Tales From Exit 22 by Al Batt

I sat on the bumpy bus. My grade-school self bounced in concert with the vehicle’s seat. A note was pinned to my shirt. I might have known what its purpose had been, but if I had, I’d forgotten. My teacher had pinned it there to make sure my parents saw it. That could have been good or bad.

I considered pulling the pin out and looking at the note, but feared I wouldn’t be able to run the pin back through the original hole. That meant there would be more than one hole in the paper and my parents wouldn’t have had to hire Dick Tracy to tell them that the note had been opened.

And adults think kids have no worries.

Stifle!

Her life had been edited severely. She was 103 years old. I asked her what was the secret to her longevity. She smiled and replied, “Not dying.”

She had been a librarian. I love libraries.

I recall going into an old Carnegie library and being shushed upon entry. That was OK. It seemed right.

 

Camera cannon

I paused on my Alaskan hike to visit with a photographer using a camera the size of a Civil War cannon. He was from Nova Scotia and we shared an appreciation of birds. I pulled my camera from my backpack. It was dwarfed by the size of his device. He looked at my camera, suspecting that I’d gotten it in a box of Cracker Jack that promised, “A prize in every box.”

I smiled and said, “Keep at it and one day, you might have a camera just like this baby.”

Losing the family fortune

You can lose money faster at a casino than you can lose pocket change in a recliner. I visited a casino not long ago, having never bet a cent at such an enterprise. I ended up betting a dollar in a penny slot machine. A slot machine is a cash redistribution system. It can take a long time to lose a dollar in one, but I managed. I’d be up a few cents, then down a few cents. Like most gamblers, my down overcame my up.

I noticed a couple I knew at the one-armed bandit next to me. In the midst of small talk, I was informed that the husband had recently taken a hearing test. The wife spilled the beans. I asked if his hearing had declined.

The wife replied, “He went from not listening to me, to being unable to listen to me.”

 

Hotwire

Elwood P. Dowd in “Harvey,” said, “Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be’ — she always called me Elwood — ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.”

I could have been pleasant. I could have warned him.

Relatives from the city were visiting. They had a boy my age. We went for a walk to explore the farm. Curiosity caused his hand to touch an electric fence in fine working condition. He jerked away.

“Get a shock?” I asked with a minimum of concern.

“I would have,” he replied, “if I hadn’t been too quick for it.”

 

To tell the tooth

I’ve been to the dentist before, so I know the drill. My dentist, who believes that my mouth is so big he could work from inside it, told me what needed to be done. It was a minor procedure, even though there is no minor procedure to a patient of any kind. He threw in a bunch of words he’d learned in vocabulary class at dental school. I knew they were toothy terms, but I asked him to put it into terms I could understand.

“$840,” he said.

I understood.

 

Reading the obituaries

I saw in the newspaper that a man I knew had died. The obituary section is filled with people I know. I knew him a little, liked him a lot. So I employed my cellphone to go to the funeral home website to leave a message of condolence. I typed out the message on the tiny keyboard and added my name. I checked the message to make sure there were no typos. I sent the message. It popped up on the screen of the funeral home website. I had misspelled my name. Al Bart. It read like it was a message from a bad guy on an old cowboy movie.

 

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.