My New Hood Ornament

As I waited for a light at the intersection of two major roads, I became aware of a little boy. I turned and found Little-Boy was sitting in a child’s seat, front passenger side in the truck on my left. He was dressed in a blue suit, hair neatly combed and parted. As I looked at him, I also looked past him, at his mom. Mom was a “looker.” I try not to be rude, but I must reiterate, mom was a “looker”, and so I was compelled to look; I am after all a guy. I suppose Little-Boy noticed my looking. He turned to me and I said to him in a mock-enthusiastic manner, as both our windows were down, “Is that your mom?” I believe I heard him reply, “Yeah.” I added, “Your mom’s pretty!” Mom took notice and smiled. Little-Boy whipped his gaze from me to his mom, and back to me and back to mom, and back to me. I noticed on his face a most serious and dark look of disapproval. I went back to watching the light when without warning, a small toy clattered across my truck’s hood. The child had launched it at me. I set the brake, turned off the engine and hustled out to recover it. I was laughing, mom was laughing, Little-Boy was not. I returned to him his toy, and hurried back to mine as the light had changed. I had just closed the door, when the toy came flying through the open window. Little-Boy had perfected his aim. The traffic proceeded and left me no chance to return his “gift” as they were well on their way but I am certain that I saw, as the two of them pulled away, mom was laughing. Mario, however, was mine.

A Brief Story

Rolf Velsen was born June, 1925 on a farm outside of the village of Vilatch, province of Vilatch, in the state of Carinthia, of Austria. He was what the people of that time and place would have called a peasant. In our vernacular of that day we would have called him a “poor, dumb farm boy.” Rolf’s education extended to the sixth grade, and his world was encompassed by the countryside about his home to a radius of ten miles. All beyond that was a foreign land. He was Lutheran and attended church regularly. Rolf’s acquaintances consisted in the main of his extended family, the nearest neighbors, and a few school chums. He worked the land beside his father and mother and brothers and sisters with the simplest of implements. He had never spent a night away from home. Home was all he knew. He was not sophisticated.

On August 1943 he was conscripted into the German Army. He said goodbye to his parents and siblings, and boarded a truck with others of similar luck, which carried him to a train that in turn took him to Salzburg, a distance of less than one-hundred miles from home, near the German-Austrian border. The handful of hours he had spent away from home already seemed to him to be an eternity, and homesick, he jumped from the train as it began to pick up speed. Several hours later he was captured by the police, turned over to military authorities and after a brief interrogation had revealed the facts, Rolf was placed in a cell. The next day he was given a Court Martial for desertion and found guilty. The following day Rolf Velsen was ushered into a courtyard with a thief, and a saboteur, placed against a wall and shot.

This story was related to me by an old man under the influence of a Scotch and heard by myself through the same haze. The story is a retelling of a tale relayed by at least several others and in the telling details may have been lost and others corrupted, but not to such a extent as to render it useless.

Mr. Stinky Breath

In the past I had the habit of leaving the cat-port open all night. My mousers have a duty to perform and it is best performed late at night when their prey are moving about. Trouble is they too frequently bring their victims into the safety of home. Whenever I can, I take their toys away and toss them into a bucket and the next morning bury them in the vegetable garden. 

You probably recall the story of how the Pilgrims that settled in New Plymouth, Massachusetts nearly starved to death due to the infertility of the very sandy soil they were attempting to cultivate. They were starving, that is, until the natives taught them how to fertilize the soil by using fish, which they had in abundance. Fish are high in protein and protein has an abundance of nitrogen, and potassium and their bones are high in phosphorous, and calcium, and upon rotting the fish become a very nearly balanced fertilizer. As there is a shortage of fish in the desert, I’ve learned to use the rodents my cats bring me. With a foundation bar, I drill a hole near the roots of a chard plant, lift a rodent out of the bucket by the tail, insert it nose first into the hole and using the foundation bar, gently tamp in in place. I’ve found I can deposit three small mice or one good size rat in each hole. It’s best to leave the tail of the last one hanging out slightly so you don’t accidentally over-fertilize that particular spot.

