TO ROXANNE WITH LOVE AND CANOODLES

Jerry Gervase: To Roxanne with love & canoodles

Jerry Gervase Central Coasting

Posted: 02/13/2011 01:47:16 AM PST

When I read Edmond Rostand's play "Cyrano de Bergerac" in college I became such an incurable romantic that one Valentines Day I decided to see if I could use my writing skills to earn extra money. I printed some fliers that read: "Your thoughts — my words. Personalized letters, greetings, invitations, thank you notes and billet-doux. Call Cyrano"

I hoped enough people knew who Cyrano de Bergerac was and would call me if they were struggling with their writing, especially regarding their love lives. I took the fliers to my local supermarket parking lot and began slipping them under windshield wipers.

I was going blithely about my business humming the love theme from "Romeo and Juliet," so I didn't notice the lady sitting behind the wheel of the pickup. As I lifted the wiper blade, a gruff voice said: "Git that trash outa here, sucker!" I almost jumped higher than the genuine fake squirrel tail on the truck's radio antenna.

"Uh, sorry," I said when I recovered, half expecting Cujo to jump out of the truck bed and tear me to pieces.

"What's on that paper," she snapped, "gimme one." Her arm reached out and she snatched a flier from my hand. She wasn't unattractive, but she was unkempt in a Raggedy-Ann sort of way. I also had the impression from the Confederate Flag decals on the truck that the sun had turned her neck slightly red.

"What's this here thing, a billet-doux?" She pronounced it, bill-it ducks.

"It's a French term," I explained, "meaning 'sweet note,' or a love letter."

"You c'n write a love letter to someone you don't know?" It did sound strange when put that way.

"Well, kind of," I said, "actually, what I would do is take your thoughts and express them in a manner, uh, perhaps, slightly more poetic than you'd feel capable of doing."

"Think you c'n write one for me?" You could have knocked me over with a white plume at the suggestion.

"And whose heart are you trying to win?" I asked.

"Ha," she sneered, "I'm trying to get some no good fool outa my house. I want a 'un-bill-it ducks.'"

"I'm not sure I can write anything like that."

"I'll bet Cyrano could." Zinger No. 2.

"You mean you actually know who Cyrano de Bergerac is?

"My name is Roxanne," she said more demurely than I could have imagined, "Well?" her black eyebrows lifted halfway into the yellow straw on her head.

"Now?" Yes, she nodded. Her boring eyes told this wasn't the time to back down.

After a few minutes I handed her what I had scribbled on the back of a flier.

Roses are red,

as a red hot canoodle.

Now scram from my bed,

With your whole kit and caboodle.

"What's this 'canoodle'?" she asked.

"It's a slang word meaning amorous cuddling or petting, or, well, you know!"

"Whadda I owe you," she said.

"I usually get five dollars. But, I'll make a deal with you. My address is on the flier. If it works send me five bucks, if it doesn't you don't owe me anything."

"Deal," she yelled as her truck peeled rubber out of the parking lot.

A week later I got a 10-dollar bill in the mail with a note that read: The rat done abandoned the ship. I'd sure like to billet-doux with you, baby. Canoe canoodle? Always, Roxanne.

I took no chances. I changed my address and switched supermarkets. Oh, and I burned my copy of Cyrano.

Jerry Gervase is a columnist for The Herald. He can be reached at jerrygervase@yahoo.com.

REMEMBERING HELEN ON HER BIRTHDAY - A REPRISE

REMEMBERING HELEN ON HER BIRTHDAY – A REPRISE

She set the bar incredibly high.

I often wondered where her mothering skills came from. Her own mother was so busy raising seven children she had little time to mentor her own daughters. She was a skinny teenager when I met her, wearing a long Pendleton skirt, rolled up bobby sox and penny loafers. Her cooking skills fell somewhere between making PB&J sandwiches and unwrapping packages of Twinkies. She thought a check book was about life in a Slavic country. To her, a thimble and a flat iron were game pieces on a Monopoly Board.

She dropped out of college after a couple of semesters in order to go to work. She went to her interview at General Motors wearing a beige suit with matching hat and gloves. A savvy employment manager recognized something special in her, and put her to work on a computer that was big enough to fill the infield at Brigg's Stadium. She learned programming, and soon became an instructor teaching others how to program, while she wrote script in a language called COBAL, as foreign to me as Urdu.

