Tag: Humor

America Collection/General interest
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Moving Day, Millionaire Style

by Fran Johns
Crane hauling loading box to 5th floor apartment

PUTTING THE NEW PLACE IN ORDER, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER

Home delivery underway on the fifth floor (Author photo)

Oh well, folks have got to get settled in somehow.

Newcomers in my neighborhood are slowly getting their Stuff in place. (When I say ‘my neighborhood’ I mean six blocks and quite a few million dollars uphill from my place; but still . . .) As is demonstrated by the silhouetted dog-walker, everything is downhill, and steeply so, from here; sweeping views of Alcatraz, San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge etc come with the pricey territory of this apartment. 

When you buy a fifth floor residence in a posh, historic building on Washington Street you then face the issue of how to get everything settled into its new surroundings. For a century or so, hefty moving guys presumably hauled stuff up the freight elevator. Today, though, the solution is to hire a giant truck with a crane, several other giant trucks and (by my count) upwards of a dozen workers to load, supervise and direct traffic.

For openers you take out the fair-sized corner window. Three sturdy guys could be seen stationed in its gaping hole to guide stuff inwards — a job I would not find wonderful. But then, watching the whole work crew for 15 or 20 minutes made me grateful for this desk job.

The mystery object rises to its destination (Author photo)

Once the new load is wrestled (cautiously, I might add) into the traveling container, it swings slowly upward. Crane operators, I guess, factor for things like the wind that was swirling around the park across the street, but if they were as nervous as I about the thing crashing into the wrong window it did not show.

On-time delivery (Author photo)

I watched as the loading box descended from one delivery to pick up the next item (rising above.) It was just one giant, bulky something wrapped in layers of felted cloth. When I inquired of the workers about the cargo, I got a deadpanned reply, “They have a lot of statues.” 

Presumably, if you can afford a home-with-a-view in San Francisco, your art collection might as well include a few works by Rodin or Ai Weiwei for the family room. That, at least, was my imagined package being hauled aloft. It helped to look up at another noise and spot a helicopter hovering above which I further imagined to be a few private eyes keeping an eye on the transaction below.

(I am only reporting what I see here. Details have not been verified.)

Seen overhead (Author photo)

Back on planet earth, there was more than a little irony in finding, parked in the small courtyard of my building, a couple of trucks ushering in one of my actual neighbors. The old-fashioned way, with hand-propelled dollies moving from truck to garage entry to elevators hung with padded cloths.

Not a single helicopter could be spotted overhead.

General interest
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Can I Get a Glass of Milk?

by Fran Johns

I MEAN, JUST AN OLD-FASHIONED GLASS OF MILK, PLEASE?

Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash

Maybe it’s just our multiple- choice culture. Accustomed as we are to 87 varieties of what used to be a cup of coffee . . .


But milk? I have been addicted to milk ever since my Uncle Porter taught me how to get it from a cow when I was in second grade. This was in the old-fashioned hands-on days. On Uncle Porter’s farm. I was pretty good.

Photo by Gonzalo Facello on Unsplash

My current senior living place features soy milk, almond milk, lactose-free milk and assorted percentages-of-fat milk.


And now I read about A2 milk, which lacks some pesky A1 beta-casein neither cows nor milk drinkers ever heard of.


“The rise of A2 milk comes,” I learn, “as the broader dairy industry is in crisis, facing declining sales amid the explosion of plant-based milks. A2’s proponents hope it will stage a comeback for dairy.”


Uncle Porter would be proud.



America Collection/General interest
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Warning: May Cause Cardiac Arrest

by Fran Johns
Medical worker looking through microscope

DO YOU REALLY WANT TO READ THAT ECHOCARDIOGRAM REPORT?

Photo by Lucas Vasques on Unsplash

Not for the faint-hearted: Echocardiogram Test Results Reports

Perhaps they are also not for the laity — you and me, the dummies whose hearts get echocardiogrammed and reported on, but what do we know? 

I should’ve quit with the ‘sigmoid septum’ thing. The report said it was ‘normal variant with aging . . . and no evidence of outflow obstruction.’ Wouldn’t that be enough?

But no. Something in these official Reports hypnotizes you. You plunge ahead.

‘Mild diastolic dysfunction!’ Can one live with dysfunction in the diastol? I don’t know. I mean, I know dysfunction just about everywhere else . . .

It is, in all probability, dysfunctional by definition to read the report of one’s recent echocardiogram. So why in the heck do they send you the thing? To raise your blood pressure, perhaps. I read on.

Oh, lord, ‘Mild tricuspid regurgitation.’ That’s got to make you sick.