One of my cats, Legs, likes the hunt and early in mid morning knocks off to come into my bedroom to “report”. He’s a big tough, blond, male tabby who loves his man. He likes to sit near my head late at night and purr into my ear and breath into my nose. Late one night he was doing so, with his cold nose so close it would occasionally touch mine. I had noticed in the past a peculiar scent about him at those times but never put it all together…I was after all half asleep…when I found myself overly disturbed by that awful musky scent that he was breathing into my nostrils. When, finally, it dawned on me…what I was smelling…was the scent of…rat blood. I must say, was so very good of him to report to me, in his pure animal-cat way, the success of his hunt.

Return to the Familiar

Upon entering the field I felt unease. At that time in my life I had an overabundance of time off and spent some of that hiking in the mountains and foothills of the Huachucas. That day I was stalking deer. I carried a camera, not a gun. I had pursued this hobby semi-successfully for a year. My first attempt, called in a buck to within twenty feet, but I waited too long to trip the shutter, and the shy thing darted away like a silent flash of lightning. It comes as a wake-up call to see a creature move so swiftly, and makes us look like the distant, decadent relations of the animal world we truly are.

Upon entering the field there is a mental adjustment to be made. We have neatly parted the world of man from the world of creepy, crawly nature. There is their world and then there is ours; theirs and ours and seldom does the twain meet. I estimate that you would need to spend a good half of your time in the field, camping, hunting, hiking to really feel one with nature. My life-style came nowhere close to that; I spent at very best only a dozen hours a week in "the field." But, the field is an inadequate phrase to mark the separation between man and nature.

A better way would be to describe the uncertainty and trepidation one feels upon entering “the field.” I left my truck parked on the side of a dirt road and with only a camera and a canteen, proceeded to walk through the dry, high grasses, toward the scrub oak of the foothills. Dryness is a constant with southern Arizona and even after fifty plus years it's still a wonder to me that anything can survive here much less thrive. My feet felt unnatural on the irregular ground. I walked far enough to thoroughly hide from me the sight of my vehicle, and stopped in a dry “stream” bed. I knew I'd have to wait quite a while to let the echo of my arrival to settle, as if with the dust that rose in my truck's wake. I had torn the peace of nature. It takes time for peace to be restored.

So, I sat me down in a comfortable spot and shortly, my tailbone proceeded to hurt. I shifted to hurt some other part. It isn’t the physical adjustment that is difficult, but rather it’s the mental. My mind felt out of sync with all about me. While I knew the names of the things and understood them through that human lens, the labels that I applied to these bits and pieces of nature were insufficient. I knew I needed time to adapt to them. And so I sat.

I felt restless, disturbed and unnatural. I felt as if my mere presence in spite of my absolute silence was sending out waves, perturbing all about me. All would align with time; I just needed to give it time. The thing that disturbed me most was the seeming infinitude of minute details in virtually everything I cast my gaze upon. There was the sand in the dry stream bed, the grasses, and the minutia of an oak branch’s bark; there was layer upon layer of details suggestive of Rocco ornamentation. Unnerved and trying to adjust, I closed my eyes for a while and saw in the blackness behind my closed lids a grainy swarm of motes reminiscent of the scene I was evading. I opened my lids and found my gaze settled on an insect wing lying at my feet.

I lifted it and held it to the light. Again there was the blizzard of details assaulting my eyes. Holding it close, I turned the delicate thing in my fingers allowing it to catch the light from different angles and finally in such a way that it threw interference fringes of many colors. It would exist for a brief while, an artifact of some flying insect, the remnant of some decayed life, and then it too would crumble into an infinitude if even finer details of dust.

I relaxed, and I adjusted, and I aligned myself with nature at last. I tooted on my game call and waited for the deer to stroll near. Waiting and waiting, I sat and sat, until I could sit still no longer as the day was closing. By now, all seemed natural and every leaf on every twig and every twig on every branch was in its place; the order of nature was at last, natural.

