This ‘n’ That

Forgive me for another comment about dreams and some of my weird ones. Last night, somewhere in that strange land in our heads, I wrote what I thought was a really funny, really clever bit involving a pun. See what you think:

When Charlie woke up in the ER after his bike accident, he realized he had lost one of his fingers. “Well,” he moaned, “I have nine left” A man in the bed next to him raised his bandaged hand and said “Me eight.” Later, Charlie sighed and said, “I have bad dreams about that oaf in the Oval Office.” The man next to him echoed, “Me eight.”

What do you think? If you got the pun, you may have moaned like Charlie. It wasn’t a very good pun, but it sounded so much better when I dreamed it than it does in the light of day. The key? The transposition of the words too and eight.

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          I recently spent a week or so in the hospital, for pneumonia again. And now that I’m home I find that my librium isn’t so equi anymore. I might come up with a neologism for it: tippsilibrium.

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          In one of the Keller stories by Lawrence Block, Keller is having a medium read his palm.

“She was still holding his hand. Keller had noticed that this was one of the ways a woman let you know she was interested in you. Women touched you a lot in completely innocent ways, on the hand or the arm or the shoulder, or held your hand longer than they had to. If a man did that it was sexual harassment, but it was a woman’s way of letting you know she wouldn’t mind being harassed herself.”

I know, I know, I’ve already written quite a bit about harassment but here’s another thought regarding this subject. I’m a huge fan of the hug as a truly important part of touching. At what point does a hug become harassment? Nearly everyone by now has seen the video of the little boy and his mother leaving a music festival with a hundred or more people sitting on the grass. The boy, at most two-years-old, maybe younger, went to each person and gave them a farewell hug. It was so beautiful it brought tears to my eyes. Here’s this little boy demonstrating for the world what a hug is supposed to be, an unspoken union of two people using an embrace to show how we should be, loving, caring for everyone even if we met them only once at a music festival in the park.