Friends and Colleagues

• One day Joey, a colleague at a a junk mail company in Virginia, told me about a brief conversation with his seven year old son.
  
  Seven Year Old: "Girls are different from boys."
  
  Joey: "Really? How's that?"
  
  Seven Year Old: "Boys got muscles. Girls got legs."
  
  Joey: "Umm. Yeah. Let's not share that with your mother just yet."
  
  
• One morning Joey spent the first couple of hours at work with a very amused smile on his face. After a while I asked him what was so funny.
  
  He told me that his wife had told him that he had been tossing, turning, and mumbling in his sleep and at some point she shook his shoulder and said his name, with no effect. She tried again, harder and louder, and he sat up in bed, scowled at her, and said, "Where have you been and what are you doing with that fire hydrant?"
  
  
• At the weekly bridge session at Sambo's in Sierra Vista, Arizona, there was a mixture of civilians, military, military wifes, retired military, and so on. Very occasionally a few of us would visit the lounge after bridge, have a drink and chat about nothing in particular.
  
  One night a Mrs. Moore, wife of a non-bridge playing colonel, joined us. She warned us that she had a very low tolerance for alcohol, and sure enough, about halfway through one drink she was flying.
  
  At some point, out of a clear blue sky, she looked across the table at me and asked "Who's your favorite poet, Donnie?"
  
  I decided to have some fun with her, thought quickly, and said "Ogden Nash."
  
  "OGDEN NASH?! He's a shitass."
  
  This brought down the house, of course, and I confessed fondness for Kipling and Coleridge, both of whom I consider underrated. I hasten to add, however, that I am no poetry expert.
  
  Several days later I ran into one of the players downtown, the wife of a captain, who told me Mrs. Moore sent her apologies for the outburst, and I asked her to tell Mrs. Moore that she had been provoked.

Newspaper Vignettes

• While I was working at my first post-Army job as a payroll clerk at a Boston newspaper, the Assistant Cashier had heart surgery and the hospital was looking for blood donors. Four of us from the various accounting departments went to the hospital together to give blood.
  
  Two at a time, we were led into a room by a no-nonsense, middle-aged nurse. I was paired with Jimmy, a big Irishman whose sense of humor was not about to be blunted by someone else's no-nonsense attitude. We were situated side by side, and Jimmy was making jokes about whatever he could think of.
  
  The nurse, with her back to us, studiously ignored him and was busy doing something on a counter. Jimmy began professing embarrassment that I was "bleeding faster" than he was, cracking himself (and me) up.
  
  At one point he cried, "Nurse! Nurse! My feet are getting numb!"
  
  She didn't even turn around. "Your shorts are too tight."
  
  
• My boss was in his early forties. He was a personable guy and often joined whatever brief social discussions occurred during the work day. One year I pounded him with college football bets. I don't remember whether it was 1968 or 1969, but every week we bet a milkshake (actually, a frappe in Boston - milkshakes don't have ice cream in them) and I gave him Ohio State's opponent and forty points. Week after week he would shake his head on Monday morning as he shelled out the frappe money.
  
  
• But my best frappe victory had to do with poetry. I heard him say, "Theirs not to reason why. Theirs but to do or die." I looked over and said, "You know it's 'do and die', right?" Well, he was dug in and insisted it was "do or die."
  
  I decided to have some fun and said, "You better study your Kipling." He responded, "I know my Kipling and it's 'do or die.'" He was little amused when I pointed out that Tennyson, not Kipling, had written The Charge of the Light Brigade. We made another bet, this time on whether it was "do or die" or "do and die." It was Friday and I promised to bring in a poetry book on Monday.
  
  I did, and Monday was another head shaker for him.
  
  
• My favorite two bets I made while at the newspaper were with die-hard Red Sox fans. Each year I would bet them five dollars apiece that the Red Sox would finish more than six games out of first and each year they would gloat for the first half of the season and then the gloom would descend. Thus they were ripe for the plucking and I got one victim each for these propositions:
  
  
  • In 1969 I offered odds of $50 to $20 that Dick Williams, the Red Sox manager, would be fired during the season. He lasted long enough to make the bet interesting, but fired he was.
    
    
  • In 1971 I offered to bet $5 even money that the Baltimore Orioles would have four twenty game winners if my opponent would bet $5 that the Red Sox would have two twenty game winners. Truthfully, I didn't expect to come out ahead. I thought it would be a wash. I figured it was a long shot that the Orioles would have four twenty game winners, but I was confident that the Red Sox would not have two. In the event, the Red Sox had none, and on the last day of the season Mike Cuellar became the fourth Oriole pitcher to win twenty games.