After many hours of this I was done, and so I lifted myself and proceeded to my vehicle. My feet seemed to fall with a new grace, and the grasses snapping under foot had a natural tone. My truck patiently waited on the road, its blueness unreal among the browns and grays of the surrounding field. It appeared odd and odder still as I drew closer, until at a stones throw I stopped and looked in wonder and awe at this familiar artifact from my life that appeared, now, disturbingly unfamiliar and very unnatural.

It was an early Ford Bronco of the metal box and functional breed. It was powder blue with a cream top, white wheels and jet black tires. The windshield and windows were absolutely flat and unnaturally pure and transparent. Its appearance halted me in my tracks. I stood looking at the thing with trepidation. It appeared very unfamiliar, weirdly toy-like and outlandish. Slowly I approached it as if it was a wild creature, as if my movement might startle it and send it fleeing. The paint was pure and its surfaces unblemished and unnaturally, predictably shaped. There was none of the blizzard of details found in “nature”. What I saw was as unnatural as unnatural could be.

Nearly laughing at its toy-like appearance, I looked closely into the light blue surface and wondered at its pureness. In it I saw, superimposed, a swarm of transparent and transient tadpole like images of the details I had previously found so disturbing in the bark of the tree branches. It was as if my mind was straining to find details in the hyper-simplicity of the unblemished surface before my eyes. The glass was even more transcending. I could see through it! And stranger still were, on its surface, the reflections of the sky, the mountains, and the field about.

Opening the door, I climbed into the contraption and closed it behind me with a resounding, clang! The early Broncos had little in the way of sound dampening. I had heard that sound a thousand times before but now it seemed very weird. Sitting in the driver’s seat, I gazed in wonder at the interior and again with wonder through the surface of the glass. What was once familiar now seemed foreign. Attempting to re-adjust to this new old-reality I began to giggle at its preposterous existence. I asked myself, "If this thing could be, then what next could be brought into being?"

My hand reached out and turned the key and the machine buzzed to life disturbing the universe with its metallically pure pulsing, clanking regularity. I placed my hands on the steering wheel and dared myself to drive this “thing” under the influence of my near hallucinatory state of mind. I engaged the first gear and it lurched to life and proceeded to bounce along the washboard road. I giggled and grinned and laughed and slowly adjusted…slowly but surely returned… to the normalcy of… the familiar.

Freddy

As I sped past, I spotted Freddy lying on the side of the road. I knew I wanted him at first sight. So I quickly pulled off and performed a double U-ey. Fortunately highway traffic was sparse. I backed up to him and stepped to the rear of the truck, lowered the tailgate, threw the tarp to one side and turned to admire Freddy. He lay there in all his glory…a youngish, coyote. Struck by a vehicle, a bone protruded from his rib cage, his jaw askew, eyes half closed; he was young and still. I put on my gloves, grabbed him by the hind legs and pulled him from the ground. He was still fresh; there was no sickening sound of gore-glued hide pulling away and exposing a hollowed out torso full of maggots. I was thankful.

I pulled Freddy toward the back of my pickup, placed one knee, then the other on the tailgate and stood up, still holding his hind legs. As I was doing so a city cop pulled up behind me with his lights flashing. I was so thankful he did not apply his siren. Continuing with my task I heaved Freddy into the bed of the truck, and stood there making sure to keep my hands in unsuspicious,  predictable places as the officer exited the vehicle. “Sir! What do you have there?“

I’d met him a month before in town when I blew my horn at him for not being aggressive enough in performing a left-hand turn onto the highway. “Coyote…them’s good eat’n!“, I tried my best to play to the groundlings.

