Check Your Facts

I once worked with a young woman who -- for a reason I will never understand -- believed that her best bet for impressing people was to acquaint them with an appalling medical history.  She happily discussed a veritable medical journal's worth of diseases, conditions, syndromes, and complaints she had suffered, all of which were exaggerated if not completely fictitious. 

She was too young to have been in the hospital that many months that many times; and a little better medical knowledge might have given some credence to her claims.  She told me, for instance, that she used to have to wear very thick eyeglasses to correct very bad astigmatism but that it went away by itself.  She also said her sinuses were so bad, she had to have them removed.

The small company we worked for was slowly going bankrupt, and while the owners were out trying to sell the product, she and I were sometimes the only ones in the office.  At those times, she concocted attacks and episodes and spells she hoped would get her out of work.  I don't know why she bothered.  It was nothing to me, since I was not her boss.

One day she pretended to faint.  I heard her hit the floor, but I just ignored it.  Eventually she began to moan softly, which I also ignored, but finally, not wanting to waste a good fall, she called out (very weakly, of course), and I was forced to go into her cube where she appeared to be just coming to.  I looked down at her and said something real compassionate, like, "What the hell's your problem?"

My favorite, though, was the time she thought she had not only figured out a way to get around being late for work, but also how to get the rest of the day off.

We both started at 8:00 o'clock, but on this morning she finally came hobbling into the office at 8:30, bravely bearing up under the horrific pain of some significant injury she had sustained.  She had slipped on ice, she said, and lain in the parking lot for over 30 minutes before she mustered the strength to drag herself into the building. 

I believed she had fallen (her knee was scraped, her stocking torn), but I knew it hadn't occurred more than five minutes before.  She counted on me being on time, as I usually was, but that morning I was late coming to work.  If she had been in the parking lot when I arrived at 8:25, I'd have seen her. 

I didn't call her out on that lie because I had a better idea.  She was convinced she had dislocated her spine, or some such nonsense, and thought she should just go on home.  I, however, insisted that such a serious injury required immediate medical attention, whereupon I called an ambulance, which came and took her away.

And I spent the rest of that day grinning to myself.

Done for now

So, one holiday down.  And traditional it was -- turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole, cranberries, pumpkin pie.  I had leftovers for lunch again today.  I might be just about burned out on that too, although there's still plenty left.

There was plenty of football too.  I will probably never surpass, nor even equal, my personal record of having watched nine football games over Thanksgiving weekend in 1976.  But I saw the ones I wanted to see and parts of various others that were interesting.  The Bears lost.  Michigan State won.  The Lions also lost, which is too bad.  I don't care about the Lions, but I wish somebody would beat Green Bay already.

And speaking of America's national pastime (Frank DeFord says it has overtaken baseball), I am tired of hearing football commentators say that a forward pass is "almost intercepted" just because the defensive player who is covering the intended receiver gets a finger on the ball or has it bounce off his shoulder pad or his head.  When the defender has the ball in his hands and drops it, then it is almost intercepted.

Gearing up for the next bunch of holiday events now.  And football games.  I'm tired already.

Anybody have change for a twenty?

A friend just sent me seven coins she brought home from a trip to Hong Kong, which I was glad to get and add to my little collection of oddball coins.

The problem was, I couldn't identify five of them.  There are handy, helpful sites all over the Internet that I use to identify coins, but I couldn't even figure out what denomination these were.  After broadening my search, I discovered they were not from Hong Kong at all but from Japan.

I love researching foreign coins, but sometimes I find one that stumps me.  A few years ago someone gave me a coin she said was from Greece.  I looked up Greek coins and couldn't find one like it, then on closer examination I decided the writing on it was not Greek at all but Cyrillic.

With that determined, I started looking at Russian coins, but that got me nowhere too.  Finally,  I got the bright idea to transliterate the words on the coin.  I found a chart online that showed the Cyrillic alphabet with the Roman equivalent for each letter.

On the reverse of the coin was "20" and then the word СТОТИНКИ.  Just taking each equivalent letter, this came out to be STOTINKI.  I thought to myself, this can't be right -- nobody has money called stotinki.

Well, you know what?  Bulgaria does.  Their unit of currency is the lev, divided into 100 stotinki, which is actually plural -- one is a stotinka.

