain routine. Typically the seller names a price. George then examines the book and talks a bit to the seller about the book, remarking perhaps that it is a rather steep price for this kind of a book. The seller usually responds by coming down a bit on the price. Now it all depends on how much George thinks the book might be worth. If he decides to buy it he will close the purchase with the formula “Will you take x dollars?”, x being an amount just a little under the sellers last quotation.

To most sellers the books they offer mean nothing. So if they ask for thirty dollars and get only twenty not much is lost from their point of view. Twenty dollars is money, after all. A useless book is a useless book that takes up space. Occasionally a seller is really ignorant as to what makes an old book valuable. Just because Grandfather once owned this copy of Moby Dick adds emotional , but not monetary value to the book. George often has to explain this to disappointed people.

Rarely, very rarely, George’s eagle eye spots something a notch above the ordinary, say a slightly worn copy of a well known poets early works, worth maybe a hundred dollars. When this happens it is very important, George says, to show no anticipatory emotion when asking for the price. Pokerface is the order of the day. You then take your time looking the book over, making sure it really is what you thought it was, then pay and quietly move on. Those cunning windfalls are the stuff of endless telling and bragging in collectors circles. George was a master in this art.

One day, though, the force was with him for sure. He stopped at what looked like a very poor house. An eight year old boy was watching the spread-out garage sale merchandise. Shirts, pants, and shoes mostly. There was a power drill amid the things. “Does your Dad not need this any longer?” he asked the boy. In a small, shy voice the boy answered that his dad was dead. There was not much else of interest. George almost passed it up but there was a box full of mostly paperbacks and maps. Also buried in this box was a hardcover book, the binding of which had come loose. As George picked it up his heart almost stopped. It was time for the poker face. This looked like a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, dated 1884. The book was in bad condition but by George’s estimate could still fetch about a thousand dollars. “Look at that”, he said under his breath, “this is unbelievable.” His eyes lit up. The vulture in him circled for the kill. This, he realized, was the big one, the chance of a lifetime. The boy was watching him with wide eyes. He, too, sensed that he was about to have a paying customer. But something happened. George, still holding the book in his hand, just stood there motionless looking at the boy for a long minute. Then he fished for something in his pocket, pulled out an old envelope, stood there as if thinking about what to write, then scribbled a note on it and stuck it in the book. “Kid”, he said, his voice suddenly turning raspy, “is your Mom at home?” The boy nodded. “Here, take your book and show it to your Mom, right away”. The boy took the book and ran inside as told. George did not look back. He got to his car and was gone.
I don’t know what got into him. He must have been temporarily insane that afternoon, or something.

The Old Man In and Out of Paradise

It stands to reason that the world is actually much older than the Bible stories make us think. In fact, the history of the creation of mankind goes way back. I have no proof, but intuition and blind faith tell me that early on God was still inexperienced. She had never yet tried to create humans before. She had done well with snakes, though. Their brains had turned out powerful and perfectly capable of cunning, as we later found out. But let us begin at the beginning.

For one thing, Earth was also new and time was still set at “universe” which meant that things went extremely fast and extremely slow at the same time. Later this sort of thing was shoved into a box labeled “quantum theory”. Remnants of the old clock setting still remain today. While in the United States, for example, “time” means money and by extension, “hurry up”, in Italy, Spain, and many other cultures “time” means “take yours”, in other words, “Hey, not so fast”. But I am digressing again.

So it took God only a day or so to start “Project Mankind”, but from then on development was slow going. The thing turned out to be more complicated than expected. As a matter of fact, it took decades, celestial decades. By the time the first complete model, Adam, was rolled out he was already in his celestial eighties. So when God set him down and explained the basic rules he was almost deaf, or at least hard of hearing and, truth be told, did not understand a word of what she said about the tree and the apple, for example. It did not matter because that topic wasn’t to come up ’till later. First she had to convince him that the least he could do was to make himself presentable when in public, and that Eve should do the same. Three fig leaves would be the norm for her, one would do for him, God said. But as we already know Adam did not hear well and consequently just gave God that blank stare of senile non-comprehension. So she tried to communicate with him in an audio-visual way. She showed him artists’ renderings of Eve before fig leaves and Eve after. The idea was to make him see the difference, what is better: with or without. Like the optometrists do, flipping lenses: “One more time, Left? or Right?” The answer seemed obvious to God but the procedure was completely wasted on Adam who had already lost most of his vision by the time he hit celestial seventy. All he could say was that he did not notice any difference. He must have been stone blind, if mixed metaphors are in order.

