Love letter to Byron Farquhar

We cleaned out the desk of Byron Farquhar today.

Byron Farquhar, man of mystery.

You can learn a lot about a person from the contents of his desk.

As might be expected, in that beautiful burl wood roll top, we found office supplies – multiple boxes of American Standard staples (no stapler, by the way), paper clips, pencil leads, funky pink parallelogram erasers, carbon paper (!), batteries, Diamond strike-on-the-box matches, and a small canister of crushed red pepper.  OK…

In the file drawer, bottom left, we found documents cached long past the recommended ‘save until’ date per the IRS’s mandate:  Bank statements and W-2’s from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s.

Photos of colleagues atop empty picture frames.  Nesting dolls?!  Rubber bands linked, perhaps the product of a meditative mind.  Boxes of business cards from each stop along his progression up the ranks in his professional life.

Then, in the top right hand drawer, at-the-ready, glasses.  No, not reading glasses.  Not even old prescription bifocals kept in case the new ones were lost or stepped on.  No.  These are plastic frames without lenses but sporting a rubber nose complete with fluffy black moustache.

Now we’re getting down to the real Byron Farquhar.

It’s a pseudonym, of course.

Byron Farquhar exists only in the mind of a 94-year-old born on April Fool’s day – my facetious father-in-law, Lloyd Plath.

He first called himself Byron Farquhar when he set about unraveling the puzzle of how he wound up on so many mailing lists when he had subscribed to only one magazine – Forbes.

His sleuthing compounded the problem, getting him onto duplicate streams of multiple mail-order solicitations, the first in his own name and the second sent to the attention of the illusive Mr. Farquhar.

Lloyd never trusted Forbes after that.  At the flea market he found a framed picture of a chimpanzee studying the New York Times and hung it next to his massive desk – his new financial advisor.

I first met him in Tulsa when my husband and I were courting.  We took him and my future mother-in-law to an outdoor arena for a live musical performance of “Oklahoma!”  The master of ceremonies informed the audience that senators from around the country were in attendance that evening and asked them to stand and be acknowledged. 

To my amazement Lloyd stood and accepted the round of applause graciously even though he never was a senator from anywhere. 

After I became a Plath, people started to ask me if I am related to Sylvia Plath, the well-known award-winning, if ill-fated author.  Once this happened at a party when I was standing next to Lloyd.  He said yes, I was, by virtue of my marriage into the family.  He said that Sylvia was his cousin and he went on to recount an anecdote from their childhood times together, playing in the kitchen.  A recollection made melancholy, he said, by her choice of exits.

I began retelling the stories of my famous cousin-by-marriage, until I learned from Lloyd’s flabbergasted wife one day that this too, was another of his pranks.

The good news is that we have the roll top desk now not because Lloyd Plath has passed away, but because he decided to move.

He decided.

He called us and his other offspring and their spouses and insisted that we come and collect all the things that he’d made us claim years ago when his wife of 57 years passed away. 

They just won’t fit in his new apartment, he said.  It’s a one bedroom affair on the ground floor of a fresh new complex in his tiny, picturesque town.  No more stairs.

He figured it was time to make a change since he took a fall and banged up his knees. 

He gave us the gift of making this decision himself, no matter how stress-laden or painful it must have been.  He’s always been, and remains, his own man. 

So we brought home the desk and the glasses, but not the portrait of the chimp. 


Lloyd wants to live long enough so that on April Fool’s Day, 2020, he can send that picture to Willard Scott for display on a Smucker’s jar labeled:  “Byron Farquhar, 100 years old.”

Confessions of a counterfeit culprit

I tried to forge my husband’s signature today.

But my life of crime was cut short since replicating a smashed mosquito proved more than I could manage.  The best I could do was a ball of twine.  Too easily detectible by the signature police.

My spouse is one of those “what you see is what you get” kinds of guys, so his deliberate sprawling scrawl of an inky splat on the page is out of character.  Not to mention illegible. 

His signature contains nary a recognizable letter. 

It looks more like the wild script of a frantic person who’s trying to force his pen to write in an emergency.  Maybe the pen’s been in the back of the drawer for a couple of years and has lint stuck in that ball of ink gobbed on the end, so he has to scribble irrationally on a cereal box (the closest thing to the phone) in hopes of writing a number down before he forgets it.

