Eid Mubarak! (Akbar)

To Little Akbar, Greetings:

° From Piers and the Anglos, "Rejoice and be merry!"

° From Giac and the Latinos, "Eid mubarak!"

° From Marcello and his nonna, "Mangia, mangia, mangia!"

° Psychically crunching a cardamom seed in cool, smooth Delhi rice pudding, Giac.

How to Have a Merry Little Christmas (Piers)

Gnädiges Pierschen (o tannenbaum o tannenbaum),
Caro Piersolino (gesù bambino),
° Shall I tell you

How to Have a Merry Christmas?

Well I will.
° Christmas Day minus 1278: calculate that your 15yearshingles will expire in August 2006. Set up a trust fund (in the amount of the expected cost times 3) for make benefit glorious roof.
° Christmas Day minus 132: notice that your roof has expired. Coincidentally notice that it doesn’t leak, that there hasn’t been rain in 3 months, and that it’s way too hot for roofing.
° Christmas Day minus 86: observe from the almanac that the pleasant and sunny month of October has arrived. Phone roofers.
° Christmas Day minus 55: comment that this was the only entirely rainy October in the history of the Valley. Blame Global Warming. Phone roofers.
° Christmas Day minus 40: smile grandly when the bid for standing seam steel comes in at just under twice the anticipated cost.
° Christmas Day minus 17: mention casually at the lumber store that one’s roofers have forgotten one.
° Christmas Day minus 14: greet roofers, give updated peptalk (I used to say, “Lads, safety first, no job’s worth an injury.” But now it’s, “Lads, if ye must fall off the roof, at least fall headfirst and break your neck clean through, that way ye won’t be a care on wife or mother or child or American taxpayer.” Pepped ‘em up right smart, especially the two apprentices who‘d never ascended a roof as steep as mine.)
° Christmas Day minus 7: start devoting the hours between 2a.m. and 4:30a.m. to trying to work the geometry in time to impart same to head roofer. Reserve some of that wakefulness to worry about leaks.
° Christmas Day minus 6: foment rebellion among the apprentices.
° Christmas Day minus 5: rejoice in the successfully applied geometry, deplore the walking off the job by the rebelled against contractor.
° Christmas Day minus 4: admire my handsome new roof (which after 8 days’ labour extends over almost half the house, minus the porch, minus the kitchen). Await rain confidently.
° Christmas Day minus 3: write Christmas cards, eat fruitcake, stage the baking of the panettone, wrap gifts, listen to the gentle rain pittypatting on the metal.
° Christmas Day minus 2: faint dead away when I discover a deep pool of water in the SE corner of the hall, just exactly under the most leakprone and complex geometry. All those sleepless nights for this?!
° Christmas Day minus 1.995: dance a gigue of gioy when I dip my finger into the pool and find it’s only cat urine. What a relief, nel senso doppio!

§

° Speaking of relief, I know you’ll feel it when you’ve finished playing the 7 Masses facing you between now and midnight.
° I believe I would just skip that second cup of coffee at breakfast.

° Drily, Giac.

Taxi Driver (Sandy)

Dear Sandy,
° Aren’t we fortunate in our taxidriver? (I say “ours,” because the County boasts only one cab.)
° The other day Friggitore was reminiscing about his childhood, and explained, very clearly,

How to Know When to Quit Smoking.

° Friggitore smoked his first cigarette when he was 5 years old. Before that he had been too clumsyfingered to roll them for his older sister (she used to wrap the papers around a pencil, tongue them shut, then try to poke the loose tobacco down one end--a very bad job).
° And he continued to smoke throughout elementary school.
° “How in the world did you buy the tobacco at that age?”
° Well he used his noggin. On the way to the store to buy lard or sugar or whatever the family had sent him to get, he kept his eyes peeled for Coca Cola bottles. When he’d found 5, he turned them in at the store for the penny refund, and used the nickels saved to purchase a pouch of tobacco. This was before inflation became the only way the American economy could pretend to be growing.
° O by the way, he was held back in first grade for being such a runt. But I’m sure it wasn’t the smoking.
° Things went on this way through junior high and high school. But one day his father caught him smoking. And he beat the living tar out of Friggitore. That was fine with Friggitore.
° But since Friggitore was smoking every day, and his father only caught and beat him every few days, Friggitore was troubled in his conscience. So he started confessing every afternoon when he got back from school. Much tar was beat out of him.
° The moment Friggitore turned 18--and I’m amazed there were any regulations in those days on child labour--he quit high school and found employment in a local factory. And every day when he returned home from a hard day’s work and a relaxing puff of smoke, he confessed and was beaten the tar out of.
° Then the paychecks began to come in. And Friggitore began to see that he had more cash money than his father.
° And pretty soon the fatal day of destiny arrived. It was a hot and sultry day, and Friggitore had sweated clear through while walking home. Confession and execution. But this time, the belt buckle reacted with the thin cotton sticking to the skin, and blood was brought.
° This offended Friggitore’s aesthetic sense. And ruint the shirt.
° So next day, when Pops prepared to beat the tar out, Friggitore grabbed the Dad’s right hand, looked Padre in the eye, and said, “We not gonna do this any more. I seen you smoke plenty of times back when, you as guilty as I am.”
° “Lad ((though Friggitore had outgrown his runtiness some years since)), I admit I used to smoke. But I quit.”
° “Yes, Paw, and when I decide to quit I will. So that be that.”
° And that did be that.

