 Column - Commentary: Humor Mmmm, fudgeBy DAVE KIFFER
September 09, 2018
This is because I have suddenly become old. I look in photographs and I don’t recognize the pasty faced, old white guy. Even though he happens to be me. I used to be able to differentiate between my knees, not as right and left but as good and bad. Now they are both bad But I digress. That is a column another day. If I live that long. My topic is walking around Ketchikan in the morning. You see, I have taken to walking downtown in the morning because at least the jewelry store workers will smile at me and ask me how my day is going. Some will even offer me fudge. Which is a sign that I am now old and completely invisible to anyone under 40. Unless they are trying to sell me something. At least I have yet to reach the stage where I am stumbling around in my walker and people are applauding me for “making the effort.” But I digress, again. I have been walking a couple of miles around town while the ships are in and when doing that one gets to hear some interesting things. For example, the other day, I heard a middle aged (assuming she lives to 150) woman berating one of the poor crossing guards. "Where are the poles, I want to see poles, I really want to see totem poles" she went on, as if her point wasn't clear the first time. He pointed down the street to two poles. "Well, he wasn’t very helpful,' she muttered to her travel partner as they walked off in the opposite direction of the poles. The following exchange occurred between a visitor and her under-enthused partner as they passed by a jewelry store with a "hiring now" sign. "Look honey," she said. "You can go in there and get a job for a couple of hours. Why don't you do that?" A different visitor seemed puzzled by the some of the jewelry store marketing strategies. "Are all the jewelry stores going out of business?" she asked out loud. "Even the ones in the Caribbean? Will those ones be open when we go there?" A visitor waiting to cross the street was inordinately impressed at how the crossing guards uniformly twirled their stop signs. "Look at that, they must really practice their twirling.," he said aloud. "Honey, they were probably on the drill team in high school," his partner chimed in. As usual, some folks were hopelessly lost. " I can read a map, for goshsakes, Dolly’s House is right around the corner," said one man, just as he and his party turned to head up Deermont Street. One person was clearly tired of his partner's pauses to take pictures. "Those are just seagulls," he said. "We have plenty of seagulls in Utah." "But these are different," she retorted. A different budding photojournalist was taking a picture of a tiny cannabis plant in a window on Creek Street. "I thought things were bigger in Alaska," she sniffed. A young family was melting down in front of the fire station as they tried to line up their three children for a photo for "grandpa" who apparently was a fireman back home. "Oh, come on, look like you are having a good time," one of the parents cajoled at the rain drenched kids. " PLEASE LOOK LIKE YOU ARE HAVING A GOOD TIME." Another couple was having a disagreement about retracing their steps. "I don't want to go all the way back across town just to go to that store," one partner muttered. "But they have fudge," his partner replied. I almost broke my constitutional to follow them. It was definitely an "oh fudge" sort of day.
On the Web:
Contact Dave at dave@sitnews.us Dave Kiffer is a freelance
writer living in Ketchikan, Alaska.
|
|||