Plus, a lot of the report has to do with Teichholz formulas. Did I miss something in Human Biology 101? Dr. Teichholz had to have been there somewhere, unless he wasn’t born until after I passed Human Biology with a D minus/minus/minus. Still . . .

For now I just need to get finished with the particulars. It’s my heart they’re reporting about, after all. And if my excellent medical team didn’t want me to know these details, surely they would not have sent the Test Results Report for my edification and enlightenment?

We embark upon a ‘Tricuspid annular plane excursion, systole,’ followed by a ‘Lv ejection fraction.’ Does this sound like any fun to you? Personally, I read it as someone being on an excursion barely long enough (fractionally, that is) to eject. It’s enough to make your heart race.

Which mine did, until I got to the very bottom. At the very bottom of the Test Results Report is a message from my primary care doc, who just finished reading the same report. Could he have put this message in bold, and kept the rest to himself? He wrote:

“Fran, the echocardiogram is quite reassuring. Really nice to see. No concerns that need intervention at all.”

Oh. Okay.

America Collection/General interest
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Peeking Wistfully Into the Past

by Fran Johns

CONSIDERING THE ANCESTRAL STORY — AND WISHING FOR TIME TO TELL THOSE TALES

(Author Photo – or more correctly, author copy of ancestral photo)

Hooked on the gnarly family tree? Personally, I never dared. 

In the first place, I figured I’d find more skeletons than aristocrats. One family story involved my maternal great uncle Samuel having died in prison where he’d gone for some offense that got more grisly with each retelling. And in the second place, once you start down that ancestral rabbit hole will there ever be a spare moment for anything else in your life?

I do however love the photo above, handed down to me from somewhere, showing my paternal grandparents or great-somethings, the woman looking so much like my father as to be spooky.

Take any photo such as the above. If you’re a writer you can write forever from it. I mean. What’s with the faux window signifying a Moorish villa the photographer felt appropriate to my forebears? (They were reportedly from Scotland.) Or those delicate hands of the young presumed groom about to topple the faux column? Did he never do a lick of work in his life? I’m going with the story (this is how I’d start making it up, at least) that he became a traveling musician and wound up a famous pianist. But meanwhile she was writing travel pieces for the penny papers, overshadowed his fame and ran off with a circus performer. She does look writerly, doesn’t she?

There are at least a hundred stories that could evolve from the photo of that pensive twosome. But here I am, MFA in Short Fiction, with my fingers getting tongue-tied — or whatever recalcitrant fingers do — just thinking about what direction such stories might go. 

(Johns family circa 1920)

Or take my in-laws — whom I would never give away and wish I’d known. These folks knew about work. All seven brothers joined their father in the the iron mines of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula by the time they were 9 or 10. Grandpa came from Cornwall for the opportunity — Cornwall is where the robber barons went to get hardy folks good at deep underground mining. I’ve no idea how Grandma Johns found the energy to raise all those notoriously rambunctious boys, but at least she had the one daughter to help starch all those collars. The collars were reportedly worn only on Sunday —  and for occasions such as this historic family photo. A picture worth a thousand made-up words.

All of the Johns boys (that’s the father-in-law I never met standing just behind his mom) worked their ways out of the mines and into a wild variety of subsequent paths. One became a mining company executive, and liked to say he was the only man around who had worked his way up from below ground. 

If only I were a novelist. 

But say you DO go down that Ancestry.com rabbit hole. My niece, it seems, recently did that, and discovered this fine lady:

(Author photo of text from niece)

. . .who seems to be my great-great-great-great-grandma. C’mon, really? Satin and lace, and powdered face?

If only I were a poet.

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America Collection/General interest
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How to Lose $80 at 80+ — or Maybe Not

by Fran Johns

APPLE TECHNOLOGY 101: YOU’RE NEVER TOO OLD TO LEARN. I PROMISE

Photo by Aaina Sharma on Unsplash

Lesson one: Never remove an earbud without immediately putting it into its little happy case. 

Oh, you already failed that one? You must be over 50. Somewhere in Never-Never Land is a football field paved with lost earbuds. That’s where they go when you think you put one in your pocket. Everyone under 50 has a secret safe place for temporarily-removed earbuds. It’s in their genetic make-up.

Lesson two: Never buy anything in an Apple store. Apple stores are where you go to take classes on how to use Apple stuff you buy at Target. The Apple people don’t care; they made their money selling stuff to Target where their stuff is wayyy cheaper. Six-year-olds know this.

Lesson three: Don’t go thinking you can pick up an orphan earbud (cheap) just because you still have its lonesome mate and little happy case. Everybody under 40 knows you just toss the abandoned mate and case, because they didn’t grow up in the Depression when you were taught never to throw anything away. (They worry about the environment just as you do, but there is a technological environmental disconnect.)