Just then God accidentally dropped her clip board. Adam, who had already developed some innate sense of politesse, instantly bent down to pick it up, a maneuver he was not prepared for. Some thing snapped and he could not get up. He had to be helped to his feet. At that moment it occurred to God for the first time that maybe she was going to have to scrap this model.

The next item on the list was that apple thing. That was important, after all. Maybe, she thought, he will understand, and maybe he will straighten out once it sinks in that this is serious. So preparations were made and Eve, wearing her finest fig leaves, brought the apple to Adam, suggesting that he take a hearty bite of it, just as the snake had instructed her. He was most willing to do that. The red-cheeked ripe juicy “Paradise Delicious” smelled so good. But his one wobbly upper front tooth, assisted by equally wobbly pre-historic partials, just did not cut it. Literally! He was unable to cut into the hard skin of the offered fruit. That did it. “If he can’t even do this!”, God mumbled. She turned the lights out in Paradise and went back to her drawing board to start over.

How long that took I do not know, but celestial time had rolled on and we were approaching modernity. We get back to the story at about Genesis 1:26. We now have a little problem, though. Can we assume that God spoke some sort of Proto-Greek? She must have spoken something. How else could anyone have heard her. It could not have been English. Even the English themselves had not been invented yet. But if you follow the text you know that she was about to create mankind, something like anthropos, and that there would be an andros and a gynaika. But then English came into use and sure enough, the English speaking translator picked the word “man” for anthropos. I wish he had been a jew. I am sure he would have called him “a mensch”. That might have been too much praise but at least it would have disspelled the notion that God favored the male of the species. That misconception, alas, has now hung on for thousands of years. It is still gospel in much of the world. I find it refreshing that lately we are beginning to suspect that in world affairs at least, we have long enough ignored the fact the Irish poet Thomas Moore laid before us, namely that “‘Tis woman, woman, rules us still”.

Perhaps “rules” is too strong a word. The old Hindu philosophers claim that it is not “a woman” or even “women” that hold sway over us but the female principle, and that is also why I think “God” is a “she”, yet not a woman. But I don’t much go for this nebulous mystic talk. And as for man, i.e. andras, the male of the species, I really have to dig deep in my memory. When was the last time one of them did anything really helpful? I believe that from time to time it simply does take a woman to set things right, here or there. A Meir, a Thatcher, or a Merkel, say.

Lazarus

The 1880’ies are often called the Golden Age. In Russia, unfortunately, these years were characterized by massive Church-inspired pogroms, events at which pious churchgoers, walking behind their priest in procession, would still yell “Kill the Jews”, and mean it.

Emma Lazarus, a minor American writer and poet intent on helping the oppressed, believed that she spoke in the name of all Americans when she wrote The New Colossus. Later, when the Statue of liberty was erected, her words found their way to the wall of the foundation structure.

Now, a hundred years later, Liberty Enlightening The World by Bartholdi is said to be the best known public sculpture in America. Lazarus’ sonnet contains probably the best known line of American poetry: “Give me your tired, you poor, your huddled masses”. Maybe the words once meant what they said. America had a big heart then. Alas, America’s heart has shrunk a bit. Those words sound hollow these days. Do we not have enough trouble with unemployment, automation, outsourcing, social security, health insurance, etc.? We need the housekeepers’, waiters’, gardeners’, and field workers’ jobs for our own people, now essentially blocked from getting into those lucrative manual labor careers. We cannot take on the problems of other nations’ poor as well.

America for Americans is a more honest slogan than ‘Send us your poor’. And if honesty matters we ought to bring Emma’s words up to date lest any newcomers visiting the statue of Liberty misunderstand what we are about. Here is one attempt:

Take back your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.
They should breathe free, live without fear.
But please,
Not here.

Why Did The Chicken

If you are a Jew and it is the night before Yom Kippur you cleanse your conscience, you let go of all the stupidities you have committed during the year. You atone. Put crudely this means that you find a scapegoat, like “The Devil made me do it”, or “Hillary Clinton”. If you are a frum Jew you do it by swinging a live chicken three times over your head. This transfers the swinger’s sins to the chicken. The practice is called Kapparot. The chickens come to the market stuffed into narrow crates. That is cruel, but we must remember that until recently all chickens spent their lives stuffed into narrow crates. Only lately are we invited to buy free range eggs, for example, eggs laid by hens who are raised on meadows where they can run and scratch for worms. I support that idea, a laudable step toward improving our collective attitude concerning the treatment of animals. But back to the business at hand.