Could he have had a momentary loss of his fine motor control?  Maybe a bee landed on his thumb and he gyrated wildly to avoid being stung?!  That must be it.

A study published by the American Psychological Association says that “in writing or artistic expression man not only communicates his conscious thought but also his underlying thought, a bio-psychological pattern … by which graphic movement becomes a ‘diagram of the unconscious.’"

Translation:  There is a deep-seated reason why a perfectly laid back, fun-loving, up-front fellow creates such an outrageous wad of tangled threads as a representation of himself!  Loving husband on the surface – below decks:  mysterious man of knotted nuance. 

No sense asking him about it – the APA says he is ignorant of his own internal bio-psychological gobbledygook!  In other words, he’s just not that deep. 

Because of this major discrepancy between man and monogram, I did a little research.  We’ve been married 24 years now, but I may not know my own husband!  Best to check with wikiHow and learn the secrets of personality revealed by his autograph.  A wife can’t be too safe.

Ah, here we go:  How to Analyze Handwriting (Graphology). 

Step 1.  Look at the pressure of the strokes.  A high pressure means the person has high emotional energy.  People with high emotional energy have a lot of enthusiasm for life and are often very successful.  People with a low emotional energy find most situations draining and will try to avoid them. 

OK.  I can make a clue out of this.  His moniker, written with a burst of energy, appears to have no pressure.  That fits.  All these interwoven lines might be tracing the path of protons gone wild, but they orbit a central nucleus of dog-like acceptance of the world.  That’s so him.

Step 2.  Look at the size of the letters.  Large letters mean the person is outgoing and extroverted; small letters mean the person is reclusive and introverted.

OK, there are no letters here, but it is a sizeable conglomeration of formless strokes.  Extroverted it is.  Check.

Step 3.  Look at the slant of the strokes.  A right slant means the person is assertive and confident.  A left slant means the person is quiet and reclusive.  No slant means the person is reliable and consistent, but reserved and constrained.

Hmmm…we have your right slant and your left slant combined with your no slant at all.  So, he appears to be an assertive and confident recluse who is reliable.  Yes.  Yes.  I’ve seen it over the years.

Step 4.  Look at the connection of the letters.  Connected letters mean that the person is logical and judges things according to experience.  Disconnected letters mean the person is imaginative and judges things according to intuition.

Again, we are wanting letters, but his doodling, squiggle-ish, complex flourish does appear to be formed by one continuous line.  Therefore, according to this pre-imminent authority, we can conclude that I married one logical guy with a crazy signature.

By the way, I did a quick review of my own lilting left-leaning mark and found that I am an enthusiastic and outgoing person who confidently asserts her intuition.


Now why would I need to forge his signature?

Styrofoam worms on a blustery day

Once, a friend of mine had to chase her wig through Safeway parking lot.

This was a long time ago, when I lived in Tornado Alley; AKA Oklahoma. 

My friend, I’ll call her Dorothy, was what my Grandma would call a “character.”  Her life had angles and quirks I hadn’t encountered before I met her at Tulsa County Courthouse where we worked.

Once, she was late for work, really late.  Unheard of for her.  She called at about the 45 minute mark to say she’d been to work on time that morning, but upon turning into the parking garage, discovered she had forgotten to put in her bridge, a piece of dental work that contained only two teeth, from alternating positions, right in front of her mouth. 

We had no cell phones, so, from her landline at home she called to say that she refused to come into the Courthouse without those teeth in place “looking like a Halloween pumpkin.”  It made perfect sense to her to turn around and drive all the way back home and call from there.  She retrieved her teeth and came to work about brunch time, smiling.

And she wore this wig that she didn’t really need.  She had perfectly good hair.  But, in her estimation, said hair would behave badly on occasion.  When it did, she punished it by collecting it into a net and stuffing it under the wig. 

Or maybe she just slept through her alarm and didn’t have time for her regulation coif.

In any case, the wig looked OK, for a wig.  Close to her natural brown hair color and shoulder length.  Shiny.  Pleasantly styled into a “flip.”  Bangs.

