Not My Native Tongue

Late yesterday as I was getting off work, my next door neighbor and her young daughter were sitting on their porch. I waved and said, "Hi!"

"Hi!" the little girl responded. Then she, very excited, launched into full on Pebbles Flintstone. "Bada dadi dodi gadda gidda da nehhi blochta hehaw!" I could actually feel the confused expression growing on my face as she talked. 

Her mother then explained, "She said she got a pedal bike at her fourth birthday party and she's learning to ride it."

I looked back at the daughter. "Mommy and Daddy are teaching you to ride a bike?"

She began another run on sentence. "Yes! Haha bingo blah suppri didi haha no a aat ya ya!"

Mom said, "Yes they are, and it's fun, and one day I'll teach my baby sister to ride hers!"

"Good for you!" I told the girl.

I'm glad she's so happy, but I was most grateful for the translator. It's been decades since I had to speak toddler.

NYC Thoughts

I'm trying to make up my mind whether I could live in New York City or its environs. 

There really is a lot to like. Active neighborhoods, sports venues, and large park areas. Interesting stores abound as well. Prices are good enough at stores and restaurants, not more than a tad higher than smaller cities. Rents and houses I can't speak to though.

What's not to like? I think I'm a people person at heart, but there's a lot of people. From my limited experience traffic isn't all that bad, but there is a lot of it just the same. Be ready, as I intimated the other day, for way too many car honking symphonies. There seems to be activity all the time, which can be disconcerting.

I think the lack of ready parking is my biggest turn off. I'm too much of a Midwesterner to want to wait to drive my car; I want to go places when I want to go. I want to walk outside my door, and there's my wheels. They aren't blocks away or lodged in a parking structure.

The judgment? Definitely a great place to visit. The jury is out on making it a home.

A fresh coat of paint

I'll never get this story quite right. But it is, in my mind, a neat little story, so I'll try.

It was either me Mother's grandmother or great grandmother, I just don't recall exactly. So we'll assume her great grandmother, and I'll refer to her as great great Grams as that's what she'd then be to me.

Great-Great-Grams lived in a small house behind one of me other great great relatives. Family legend says she lived to be 108, though I really don't know about that. One day she decided that her house, maybe three rooms in size, needed to be painted. Only she didn't have the money to pay for it. Neither did anybody else, the time being the Depression with cash particularly scarce in the South those years. Yet she really wanted the house painted.

The solution? Friends and relatives went through their homes and barns and garages and came up with a pint of paint left in a can here, a quart there, maybe most of a gallon in another can and so forth. They mixed it all in a large bucket, furnished a few paint brushes from their various collections, and painted Great-Great-Grams house a nice grey-lavender kind of color. She loved it, her newly painted little home, and everyone involved felt a certain pride of neighborliness and kinship.

So that's the story. I haven't told it well, but it was worth trying to tell anyway.

Dumpster diving Dan

When we moved into our house, the upstairs bathroom had a nice mahogany toilet seat. But as with all things human made, it eventually broke. I went to the hardware and bought a decent replacement. We simply threw the old one in the common dumpster which we shared at that time with about six neighbors.
Several days later I happened to be in my neighbor Dan's house. Excusing myself to use his washroom, I saw a nicely refinished mahogany toilet seat. "When did you get this, Dan?" I asked.
"Out of the dumpster. Isn't it cool? Someone was throwing it out; can you believe that?" He had taken the thing, reglued and refinshed it, and put it on his commode.
I answered, "Yes I can, because it was mine. I can't believe you took something like from a dumpster!"
"It's perfectly good," he protested. But that didn't keep him from chastising me several days later when the seat had rebroken and left a blood blister on the back of his thigh. "You toilet seat did that to me," he whined.
"Serves you right dumpster diving stuff like that," was all I said.