Life Advice – Page 3 – HUMOR IS NO FUN UNLESS YOU LAUGH

When Two Sides Aren’t

There is a story in the Bible about some skeptics who questioned Jesus about the need to pay taxes to the Emperor. They did this only to see what he would say. But Jesus did not fall for the trick. He told them to look at a Denarius, a penny. Sure enough, on one side of the coin there was the emperor’s picture. That tells you, Jesus said, that you must pay your taxes (Mark 12:14). He did not say anything about the other side of the coin but added that ” you must also give to God what belongs to God”.
We do not know if that phrase about God had anything to do with the other side of the coin. What might have been pictured on the other side? Probably nothing about God or even religion. It could not have been a cross because Christianity had not been invented yet. It could have been a picture of some heathen god but as far as I know Jews were pretty strict in their belief in one sole God, namely their’s. The picture of any heathen god they would not have taken seriously. For all we know it could have been an elephant. There was such a coin but I doubt that it was still in circulation at the time, nor can I guess how that would have been interpreted in the context. So much for the two sides of the biblical Denarius.

Nevertheless, coins do have two sides and they usually show symbolic pictures on both sides. The quarter I hold in my hand shows an eagle on one side and the profile of President George Washington on the other. Which side is heads, which tails? That is entirely up to us. I assume that most people would declare the side with the President’s profile to be the recto, to borrow a term from the printing trades, and the eagle the verso. So if Jesus were to look at my coin he would say that George Washington represents America and ergo I must pay my taxes. The logic appears to me to be somewhat tenuous but I would go along with it. And the eagle on the verso might mean that we are free, free as the birds, and I am for that. But Jesus never let anyone get away easy. I bet you a nickel that he would tell you that the eagle on the quarter’s verso stands for the federal government and that it means “or else”, i.e. if you don’t do the recto thing the IRS will come after you. So in the last analysis this quarter is special: it has only one side.
If you did not know this you have obviously not filed your tax return yet.

E. R.

We were about the same age. In my (and her) younger days E.R. stood for Elizabeth Regina. I am still the same fool, and she is still the Queen. But we are both older now and ER, at least for me, has come to mean Emergency Room. I do not know how Buckingham Palace handles such situations. For us commoners it gets tricky when you are sick because being sick is not an either-or decision like, say, being alive or being dead. You cannot be “just a little” dead. A woman cannot be “just a little” pregnant. In sickness there are variations. You wake up feeling sick, for example, but you take a Tylenol and by noon you are all right again. There was no need to call the doctor. You were just a little sick.

But then you may also wake up wretched. Your breakfast does not stay down. You go back to bed and sleep all day. And the following night. But the next morning you are better. You had almost called the doctor but now you are glad you did not. You would feel like a fool if you had made an appointment. This time you were just plain sick but it passed.

The next stage is when you are real sick. Your throat is scratchy and you shiver although it is not cold. You have no appetite, your belly aches, and you are too weak to lift a spoon, almost. Now comes the question: do you call the doctor? Before you do pause a moment to think. If you have lived long enough you know that anything you do, even calling the doctor, has consequences. There are several possible scenarios. Either you diagnose yourself and go to the emergency room. As you probably know, that alone is a stressful event and it takes all day to get out again, in the best of circumstances. It is also embarrassing because minutes after you touch 911 you hear the siren. An ambulance rushes around the corner, followed by a lumbering full-sized fire engine and, for all you know, an ambulance-chasing TV transmission van to set the neighbors wondering what happened to the man who lives in the corner house.

Or you call the doctor. With a little bit of luck, as the dustman sang in the musical comedy, he is in and will see you at 2 pm. All is well. But how probable is that outcome? You now do not have much to lose, actually. You either stay sick, maybe die. Or you put up with the ER. Or you chance it and call the doctor. Good thinking. The last time this happened to me I did just that. The nurse answered and told me that the doctor was out of town but “with your symptoms”, she said you have to go to the ER immediately. “I will call them ahead so they know you are coming”, she added. Stuck! There was no way out.