“You can’t stop here sir!”, the cop explained. “Didn’t you see the signs back there? ’No parking within 80 feet of the road.’ ”

“Yeah, sure, always wondered what those were all about so I stopped to take a closer look at’m.“

This cop was aggressive. Every time I saw him he had someone pulled over. Typically he drove a dark blue unmarked police vehicle and he worked it hard. He had given me a warning for using my horn earlier. He looked not too longingly at the coyote I had harvested and ask, “What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m going to mount him. Take him home, let the maggots eat their fill and then clean 'im up, glue the bones back together and mount him…ya know…put him on display.”

He looked amused, “OK,…fine…just understand you can’t be stopping here.” I knew there was really no problem; he just wanted to make contact with a “normal” person.

“Sure I understand, I just wish people would stop hitting these guys and luring me into stopping for 'em. Next week it’ll be a havelina. Trouble is, those pigs are stinky from the get-go.” I stepped off the truck bed.

“So, you’re going to mount him?” he sounded incredulous.

“Yeah, and put him into a real-life crouch with a kangaroo-rat as the target.” I was dreaming big now.

“OK sir, good luck...be careful pulling out.” he advised as he returned to his cruiser.

I quickly gave Freddy a respectful tarp covering and pulled onto the road. As I gained speed another coyote crossed the highway a few hundred yards ahead. “Oh, wow! Wouldn't it be great to have a pair?”

I Am the Bear-Man

Bear-man! Bear-man! cried out the little boy sitting in the back of his mother’s shopping cart. Despite the darkness of the parking lot, the child had correctly identified me as the "bear-man." Yes, I am, in fact, the "bear-man." But the boy’s mother had no clue what her son meant. He gesticulated toward me as if beckoning me to come to him. “What are you saying“, I heard her quiz him? But I knew what he meant. So I approached . “I know what he’s saying,” I said, then I turned to the her boy, perhaps three at most, and said emphatically, “I am the bear-man!” The boy cooed and gripped the handle bar of the shopping cart. I turned to his mother and explained. “I believe he goes to the nursery school at the corner of Lomita and Grand Avenue in El Segundo.” She was truly puzzled, “Yes, how did you know?”

I explained, “Your boy and I met a several weeks ago, when I donated a giant stuffed Panda Bear to the school.” I walked into their nap room and found a sea of babies, perhaps forty in all, asleep on their mats, side beside side, watched over by a half dozen care-givers. In a nutshell, they were too perfectly cute. Sleep seemed to permeate the air, all fast asleep, with one exception...this one boy…hers…who stood gripping a long, low plastic fence. He quickly burbled over with joy at my appearance with the giant stuffed toy...this fantastic new thing that I had introduced into his world. His eyes shone with a liquid, dark excitement; he cooed, and burbled, and rocked the fence excitedly. I placed the panda on a heap of similar, but less significant, stuffed toys and departed. Some weeks later I happened to meet one of the caregivers, and she related how much the boy adores the panda and how he rushes immediately to it upon arriving at the school.

It’s remarkable that in the darkness of a parking lot, and over a distance of thirty yards, and several weeks time, he could recognize me. But then there is only one person like me in his world; I am the one, and I am the only “Bear-Man.”

Why Cat-Men are Better Companions for Women than Dog-Men

There are men who prefer cats, and men who prefer dogs. I 'm of the opinion that such a bias will shape the relations between a man and a woman, and furthermore, that cat-men (men who’s sympathies lie with cats) make better companions for women than do dog-men. Here is my reasoning:

1) Cat-men learn to gently stroke their cats, while dog-men learn to fondle their dogs. Which would a woman prefer, being gently stroked or fondled?

2) Cats are elusive and mysterious and make little attempt to adapt their behavior to yours so a cat-man has spent many hours observing and wondering about his cat companion's behavior and in the end he will happily accepts as fact that the cat is not totally at his command; so too with his woman consort.

3) Dogs are the sycophantic glad-handers of the pet world. Cats, on the other hand, can take you or leave you and if they had a middle finger they would let remind you...frequently. As a result, a cat-man will not expect his female companion to fawn upon him and be constantly at his beck-and-call.

4) A cat’s coat is soft while a dog’s is rather hard so a dog would rather be patted. So, a cat-man is more likely to apply a soft touch out of habit. And really, how many women enjoy being patted or having a finger inserted in their ear?