But, to a trained observer, it could be spotted for the pretender it was – no scalp in the part line.  Always a dead giveaway.

Once I saw Dorothy in the process of forcing her glasses back under the thing after she’d taken them off to swab away the residue of Midwestern humidity; so I thought it fit pretty well.  Which begs the question:  I know we’re in Oklahoma, but how big a wind was that?

There was no tornado on the occasion of Dorothy’s escapade.  Just a blustery, gusting wind that must have caught her in an upburst – the kind of upward explosion that will blast your kilt right up over your head. 

It came sweeping down the plain.  (Sorry.)

This tempest surged right through the Safeway parking lot just as she was loading groceries into her car after a hard day’s work.  The gust yanked her hairpiece off, flung it over her car and threw it across the path of oncoming shoppers and their carts.

She said the wig surged ahead of her and paused like a terrier with its toy, teasing her into believing she’d caught up.  Then it lurched again and bumped along the ground, bouncing and rolling like a macabre, shaggy tumbleweed.  It took her all the way from Safeway past Baskin Robbins and beyond.

As she chased it, she formed a plan to put an end to Nature’s little game of keep away.  At last, when she got in range, she lunged forward and stomped on it, flattening it like the bag of hair it was. 

She snatched it up and stood tall with as much dignity as she could muster for one victorious moment.  Then, wig in hand, natural hair plastered to her head and contained under its net, she stalked back to her car and drove her groceries home.

I was missing ole Dorothy this morning after I received an object shipped to me in a mid-sized box stuffed with Styrofoam worms.  That box was housed in a second, inappropriately large box, a huge box, a box for the ages, also stuffed with Styrofoam worms. 

Let me just say that those worms wanted out of those boxes.  And fortuitously, when gust of wind came up in the alley by the recycling bin, they bolted and ran ahead of me like so many minions.

They skittered gleefully toward my neighbor’s fence, laughing all the way, with me behind them in a life-sized game of Whack-a-mole, frantically stomping and collecting them one-by-one, Dorothy-style.


If she could see me now!

A fool and her internet

I’m a sunflower.

Yep.  Oh yeah.  I am a regular ray of sunshine.  Facebook told me so.

The social media giant’s newest package of postponement is delivered as, “What kind of ________are you?  Take this simple quiz and find out!”

I found my floral identity this morning shortly after reading the DailyGood’s article entitled, “How to eliminate procrastination.”

By the by, according to another Facebook/Quiz Social questionnaire, the best tattoo for me is …wait for it … a human skull!  Yes, that’s right.  This little sunflower has a dark side.

Quiz Social zeroed in on my shadow personality and matched me perfectly with that symbolic representation of my cranky alter ego. 

The skull is suited to me, says Quiz Social, because it’s “bold and powerful.”  That is so me! 

I am the bold and powerful sunflower who declares her “opposition to the natural order of things and her unwillingness to be limited by anyone's rules or expectations.”

This nonconforming little blossom cannot be repressed. 

And this:  In the yin and yang yoyo of things, if I were a super hero, I’d be none other than Superman, the Goodie Two Shoes of the super hero set! 

And here’s how they reconcile the skull tattoo with the embodiment of truth, light and the American Way:  “Sometimes you are tempted to use your powers for evil, but lucky for the rest of us, you have a heart of gold.”  It’s me!  So very me!

                                                                       
In a past life I would have been an Egyptian queen, states the Department of the Obvious.

In the next life?  After I answered their quick quiz, the pronouncement came down – I’ll be reincarnated as … a single grain of sand?! 

Not sure I’m looking forward to that in quite the same way I was anticipating my return as a mountain lion or even redwood tree, or Empress of the Universe.
                                                    
But Quiz Social trots out none other than William Blake to make life on the beach with the masses seem Zen: "To see a world in a grain of sand ...  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand…"  OK…

Sensing the lack of enthusiastic response to such a gritty future, the quizmaster extrapolates, “There is nothing that separates us from the sand.  Nothing separates the sand from God.  We are all here.  We are all everywhere.  We are all forever.”

Oh brother!

