Dazed and confused? Not me. I’m just Lost in the Cheese Aisle.

Monday, November 3, 2014

ON SPIDERS AND MUNCHKIN LIGHTS

I’m not sure why, but yesterday morning as I was feeding Miss Stella - or, more accurately, standing over the sink rinsing out Miss Stella’s plate - a song from my distant childhood popped into my head.

You know the song. Everybody knows the song. Its the one that involves a spider and a waterspout. But for some reason, as the song played in the deep recesses of my cranium, it just didn’t sound right. And I couldn’t figure out why.

The inky dinky spider went up the waterspout.

No, that’s not it.

The inky binky spider went up the waterspout.

Nope, still not it.

The inky winky spider went up the waterspout.

Damn, I was thinking by this time. What am I missing? Inky stinky? Inky blinky? Inky cacaminky?

By this time I knew I was in the midst of a major Brain Fart. I needed help.

Dee was upstairs in bed. “I need your help,” I said. She practically leaped out of the bed, concerned that something was wrong. “What is it? What do you need?”

“What kind of spider went up the waterspout?”

At this point convinced that I had lost my mind, Dee replied, “Itsy bitsy.”

Aha! Suddenly everything clicked into place. Itsy bitsy! Itsy fucking bitsy! Of course!

“Itsy” was the key to the whole puzzle. Once you have “itsy,” you see, “bitsy” follows of necessity. But “inky” plays with a lot of different friends, and that was the spanner in my mental works... the discordant note in my nutty cerebral symphony.

Random brain farts, alas, are one of the joyful side effects of getting old the maturation process. And even Dee is not immune. A few nights ago, looking for the remote control for the television, she asked, “Where did I put the munchkin light?” We both laughed ourselves silly over that one.

Thus, henceforth we shall refer to the remote control as the Munchkin Light... because we can, and because it is a way of tacitly recognizing that we are both losing our minds.

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