If I fell*

Yesterday my wife and I were working on our back deck, she making planters while I tried to clean out a problematic gutter that sits over the ell part of the deck. I had to borrow a 13 foot ladder from our neighbor Tom, but before that thought that an eight foot step ladder was enough to reach a gutter twelve feet high. In fact, the eight foot ladder was enough, but only if once on the highest step I made no movements, used no force and applied no pressure to the various pain-in-the-ass parts of the gutter that clog up every year. (I have an extension ladder, but cannot lean it into the gutter and accomplish anything without damaging it.)

One time on  descent from the eight-foot ladder, I said to her:

I would not like it if I fell.
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well,
I would not like it if I fell.

She’s a literate person, college graduate and former teacher, but she did not know what my reference was. Nor did I. I just remember hearing someone in reference to Richard Nixon quoting an old aphorism that was new to me then:

I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well,
I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.

Aren’t I clever? This morning I have been trying to put together a similar verse that would open as follows:

I do not like thee, Albert Gore….

That is as far as I have gotten, and I invite readers to fix it for me. On recommendation of a reader, I am reading a book from 2011 called The Inconvenient Skeptic by John Kehr, recommended by a commenter Tim Groves. He called it a pleasure to read, and indeed it is. I knew at the outset that I would like it, as the author John Kehr, says

I will admit that I was more than a little skeptical of watching a scientific movie [An Inconvenient Truth] that was made by Al Gore. Al Gore and science go together like Spongebob Squarepants and Mensa.

OK, that’s on page three, so I can say of Kehr that he had me on page three. I regard Al Gore as a waste of time, a man who would have no creds and draw no attention were he not on a mission, one funded and driven by others. He’s an actor, a man whose weakest subjects in college (where he was but a legacy) were science and math. Add to that complete hypocrisy in recommendations he emphatically makes for others that he does not even begin to try to follow for himself, and you have a public ass, a rich boy who never learned to tread water on the deep end.

Oh well. It is a joy to sit down and write now, our jet lag over, spring upon us, and excitement filling my veins. Yesterday I saw a doctor about my ankle, telling him that nine months after surgery it is still sore and swollen. He said “This is why we always tell people to give  recovery a full year.”

“No one said that to me!” I told him. I guess they forgot that part. My wound was torn tendons from a ski accident in January of 2022, and my surgery to repair them done on October 3rd of last  year. All I remember the doctor telling me was that I would be skiing again by January of 2023. I was hobbling at that time.

Oh well. The other thing going on here is that our Internet has been down for a week or so, kind of a blessed interval. Yes, I could still follow email and things on my iPhone, but mostly it meant that I was reduced to watching the Great British Baking Show on Netflix on my iPhone during evenings. I cannot do much with an iPhone except that and play Scrabble with my wife. It has been a calm period interspersed by outdoor labor, and has brought me much contentment.

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*OK, being way too clever here, If I Fell was also a song (supposedly) written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and sung by George Harrison (my recollection) in the movie A Hard Day’s Night. [On further inspection, the song is performed by Lennon and McCartney in the movie, though I do not for a second imagine that the group at that time was anything more than polished singers performing songs written by others. They were also charismatic, the reason for their recruitment. I also note that in the movie performance of If I Fell, it is Mike, and not Paul, doing the singing. I am wondering now if Paul was ever anything more than a sidebar, a head-bobbing crooner. Off I go, another subject, another day.]