is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wild Turkey, The Sequel.
Wild Turkey, The Sequel.
I was drinking bourbon (Blanton's. Yummy.) tonight over at wine-and-ice-cream's house, and I was watching him and his son play scrabble, while every now and then helping the son get a better word, when I began to tell the story of the wild turkeys in my backyard. Of course, this was nothing special for them. They live in Amherst. However they don't live at the edge of a huge field with no houses in sight, so I doubt they have flocks of wild turkeys in their yard! Anyway, wine-and-ice-cream was asking whether I had gotten any good photos, and I said, "No, I couldn't get them to sign the photo release. They kept running away from me." Then he said, "Yeah, well, they do that. Wild turkeys can run thirty miles an hour."
There was some silence. Then I said, "Wait. You're telling me that a wild turkey can run as fast as a BEAR?!" He said, "Yes. That is what I am telling you." And I said, "Well I would really like to see a bear-and-turkey race. Can you set that up for me?" Son of wine-and-ice-cream liked that idea. Which only goes to show you that he is a genius. Wine-and-ice-cream started to ask how such a thing could be set up, really. And I replied that, if I were king of the world, I would, like a Roman emperor, have a bear and turkey race in place the very next day in the local Coliseum. Yes I would!
Talk turned back to scrabble. Son of wine-and-ice-cream has a charming way of "trying something out," which means spelling something that doesn't exist and then defining it, or placing a word directly above another word so that it ends up spelling a bunch of two letter words because of the overlap, and then looking up each two letter word in the dictionary to check whether it exists. I encouraged this practice by laughing and finding it charming every time. Wine-and-ice-cream is one of THOSE scrabble players, however. You know. Like Gayle. The ones who know all the special scrabble words and who always get the Z on the triple letter score, etc.?
At some point wine-and-ice-cream asked whether I had thought up any more animal races, and I said, no, I was still actively picturing a turkey and a bear running alongside each other in the back of my mind. But then I suggested that if we had a book of animal speeds we could make some impressive plans. He guessed that such a book must exist, and I said, "Yeah. It's called the INTERNET!" Then I said I could probably find out all we needed to know using the Sidekick device if it weren't so far away from me. (It was across the room.) He said, yeah, well the whole house is wired, so I could find out too, if my computer wasn't so far away (his computer was even closer, but not within reach). Then we laughed and talked about how difficult the life of the mind is.
Speaking of the life of the mind, and of avian dinosaurs, this is my favorite response, which I just received from Ben, to yesterday's entry: "that's funny about your interpretation of the almost-hit turkey. once when i was a kid, playing by the elkhart river, i saw an enormous beast flying through the trees. i realized that it was a pterodactyl, from a brood that had somehow managed to breed for millennia in the deep forests of northern indiana. i ran home to tell my mom, who didn't believe me. this was probably because i had not too much earlier convinced her that i had leprosy, and even got her to call the doctor, who laughed at her."
12:09 a.m. - November 13, 2004
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
