Unscramblin’ eggs!
Published 3:00 am Saturday, March 3, 2018
Sometimes my brain is scrambled like yard eggs in a frying pan.
Putting a thought together would be like holding water in a sieve.
So I’m stringing thoughts together in hopes that some sense can be made of it.
When I bought my last car – not the car before this one – the last car that I plan to buy, I drove directly to the Pow-Wow at Troy University before heading on a road trip. An aging Native American handed me a rabbit’s foot on a cord and said, “For you.” I have a little of Mama’s superstitious nature so I graciously accepted. I hung the dead rabbit’s foot on the rearview mirror of my car. It has been dangling there for three years now, perhaps bringing me any good luck that I have had.
This weekend, my son, as sons will do, enlightened me. He fiddled with the rabbit’s foot.
“China,” he read from the plate holding the foot to the cord.
A lucky Chinese rabbit’s foot, gifted by a Native American, dangling from a car founded in Japan and driven by a grandma born in Montana and homesteaded in rural South Alabama.
I took the rabbit’s foot right off the mirror. Then, I had a flat tire. The kitchen sink stopped up and the goat’s neck got stuck in the fence. The rabbit’s foot is back on the mirror. I need all the good luck I can get, no matter from whence it comes.
Gene Omasta and I discussed the $21 trillion national debt. Who could imagine a number so large. How long would it take to count to a trillion at the counting rate of one number per second?”
Having the mind of a mathematician, he figured it out.
“Simply divide 1 trillion (1 followed by 12 zeros) by the number of seconds in a day (86,400) times the number of days in a year. To count to one trillion, one dollar at a time, it would take 31,710 years.”
That brought to mind the time Fran Sharp, who was among us girls working at The Troy Progress, illustrated to readers the volume of water held in Troy’s new water tank. If you lined gallon jugs of water side by side, it would reach from The Troy Progress on South Brundidge Street “all the way” to True Value Hardware also on South Brundidge at that time. As soon as the papers hit the street the phones began to ring. Fran was a little off. Actually, the gallon jugs would stretch all the way to Atlanta or to be exact Augusta, Georgia.
Scramble. Those five men from Duluth who won the Olympic Gold Medal in curling deserve America’s applause. On the medal podium, they put their hands over their hearts and sang when America’s National Anthem was played. On the other hand, those Gold Medal hockey girls, hooked arms like high school cheerleaders and swayed and grinned like “chessie” cats. It used to be that America’s Gold Medalists were so overcome with national pride, they actually shed tears when their country’s National Anthem was played.
Just when I was at my wit’s end with thoughts running through my head like a chain saw through a log, Keith Roling brought me a book. Abraham Lincoln said his best friend was the one who brought him a book that he had not read. Ditto that. Thanks, Keith.
So, that’s what I’ve been thinking lately.
P.S. It’s a fact that any song can be sung to the tune of “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”
Try it. It’s like unscrambling eggs.