Give us this day our daily Mondegreen

A certain number of us hear the first line of "America the beautiful" as "Oh beautiful for spacious guys". This line has great appeal for us fat guys or any one us for whom the 105 year old excerpt from the Northport (Michigan) leader mentioned the return of a noted of my grandfather businessman from downstate saying "All his friends gathered to speak to 'Fat Charlie' " Those wishing to research "Mondegreens" in depth are recommended to all ten years of Jon Carroll's archive under "SFGate", the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle. You might also be titillated by his Hemingwayization of a trip to IKEA to buy a table.

I guess I have been a "spacious guy" ever since I was champion weight-gainer in the 7th grade. I did reach a local minimum attending Ordnance School at the beginning of my compulsory military service; having no wheels, I habitually skipped lunch and was at 150 in my Detroit aunt's house on the way home for Christmas. At home, I am sure I sang that car0l in which "Round John Virgin" appears; being on the farm, I was also much captivated by that carol "Silo at Night".

I caught the train to Huntsville, AL and rode into town with a bird colonel, soon to be a general and executive officer for the post. On New Years Day we greeted the post commander and I had my first caviar. My reaction was that of a subsequent state university colleague from Minnesota who said "I don't eat bait". I stayed pretty steady until the night before I was wed, when my mom prophecied "Well, if you marry that German girl, you're going to gain weight". (From Mom's language, you could wonder if she thought I had an honorable alternative choice)
Well, in fairness, my mother-in-law, whom I dearly loved, was also important. I did carry my bride over the threshold of our first rented house but I am no longer the man I once was; to be complete, she is no longer the girl she was. However, neither of us has gotten an ultimatum from our doctors; Spacious is okay, one hopes.

Sarcasm, or an overdeveloped sense of irony?

I can't remember what led to it, but one day the prettiest girl in my confirmation class said to me,"You're too sarcastic!". I was a bit nonplussed; I figured I said things because of the Norwegian gene pool and this girl was just as Norwegian as I, which is to say 50%. Still, I could always stun my contemporaries with vocabulary, and maybe they misunderstood me; the result was that a neighbor cousin dubbed me "professor", a destiny that illustrates her prescience (unless it was the idea of her good friend, to whom I later sold a car.)
I will freely say that the most useless things I learned back then were the rules of grammar, which have been falling by the wayside every since at the cow college I took what we called "spitten and broken English." The first doggone day, the blooming professor, in a three-piece suit, yet, miss-spelled a word on the blackboard, before our very eyes. Still, I really enjoy vocabulary, if only for the anecdotes and jokes. There was the day Mrs Noah Webster caught him in the pantry kissing the maid. She said, "Noah, I am surprised!" and he replied, "No, my dear, you are astonished. I am surprised.
Just one more and then I must go. An English professor walks into a lunch place and orders
"Figs and cream, please" She brings a dish of figs covered with cream and he says, "I ordered figs and cream." and she says that's what I brought. He says,"This is figs with cream" She starts to stammer, "Aren't they the same thing?" He says, "would you say a woman and child is the same as a woman with child?"
Shalom.

Does Father still know best? Did he ever?

My dad has been gone for more than 28 years, but I would be hard put to fault him on any economic decisions he made. He presided (officially) over raising 6 kids to maturity and was able at the end to turn over the farm, on which he may still have owed some money, to my two brothers, one of whom still owns it. Now, my mother was pretty smart and seldom complained of the difficulty of keeping us fed and bringing some beauty into our lives. Precisely when women became eligible to vote, she voted, probably for Harding, but one has to understand, down on the farm, we believed in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and the Republican party, which we were taught was full of hard-headed businessmen. who knew what was best for us. One of the most valuable things we learned in the second half of the 20th century was that women are much smarter than we had thought. I am confident that all of my sisters have been full and equal participants in their family decisions. One can doubt the wisdom of having six children in one family, but four of those were conceived in the euphoria following victory in World War II.

Now, from the perspective of a man who will soon score fourscore years, I say we must concentrate this century's efforts on educating our females equally with the males; both need to learn that numbers can be much more usefull than simply keeping score in a football game, and that there are superstition-free ways in which the sciences work. They should learn that babies are animals with extremely trainable brains and that no matter where they were born, they are entitled to air that is pure enough for their survival, and that no matter in what nation they are born, they deserve the resources of this earth sufficient for their survival. Climate change must be seen as an obstacle to civilized society and headed off asap,

The Celebrated Clarence Darrow of Leelanau County

Calaveras County. CA celebrates its jumping frogs; Suttons Bay, MI, has "still kicking and screaming" Dean Robb, who is proudest of his history of "sticking up for the little guy". To be successful in the courtroom, an attorney needs finely honed dramatic skills. Counselor Robb hones his by impersonating Mark Twain, complete with white Southern gentleman suit. Not a minute too soon, he and his son are about to publish his memoir; to get the true measure of the man, we must read his book to see how he stood up for the little guy. I await the publication with great difficulty, but much anticipation.