“As I lay dying”, to steal a headline from Faulkner; well, just “waiting” of course, I met my nurse, her assistant nurse, and the nurse of the day. There was no nurse of the night. They connected me to many wires, poked me, and squeezed me, and then covered me with a warm blanket and left me. I then had several hours of leisure to observe the goings-on in the ER corridors. Eventually the doctor of the day came to see me, examined me, and assured me that I would live. He prescribed something to take twice a day for five days and then released me. In the ER this means two more hours of waiting because it requires paperwork, many pages of it, and signatures. It was getting dark already when the word came that I was free to get up and go home. “Go home and rest”, they advised. They did not know that one cannot rest much when one has four hungry howling dogs at home waiting for their dinner. “And drink lots of fluids!” As if there is anything else I could drink. “And call your regular doctor tomorrow.”

“Here we go again” is all I could say to that.

CTE

Due to our unfortunate involvement in the Middle Eastern wars we have become familiar with CTE, or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Soldiers exposed to heavy blasts and explosions often suffer serious concussions. They may survive the hit but the trauma may leave them with a damaged brain involving changes in some biochemical processes that will slowly but surely lead to deterioration of brain functions. As the adjective “chronic” suggests the condition is irreversible and, so far, incurable. The symptoms are devastating but may not appear until years after the incident.

Needless to say, our soldiers did not deliberately expose themselves to the danger of slowly losing their minds. They are heros whom we sent out to fight in defense of our national interests. Most of us, of course, stay home. There is a bumper sticker that says “We support our troops.” It is probably too lukewarm a tribute when you consider what could happen to our troops years later as a result of brain damage incurred in the line of duty.

There is another part to the CTE story. The victims in this story are also afflicted with CTE but they are not heros fighting for anybody’s country. They are merely athletes, mostly football players, strong, skillful, admired, and often well paid men. But while the soldier in the field is wounded in the service of his country many, if not most football players suffer equally serious concussions with the same symptoms and consequences while, and this sounds absurd to me, while playing with a ball! It is called a game, but it looks more like the fight-to-the-death gladiatorial games the ancient Romans were fond of.

To the fans, of course, football is not trivial at all. Football games are watched and cheered by thousands, sometimes millions. And so, although it is more like a business, it is also still a game and a spectators’ pastime which has taken on the aura of a national, even patriotic, ritual. There is a Greek word, eisegesis (as opposed to exegesis), used by textual scholars to characterise interpretations that introduce the interpreter’s own ideas beyond what the text says. Applied to the issue of football, we have on the one side, simply stated, a ball game, albeit a dangerous one. On the other side we have the fans who interpret the same set of circumstances as a patriotic ritual, something that merits flags and national anthems.

My prediction is that the game will go on, football forever, ignoring the threat of encephalopathy. We will manage to convince ourselves that it cannot by as serious as all that. We spectators do not risk anything. The players do. Just as we do not go to war, soldiers do. Football is a well established tradition and we will continue to rely on our own interpretations of what it means and what it is good for. We may be dealing with a third kind of CTE which I would call Continuing Traditional Eisegesis.

The sad part is that even school boys and college students are often encouraged to play this macho “sport” of football. Is it worth the risk? Or is it time for “Friday Night Lights Out” as someone suggested in a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times (2/8/18). My guess, though, is that this will go on, encephalopathy or no encephalopathy. Unless, perhaps, mothers of sons start a protest movement.

PS. Women are known to do such things.

Frost on the Wall

“Trump renews wall demand” [Headline in Los Angeles Times]

When I came to the United States as an immigrant in the early fifties people were very much into education. Empowered by the G.I. Bill, veterans crowded the colleges. “English”, which included American literature, was a required subject then, and every body knew who Robert Frost was. When I first read the line “I took the road less traveled by and that has made all the difference” I thought that it was so very American, so much like “I did it my way”. When he writes “Something there is that does not like a wall”, and when Cole Porter sings “Don’t fence me in”, are these not arch-American sentiments you could not express better any other way?

