Ah, yes, my feet are in front of the firestove. They are toasting. My calves hurt this morning, so what was I doing yesterday? I remember nothing, really.
***
Oh, dear, I was quickly checking to see if songs from itunes had copied onto the computer when, somehow, this old file popped up. It made me groan.
Alma Wickham got married years ago this month to Daniel Mater and, of course, became Alma Mater, which should not have been a problem and, actually, wasn’t. However, Daniel was a professor at Cornell in the 1970’s made her the butt of many jokes, and she tried to avoid all the alumni meetings where quite a number of those gathered actually loudly sang:
Far above Cayuga’s waters
With it’s waves of blue
Stands our noble Alma Mater . . .
and then guffawed their way through “Glorious to view” and with mirth-charged spirits launched into the second verse.
Finally, she decided to start using her middle name which was Anne . . . and that was fine. Professor Mater passed away suddenly in 1982, though, and Anne, formally Alma, married the head of the Physics Department, Lewis Teak in 1984.
It was, of course, a quiet wedding, attended by a few close friends and one life-of-the-party fellow, Norman Hastings, who owned a used furniture store next to a popular lunchroom near campus. After the ceremony, all the gentlemen took the opportunity to kiss the bride. When Norman approached the head of the “queue” – as he was wont to say – having left England in 1966, exactly 900 years after the Norman Invasion, as he was wont to point out, he took Anne’s hands in his, leaned back to gaze at her radiant face and announced, “Ah, what a lovely Anne Teak you are.”
Just as Anne fixed Norman with an icy stare of death, Doug Graves came though the front door, exclaiming, “So sorry to be late; I’ve been just buried in work.”
After the reception, Anne (Alma) turned to Lewis and said, “Really, dear, I think we should just have a quiet getaway week at my cottage in Malcolm Falls.” Lewis quite agreed.
So, two days later, after having watched Brighton Early on the morning news, they climbed in Lewis’ Hummer and headed off. On the way, Anne told him several tales of her friends and family in Malcolm Falls and that her cousin, Jean Wickham, was planning to throw a party for them at the old homestead.
Lewis thought it would be nice to see the ancestral home, but Anne told him the party would not be where her family had settled, but at the original home site of one of the other pioneers – the Old family. He asked, “That wouldn’t be the Phil N. Old family would it?” And she answered, “Why, Louie, however did you guess?”
She proceeded to tell him that Jean’s mother had a sister who had married into the Old family, but that her mother-in-law, Jessica Old, had been Ima Young’s daughter. Jean herself had married Oliver Poole of the Virginia Pooles. She had met Oliver while visiting her college roommate Ruth Hamm in Norfolk.
Lewis pulled the car over at a gas station and turned and looked at Anne. “Are you telling me,” he asked, “that your cousin Jean’s roommate was a Virginia Hamm and now Jean is Jean Poole?”
“Yes,” she answered, momentarily puzzled. Then her face sported a large grin as she murmured “gene pool . . . gene pool.”
Lewis exploded out of the car and leaned back in the window, more stating than asking, “And you don’t see a weird trend here, my dear former Alma Mater?”
Anne whispered, “It’s a curse.” Going around to get the gas nozzle, Lewis turned and said to Anne, who had by now climbed out of the car herself, “It is NOT a curse. I’m a physicist and there are no curses – well, except the one that keeps the Cubs from winning the World Series.”
He got so agitated that he scratched the paint on his Hummer when he manhandled the gas nozzle out of the tank.” They stared at the scratch and Anne – who, by the way, was seriously considering going back to being Alma – said, “ You know what you have now, don’t you? A Humdinger, that’s what.”
She got back in the car and Lewis went in to pay. He came back and brought a couple of fountain sodas with him. As he handed his to her, he said slowly and firmly, “I believe you live in the punning dimension; this may be the greatest breakthrough in physics since Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It could mean a Noble Prize.”
Alma (Anne) took her lips off her straw and watched him as he started the engine. “You believe that,” she asked? You know, you might just be headed for the phunny farm.”
Lewis drew in a slow breath and said, “Okay, look, I think this is it; I think both of us have a link to the Punning Dimension (notice he is capitalizing it now) and when we joined together, our punning potential reached a critical state . . . and poof . . . we have a rip in reality fabric.”
Alma (Anne) started to protest, but then tentatively spoke his name, “Lewis? . . . Lewis, the mechanic who worked on my cars for years retired and called to tell me the guy who is taking his place is . . . Alf A. Romeo.”
Lewis allowed himself a triumphant “Ha!” Then hit the steering wheel and chortled, “The new director of the town band is Claire Annette!”
“Oh, gosh,” Alma (Anne) said, “The banker’s daughter, Kerry, who went to the Julliard School of Music? Well, she met a man from Japan, Floyd Oki, and she married him. She’s . . . Kerry Oki.”
Suddenly she grabbed Lewis’ arm and begged him to stop. “We can’t go to Malcolm Falls . . . It would be the perfect storm scenario. Our punning factor and . . . I have to tell you, Lewis, a lot of people think Malcolm Fallians do strange things. We can’t chance it.”
“Malcolm Fallians??” Lewis was energized; he could see himself in Stockholm – hear the applause. “The Perfect Storm, eh? George Clooney could play me . . . “ Just as Alma uttered, “Get Real,” the Hummer crossed the city limits sign on the very edge of Malcolm Falls and perhaps did enter another dimension.
They never reached Malcolm Falls and perhaps they are heading toward a distance star – – maybe the bright one that little Polly Ester calls Venice.