At the restaurant, the waiter asked what I wanted to drink.
I said, “Water with a slice of lemon.” He said, “Perfect.”

My wife ordered a glass of water with ice but without any
mention of lemon. According to the waiter, that, too, was

perfect. Did he know something about me that water with
lemon was perfect for me? Did he know something about my

wife that water with ice but without any mention of lemon
was perfect for her? And so I tried an experiment. When my

water glass was empty, I ordered a different glass of water,
one with ice but without any mention of lemon. According to

the waiter, that, too, was perfect. Might he have mistaken
my wife’s water order for mine? Then my shrimp scampi was

perfect and my cup of coffee was perfect and my wife’s steak
salad with medium-rare steak was perfect. As the waiter hand-

ed us the bill, he asked how everything was to which we re-
sponded simultaneously and quickly, “Perfect,” when, in fact,

not everything was perfect. I just didn’t want to bother him
with the results of my annual physical. It isn’t anything serious —

just not perfect.

He sat in the sand;
he watched the waves rise and fall;
he felt the pounding.

He was a year and a half into severe
grief when the congregation basically
said enough is enough when all the

stats were still looking really good —
good income, good attendance, good
youth group, good Christian Education

program, really good everything as the
institution measures it, and so he sub-
mitted a nice letter of resignation, which

needed to be approved by the higher
judicatory, but which he was pretty sure
would happen with a safety package

for him and the concerns of the con-
gregation accounted for, and so it was,
and then the congregation embarked on

a “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” the
wilderness of an eighteen-year journey
into dwindling and dwindling statistics

until the whole thing almost collapsed
and then they hired a kid, like the kid
who then wound up in severe grief,

through no fault of his own and things
picked up until the new kid had an affair
and things took another nose dive and in

the  meantime, the guy in deep grief, has
gone on to live a full life and a fine spiritual
existence without the institution and the

people in the institution, who, like Alfred
E. Newman, look around and, in true comedic
fashion, like those who make things happen

and those who watch things happen and
those who wonder, “What happened?” ask,
blankly “What just happened?”

Her dad sat contemplating words, images,
similes, metaphors, analogies. To the best
of anyone’s knowledge he didn’t do cross-

word puzzles. He just contemplated language,
the English language, not Hebrew even though
he was Jewish converted to Roman Catholic-

ism, maybe a bit of Latin, which we all were
told we had to study in high school because
so many English words have their origin in

Latin. While his wife left the house every day
to work for an insurance company, it wasn’t
easy for her, given her semi-paralyzed legs

and one day the little girl would take care
of her mother and do so gladly. The little girl
sat in her dad’s lap as he recited Shakespeare

and then he up and died when the little girl
was seven and for the next forty years she
went in search of the man who gave her the

love of language and she found him through
her own writings and she whispered, “I love
you, daddy.”

In a writer’s biography, the man read the following lines,
the first of which he thought was just wonderful: [Her father]
adored his family and radiated charm, but never radiated much
cash. He worshiped intellect and religion, and cherished a
dream of being a writer. The father radiated charm but
never radiated much cash. What a great sentence. The man
wondered if the father was derelict in his duties or just a
romantic who loved language through and through — a
modern-day Don Quixote defending the honor of the mythic
Dulcinea — a metaphor for literature — or perhaps a bit of
both. He adored, he radiated, he worshiped, he cherished,
he dreamed. Apparently, while he didn’t generate a lot of hard,
cold cash, he plumed the great and rich veins of a passionate
life. And apparently, there were no hard feelings between father
and daughter because she fulfilled his dream by becoming a
writer of estimable esteem.

The odds were against the team that faced the number
one team in college football. In the first half, the
challenger took a commanding lead, but in the second
half, the #1 team took over and ran away with the game.
A man and his buddy watched the game. The buddy was
a big fan of the challenger. When it became apparent
that the #1 team would win decisively, the man tried
to make his buddy face statistical reality and perhaps
feel better by telling him this pun: There was a person
who sent ten different puns to friends, in the hope
that at least one of the puns would make them laugh.
No pun in ten did. “The odds were against you, buddy,”
the man said while his buddy picked up his football
and went home.

I’m loving Nancy more every day;
she’s saving our representative democracy
until the Occupant goes away,
hopefully, before he drives us all crazy
or pushes the button and blows us all away.

The refrigerator is crepitating —
in the middle of the night it goes snap, crackle and pop.
At first it was frightening
and now it is just irritating and I wish it would stop.
I would call the management company
for help in getting the crepitating to stop
but I bothered them about internet access
when it was all my fault — wrong password for my laptop.
And so each night around three
I awake and anticipate a snap, crackle and pop.
Actually, I think I would miss it, if there were no crepitating —
just a creepy stillness without any comforting snap, crackle and pop.

They sat at the nearby, winter rate
beachside restaurant bar enjoying a

split of the Friday evening special of a
New York Strip done medium rare, tilting

toward rare, with a Caesar salad and
mashed potatoes with real bacon and

green onions for ten bucks and glasses
of wine for three bucks, questioning if

this is the place they really want to spend
their winter months where there apparently

are few of the cultural activities they are
used to enjoying and then they looked at

each other and he said, “A really good New
York Strip for ten bucks and pretty good

wine for three bucks and Wednesday’s
special of shrimp scampi and chicken

Parmesan for eight bucks and two-dollar
glasses of wine, I think we can find the

symphony, the ballet, the theater and an
art exhibit or two on PBS, darling, and,

darling, one more thing, the price for
cable is included in the rent.”

The article was about the three things that make a person
a toxic element in the workplace:

1. You Make Everything About You.
2. You Say and Do Passive-Aggressive Things.
3. You’re Jealous of the Success of Others.

Well, if we are honest, we can see some of ourselves in
those three things from time to time, right? But seriously,
who immediately comes to mind? Yeah, except there is one
caveat, does the White House qualify as a workplace these days?