“Picture If You Will…”

THE EARTH IS A BUSY and often confusing planet and sometimes things just look out of place to me. It’s kind of like when you rearrange your furniture. Until you get used to the new configuration you’re likely to stub your toe on that chair that wasn’t sitting there last week. A few of these oddities came to mind recently.

We attended a funeral recently and as we were at the cemetery for the graveside service I looked down. There in the grass by several headstones was a golf ball. A golf ball? That just seemed to be terribly out of place. True, there was a hole nearby, but…

This was not my first encounter with errant golf balls. A couple of years ago at home in Terre Haute (That’s French for “Hand me my 9 iron.”) I came out to get into the car and there was a golf ball there in front of the garage door. We are at least 5 miles from the nearest golf course. I moved the golf ball to a table by the back door. not wishing to seriously tinker with the universe that put it on the ground. The next morning I came out of the house and the golf ball was gone and on the ground right where the golf ball had first appeared was an apple. I was afraid to touch it. The next morning the apple was gone. I was becoming afraid to go out there. I still am.

I’m halfway tempted to go back out to the cemetery to see if the golf ball there has been replaced with an apple. If the golf ball is gone and there is fruit lying there I would be seriously spooked.

I do believe that there is a place for everything and everything has its place. Sometimes though things get pushed together that just don’t make sense – to me anyway. Take a look at Dennis Kucinich and his wife and you will understand.

There used to be, and maybe still is, in the city of Cleveland, Ohio near to where I used to live, a perfect example of how two incongruous things have been mashed together. I just wish I had a picture of it, but this was in the days before phones with cameras. I had a camera but I would have had to go to one of those little Fotomat booths.

Sitting on the west side of town was a store that had two diverse specialties.

“Lottie’s Delicatessen and Bridal Shoppe.”

To quote Rod Serling – “Picture if you will” a store window display of mannequins in lovely bridal gowns and dangling from the ceiling between the brides – a number of Hebrew National salamis. I suppose the combination made sense on some plane. The bride could select a gown and arrange for catering all at the same time. I cannot help but think that the bridal gowns must have had their own special aroma. But who am I to judge?

There is no doubt that there are dozens, millions even, of similar collisions of reality and questionable taste out there. And the way things have been going I’m sure that I will bump into more of them – or them into me more likely.

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