Smiles. We have been talking about smiles lately...as least I have. And the importance of a smile a day to keep the bogey-man away.

Well. Then there is this. You know I am honest. You know that I try to make you smile. To help you take a break from the zombie apocalypse. It is Halloween Season after all. The hour of Trick Or Treat is upon us. When tiny tots emerge as Ernie, or Ariel or as Dora, the fiendish troublemaker in Nemo. Knock knock. Who’s there...ooh, we say...aww...how sweet...how about a little treat?

However, these days, some folk seem to think that Halloween is celebrated EVERY day and they prank and trick and scare us all. Who are these nut cases dressed up in costumes scaring us all to death? Clowns roaming the streets in France. Sesame Street characters parading through NYC. It is difficult to separate reality from fiction. A trick on us for sure, and surely not a TREAT. Shame on you. Grown ups are supposed to shine a light on the path, keep the children from harm, and wait patiently on the sidewalk. And no sir, I may need glasses, but the beer can in your hand does not remotely resemble a UNICEF can, and no I do not have any spare change.

But I am here. I am here to help you stay the course. To keep your head in the right space. The right place. Where reality meets Never Ever Ever Land.

And I Never Ever Ever....

...can understand why, when I do something truly technologically brilliant, I end up in the middle of a police bust.

This is a true story.

The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

The innocent would be ME and I cannot change my name, but I can tell you that if I was wearing my yellow wellies...I might have known better. Might have missed all the excitement. But as a true and accurate reporter, I must heretofore offer you the exact, true to life, Who and What and Where and When.

I have a new phone. I have limited usage...limited options...because I know better. I know that the more options, the more I am able to get myself in trouble. And if I limit my own limitations, I keep myself and YOU much much safer. So consider this a PDA...a Public Display of Affection. Do Not Do What I Do. Learn people, learn from my mistakes. The error of my ways.

All I wanted to do was to Show Off. To be a Technological Up-To-Date Whiz Kid. I wanted to send a photo with my text message. I am embarrassingly emotional with emoticons, possess oppositionally defiant opposable thumbs and tend to omit my SELF from my Selfies.

So there I sat, in the parking lot of the Quik Trip this afternoon and lovingly, tenderly and with a pure heart, tried to attach a photo to a text. A big jump into the deep end of the texting pool, for a Minnow like me.  I sat quietly in my car, with the windows rolled up and donned my swimming goggles. My very yellow, very mellow Minnow Mermaid swimming goggles. I struck a pose, aimed my phone at my face, and took a magnificent shot of the gas pump.

Oops.

All right then. Let's do that again.

Goggles. Yes. Camera Ready. Yup.

Click. Click. Click.

Ha! Got it. Well, not GREAT Ansel Adams picture perfect, but a reasonable facsimile of me.

Nope let’s see...  compose message...add funny comment...attach photo...hit Send!

Success!! Yes. Yes. Yes. I am a yellow goggled synchronized text and attachment sender. I have done swimmingly, so to speak.

I look up. Smile into the rearview mirror ready to give my very solitary and successful self a webbed swim glove high five...and instead...the flash of red lights...the Woo Woo Woo of sirens closing in...not one Patrol Car but seven...the Canine Unit on the ground... prowling dogs straining against their leashes for the scent of a perp.

Ask yourself, as I did, WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

It was just a test...a texting test...an Emergency Broadcast Test of the Texting System. The National Everybody Knows More Than Me Texting Test.

And now...Oh No! I am surrounded by police cars. And I am sitting in my car in the Quik Trip parking lot wearing goggles. Yellow neon colored goggles in the middle of the day.

I throw up my gloved hands in surrender.

I resolve NEVER to do it again.

I am innocent.

I was just Trying.

Trying to be Technologically Gifted.

To be hip. To be cool.

And now I am going to be arrested.

An arresting development.

Oh dear me. O what have I done?

Oh.

Oops.

A bank robber.

They are looking for a bank robber.

Down the street. A snatch and grab.

He wasn’t wearing yellow neon swim goggles.

He was just looking for CASH.

They are not looking for ME.

They are looking for HIM !

Time to slowly put down the goggles and to back away....

Just back away....

Back away from the photos and the texting and the....

Maybe I should put my arms down...

Maybe I should rethink the surrender scenario and just go...

Home...

Pride surely doeth goeth before a Fall...

And I have fallen...and escaped...

Just in the nick of time...

Before I got nicked...

For wearing yellow goggles in the middle of the Quik Trip parking lot...

And texting...

I am not a Perp. I am a PERPetual over-my-head-out-of-my-depth-in-need-of-water-wings-to-keep-from-going-under, rotary phone afficionado sculling into the rising tide of technology.

So I bury my goggles in my gym bag, throw the car in reverse and back away slowly before the dogs get a whiff of the scent of an elderly not so proficient textee and sink their teeth into my thigh...

Are you smiling yet?

Giggling at my expense?

Well you should be, ‘cause I was.

The Minnow is Free!

And no one needs to know...

Ever...ever...ever...

Except You!

I...I am the Minnow...and outside the pool a complete and total innocent...

Emoticonally challenged and lacking the oppositional thumbs to text.

However, as I head for home, my fertile imagination generates what could have would have might have been....

A

Little Comic Relief

For A Very Serious World...


Thank you Jim Gaffigan. Thank you for the belly jiggling snort inducing hold your sides until you hurt laughter. I needed that. We all need that. An intravenous fast and furious log in transfusion of our sense of humor. A reminder that a smile requires less muscles for those of us who avoid the stair master and can barely find the energy to turn the page, to hush up, or to remember that life has two sides.

