Slinky Trivia and Frothy Cappuccinos – Another perfect morning on the deck…
I was at the Breadboard the other day, relishing the final days of a basically smokeless summer. Because my Veggie Benedict with creamy hollandaise was so tasty and the setting was so pleasant and my old dog was sitting there so contentedly, I was launched into a creative reverie that would probably amaze German Gestalt scientists were they to do a quick brain scan. Possibly because of the perfectly seasoned home-fried potatoes, a story popped into my awareness and I thought I should write a novel but I immediately remembered Somerset Maughm’s famous maxim that there are three rules for writing a novel; unfortunately no one knows what they are and my motivation instantly withered and my attention shifted to a teenage girl at the table next to me playing with a slinky but then her Dad told her she was too old to be playing with slinkies but with the verbal agility of an Olympic fencer, she was quick to point out that NASA engineers conducting zero-gravity expirements on the Space Shuttle weren’t too old or that soldiers in the Vietnam war jury-rigging field antennas weren’t too old and that the Naval Civil Engineer in 1945 who was in the process of designing cushioning devices for sensitive equipment on destroyers didn’t seem to be too old and my dog seemed to be as intrigued with the movement of the coil as I was by her knowledge of the modest little toy and then she added that so many slinkies have been sold since 1945 that if you connected them all together they could wrap around the earth over 200 hundred times and then she added that that statistic was more accurate than the supposedly “accurate” statistic of the number of people like her dad who claim to have been at Woodstock because if you search the internet and calculate all of the people who claim to have been there it would come to over 47 million people, half of which were 2 years old, driving 22 million VW buses and everyone knows that’s impossible but the advertising jingle “everyone knows its slinky” is possibly one of the most successful jingles of all time. Touché. Double wow. Slam dunk. I was just eating my Veggie Bene, slowly savoring every bite, resisting today’s culture of immediate gratification and it occurred to me that I get most of my brilliant ideas in the afternoon and that there are night owls and early birds but what is someone whose productive peak is in the afternoon called? And it made me think of Napolean because someone asked him how much sleep people need and he said 4 hours for a man, 6 hours for a woman and 8 hours for a fool and I thought I need at least 8 and my old dog seems to need 23… Then the slinky girl ordered a Veggie Benedict and I knew. I just knew. Kismet. Cheerful chatter, wonderful morning ambiance, delicious food, and tremendously useful slinky trivia. Maybe the slinky is a simple little kid’s toy and maybe I sleep too much – but hey, I’m sitting here with my old dog enjoying a perfect morning and Napoleon ended up exiled on an island and the girl’s Dad never made it to Woodstock and the closest thing he probably ever had to a VW bus was an Outback and she might end up being the first person to play with a toy on Mars. So I raised my cup to the slinky girl and my old dog took a satisfied slurp from his water bowl…another marvelous day at the Breadboard.