GREAT SIGNS

The following represents a sampling of some great signs we’ve collected over time. Feel free to add some of your favorites to the mix. And to all of you out there in blogland, have a safe and enjoyable Labor Day weekend.

On a Plumber’s truck:

“We repair what your husband fixed.”

In a Podiatrist’s office:

“Time wounds all heels.”

On a Maternity Room door:

“Push. Push. Push.”

On a Fence:

“Salesmen welcome! Dog food is expensive.”

Outside a Muffler Shop:

“No appointment necessary. We hear you coming.”

At the Electric Company:

“We would be delighted if you send in your payment. However, if you don’t, you will be.”

At a Propane Filling Station:

“Tank heaven for little grills.”

…And my personal favorite –

In a Nonsmoking Area:

“If we see smoke, we will assume you are on fire and take appropriate action.”

TWILIGHT ZONE

We had gone out to a movie and dinner last night. The movie was “Scoop”, and despite an excellent cast and the fact that it had some moments, I can’t give it much more than a lukewarm recommendation. After eating dinner at a small neighborhood restaurant, we passed by one of those old style pharmacies that were found in any small town and in most cities from the turn of the twentieth century until the Walgreens and Save-Ons of the world put most of them out of business.

There was a soda fountain with stools and small tables, a tin decorative ceiling, racks with greeting cards, a smattering of child toys and stuffed animals, a few aisles with a miscellany of grooming products, and a feeling of déjà vu for anyone born before 1960. Music from the fifties was playing in the background, and I expected the voice of Rod Sterling to begin intoning his introduction to the “Twilight Zone.” We couldn’t resist. I had a chocolate milk shake made in a metal cup on a genuine Hamilton Beach mixer, served with whipped cream and a cherry on top. The only difference from the ones I drank when I was in high school and this one was the price, which had grown ten fold. The taste, the texture, the feeling of self satisfied contentment as the last ounce was sucked through the straw – it was all the same. The young people at the table next to ours, whispering to each other, looked no different than the ones I remembered, except for the earring sported by one of the acne faced teen boys.

As Miki ate her ice cream sundae, and my friends drank their chocolate soda and double chocolate shake, we found ourselves talking about old movies of the period, drumming with our fingers on the table to tunes to which we still remembered the words, and feeling, just for a moment, the careless joy of a period in our lives when things seemed a lot simpler, unambiguous, and our world could be changed by a blond pony tail or by the guy in the jeans with the legs rolled up walking past in the aisle.

Once upon a time,

In a land far away,

A beautiful, independent,

Self-assured Princess

Happened upon a frog as she sat

Contemplating ecological issues,

On the shores of unpolluted pond

In a verdant meadow

Near her castle.

The frog hopped into the Princess’s lap

And said, “Elegant Lady,

I was once a handsome prince,

Until an evil witch cast a spell on me.

One kiss from you, however,

And I will turn back

Into that dapper young Prince that I am,

And set up housekeeping in yon castle

With my mother

Where you can prepare my meals,

Clean my clothes, bear my children

And forever feel grateful and happy doing so.”

That night on a repast of lightly

Sautéed Frog legs

Seasoned in a white wine sauce,

She chuckled to herself and thought…..

“I don’t think so!!!”

PLAIN SPEAKING

There is a truth, an honesty, an economy in the use of plain language that every day is becoming more lost to us. 1984 has come and gone,  and I doubt even George Orwell could have foreseen how real his prophecy of the evils of doublespeak would become.

We have long ago renamed the War Department the Department of Defense. We have sanitized the language of war and killing so that we now refer to the destruction of a city as the “pacification of the enemy” and the obliteration caused by missiles filled with high explosives as “surgical strikes”. The horrors that war inflicts on our own soldiers has gone through a similar process. During World War I the mental breakdown caused by the terrors of combat upon our soldiers was appropriately called “shell shock”. By WW II, we had downgraded the haunted, catatonic to be suffering from “battle fatigue”. Zip through Viet Nam and Iraq, and now we have men and women with “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” or PTSD. We no longer kill people; we simply “neutralize” them. You should be frightened to know that the Pentagon measures the amount of radiation from a nuclear strike in “sunshine units.” How long before some well intentioned souls decide that the world is in need of a better tan?

Companies no longer fire employees. They don’t even “lay them off” for that would mean they could be expected to pick them back up. They “rationalize” them, “downsize” them, “outsource” their jobs while allowing the few stragglers to “multi-task” in the gaps.

And I won’t even begin to discuss the obfuscation practiced by the federal government along with the hordes of our politicians!

There are words that were designed to make us angry, that bring forth a justified outrage directed at their targets: killer, liar, thief, murderer, rapist, cheater. We need to use these words in the settings and the occasions for which they were intended. We need to maintain our sense of having been violated, to be able to express our anger and just fury when the conventions of civilized behavior are broken. We need to fight and reject the efforts of all who want to hide their destructive, lethal actions behind innocuous, soft sounding words. Damn them all!