Lesson four: If you failed Lesson Three, do not pay the smiling Apple person $80 for a right earbud she swears will happily pair with your lonesome left earbud. She lies. She does not mean to lie; she is simply under 30 and can’t imagine anyone would still have a Gen One AirPod. Only someone over 80 would still have a Gen One anything.

Lesson five: Once you fail Lessons Two through Four, do not obsess over the fact that no amount of following the instructions will make your $80 right earbud work. Because:

Lesson six: “Gen” as in “Generation” does not refer to your grandchildren. Anybody under 90 knows that “Gen” = a step in production. You won’t find this in the OED, but nobody under 70 ever heard of the OED. (Oxford English Dictionary, the bible of semantics before Google invented search engines.) Anyway, obsessing over all this is bad for your blood pressure.

Lesson six (cont’d): Apple AirPods Gen One came out in 2016. Only someone in her 90s — well, maybe 80s — would be so gauche as to still have a Gen One AirPod. Most people still owning a Gen Two (b 2019) would hang their heads in shame before admitting to such a thing. Gen 3? Reputable, although now there’s Gen 4 and while you read this they are busily at work on Gen 5. Everybody under 20 now has the Gen 4 (debuting in September) on order if not in ear.

Lesson seven: Do not think, just because you paid them $80 three days ago, that the Apple people will cut you any slack. They will “run diagnostics” — something understood by anyone under 30 to mean a mysterious technological study and by everyone over 60 to mean “I’m slipping behind that white door for a cup of coffee while you stare into space for 10 minutes.” The diagnostics will reveal you to be the owner of a Gen One and you will need to slink out of the store in disgrace. Empty-handed.

Lesson eight: But listen to the smiling Apple Genius person as he hands you back your worthless stuff. He is giving you good advice. He is saying, softly, “Just go to Target and get a new pair.”

Congratulations on your graduation.

General interest/Optimism Collection
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A Confession: Abject Failure of Domesticity

by Fran Johns

ARTHRITIC HANDS, 1 — SEWING TASK, 0

The hands in question (Photo by friend, used with abandon)

I have sunk to a new low.

This report is in the hope of some sort of absolution, some tiny relief of guilt, or at least the promise that you won’t tell the ghost of my mother.

My mother, Helen Hardy Moreland, was a woman of her time. Which was 1897–1967. The last half-dozen of those years were eaten away with a series of small strokes, and may she rest in well-earned peace. I am living proof that a somewhat easier, if less righteous, life might have given her another three decades or so, but probably my real secret was being born in an easier century.

Despite a graduate degree and (usually) enough money to pay the bills, my mother was constitutionally unable to pay someone to do anything she could do herself. She tried really hard to instill this philosophy in her daughters. Being A Lady was of paramount importance, but if the toilet malfunctioned you went for the plunger yourself.

Helen Hardy Moreland, circa 1940 (Author photo)

When my mother was not cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring, writing, teaching, gardening, canning, hostessing, ironing, baking or functioning as a personal enabler of her husband’s distinguished career in academia she was sewing. I mean, how else to clothe four daughters? Sewing included darning, mending, tatting, or crocheting when called for and in all circumstances fixing everything yourself.

It is this last that just did me in.

I needed to add a snap fastener to a newly purchased garment. (Which itself my mother would have stitched up between tea and dinner.)

In my defense, I actually own a sewing basket. I inherited it from my mother-in-law, another woman of the same time and disposition as my mother. She actually used all this stuff:

Isabel’s sewing basket (Author Photo)

Hidden deep within this nifty basket are some snap fasteners. I got one out. I went so far as to mark the spots where its two pieces needed to go.

Then my fingers mutinied. My opposable thumbs absolutely opposed any participation in holding the tiny snap in place, let alone getting the threaded needle (I deserve points, at least, for getting the #$^%+@# thing threaded) through its tiny hole. As if my hands were given voice to shout, with indignation, “Oh good grief! We type your stupid stories!! What more do you want?” It was a battle of frustration; the mutineers were unmoving.

Vanessa’s alterations corner at Lily’s Cleaners (Author Photo)

I caved. Took the damned thing to my friend Vanessa at Lily’s Cleaners on Pine Street. She said, with a gentle smile, that plenty of people bring in small jobs; she’ll have it ready tomorrow.

It will remain our secret.

General interest/Optimism Collection
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Solving the Rose-Colored Mystery

by Fran Johns

WHERE EYEGLASSES GO TO DIE

I have long wondered where my lost eyeglasses go.

