I don’t think that I could be an English teacher, or more accurately an instructor in English poetry and the writing thereof. What would be poets have been stifled by English lit teachers who have cried “No, no, no!” at pupils’ submissions.

I can just see the big red letters reading: YOU USED TWICE THREE TIMES, EMILY!!!

I never lost as much but twice,
And that was in the sod.
Twice have I stood a beggar
Before the door of God!

Angels—twice descending
Reimbursed my store—
Burglar! Banker—Father!
I am poor once more!

Emily Dickinson . . . courtesy of The Poem Hunter.

Given that I don’t watch a lot of TV that has commercials, I’m certain this is not the first Christmas commercial broadcast. However, I am announcing that my first has just been experienced and it is Denny’s pancake sort of dish; I don’t know what it is called because I was focused on the little nutcrackers behind the food display and the bouncy, cheery Christmas music.

Thinking back, I believe commercials were something that we endured and maybe used to our advantage to run and snack or go to the bathroom. When I started watching WGN’s Late Night Movies, which came on at 10:30pm because we were on Central Time in Chicago, the commercial breaks did get annoying and lengthy to the extent that I would often fall asleep, missing scenes in classic movies. However, you really weren’t certain you’d missed anything because you’d seen the movies so many times before. Of course, if the National Anthem was playing or you were looking at a test pattern, you knew the vision of Bogart and Rains walking into the fog talking about a “beautiful friendship” was from a previous viewing.

Once, in a sort of misguided idea of tradition, we watched “It’s A Wonderful Life” on broadcast TV. Lordy! We could have played the video tape three times in the time it took to make it to Zuzu and the angel getting his wings and George Bailey winking upward to Clarence.

I must admit, though, sometimes a commercial pleases me. The latest is the Geico commercial with the pigeons on the telephone wire using the phrase, “Fire at will.” Then one pigeon thinks Will has flown by  . . . and it is not unlike a short “Who’s on First” experience.

When the Discovery Channel was new, along with The Learning Channel, I sometimes would walk into the room, turn on the TV and find myself watching hour after hour. Modern Marvels was an incredibly compelling show and at the end of each segment, I would tell myself that this would be the last. Then a promo for the next show would come on and it would be something along the lines of the Grand Canyon or the Golden Gate Bridge and I would sigh and settle in.

Then, somewhere along the line, it seemed that these educational stations went more to reality shows and following the lives of atypical families or, belief it or not, choosing wedding dresses.

My son had told me about The Smithsonian Channel, but with the long lineup of cable channels, I kept missing it. Then, yesterday, there it was and it was highlighting aerial views of different countries and areas of the United States. The One Hour More Syndrome hit and I spent most of the afternoon watching National Geographic type pictures and hearing factoids of areas about which I had been unaware.

I do hope the channel does not morph into choosing kilts or saris or kimonos.

Holy Moses!! I quickly added three newspaper clippings to my last post and did not then go and look at it. BAD MISTAKE. It sprawled across the entire page. I went into site administration and did what any 69-year-old unaccomplished post poster would do – I spent a lot of time figuring out how to fix it.

I am no longer thinking about that now, however, for when I typed BAD MISTAKE, I started to wonder if that was actually correct. A mistake is something done wrong and this was an instance of something definitely wrong, so how could it be a bad mistake. I would think as mistakes go, it was a good one – or at least an adequate one.

I suppose it is intended to refer to the severity of the effects of the mistake – maybe like giving someone aspirin instead of Percocet and them complaining, as opposed to reversing the dose and totally knocking out someone with a minor headache.

I am considering now that if you make a mistake and the effect is minor, then maybe you have done this mistaking business badly. If you make a mistake and your stove catches fire, well, I guess you have mistaked really well.

It’s possible that I need to stop thinking.

My younger son’s middle name is his great-grandmother’s maiden name – Akers. I found three quick references to her from about 100 years ago:

I read a blog entry about Trump tweeting and on the spur of the moment commented that I thought sooner or later a pundit would start referring to him as Tweety Bird. Now I can’t get it out of my mind. This could make for a long day.

That is a misleading post title; I should have typed my shark vacuum and my memory, but what is done is done. Oh, I know there is a delete key and it would me so easy, but today is : Return to Your Past Day and so I doing it like we did waaaay back then.

For those who did not live in those Stone Ages, I will explain:

You did not have a delete key; you typed it, there it stayed. You could use really thin onion skin paper and with an eraser make the paper even thinner; or, if you couldn’t get away with that, you could use White-Out, which was so very obvious.

To deal with these frequent situations, you had to write your way out of your predicament, finding someway to get to the period of the sentence  in a grammatically acceptable process. Often this was not easy. And it definitely was a pain in the neck.

By the way, I made up the today is Return to Your Past Day, although I suspect you knew that.

Getting back to what I started to relate in the first place, I have a Shark vacuum, which is bagless and lets you see the dirt you are sucking up. This can be upsetting, for you may realize that  you are a very dirty person. On the other hand, you feel like you are accomplishing something. On top of it all, the vacuum comes apart in several washable pieces, including the hose and that comes in handy when you inadvertently suck up something noxious.

Yesterday, I vacuumed some areas and then decided I’d wash the filter and let it dry overnight so I could really do a whiz-bang job today. However, and I have no idea how this could have happened, since I have a not-bad memory, I forgot to wash it out. I got up this morning and thought: Oh, no, I really can’t start out the day by vacuuming . . . Gosh Darn! I could have been psychically crushed, but I am resilient and opted to sit down, eat a foldover (peanut butter sandwich) and look at the Internet news.

I just posted not ten minutes ago, but I am here again because I must confess to a totally AmeliaJake type of mistake. I glanced at a sub-headline on the Internet news that announced a Miss Turkey had lost her crown due to a tweet. And I thought – please brace yourself – that it had something to do with a Thanksgiving event . . . and maybe with an actual turkey that had been judged “perfect”. Well, no, it wasn’t; you can see for yourself what the real story is HERE.

This started out as one of the major no-no’s for trial lawyers: Do not ask a question you do not already know the answer to or are an answer you are not prepared to hear. I suppose it derived, as so many prudent things do, from the old adage that curiosity killed the cat.

Firemen feel the door before they open it, for instance. I’m not going to give another example; I am going straight to crux of what prompted me to sigh and sit down and whimper onto my laptop. I suspected it, I know, and that is probably why I put off going upstairs and into a certain room. However, because an attachment to my vacuum has been missing for a number of days, I decided to go see if I had left it “in a certain room.”

Up the stairs I went and I turned left and I did not find the attachment; I viewed a room that harbored nothing filthy, but a number of plates and empty cups and glasses – everywhere. I assume it was everywhere because I made a U-Turn and descended the stairs.

A little while later, I heard the door open to the back vestibule and went out to the kitchen to speak with the dinnerware collector. He tilted his head and said, “Well, it’s a work in progress.” That is one thing he has inherited from me – the ability to disguise something distasteful with a euphemism. Why, when I wanted to wash a stuffed animal and make it sound less horrible than saying, “I’m going to put it in the washing machine,” I simply said it was going to a spa. Never mind that the last time I did that in a HE washer, the spin cycle totally flattened the thing against the side and in the end, an eye fell out.

Actually, no one asked me to relay that story and I shouldn’t have, which only goes to show, even if you know the answer to a question – especially one you are not asked – sometimes you just should keep your mouth closed.