All Saints' Day

What are the chances that three people who share a birthday will all work for the same company, work in the same department, work on the same floor, and sit in adjacent cubicles all in a row?

I mean, how freaky is that?

Co-workers with the same birthday, sure. There are five of us (out of about 650 employees) where I work who were born on November 1. Four of us are in the same department. But that three of us who were born on the same date are occupying workstations all in a row is an extremely weird coincidence.

I'm in the middle cube, by the way. On the one side is a woman, the other side is a man. We were born in three different years (1968, 1965, 1946) in different places (Illinois, Michigan, Bangladesh).

And we came together here. My my.

Dad's Two Cents' Worth

After my father died in 1978, we found a small cardboard box in his top bureau drawer that contained about three dozen old or unusual coins. It was not a serious coin collection, and none of the coins was extremely rare or valuable. I'm sure he took most of them out of circulation after getting them in change.

There were, among other things, a few large cents (pre-1856) and quite a few Indian-head pennies and Liberty nickels. There was a half cent and a two-cent piece, some Morgan silver dollars, and some commemorative half dollars. There were a few foreign coins, but most were American.

What is really fascinating about his little accumulation of coins is what it did not contain. For instance, there were no Standing Liberty quarters, no Mercury Dimes, and no buffalo nickels.

Now, coins will generally remain in circulation for at least 20 years after they are last produced, and that should have held true for the Standing Liberty quarter (minted from 1916-1932), Mercury Dime (1916-1945), and buffalo nickel (1913-1938). Yet he didn't put any of those away in his little cardboard box.

Why would that be?

He could simply have lost interest, I suppose, but I think the real reason is that to a man born in 1912, these coins would not seem old or unusual. They were coins he literally grew up with.

You Are What You Do (or They Did, Back When)

Well, this is about as fugitive a thought as I've ever had. How I got here was by watching lots of old episodes of Murder, She Wrote. The main character's name is Jessica Fletcher. A fletcher is a maker of arrows.

There are many surnames derived from occupations: baker, weaver, miller, brewer, farmer, barber, singer, mason. There's wright (worker) and specific wrights: wheel-, cart-, and wainwright (makers of wheels, carts, and wagons); and all those woodworkers: joiner, sawyer, turner, carpenter. Some are more obscure: chandler (retailer), cooper (barrel maker), crocker (potter), draper (dry goods seller), tanner (curer of leather), tucker (cleaner of cloth). I could go on.

But I won't, because here's the point, at last -- I cannot find anybody whose last name is Printer, and I wonder why.

Could it be that printing, as an occupation, is a relative newcomer? Most of the names I've listed here go back 700 or 800 years, many of them much further than that. But we're into the 16th Century before printing becomes a regular job.

Before printing, of course, written material was painstakingly copied by hand by a scrivener (scribe). There are plenty of people named Scrivener.

But nobody named Printer.

Hmm.

And here's a post script. There are a few people whose last name is Cobbler, but lots more people whose name is Shoemaker. Now why is that, do you think?

To read, press on

In his poem "I Am Waiting," Lawrence Ferlinghetti (one of my fave poets, by the way) talks about many things he's waiting for, but since he mentions it several times, we can assume the one main thing he is waiting for is "a rebirth of wonder."

That's lofty stuff. And it should be, being poetic and all. My needs and desires, on the other hand, are pretty simple. Oh, sure, I'm waiting to win the lottery, and I'll even wait around for world peace, the obliteration of hunger, and a cure for cancer. But when it comes right down to the nitty-gritty nuts and bolts of every-day life, there really is just one thing I'm waiting for. And it is this:

Someday, somebody is going to invent a cardboard container that says, "To open, press here," and I'm going to press there, and it's going to open.

That will deliver me some wonder.

I Don't Smell Very Good

I enjoy saying that I don't smell good.

What I should say is that I don't smell well. Of course, there are definitely times when I get all hot and sweaty and really stink, but in general it's my sense of smell that stinks.

As far as I can remember, it's always been this way. I remember one Monday morning when I was in high school people were practically vomiting from the stench of something in the home-ec room that had been left out of the refrigerator all weekend. To me it was just a faint odor.

One Christmas -- I was in my mid-thirties by then -- my sister-in-law was saying how nice it was to have a real tree in the house, and I asked her why. She said it was because of the needles, and I said, "Yeah, you have to vacuum them up." She said, "No, for the smell." To which I replied in genuine wonder, "Do pine needles smell?"

Epiphany! That's why my college roommate had brought a small pine bough into our room and propped it in a corner. When asked what she planned to do with it, she had said "Nothing. It's just nice to have." Definitely strange, I had thought, but harmless. And now suddenly after all these years I figured out she had brought it in to perfume our room.

Meanwhile, my sister-in-law (looking like she would weep at the sadness of it) said, "You mean you've never smelled a pine tree?"

Nope. Never have. But then, I've never smelled a skunk either.

Bug Your Bundies

I keep saying, often with the slightest hint of wonder, that you can find anything on the internet. And that's a good thing when you want a .wav file of Andy Devine saying "Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!" But if you want to validate your own self-perceived uniqueness, forget it.

Lately I've taken to Googling expressions that I have always suspected were unique to me and my friends and my family. What a disappointment.

As an example, when I was in college in the mid-60's in mid-Wisconsin, we moved the interjectory "hey" from the beginning to the end of a sentence: "Hey, wait for me!" became "Wait for me, hey!" Actually, I still do that sometimes. But unique? No. Apparently people in parts of the U.K. do it all the time. Darn.

Another oddball locution from those days was "Bug your bundies." That meant to hurry up. So far I can find no reference to that anywhere, so I get one point.

My grandfather liked to say that supper would consist of "slumgullion and essence of squadrops." I've heard slumgullion used a lot, and there are even recipes for it on line -- sounds kind of like do-it-yourself Hamburger Helper. Google returns nothing for squadrops, however, so Grampie gets half a point.

Imagine my disappointment, however, when I Googled something my mother used to say. When she'd see me exerting myself at some task or other, she'd say "Don't strain your milk!" Since I never heard anybody else ever say that, I assumed it was something of her own. No. The Urban Dictionary is all over it. But what really blew my mind was that I never even got the whole thing typed in the box -- I only got as far as don't stra:

Oh, well. Don't strain your milk. But bug your bundies.