5) Cats make high-pitched sounds much like an infant’s cry. Consequently, a cat-man is more in tune to the sounds of a distressed infant and will notice the sound and accept the sound of a crying infant without as much distress.

6) Many dog-men select an expensive purebred dog simply so they can put it on a leash and parade it to induce envy in others. Do women really wish to be treated as trophies? Cat-men, on the other hand, are far less likely to search out a particular breed and readily accept a Heinz-57 variety of cat; they just want love.

7) Cats must be gently coaxed into doing new things while dogs must be restrained from doing whatever they want to do. Hence, a cat-man is relieved when a woman takes the lead while a dog-man may feel a woman needs to be restrained. Which would a woman prefer, a Cat-man who gives his approval of her behavior or a dog-man who feels the need to collar her?

Zappa

I met my dog Zappa purely by chance. As I pulled up to an  intersection of two major roads outside of Dead Stick, Arizona, I saw her on the roadside looking frantically at passing motorists. She appeared to be anxiously hoping her family would stop and pick her up. I feared she might dart out onto the highway and so I stopped and approached her. She looked at me with nervous-hopefulness; I assumed her to be abandoned and approached her with hopeful-nervousness. People here have the foolish idea that it's better to dump a dog in the desert and hope it will be be taken in than to take it to an animal shelter. Coyotes swarm the area and a domestic dog is hardly a match for one and is no match for two; they keep the place thoroughly cleaned of "stray" pets.

She was a young female German Shepherd of medium build and trimmed ears. She had on no collar. I took off my belt and applied it as a leash and led her back to the truck. The other tasks of the day were put to one side as I drove her to town and deliver her to the animal shelter. The town’s shelter denied responsibility as I had found her outside the city limits. They directed me to the county shelter another seven miles off. And so I drove her there.

She was nervous at first, but the ride in the truck calmed her and by the time we arrived, she was positively grinning. I described her to the animal control people, one of whom stepped outside to have a look and declared, “That’s a mighty pretty dog you have there.” I looked at her, and she at me; it was then I realized how utterly stupid it was to deliver such a beautiful creature to a shelter. I could keep her at home while I ran an ad in the local paper to find her owner. And if no one claimed her…well then…I had a dog.

So I took her home, and ran the ad for a week, knowing it would not be answered. And, in all honesty, whoever dumped her didn't  deserve to have her back. I anointed her Zappa, and introduced her to my two Rhode Island Red chickens, Gabriella and Henrietta. Zappa adopted the chickens as pets of her own and positively fawned on them. The chickens would wander as one about the yard and the dog would follow closely behind, with a big grin on her face, nearly stepping on their tails. She liked to see them move. If they sat down she would nudge them to get them to move about. On one occasion, I saw the chickens squat and refuse to move anymore. Zappa wanted to see more action and in her frustration picked one up by the neck. The result was much squawking from the offended hen. I scolded her and she promptly dropped the bird. The poor bird, very upset and possibly bruised, came running to me squawking in a hoarse voice as if to level some inarticulate complaint against the rough handling she had just received. I gave the hen a little stroking and sent her on her way.

As with all dogs she loved a ride in the truck. While passing through town we pulled up to a red light. As I waited I adjusted my center view mirror. In the mirror was a cop car. Zappa turned to me with a grin and reached out with her nose to sniff the scent I had left on the mirror. As she did, she accidentally nudged the mirror causing it to go askew. “No! Don’t mess with the mirror!”, I scolded and I readjusted the mirror. I could see the cop grinning. I turned to look at Zappa, she grinned and reached out with her nose and again nudged the mirror throwing it off even more. “Nooo!! Don’t mess the mirror!!”, I sputtered in exasperation. I gave her nose a playful swipe with one finger. At this point, was really grinning, and so too was the cop. Zappa’s grin widened to include her back molars. Now she understood how the game was played. Again, she reached out and bumped the mirror. This time the mirror jumped off its mount and fell to the floor of the truck. “Noooooo!!! Don’t mess with the mirror!!!”, I howled setting the parking brake, I scrabbled about on the truck’s floor for the mirror. I replaced the mirror and witnessed the cop shaking uncontrollably with laughter.

