After posting yesterday's bit about left turns, my thoughts ran in the other direction, and I thought about hanging a Ralph, and that made me think of Linda Eisenstarck with whom I was very good friends when we were in high school.
One time when a bunch of us were somewhere, somebody told this joke: A traveling salesman, driving in unfamiliar territory, stops at a gas station in a small town. While the attendant is filling his tank, the salesman says to him, "Where am I?" The gas-jockey says, "This is Queersville." The salesman says, "That's a strange name for a town. Why do they call it Queersville?" The attendant says, "I don't know. Let me ask my wife," whereupon he turns and calls out, "Hey, Ralph! Why do they call this town Queersville?"
Okay, I know, I know, but to dumb teenagers in the early 60's, it was funny. As a matter of fact, Linda Eisenstarck laughed so hard at that joke that we thought she would never recover. Thereafter, any time you wanted to get Linda to laugh, all you had to do was say, "Hey, Ralph!" and she would crack up. After a while we started calling her Ralph, and that nickname stuck with her for the rest of our school days.
A couple years ago, Linda Eisenstarck (whose name isn't Eisenstarck any more) got a hold of me via Facebook. We emailed back and forth for a while, and on two occasions I mentioned something about how we used to call her Ralph. Not once did she even acknowledge my having brought it up.
I could show her where in my senior yearbook she signed her name "Linda Ralph," but I suppose it is sometimes best to let sleeping memories lie.
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