§§§§§

° Why did the father quit? Was it because of Big Brotherly health warnings or common sense?
° Well it was because--”I quit when tobacco went from 10cent to 12cent a pouch.”
° And when did Friggitore quit, and why?
° 35 years ago. “I quit when cigarettes went from 25cent to 30cent.”
° So yes, common sense.

° Phoning for Inch right now, Giac.

Pink Sugar (Foto--Coz)

Dear Coz,
° Do you know how I learned how the Resurrection of the Dead is worked? It was Mother’s cook, Mandy. Her second favourite daughter died, suddenly, but not unexpectedly. The very next night Mandy waked to see her “sweet big fat Bessie Mae” standing at the foot of her bed. The vision affected Mandy right smart.
° So that’s how Jesus did it, or rather, how Mary Magdalene did it.
° My friend Ella never did resurrect her Daddy. But six months after he died, her buddy in Japan did. The General was sitting there chatting with Jesus. So the story goes. But I doubt it, because Jesus wasn’t tearing his garments in blasphemed dismay. The General’s vocabulary was salty Government Issue.
° My friend Lettye dreamed repeatedly that she was encountering her father on the streets of Overton. Both were repeatedly delightedly surprised.
° And this Semain I dreamed that Mother was playing with Sugar, Slash’s favourite and softest kitten. Sugar was purring, Mother more or less was too.
° So that’s how Heaven is worked.

° Diviningly, Giac.

Civics 101 (Sandy)

Dear Sandy,
° I’ve done my civic duty, I’ve voted. Early voting, at the Courthouse, because without Mapquest I will never be able to find my own gerrymandered voting site.
° On the DifferentSex Marriage Amendment, NO. Not because I desire to subsidise the sexcapades of samesexers, or because it is reasonable that I continue to subsidise the sexcapades of married differentsexers, but because the Amendment takes advantage of the gullibility of the Christianists, by pretending to give them dominion they didn’t already have.
° On the Senile Property Tax Freeze, YES. Not because it will freeze my property taxes anytime soon, but because it is a pathetically inadequate and accidental step in the right direction, of letting parents honestly pay for the educations of their own children, without forcing nonparents to subsidise the products of the parents‘ sexcapades.
° As for the offices, it was easy as pie. Where the Democrat was crazymeaner than the Republican (and that was the case in most of the races), and there was no Independent, I withdrew my governed consent from the filling of that office. That is, I didn’t vote for either.
° But where there was an Independent, I had to update my traditional method of deciding. I used to vote for the betterlooking candidate, but our Independents are so povertystricken, they can’t afford fotos. So I just ran down the list and picked the bestlooking name. One, for example, appeared to be a Cherokee, so I knew he would be sound. In another case I voted for a man whose Christian name was “Christopher,” because in my experience men named “Chris” tend to be decent sorts.
° So I’m satisfied I chose wisely and well.

§

° I did take under consideration your plea in favour of yellowdog Democrat voting (that is, to vote for the crazymeaner than a Republican candidates--as if one could purge a poisoned well by adding more poison--because “Bush trumps everything”).
° I asked myself, “Am I better off, or worse off, than I was 4 years ago (or 6 if you focus exclusively on Bush)?” I am way exceedingly doubleplusgood better off. Mostly not Bush’s doing, but on the tax question, yes, Bush’s doing.
° I continued asking.
° You are better off (Bush non c’entra).
° Piers is better off (Bush non c’entra).
° Little Coz, Nathan, Leggero, Julja--all better off (Bush non c’entra).
° Lettye is worse off, she faces surgery, but I’m pretty sure Bush didn’t cause her condition.
° Really only the 600,000 innocent Iraqi civilians Bush’s Army (with full Democratic support from the outset) has slaughtered at random these last couple of years--well they are in the hands of God, and so even they’re better off.
° And while I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t vote for Bush, I equally doubt if they’d vote for Bush’s enablers, viz., the crazymeaner than Republican New Democrats.

° As always, correct me if I’m wrong, Giac.