In American dollars, 20 stotinki is about 14 cents.  Oh, well.  Its real value is that it is my first and only coin from Bulgaria.

A Sunday Birthday

My mother, Elizabeth Anna Weatherford, was born 90 years ago today in Hillsboro, Illinois.  Last year on this date I presented the newspaper announcement of her birth.  That does not seem like a year ago.  Tempus is definitely fugiting.

November 20, 1921, was a Sunday.  She also died on a Sunday (August 15, 1971).  Last month when I was writing about my father's birthday, I checked to see what day of the week October 13 was in 1912, and it was a Sunday too, and he also died on a Sunday (January 22, 1978).

How freaky is it that both my parents were born and died on Sunday?

If this runs in the family, I should be extremely careful on Fridays.

Stop n Shop

Once again this year I am doing my Christmas shopping online.  It's just a matter of pointing and clicking, and I've got a lot of it done already.  It lacks the interpersonal experience of going to the store where you can touch and feel and heft and poke things to see what they really are about.  But it certainly is easier.

When I was a kid, my mother and aunt and I always made one very special Christmas shopping trip to downtown Chicago, which required a bus and an elevated train to reach.  It was usually within close range of Christmas, so it was cold and often snowy, and the Loop was in full festive decoration, and the stores were busy, the sidewalks crowded.  We would hit all the big department stores -- Wieboldt's and Carson's and The Fair -- and no trip was complete without a visit to Marshall Field's to see the famous Christmas tree that was four -- or was it five? -- stories tall.

During one such shopping trip just about in the middle of the 1950's, we were in Field's taking the elevator up to the seventh floor where the ladies' lounge was.  It stopped along the way and one woman got on.  Unlike every other woman in the elevator and in the store and in the Loop, she was wearing slacks.  Even I at age nine or ten noticed it, since shopping (or  just being) downtown in Chicago was a dress-up affair.  She got off on the next floor, and the second the doors had closed behind her, a woman turned to her companion and said with disdain, "Hmmp!  I wonder what suburb she's from."

We were from the suburbs too by then, but luckily we knew how to behave.

I wonder what that women would think of me sitting in my jammies pointing and clicking my way to Christmas shopping success.

But he didn't come to dinner after all

I was flipping channels earlier and came across "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," the 1967 film that is probably considered a classic if for no other reason than it was the last of the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn flicks, and, in fact, Tracy's last film.  It was a bit touchy in its day, all about inter-racial marriage, or the prospect thereof, between Katharine Houghton -- Hepburn's niece, who never did much else in the movies -- and Sidney Poitier, who did.  Good movie, though, with a great cast, including Cecil Kellaway as a lovable teddy bear.  Beah Richards as Poitier's mother is especially wonderful, but she always is.

I remember when my parents came home from having gone to see the movie, which I had already seen.  We talked about it -- the Tracy- Hepburn end-of-an-era thing, how old and near-death Spencer Tracy looked.  But with regard  to the social and familial implications of the story, I said to my mother, "So, how would you feel about it if I brought home a young man I wanted to marry who was black?"

She ruminated on that for about three seconds and then said, "Well, if he looks like Sidney Poitier, that'll be all right."

Da Bears and Binny's

Bears games are not on television in mid-Michigan very often, unless it's a Sunday- or Monday-night telecast or they are playing Detroit.  Yesterday they did play the Lions in Chicago, so I got to see that one.  It was a good game, which da Bears won handily (37-13) and in which Devin Hester set an all-time NFL record for the most punts returned for touchdowns (12). 

My mother had a good friend named Ruth who was a big Bears fan.  Football teams can black out telecasts of home games in the local market if they aren't sold out, and back in the 1960's and 70's that happened quite a bit to the Bears.  But that didn't stop Ruth.  On those Sundays, she and her husband and mother and brother Hank and his wife would all pile into the car and drive northwest toward Rockford to a motel that was the required 75 miles from Chicago.  They rented a room for the afternoon and watched the game on the TV there.

When I can't see the Bears on television, I listen to the games on WBBM radio from Chicago, which I can stream on my computer.  It's not the same, of course, but at least I know what's going on when it's going on. 

A fringe benefit of the radio show from Chicago is the homey little ads they read.  My favorite is the one for a liquor store called Binny's Beverage Depot, which always ends with, "If you can't find it at Binny's Beverage Depot, it's probably not worth drinkin'."

A-men, brother.