She was Ginger Rogers on the dance floor, but I was Fred Despair, who could trip over the painted white lines on a parking lot surface. One day she dragged me onto the dance floor. She was as light and feathery as an apparition; she knew where I was going before I knew where I was going. We glided through life with her making me believe I was leading. She thought I was the funniest person she had ever met, so when we married in 1958 I set out to make her laugh as often as I could.

We hadn't heard of feng shui, but without the aid of an accurate Chinese compass she turned our upper flat into heaven on earth. Then I proceeded to drag her all over the country for the next four decades. No matter where we ended up, in a matter or weeks she had the place looking like we were the original owners. Twice I bought homes she had never seen until we met the moving van there. She swept the front walk, talking to passers-by until she befriended the entire neighborhood. She made curtains and drapes and made clothes for the kids and for herself. If she put her mind to it, I swear she could weave straw into gold.

Once I plunked her down on 10 rural acres in the middle of nowhere, with a house half the size of the one we left. She bought a huge freezer, planned meals for a month, and then shopped so efficiently that I only had to bring home milk and bread once in a while — and then just milk because she began baking bread.

On Mother's Day in 1975 I bought her a 10 horsepower gas-operated rototiller. You would have thought I had emptied out Tiffany's for her. She tilled the land into a garden overflowing with enough healthful food to make a heart specialist smile.

And she learned to cook, too. She became so good that she created a cookbook she gave to close friends as Christmas gifts. It remains the one book that keeps me from slipping into fast-food purgatory.

She never gave up on her education, and during the same week our youngest daughter graduated from high school, and our son graduated from college, she earned her AA degree from a community college — with honors.

At her memorial service, a cousin confided in me that my wife told him I made her laugh every day. I doubt that's true. The philosopher Plato said: "In everyone's life no matter how good their intent there are people they made suffer." But if I unintentionally made her suffer she suffered silently — remaining at my side, but like the dancing, always a step ahead of me.

She set the bar incredibly high for our two daughters, giving them her best so that they could be their best. It is no surprise they are loving mothers. And I never have to wonder where their mothering skills come from. Ironically we celebrate her birthday on a day when a furry rodent is supposed to see its shadow. In life Helen cast a long shadow of her own. In death, the light that spread that shadow to such great length still shines.

Happy Birthday!

HOW TO REALLY REDUCE OUR NATIONAL DEBT

            The battle between our two political parties on how to reduce the size of our 14-trillion dollar national debt is never ending. One party wants to slash and burn. The other wants to put a cap on spending, but change the wording so that government invests rather than spends. Our Congress is much like Old Man River – it don’t plant ‘taiters, don’t plant cotton – it jus’ keeps rollin’ along. It keeps rolling along spending our money because most of us cannot begin to imagine how much a trillion dollars is.

            Think of it this way: a stack of thousand dollar bills 4 inches in height equals a million dollars. To make a billion dollars that stack of thousand dollar bills would be 358 feet high. A trillion dollars is a stack of thousand dollar bills 67.9 miles high. Looking down from the top of that stack you can see just how deeply in debt we are.  Here’s another way of looking at it. The National Debt is approaching 14 trillion dollars. There are approximately 100 million households in America. Spreading that 14 trillion among these households would give each one about $140,000. I can squeeze by on that.

            I’ve heard suggestions that one way to reduce the deficit is to reduce the size of government. The persons making those suggestions always go about it in the wrong way. They want to cut some programs they deem unnecessary or abolish some federal departments that are redundant. Those suggestions have some merit but they either don’t go far enough or they don’t get to the crux of the problem which is actually reducing the size of government by reducing the number of people representing us. There are 435 members in the House of Representatives and one hundred Senators. Do we really need that many? Can’t we get along with half that many – 217.5 representative – okay make it 218. We don’t want to slice any of them in half, or at least we’d have a hard time deciding which one to slice – and one Senator from every state – or fifty total. Congresspersons earn about $165,000 each. So halving the number of people in Congress would save roughly $52 million dollars and some change, which is a stack of thousand dollar bills more than 16 inches high.  That’s not much when you put it up against that stack that’s almost 68 miles high. The real savings would come in the money spent by the 217 members of the House and 50 members of the Senate we eliminated.