I’m beginning to see the wisdom of Fred Stutzman, a 2009 graduate student at the University of North Carolina.  DailyGood reports that Fred had trouble concentrating long enough to finish the work for his thesis.  He blamed access to the internet.

Stutzman, like other people I’ve heard of, found himself distracted by the endless supply of sappy pastimes and useless but fascinating crapola at his fingertips — even when she, er, he really wanted to get something done.

Like any addict, he told himself he could disconnect any time he wanted to.  But it wasn’t that simple.  He tried aversion therapy and the ‘step down’ method.  He went cold turkey.  He wore the patch.

OK.  He didn’t do any of those things, but it was hard for him to look away from the screen.  No.  It was impossible. 

So he did what any red-blooded, skull-tattooed sunflower would do:  He went home and created a software program that would solve his problem.  Oh, I should have mentioned – Stutzman was a computer programmer studying Information Science.  

His creation, called “Freedom,” is simple.  All you have to do is turn the application on – after you pay your $10 – tell it how long you want to focus on something, anything other than the electronic pabulum you’re Jones-ing for and it blocks your computer from going online for that amount of time.  

If you have to have a fix before your time is up, you have to turn your computer completely off and reboot, which, in theory, is so much trouble you’d actually rather accomplish something you’re not ashamed of or embarrassed by instead.

I’m thinking of getting it.  Right after this last quiz:  What Tarot card are you?

Seven quick questions and…The Fool!?  I beg your pardon!

The devil and Hobby Lobby

Effective this week, a for-profit corporation has line item veto rights to federal law.  Isn’t that convenient?

Because it is owned and operated by a Christian family, Hobby Lobby can now choose not to comply with any portion of the law that offends their sensibilities.   

Thank you, United States Supreme Court. 

Reminds me of an axiom circulating online this week:  Things happen for a reason; and sometimes the reason is that you’re stupid and make bad decisions.

Ahhh!  That helped a little.    

My goal each week is to give you a laugh Dear Reader, but this week’s Supreme Court decision just sticks in the marrow of my funny bone.  It felt good to vent.  Glad to have it out of my system, for the moment, at least. 

But as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg declared in her dissenting opinion, “The fight isn’t over.”

I’m with “Notorious RBG” as Justice Ginsburg is now being affectionately called.  I wanna dig out a tie-dyed t-shirt, paint my face and carry a torch.  I wanna sit in.  “Hell no!  We won’t go!”

OK, wrong slogan. 

Breathe.  Breathe.

What the hell are they thinking??  Don’t they have a big picture point of view?!  Of all people the Supreme Court should be able to process the implications of their decisions.  Can’t they see that allowing Hobby Lobby et al to cherry-pick the parts of healthcare LAW they want to abide by sets a bit of a precedence!  Hello?!

You know, I don’t like it that as part of that same “mandated” healthcare package my tax monies pay for Viagra. 

This is a deeply held belief of mine – a when-it’s-over-it’s-over philosophy that I believe men should accept.  I’ve lived my life accordingly mostly because that issue doesn’t affect me. 

So it just naturally follows that I would not fund distribution of such a drug.  Therefore, next April, I’m going to draw a red line on my Form 1040 and reduce my tax burden accordingly.  That’ll work.   

All right, Carolyn.  Mellow!  Mellow! 

You know what?  My blood pressure is up and I want to eat a bag of fun-sized Snickers. 

But I can let this go. 

Let’s talk about something else.  Something completely different...

I woke up again this morning with parrot tongue.  This is a bad sign because I’m being told that someone in this house is snoring.

In case you’re unaware, parrot tongue is a well-documented syndrome whereby an otherwise cultured and genteel person tenderly rests her head on her memory foam pillow and falls asleep instantly, drawing her life’s breath orally.

That is to say she closes her eyes and steps off the precipice into the darkest depths of guilt-free slumber post haste.  Sheep uncounted.  Lips parted just so.

When she wakes, some seven stress-free hours later, her tongue is the tongue of a Mojave Gila monster; her house pets cower in the bedroom corners and her husband hovers gleefully with his iPhone recording ready to play. 

“Ha ha ha!” says he.  “Listen to yourself, Honey!  You could peel the paint off the walls!  Tee hee hee!  Wait until our son hears this!” 