People who are not Jews are called Goyim. The Goyim are sinful, too, but they don’t have an efficient mechanism to deal with that. They mistreat their chickens just as cruelly, and not just on Yom Kippur but all year long, before they chop them up and package them for the supermarket. It is a disgusting business either way and all my vegetarian friends agree. And the Goyim’s sins do not go anywhere, to boot.

The more merciful Jews practice Kapparot by swinging a bag of money around. Same result: the sins are transferred to the money. I do not know what happens to the swung money. It gets spent, I suppose. As for the sin-contaminated chickens, some are eaten, I learned. Those are the lucky ones. Many end up on the garbage pile.

I have an idea. What if we were to convince all the Chicken-Kapparot people to switch and become Money-Kapparot people? Picture this huge banner I have designed: JOIN US FOR YOM KIPPUR – COME AND HELP US SWING MONEY – SUPPORT CAGE FREE KAPPORES. This should go over well and would be good news, at least for Jewish chickens. And it might be an incentive for the rest of us to become more humane.

And then again it might not work because the practice is such an age old tradition and age old traditions are difficult to replace. Unless, of course, people see an advantage in doing things differently. We have witnessed such dramatic changes in our lifetime. We used to go to the store to buy something and then took it home to keep. We do not do this anymore. We now do it the other way around: first we buy something at home and then we take it to the store for a refund. We also used to use a special kind of very dirty green paper called money to pay for things. We don’t do this anymore, either. We may still go to the store occasionally but we pay by sticking plastic in a little box that is full of electronics. It reads our credit card, debits our account, and says “brrr!” when it is done

Now if a few overhead swings of a bag of coins can make a year’s supply of sin particles disappear I see no reason why a few electronic nano vibrations administered to a credit card by a scanner should not have the same effect. We would no longer have to swing anything over our heads. Instead there could be a scanner in every synagogue. Sinners would be encouraged to insert their card and just wait for the “brrr!”. It would be so simple, so easy. Not just Jewish temples, but churches would probably find this attractive as well. Malls, banks and other places of worship would, I trust, be delighted to offer such an extra service for a small fee. Before long the entire nation, in happy coexistence, will be seen chipping away at their sins.

The only problem remaining, some will say, are the jobs lost. Thanks for bringing this up, but this is the beauty of my plan: there are four thousand temples in the U.S.; each temple will install at least two scanners; it is common knowledge that one of them will always be out of order; former once-a-year pushcart operators will be retrained and turned into full time scanner fixers. I tell you, all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. I did not say that, however. Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss said it first.

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In Praise of Martha

The curtain opened, first a little bit and then all the way. But this was not the Opera, just my hospital room. And there stood Martha in her uniform, broom in hand and a bucket at her feet, a member of the housekeeping team. She was delighted to find me sitting in a chair and able to speak. All the men in the adjacent rooms were still on their beds snoring, having just recently been rolled in from the operating room. “I can practice my English?” she inquired. Sure, I said and welcomed her.
As she went around the room sweeping up tissues, bandages, and debris, she saw my Kindle and wanted to know what it was. I told her that it was my library and that I had stored on it over a hundred books. When she heard that she forgot all about speaking English and asked in Spanish what kind of books they were. Books in all languages, I told her, even Spanish books. By some curious coincidence I had a Spanish story on the screen, The Lazarillo de Tormes, a little masterpiece of 16th century Spanish literature. I showed it to her. “Tormes? Tormes?” she said, “Where is that?” Somewhere in Spain, I suggested, because I did not know.
I thought I was facing a very simple God-fearing loveable housewife of the old school. Until she burst out laughing: “You remind me of Don Quijote!” I am over six feet tall and I look gaunt with my bare legs sticking out from under the hospital gown. I could not help it, but I had to laugh out loud at the thought of how I might look. “That’s a lot better than being compared to Sancho Panza,” I replied in mock offense. To most of the people I know this would have been a non-joke. After all, how many of us speak Spanish. But Martha and I laughed tears. In a miraculous instant Miguel de Cervantes whose name, by the way, was never mentioned that morning, had created a bond. I will probably never see her again, never find out what makes her tick, but that is alright. She did not just clean my floor. She helped nourish my damaged heart. How is that for wholistic medicine!
(c) 2017 by Herbert H. Hoffman. Picture credit: Chess.com
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