Say That Again – I’m Writing It Down

I cleaned a house not long ago with Mary, a delightful woman who makes me laugh until I fall off furniture. Generally speaking, I’m against falling off furniture; but if it’s because of uncontrollable laughter, what can you do but go limp and succumb to gravity?

Frankly, we think we’re hilarious.

We scrubbed this house silly: baseboards, the doors, the floors, and the piece de resistance, windows covered with Venetian blinds. Nasty things, Venetian blinds. Normally, I wouldn’t recommend washing the truly dirty ones when you can replace them cheaply, but on the one hand, it’s a waste of money to replace what’s not broken, on the other hand, they were actually quite nice wooden blinds, and on yet another, perhaps abnormal hand, we were paid to do it.

And somewhere in all of this, between the parquet floors and the enormous picture windows, Mary makes the claim that she can idenfity, by taste, the blue M&Ms.

She can identify the blue M&Ms by taste. Why I oughta…

I’ve been trying to work that little revelation of hers into a post ever since.

I collect these little remarks. I have wrinkled, stained piles of these little tidbits: the comments I’ve had directed at me, made myself, overheard, written into and onto books, receipts, take-out menus. Every day, I am confronted with situations, features, sentences that make me pull out the book I keep in my purse and scribble furiously, often with a smile on my face. What can I do but write these things down? Surely the day will come when something like “I Don’t Shiv A Git: I’m Not Really Swearing, Mom” becomes the topic of a thought-provoking post.

I received an e-mail the other day asking me how many posts I had written. After I told him that I was coming up on my 800th, he then wondered if I wasn’t about to run out of ideas.

Now why would I run out of things to say?

The truth is that there are ideas everywhere. They’re not my ideas – they simply present themselves, rarely politely, rarely one at a time – and if you don’t write them down immediately, they’re gone.

Only to be replaced by other ideas.

Which reminds me: my parents seem to be stocking up on water chestnuts. What do they know that I don't?

Oh, and I need to buy some M&Ms. I think Mary’s bluffing.