            Let me use a sports analogy to shed some light on what I’m getting at. Let’s use basketball for example. Basketball was a terrifically fast-paced game when there were two referees calling the game. Then someone got the bright idea of adding a third referee. I don’t know if anyone has kept statistics on the number of fouls called before and after the third official was added, but I would say the number of fouls called has increased substantially with the added ref. Let’s face it, you give a guy a whistle and he doesn’t blow it – he’s out of a job. If he doesn’t blow the whistle so many times a game someone will figure out that he’s not necessary to the game. You’ve seen the replays on the “phantom” fouls called in both the NBA and the NCAA. The Zebras have made it almost impossible to play good solid defense in basketball.

            It’s the same in our Congress. Send a guy to Washington and he doesn’t sponsor a bill or write a law – sheesh - someone will figure out he’s not needed and he’s out of job. It’s these new bills and laws that cost so much money. Who do you think dug this 14 trillion dollar hole we’re in?  Not you. Not me. It was those people we sent to Washington.

            Be honest with me. How many times have you personally needed your Senator or Representative? Sure there are activists who bug the daylights out of their representatives but most of us go a whole lifetime without ever having any interaction with those folks.

            Reduce the number of people in Washington spending our money by 50% and that stack of Grover Clevelands will be down to a mole hill faster than you can whistle me for having too many men on the court.

ORWELL ONE, ORWELL TWO: 1984 DEJA VU

            Orwell one, Orwell two: 1984 deja vu

In 2011 Parent One Day will be celebrated on May 8. Parent Two Day falls on  June 19. If you are confused by this silly statement it is because we live in an age of silliness and obfuscation. Allow me to try to explain. Starting in February, according to the State Department,  the words “mother” and “father” will be removed from U.S. passport applications for minors and replaced with the gender neutral terms “parent one” and “parent two.”

            The State Department’s web-site indicated that “These improvements are being made to provide a gender neutral description of a child’s parents in recognition of different types of families.”

            The Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services, Brenda Sprague, said that the decision to remove traditional parenting names was not an act of political correctness.  She said: “We find that with changes in medical sciences and reproductive technology that we are confronting situations now that we have not anticipated 10 or 15 years ago.” Huh?

            If the changes were not an act of political correctness why didn’t the State Department simply provide additional space on the applications to accommodate these unanticipated changes confronting the department because of changes in medical sciences and reproductive technology?

            Perhaps here is a reason: An organization named the Family Equality Council has been lobbying for the change for many years. It’s executive director, Jennifer Chrisler, recounted the day she tried to get passports for her twin sons. “Even though my partner was their legal mother, had adopted them after I gave birth to them, she still had to put her name in the father field and that is both discriminatory and makes us feel like second class citizens.”  So the solution seems to be to discriminate and make second class citizens out of parents who raise children in the old fashioned gender specific way and, apparently, belong to some infamous Family Inequality Council.

            Frankly, I think the changes in the application forms can lead to more confusion. How do gender non-specific parents decide who is Parent One and who is Parent Two? And how do their children know who to send a greeting card to on May 8 and June 19?  On those days should the kids shop at a florist or an auto parts store?

            Even though the Deputy Assistant Secretary assures us that the change in the application form was not an act of political correctness I am disturbed by the Orwellian aroma of her protestations. In his classic dystopian novel, “1984,” the totalitarian state’s Ministry of Truth (MiniTrue) made the government seem omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient by continuously revising history and using doublespeak slogans such as War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength. I sense the Family Equality Council (FamQaulCon) is imposing doublespeak on us to let us know that mother and father are discriminatory and that the State knows best.

            I worry where this doublespeak will stop. Will our mother tongue become parent tongue? Will computer printed circuit boards become parentboards and will we lose good old Father Christmas to Parent Christmas?

            Perhaps all we can do is pray that FamQualCon’s desire not to feel discriminated against doesn’t become unreasonable.  So let us pray: “Our Parent One, who art in heaven … deliver us from the evils of PC. Amen. I mean Ah-parent. Oh well, all’s well that’s Orwell.