I am somewhere between 1 minute and 6.8 x 10^15 minutes old; you’ll forgive me if I don’t answer with greater precision. My age is irrelevant. It’s inaccurate at best and breaks down laughably as you get technical about it. It’s a measure of how long I have been an individual entity, nothing more.
Since everything was coming out of the fridge anyway, I thought I would spend some time deciding what would go back in. I chose an arbitrary cut-off of January, 2009. Anything that had expired since President Obama took office would have to go.
Grandma had her finger on the pulse of the town. While the names changed from letter to letter, the circumstances were always the same… and they weren’t good.
Daniel’s nose is crinkling now. I wait for the stoplight by the bank to turn green for my lane, so I can head down the main street of Belvidere… ironically not called Main Street (that’s two blocks over).
It started out innocently enough. I was looking up information on one single topic. In fact, I was using Google to do so. One of the links just happened to go to Wikipedia. I think you know what happened next.
There is a fine line between crisp bacon and burnt bacon. When we’d go out with Grandma, she would fight with waitresses over this point. Her bacon was crisp to the point of being dry, but never burnt. It crumbled in your mouth.
Often times Daniel looks as confused and mystified as I do; he truly doesn’t know why he did what he did. This was one of those times.
We don’t like the cold any more than anyone else does. We watch Bears games in the snow… I don’t know why we watch Bears games in the snow. I think alcohol might be involved.
I feel bad not giving Zachary a more dignified send off, but it was obvious he had gone gently into that good night, leaving his mortal coil at room temperature in an enclosed area for a couple of days.
At 11:00 that morning, the Great War (as it was known before there were two World Wars to choose from) ended as far as the soldiers were concerned. While formal armistice wouldn’t happen for another six months, the guns fell silent behind the trenches where four years of “modern” warfare had done their best to eradicate as many young men as possible in the most efficient manner available, whether it be rapid fire bullets, handheld bombs, tanks, airplanes, or poison gas.
I took Daniel along with me to the polling place Tuesday morning. If he observed the voting process, he would get yet another badge in Cub Scouts. According to the Den Leader, the Cub Scouts were “encouraged to ask questions”. I didn’t have to worry about Daniel. I was inundated with questions from the moment we pulled into the parking lot.
Amazon parrots are not as good at mimicking as African Grey parrots. She’s also quite old, pushing fifty or sixty. Akane is the African Grey parrot downstairs. She’s copied not only Meka and Daniel’s words, but she can speak in their voices. It’s eerie. Pepper – on the other hand – mumbles.
We gained more confidence when we discovered we could read a number of the signs on the street: BANK, PHARMACY, GROCERY STORE. We found a discoteca (RECORD STORE) and spent a pleasant half hour looking at all the different selections. I found a record by Julio Iglecias. I’d heard of him!
Daniel and I stopped at Tom and Jerry’s in Rockford after church. We haven’t been there in awhile. We have a Tom and Jerry’s in Belvidere now, so I don’t have to drive fifteen miles to Rockford for my Vienna Beef hot dog fix. Also, I’m on Weight Watchers, so I shouldn’t really be getting a Vienna Beef hot dog fix in any case. We parked among the puddles and made a run for the entrance. Daniel stopped at the door though, leaving me standing outside in the rain.
“They’ve taken away all the old stuff!” he cried.
Pressing zero didn’t work. Punching zero really hard didn’t work either. When I refused to answer the prompts any longer, it just hung up on me.
pi is the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference. If you have a circle that is one inch across, you will measure a little more than 3 inches around the outside edge. Depending on how accurate you are, you may get 3.1 inches or even 3.14. It actually breaks down farther than that. Pi is a special kind of number; it goes on forever (as far as anyone can tell).
As the week progressed, the signs changed from typed to handwritten. Photocopied pictures of Shave and his owner covered the pages. The cash reward had been upped to “large cash reward”, possibly to overcome the fact that Shave is described as “generally unfriendly”.
He started out copying things he found in books or on television. He would get papers back in school with comments and he felt it was his duty to pass these along. I always enjoyed getting the bill for Dish Network with a neatly written “Good Job!” inside a homemade explosion. It took the sting out of paying it.
I was down in the basement going through my record albums. Daniel came down to take a look, “What kind of movies are on those big DVD’s?” That was just so wrong on so many levels; I felt that it was my parental duty to set him straight.
Then I heard about MySpace. I checked it out and it looked like it would be a good thing to join up with. I got myself an account, posted some pictures and even a couple of video clips, wrote some blog entries and joined some groups and was happy to see that I was getting some friend requests.
Until I actually started looking at the requests I was getting.
Now, you’d think that Chris – being the solid sort of fellow he was – would get moved up in the lineup; maybe become lead guitarist? Nope. Instead The Yardbirds hired a guy named Jeff Beck; again, arguably one of the greatest rock guitarists ever.
The first stumper of a question from Daniel wasn’t a “why” question, but more of a “where”: Where did Great Grandma go?
The literal answer – of course – was “in the ground… not too far from the tollway”.
The entire plot of the book gravitates around Man’s addiction to sapphire. Sapphire? You know, that blue stuff in rings. You know how the fate of nations (and in this case) entire worlds hang in the balance if they can’t get enough of it. No? Actually, neither had I.