But that was six decades ago. The culture has changed. Who, after all, would read poetry on their iPads, really now? Perhaps our culture does not encourage us to use the right half of our brain, where we store wisdom, as opposed to the left where we keep our facts. Or perhaps our values have changed. Maybe we do love walls, after all? It pains me, the self-appointed defender of all that was good when I was young, to now have to admit that we may have to update our very poets. But can you imagine Robert Frost admitting that “Something there is that does love a wall”? And should we really join Cole Porter and sing “Do fence me in”? And while we are at it, should we improve Ronald Reagan’s powerful speech? What if he had said “Mister Gorbachev, do keep up that wall”?

We are new to this wall business. Other nations have walls. The Chinese love their wall as a tourist attraction. Hadrian, too, was very happy with his. Kept the British out of Londinium. He thought. Oh yes, and the Roman Limes, the 500 km wall that was supposed to keep the Germans out of Frankfurt. Those, of course, were bigger projects. But watch out, World! We have not even started yet. Ours will be much bigger.

What, however, if the prophet Carl Sandburg saw something we have not seen yet? In his Chicago poem “A Fence” he writes: “As a fence it was a masterpiece… (but) passing through the bars and over the steel points will go nothing except Death and the Rain and To-morrow.”

Meanwhile, though, while we are on the subject of reviewing our poets let us also look at what Shakespeare had to say on the subject. In his Midsummer-Night’s Dream the villagers are about to perform a play. One character, Quince the carpenter, is the self-appointed director. In discussing the necessary stage props he speaks these memorable words: “Then, there is another thing: we must have a wall”. He also specifies that there has to be a cranny in that wall “for Pyramus to whisper through” (and tell the people on the other side, perhaps, that they must pay and that we hope they do?)

Funny how Shakespeare always emerges as the most current of all poets if we tweek him a little.
(c)2018 by Herbert H. Hoffman Picture credit: easyfreeclipart.com

PS: For $25 an artist, Christoph Buechel, takes visitors to see the eight border wall prototypes. “They may have significant cultural value”, he jokes. (I think)

Curriculum Vitae

In the Blackfriars area of London, just South of St. Paul’s, stands a tall sculpture called “The Seven Ages of Man”. It invites contemplation for two reasons. It reminds us, first, of the fact that youth does not last forever, that we cannot escape getting old. The second remarkable fact is that Richard Kindersley, the sculptor, has made no effort to cheer us up: all seven portraits he has piled up into a column, from baby to nonagenarian, show the most serious faces possible. I believe that he was saying that life is tough, nothing to laugh about. Or, to use contemporary street language, that life sucks.

Good Lord, if we were all that pessimistic? What would we do for fun? On the other hand, I do find voices that echo those sentiments. In Southern Germany, for example, where I spent my childhood years they have a saying that goes somewhat like this: “All my life I work like a maniac and in the end? There I lie, only my stiff legs sticking out”. I do not expect any of my readers to be fluent in German, but in case any do read German I must give you the German dialect version to be fair, for the humor of the original does not come through in translation. Here it is: “Dei Lebtag schaffscht wie a Dackel und am End schtreckscht die Baa naus”.

Not all Germans, by the way, see life in such harsh terms. The more bourgeois version of the above goes like this: “From the cradle to the shroud there are forms one must fill out”.

We are all free to elaborate on that. I could try to imitate Ogden Nash and suggest: “From desperately crying newly born to one slowly but perceptibly wilting and visibly worn.” Or if you are in a hurry, “From womb to tomb”.

Due to a temporary condition requiring rehabilitation in a place established for that purpose I had a chance to observe the many specially designed pieces of equipment that occupational therapists use to help people “relearn” to get in and out of bed or deep chairs, or to sit down on the toilet and, more difficult, to get up from same. The latter task is facilitated by a specially designed restroom which a large sign on the door advertises as the Training Toilet.

And there goes, we might say, the last shred of dignity and decorum as we now sum up the ages of man: “From baby’s toilet training we recoiled at, to weakening old folks’ rehab’s training toilet.”

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.

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.

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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