First of all let me just say that, squirrel mouth aside, I do not accept that the racket on that recording came from me.  My assertion is that my husband accumulated those sound effects over time in revenge for that innocent prank I played long ago when I dipped his hand in warm water.

No – those sounds came from somewhere else.  Something else.  Just recently, for example, he had to pry bent nails from warped boards on our deck.  He could easily have had his recorder in his tool belt.

Our neighbor’s dog snarls at the slightest provocation.  We visited Yellowstone when the buffalo were feeling frisky.  Our house is haunted!

I don’t know!  It wasn’t me, I tell ya!

All right.  Let’s say Spouse A is possessed by the devil.  She cannot control the proclamations of the Dark One!  He has a lot on his mind and the volume set on 10.

Spouse B may be laughing but he’s looking frazzled.

This can’t be healthy physically, mentally or matrimonially!  Medical science surely has some relief.

No worries.  This one’s tailor made for Christian healthcare.

Taking Mr. Top 40 down

Mimus polyglottos, how I loathe thee!

Oh, computerized chess games may seem relentless. 

The IRS.

Sharks.  They never sleep.  Or at least that’s what their press agents want you to believe.

But on a cool summer’s night, when you have the windows open to a luscious breeze; when you’ve just drifted off with a hint of a smile and begun to float in dreamland.  Just then, just at that perfect moment, there’s nothing quite so ruthless as a mockingbird. 

Like Santa, he knows when you are sleeping.  That’s his cue to take the stage at treetop, just out of reach of your super-soaker.  I imagine he feels glorious up there as he drinks in the moonlit panorama from his vantage point.  And so, he draws a deep birdy breath and begins to “sing.”

An unmated male is the likely culprit.  Figures.  Like a drunken Romeo he prattles on as though he can win the heart of his Juliet with a continuous loop of tunes from around the ‘hood.  Second verse?  Same as the first!

His performance plays like the demo tape of a tribute band.  Nothing original.  Eight bars of everything from warbler to car alarm.  All of it in brass. 

Initially, we put his appearance down to the super moon.  You know, that dazzling full moon that rose on Friday the 13^th.  The one that moved wolves to howl and the undead to stir and walk their funky walk.  That one.

We supposed it motivated him too.  Mr. Mocker.  And like Foghorn Leghorn, he reckoned he’d better announce what looked to him like the start of the day.  And announce.  And announce.  And announce.

That morning, after thrashing his way through the night, twisting the sheets and stuffing his pillows into his ears, my husband stood bedside and glared at me with an expression that, try as I might, I cannot unsee.  Eyes bloodshot, hair disheveled, he swayed on his feet, pointing toward me as though I were the one who squawked through the wee morning hours. 

“I’m going to get that bird,” he declared.

I actually have a grudging appreciation for this avian blowhard.  According to Chris Clarke, natural history writer and environmental journalist, male mockingbirds can learn as many as 200 distinct songs.  If only they wouldn’t sing them all!

Having a mockingbird in your yard is somewhat akin to having a batch of teenage girls in the car who know all the words to all the songs.  And you’re driving to Nevada. 

Changing stations won’t solve the problem.  They can pick up in the middle of whatever the airwaves toss out.  With gusto.  Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall…ninety-nine bottles of beer!

My own personal theory is that mockingbirds suffer from low self-esteem.  Why else would they try so hard to sound like some other bird, any other bird, but themselves?  Poor, poor feathered fellows!

Another thing in their favor is that female and male mockingbirds fearlessly defend their nests this time of year, dive-bombing cats and birds of prey, even humans if they’re perceived to be interested in climbing a tree and bringing home a clutch of speckled eggs to scramble up with some Jimmy Dean sausage.

But none of that offsets a sleepless night for my beloved.  No.  He’s tired and cranky and he will have his revenge.

I reminded him that most of the things he is willing to try aren’t worth the jail time:  His potato launcher might be effective, but the ammunition has to come down somewhere on the other end of the arc, where our neighbors live with their beloved pets and small children. 

His Red Ryder carbine-action, 200-shot, range model air rifle with the compass in the stock, though technically a toy, is most likely illegal to fire in city limits.  And will, as you certainly know, shoot his eye out.