This is because I lose a LOT of eyeglasses. Reading glasses, valuable prescription glasses that magically darken with the sun (my latest and most tragic loss;) snazzy sunglasses from the Cocoons people that drew high fives from handsome passersby (alas, 60 or 70 years past the age at which I might have built upon these encounters;) outdated prescription glasses pressed into service when I lost the good ones; cheap sunglasses regularly bought for $6 at Goodwill . . . you get the picture.

If you are a loser of eyeglasses, this essay is for you. I have discovered where they go to die.

Earlier I had discovered where they don’t go — or at least, how not to find them. They don’t go into airport lost-&-found departments; we’ve all tried that. They don’t go into municipal trash bins near where you last saw them, so forget digging through those malodorous heaps. They will not come home via group emails to every meeting or friend group with whom you worked or partied in the week before you discovered them AWOL.

Shoot, they don’t even come home to collect rewards. At least a dozen of my lost former bafs (if your eyeglasses aren’t your BestAccessoryFriends you don’t seriously need them) have left home with my business card glued to the case or (in one desperate failed instance) my cellphone number etched onto the piece that goes over your ear.

A few of them get swept into gutters or trash bins and go thence into the landfill for future civilizations to puzzle over, assuming the planet survives for future civilizations. I hereby offer my abject apologies to the planet; I am profoundly sorrowful.

Photo by Documerica on Unsplash

Today, however. I have discovered the secret final resting place of lost eyeglasses. It is in the bowels of a Subterraneous International Repository beneath the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, accessible only through the Property Department of your local Police Department.

I know this because I recently learned of the New York Police Department’s Underground Storage facility and its current trove of approximately 1,752,012 items, among which are at least five pairs of my missing glasses (readers & sunglasses.) Extrapolating backwards to similar facilities in San Francisco, Paris, London and elsewhere I estimate that each of those must be home to an average of 1,324,500 items including at least a pair or two of my formerly beloveds. But since all of these facilities have a finite amount of space, it follows that they must relieve themselves at some point when income exceeds capacity and necessitates outgo.

Thus the central subterranean repository. There is no other possible answer.

The same article that informed me about the New York inventory revealed that each and every item is carefully bagged, tagged and numbered. (From one to infinity.) Therefore, we know our eyeglasses will be kept into eternity, because what governmental entity can you name that ever destroyed a numbered item in its care? (No politics, please.) After varying numbers of years, a few thousand are certified as eligible “for destruction;” this is code for shipment to a sub-subterraneous destination.

I think, although this is the one piece of the puzzle still under peer review, that between the bagging and the tagging someone enters details in a box below the “Eyeglasses” label. The time required to search the database for the precise item labeled “Fran’s ridiculously expensive prescription trifocals that darken with the sun” however is likely to exceed my anticipated lifetime.

So now that you understand, perhaps you will undertake a search of your own.

And just in case: They have lavender metallic frames. Just send them to my granddaughter.

General interest/Optimism Collection
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Get Ready to Rizz in the New Year

by Fran Johns

Photo by Taylor Wright on Unsplash

Should we be worried about Rizz? I’m afraid so.

As if there weren’t enough to worry about — climate disaster, endless wars, A.I., fragile democracies — along comes rizz.

Rizz is the newly-crowned Oxford Word of the Year, which is a Very Big Deal. I mean, it won out over three other finalists — Swiftie, prompt, and situationship. I could’ve dealt with prompt. Even though I’ve always tried to be prompt and am thus a little miffed about AI re-purposing a perfectly good word. (I could not have dealth with situationship, sorry.)

Rizz, though? Now that it’s THE word, I am considering how it and I can get along. Officially it means “style, charm, or attractiveness; the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner;” unofficially it means all of the above, or, in general, maybe, pizazz — although pizazz never got to be Word of the Year when it slid into the lexicon a century or so ago.

Photo by Juan Camilo Navia on Unsplash

Rizz. Apparently if you have it everybody knows. If you don’t have it, as I secretly fear may be my bottom-line situationship, what can you do? (Situationship, in case you’re over 30, is when the relationship you’re in is not quite a real relationship, or at least you’re not having sex with whomever or whatever else you’re relating to. It’s complicated.)

The Oxford people tell us that rizz is “believed to be a shortened form of the word ‘charisma’, taken from the middle part of the word.” Charisma, according to Wikipedia, “is a personal quality of presence or charm that others find compelling. Scholars in sociology, political science, psychology, and management reserve the term for a type of leadership seen as extraordinary.”

Fleetingly, now and then I might have had some charisma. I like to think I’ve been influential in a cause or two, if not identifiably charismatic. But even that wouldn’t help when it comes to rizzhood.

You can’t, in short, rizz your way into being rizz, even if the new Word of the Year is both a noun and a verb. Rizz, it seems, just iz.

May your new year overflow with ripples of rizz.

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