Zappa was a home body. I had no fence around the house at that time. The first instance I drove away without her, she attempted to follow. I led her back by the collar and explained as best I could in my inarticulate people-speak that she was to remain on guard and take good care of her chickens. It took only one lesson for her to catch on and from that day forth she remained faithfully in place. I built her a nice dog house and she was gracious enough to share it with her chickens during the day. They had a house of their own for use at night, but enjoyed napping in the dog house beside Zappa. The three together was too beautiful a sight to forget. Regrettably I did not take a photo.

The end came in a very stupid way, when I came home to find one of the hens ripped to pieces. The other hen, in her terror had stuffed her head into a small bush. Her rump protruded for all the world to see, but as her head was hidden and her eyes closed, in the simple mind of a chicken that was sufficient for her to think she was invisible. I accused Zappa of killing the chicken. I thought perhaps she had tried to pick up the hen and the hen in its panic had squirmed and fluffed up its feathers in the dog’s mouth. The feeling and scent of a bird struggling in a dog’s mouth is enough to awaken in most any dog the most primal urges and I assumed Zappa had gone off the deep end and ripped the hen to pieces accidentally-on-purpose. I scolded her, I railed at her, and I threw the carcass at her and made her look at it as I left it there in front of her house. She looked sheepish, confused and hurt. And I declared I could not have a chicken killing dog in my life and resolved to give her away.

How perfectly stupid. First of all there was no fence around the property and I had seen a pack of dogs from one of the neighbors pass by the house on occasion. In addition, how could I have equated that beautiful, obedient, intelligent dog with a hen? I could get another chick for a dollar and I could have kept them separated by bit of cheap fence. There was no comparison. Nevertheless, I placed an ad and found a new home for Zappa within a few days. She happily boarded her new family’s vehicle. I watched to see if she would turn around to look at me as she was driven away, but a dog is a very adaptable creature and I didn’t deserve any better than to be ignored. In an instant, she had a new family to protect. I wonder if she every thinks about that insane man who railed at her for failing to protect her hen from a pack of roaming dogs. Giving her away was the dumbest thing I’ve done in ages.

Lunatic Time

Sometime around 1990 I was listening to radio KPFK based in Santa Monica California. KPFK is a member of the Pacifica Radio Network, a for the most part left of left-liberal voice of the “loyal” opposition. I don’t recall the particular radio program but the host had invited onto the show a person who claimed to have the inside scoop on the goings on in Nicaragua. At that time the Sandinistas held power and were being challenged by the Contras in irregular combat. The guest supposedly knew all about the CIA involvement in the conflict, and was laying out the "facts", when for some unknown reason he suddenly went off the rails and began expounding on how the CIA had infiltrated the Veterans Administration Dentistry Department and when veterans came in to have their teeth worked on, the agents would proceed to implant radio receivers in their teeth and then wire those up to the emotion center of the patients' brains. That’s right, you heard correctly. The CIA was doing brain surgery on veterans surreptitiously. And to what end do you ask? The guest explained that whenever the CIA felt the need to nudge the nation a little further to the right politically, they would dial in one of those radio receivers which would send a jolt to the victim’s emotion center causing that poor patient to go berserk and to kill someone at random. There would be terrific response from the terrified public which would produce a conservative reaction. And so by way of these small but horrific incidents the CIA could slowly but surely move the nation onto a more conservative path. 

I could hear the host of the show sputtering and stammering in the background as he heard this ridiculous story unfold live on the air. He obviously realized that his guest had wandered into the deep end of the pool and needed to be saved. The host quickly announced a station identification break and when they returned he had his guest back on the rails. Ah Pacifica Radio, the voice of the loyal opposition and chock to the hilt with the lunatic fringe. I miss yea…not!

