Something I’m Working On

March 17, 2020

I find myself worried about my mom getting sick ’cause she doesn’t have a spleen. Actually, she doesn’t have a gall bladder, either. She’s pretty much hollow inside. She seems a normal-sized woman of her age, but she weighs no more than twelve pounds. A few years ago, a toddler pushed her into a stiff wind and we found her in the next county caught in the branches of a crepe myrtle tree. Before my father passed, he was down to just half a lung. I found myself wondering how many of our organs we actually need. Sure, we need a brain and a heart; but, I have it on good authority that we can live without a pancreas providing we eat a Milky Way bar every ninety minutes. We can live without most of our bowels but, after you’ve used them once, no one else wants them.

I think life is like that. We keep reevaluating what we need and what we don’t need. For example, I don’t need frog repellent or fertilizer on a stick. I certainly don’t need some kid fresh out of college with literally NO experience telling ME how to do my job… although it is nice to get a fresh perspective on things… and, I AM woefully ignorant of recent technologies. Come to think of it, I DO need some kid fresh out of college to tell me how to do my job. Who knew?

Do we need love? I think back to that famous experiment where a monkey was bottle-fed from a warm monkey-shaped cloth and another was fed from a bottle stuck through iron bars. BOTH monkeys survived. But, the one raised in the cold metal environment was far more motivated to succeed. Who knows what he’d have accomplished if the scientists hadn’t cut both their brains into thin slices for viewing under a microscope? Are psychologists monsters? Let’s just say that, if you scream out “Monster!” in a room full of psychologists, ALL OF THEM will turn around.

I’d like to think my mom would shrug off covid like she’s shrugged off every other ailment. It came a revelation a couple of years ago when she broke her pelvis. She was walking in less than a week. The only logical conclusion I could come to was that my mother was, in fact, a Terminator. I still keep a tank of liquid nitrogen in my basement just in case she goes rogue on us…

Today is Evacuation Day in the county of Suffolk, Massachusetts. It commemorates George Washington’s successful siege of Boston during the Revolutionary War, which forced General Howe to evacuate and tragically sail to Canada. George III was sure he could win the war with the colonists but he didn’t know Howe…