Positive and negative.

If you have not met Jim Gaffigan, let me introduce you. We met on Comedy Central during a trial run on Sirius Radio in my car on the road to endless errands on a boring afternoon, when I lost my way in the new super screen full of instructions and supposedly easy one touch unexplored new vistas accompanied by a woman named Siri. Siri and I have never met, but her voice creeps me out and I prefer to choose my own forms of entertainment, so I punched in and there he was...in the middle of a monologue on dessert and we instantly bonded. Right there, in the car, my private space, my sole place to be myself. To pick my nose or eat handfuls of M&M’s and no one the wiser. Instead, there I sat, with my driver’s side heater warming my buns, a slight blip in screen choices, but oh so perfect as Jim’s voice entered my head and did me good...sooo good.

I laughed out loud.

He saved me. Jim Gaffigan saved me. From the man in the tan SUV who veered back and forth across the double line, who I approached gently in my lane, only to see him texting with one hand and smoking a cigarette in the other. Neither hand on the wheel. The driver behind him honked, and this ambidextrous fool managed to give him the only non-engaged finger he managed to free up while fluidly texting and flipping ashes out the window.

Enough. I muttered to myself. Enough. Bad news. On each and every station on the radio...on the TV...on the Internet...over and over and over and enough and enough and enough. And now this mad man weaving in and out of my life, a dangerous real life risk in a world filled with real life really close by oh my oh my oh my risky day after day after day disaster.

And then there was Jim.

I forgot. How to smile. How to laugh. Not at others but at the simplest laughable highly comical indisputable snorting milk out of each nostril nonsense. The funniness of every day, day to day, moment by moment side splitting silliness. The human condition. The hysterical human condition that marks us all as the punch line to a joke. This is lunchroom comedy. Remember how you laughed with your friends in the cafeteria over absolutely nothing or in the middle of a chemistry class, when you couldn’t straighten up, let alone answer intelligently on any subject because you could barely catch your breath?

This. This is Jim Gaffigan.

At least for me. Maybe not for you.

I won’t link to his You Tube videos out of respect for his hard earned efforts. But you should.

Or buy his book....My Dad Is Fat

Or his latest prose...Food:A Love Story

Because we all need a laugh and we need a laugh that is not at someone else’s expense.
Clean. Family. Funny. Oh so funny ha ha ha ha ha tee hee hees.

Or maybe you have your own giggle box.

Your favorite jokester, comedianne,

Perhaps a child. a niece, a nephew, a neighbor, a student, grandchild... perhaps you are just sitting one day at a table eating some kale fries or something, poor you, vastly more healthy but ick, and the timbre of the air is fractured by the ting ting a ling...the laughter of a child nearby, an uninhibited rollicking rock and rolling gigglefest...and without thought or reason you smile along in a silly simulation...and your world is for once at peace.

Jim. James. Better, Mr. Gaffigan, sir, as we have never met, is a parent like me. A father of five. And it is from this mundane day to day nary a full night’s sleep environs, that he paints on his artist’s canvass with the same pure honesty and spirit as if finger painting in chocolate pudding, then licking his fingers with a smudge of chocolate on his chin and a grin. A sweet sweet treat of comic relief with which no OTC painkiller can compete.

The laughter man cometh.

As a former schoolteacher, and having deep respect for the hard bone crushing efforts of artists everywhere, coveted by others, copied by some, I swear to you that this an endorsement of the highest level, and definitely not paid. Let’s just think of it as a sharing of a smile.

For what Jim has is the gift of child sight. The unequivocal and very vocal truths children utter at the top of their lungs in a crowded restaurant, that knock parents to their knees, and leave the rest of the customers in a smothered fit of hysteria.
 
I know. I have it too.

It never happens out of our sight line, but rather, on the drive home from soccer practice or in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner with unruly and somber distant relatives pointing out the lumps in your gravy with their supercilious tones and the tines of your Great Aunt Sylvia’s hand me down forks.

For me, one afternoon, driving home from soccer practice, my son asked innocently. “Mom, what is a fake orgasm?”

Like the man I met on the road this morning, and with considerably less dexterity, I swerved into a parking lot and calmly met his gaze.


“What?”

That’s it. One word. Parent Rule #1...always wait for more information before answering a leading question.

He asked me again. Same question. No explanation. So I did the right thing. I carefully and anatomically correctly answered and collapsed with my forehead resting on the steering wheel.

A Pause.

Timing In Comedy Is Everything.

He looked at me and as if my biology made no sense to his naive little brain... asked one more time...”But why Mom? Why would she, the operative word she, do it?”

Before I could answer, his younger brother, nose buried in a book, being what I thought was much younger and much more oblivious to the discussion at hand, looked up and our eyes locked in the rearview mirror. He laid one hand on his brother’s shoulder, glanced at me and replied...

“To please her mate.”

I wish I could tell you what happened after that, but I honestly think I fainted.

The point is, at the moment, not funny at all, but in hindsight, even as I relate it to you now, I can barely type as I am still grinning and holding my sides.

Mr. Gaffigan makes it look so easy, standing up there on the stage, the corners of his mouth already winding up for the first pitch, and then bam! he connects with his audience, because they too, whether they would ever admit it or not, have child sight.

The punchline here, is that we all have child sight, for we were once children, and wherever we go and whatever we do, the children will always find their way home. To the heart of the matter. To us.
For your sake and mine..

I hope you are much better at explaining than I am.

In the meantime, keep your hands on the steering wheel, your eyes on the road, and the child in you, alive and well...