Fried Herring

In days of yore, when I lived in west Los Angeles, a friend came to visit. I resided in what was known as the Fairfax district and in fact only two streets over from Fairfax Avenue where there were to be found, a number of ethnically Jewish restaurants. He suggested we indulge in a meal and so we decided to walk the very short distance to Fairfax Avenue.

The day was one of those that define Los Angeles; simply put, the sun was vertiginous. The neighborhood was a mix of ethnicities known as salt-and-pepper but very much upscale as attested by the informal cognomen of "Beverly Hills Adjacent." The short walk was blessed with a variety of yard-scapes of whimsically pruned shrubs, carpet-like lawns, and architectural beauties that varied from Tudor to Spanish Mission.


As we approached Fairfax Avenue, the ubiquitous traffic parted and we crossed in safety to the east side, and into an abundance of restaurants. Their façades were worn, and sun-burnt, and very much plain-Jane in appearance. We briefly searched up and down the street for a home for our hungry stomachs. In the end, the clincher, was a well-worn entrance and in particular the polished stones of the concrete at the very point at which one-hundred-thousand persons, most likely times ten, had voted with the balls of the feet as they had made their turn here.


We declared this restaurant as “the best.” It was simple; it was plain; it had booths, it had a snubbed out cigarette on the floor. Neither too clean nor too dirty, it was just a restaurant, with a few patrons, a menu, a waitress, and a cook.


We scanned the menu and I knew I had to have something exotic but not so that I could not recognize it when delivered. I puzzled over the menu, uncertain as to what to order when my eyes fell upon something familiar: fried herring. I knew herring. It was a fish and my encounters with pickled herring were very positive and so I settled upon a meal of fried herring with all the trimmings. I announced my selection to my friend who gave me a questioning look and asked anxiously, “Are you sure you want fried herring?” I didn’t take the hint from his worried tone. “Yes”, I answered, “fried herring please.”


Our dowdy waitress arrived and failed to announce that she "would be our waitress for the afternoon." She requested our orders and I without concern for the well being of others asked for the, “Fried herring plate, please.” She paused and gave me a very direct look through her horn rim, rhinestone-studded spectacles and asked very clearly but with a worried undertone, “Are you sure you want fried herring?” Oblivious to the obviously dark undertones in her voice, I answered, “Yes, please." The patrons in the neighboring booths had apparently overheard this, a number whom gave me double takes.


At the time it never occurred to me that anything was amiss. The waitress departed but soon returned from the kitchen. She marched straight up to me and asked in a very direct and pointed fashion, “The cook wants to know, ‘Are you sure you want fried herring?’ ” At this point one might think I would have picked up on some hint of alarm, concern, or trace of an objection to my order. But hints do not work well with me. I will frankly admit to being a bit obtuse. Do not waste your time dropping hints unless they have the substantial weight of a bowling ball and are applied directly to my skull. Some might say I am thick, I like to say I am not always very perceptive or concerned about the welfare of the people about me. And so I replied to the cook’s interrogative, “Yes, fried herring please.”


My companion, a professor of mathematics a UCLA, a man steeped in logic and rational thought, appeared puzzled and completely unable to parse my thinking. The behavior he observed before him must have seemed totally irrational, as was attested to by his gap-jawed, alarmed stare. The other patrons began to change to booths far away from ours.


The waitress left with the order and soon there began to fill the very air, a very putrid odor akin to that of flaming tires, salted with burning flesh of a fishy sort that rasped at the olfactory canals in an painful way. Though I was much alarmed by the stench I had no clue as to what could be the cause, until the dead fried thing was presented to me, by the waitress on a very hot plate, still sizzling, and with an ironic look from her that said "Enjoy."


Sooooo…this was fried herring, most interesting! It took me all of about two seconds to come to the conclusion that I did not want fried herring. And although I am sure, the tasting of such a thing probably would not have killed me had I eaten it, I declined the opportunity to test whether it might have rendered me stronger.