So I’m surprising him with a plastic owl ‘scare crow,’ some SureFire EP3 Sonic Defender Earplugs and a white noise machine. 

If that doesn’t work, I’ll aim my iPhone at the offender and unleash my iBirdPro app’s recorded screeches of an eagle.  

From there I can go to scaffolding and a pressure washer.


Mr. Top 40 thinks he’s relentless?  He doesn’t know relentless.

Zzzzz

I knew it!  I should be napping!

I hope my husband is reading this because he is one of those extremely annoying people who goes all day without even the tiniest flutter of his eyelids.  He just goes and goes and goes.  Wide awake all the live-long day.  Sheesh. 

And you know what he told me?  If he feels tired during the day?  He just sits down at his desk and keeps on working.

Well.  Yeah.  He is employed.  That could be a factor in his persistent awareness.

To be fair, if I think back to my days as a high school principal, I don’t recall getting sleep breaks.  I have to grant him that.  No sleeping on the job! 

Poor guy.  All that enforced alertness.  It must be a real drag.

His company is so 20^th Century on this issue – According the National Sleep Foundation, about 34% of U.S. employers now allow napping at work!  Where were they when I needed them?   

And 16% have even designated napping areas!  For example Nike employees can sleep in “quiet rooms.”  It sounds so civilized, doesn’t it?  Not at all like public school where it’s loud all day every day. 

Google’s Mountain View campus includes ‘sleeping pods.’  Absolutely kindergarten-esque! 

Both Continental and British Airways allow pilots to nap during long international flights.  OK.  I get the point.  Just don’t tell me Sully’s sawing logs during in-flight turbulence!

These nap-friendly companies report that permitting rest breaks during the work day boosts revenue, productivity and employee satisfaction.  I’m just sayin’.

So I don’t see how my husband’s compulsory wakefulness justifies the routine ribbing I endure if he should discover that I’ve had a dose of shuteye during the day. 

Therefore, I don’t always include my siesta in my response to “How was your day today?”

Good, Honey.  My day was good.  Due, not in small measure, to my little kip.  Surmise all you want.  I’ve straightened the bedspread and re-plumped the pillows.  Covered my napping tracks, if you will.  My eyes are bright and my lips are sealed.

Really.  If I’ve been at the computer all morning, seeking depth of knowledge and insights to share with you, Dear Reader; and I’ve had my noontime snack; if at that moment, after folding a load of fluffy warm clothes at bedside I begin to circle that self-same bed and find myself wobbling in orbit…well!  What’s a person supposed to do?  Dust?

And besides, it’s confirmed now:  Sleeplessness can kill you! 

That’s right.  In a study called “Sleep or Die,” YourLocalSecurity.com reports that poor sleep habits can lead to as much as a 12% higher risk of death!

Not sure exactly how that factoid is supposed to help me sleep.  It actually kind of keeps me awake – worrying about dying in my sleep or waking up too early only to die from consciousness.

It’s a conundrum. 

Studies have also shown that insomniacs are 10-times more likely to develop depression and 17-times more likely than their counterparts to have significant anxiety.

So there.

I am neither anxious nor depressed.  I am relaxed and happy, happy, happy!  I sleep the sleep of those unencumbered by guilt, except of course, for the small shame of deceiving my husband regarding my habits of slumber. 

But what’s the definition of a white lie?  It’s an unimportant lie, especially one told to be tactful or polite.  See?  I’m being courteous.  That’s all.  I’m protecting his sensibilities. 

There’s no harm in a tiny prevarication told in the interest of face-saving and spousal bliss. 

Not that he begrudges me my catnaps.  It’s just poor form to rub it in:  “Oh?  And while you were dealing with a terrible human being who holds sway in your work environment, I was snoozing and smiling in my slumber.”  Not nice.

And I am a nice person.  Probably because I am a napper. 

Visual.ly found that forty winks can elevate a cranky person’s mood and alertness and improve the quality of her interactions.  Translated:  We nappers don’t respond crabbily to those who snicker when they learn we’ve had a lie-down in the daylight.

So get off my back about it, OK? 


Oh!  Sorry to be so snippy.  Must be time for my nap.