Schwa Day

Posted on April 7, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Generally unsung and unremarked on, the schwa is misnamed, in my opinion. Although the word is fun to say, a more appropriate label would be “the uh.”

For those of you who don’t remember third grade or grew up in an era when they didn’t teach such things, the schwa is the weak “uh” vowel sound in unstressed syllables, like “uh” working for the “a” in “about” but also working for the “e” in “given.”

You might know it better by its upside-down-e symbol:  ə.

Apparently this little worker bee got its own day in 2023, when schwa champion Yvette Manns, author of The Not-So-Lazy Schwa, pushed for it. She chose the date Apruhl Sevuhnth because of the schwa present in the second syllables of both words.

I worked for about five minutes trying to construct a sentence in which each word had a schwa. I failed. You try!

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Plan Your Epitaph Day

Posted on April 6, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Personally, I don’t anticipate being planted anywhere particularly, so no epitaph is necessary. (The plan is for the kid to chuck me and the hubs off a bluff in Yellowstone on a windy day—hopefully in such a way that he avoids arrest.)

That said, I am a great fan of brevity, and epitaphs are good for that.

I am also a fan of humor, so “Beloved spouse and mother” won’t cut it (and would be pretty unlikely, since nobody in my family talks or thinks that way. “Yeah, we’ll miss her” would probably be closer.)

Mel Blanc’s is “That’s all, folks!”

My grandfather always said he wanted, “I told you I was sick!” (This wish went unfulfilled.)

Another one I remember hearing or seeing somewhere was “I’d rather be reading this.”

It was also a parlor game among the Algonquin Roundtablers (and others of the era). George Kaufman was credited with, “Epitaph for a dead waiter – God finally caught his eye.” Dorothy Parker famously chose “Pardon my dust.” Another story has Robert Benchley sitting next to an actress famous for love affairs who claimed she could not think of an epitaph for herself and Benchley helpfully offering: “She sleeps alone at last.”(This story is also ascribed to others, but it seems very Benchley-esque.) 

If I did need an epitaph, I think I’m partial to something along the lines of “Marked safe in my second location.”

I like this game. What is your epitaph?

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Read a Road Map Day

Posted on April 5, 2025 by arwenbicknell

My husband will be the first to tell you that his century of preference is the 19th one—except for air conditioning, indoor plumbing, satellite and high-def TV, and a slew of other things.

One tech advancement that he deeply disdains, however, is any map app on any smartphone.

The routes are not how he’d go. The detours are nonsensical. The directions are hard to follow; you can’t tell which lane the phone wants you in until it’s too late and you’ve chosen the wrong one. He sometimes misses the topmost instruction and fusses about “it never told me to get off the interstate but it’s telling me to turn left on First Street.”

(It does not help that sometimes he expects me to be helping and I’m busy staring out the window reading names of stores and staring at pedestrians—you know, because I assume the phone has navigation handled.)

I have some sympathy for him, but my relation with the phone is less fraught. First of all, I am more bovine in nature. Live by the phone, die by the phone. If it tells me to take a 40-mile detour, I don’t mind. If it sends me from Illinois to Florida via New York, I’ll cock my head, but then figure a drive through New York might be fun and leave earlier. If I miss a turn, I’m quite content to circle back a mile later—or farther, if traffic is bad and I can’t do it sooner.

I am not sure how much of this difference between us is driven by personality vs. experience. The hubs absolutely adores maps. He will sit and study the road atlas in front of the fireplace for fun. He gets nervous driving on dirt roads and never takes them if he can avoid it, but he’ll follow them for miles on paper. He likes “knowing where things are.”

I am much less fixed in space. I have a general idea that things are … you know, over that way somewhere … maybe half an hour or so? We live in a tiny town (seriously, it is tiny; if I leave my seat belt off, I am literally halfway through town before the alarm stops dinging) and after nearly three years, I still haven’t memorized all the street names. I am one of those folks who gets Americans mocked by other nations. I have no idea where Montenegro is (over there by Italy somewhere?) and I have no idea what the capital is. So what do I do? I look it up. On my phone. Turns out it is over there by Italy somewhere and the capital is Podgorica. The phone not only told me all that, it also would have told me how to pronounce it if I’d had the volume up. (I did not, so my husband got to correct me after I sounded it out to him.)

I think part of the reason I’m partial to the phone directing me is because in my younger days, I lived in Los Angeles and spent a lot of time getting lost. Anyone who has a pre-phone history with that place will remember the joy of the Thomas Guide. (I guess there were Thomas Guides for other places—Seattle, DC … but NOT New York, oddly enough.) Driving in LA was fraught enough—everyone is impatient, nobody will let you merge—and dealing with the Thomas Guide on top of that was like trying to read a Choose Your Own Adventure book (You are on Cahuenga. Turn to page E-42…) while trailing other cars, avoiding pedestrians, minding traffic signals, and getting out of the way of a random ambulance or police chase. On top of all that, I lived under constant fear that my car would just die in the middle of the road and I’d have no idea what to do about it. The Thomas Guide would not call AAA for me or help me get to a garage. And then, once I’d actually found my destination, the Thomas Guide was absolutely zero help in locating parking in a 40-mile radius. My phone will map me to a parking structure and tell me how long a walk I have to look forward to. (I mean, usually. It does have problems in metro areas, and will occasionally spin in circles for a few minutes trying to get its bearings. I find this amusing, but the hubs will huff and sigh and just strike out in whatever direction he thinks is right—and he’s usually correct, but I’m not sure that gratification makes up for his high blood pressure.)

It drives my husband nuts that the kid never looks at maps. “What are you going to do when the internet goes out and you don’t know where to turn?” The kid shrugs. “Miss the turn. Hope I don’t run out of gas.”

Clearly, the kid takes after me. Not sure if that’s a good thing, though.  At least we know he’ll probably never be without a calculator?

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Hug a Newsperson Day

Posted on April 4, 2025 by arwenbicknell

According to the interwebz, this day has been around since 1998, which is fitting for me since that’s the year I met my husband. We worked at rival newspapers and almost never discussed work.  Then we went to work for the same congressional news outlet and talked about nothing but work. Then we both left the news business and only hugged newspeople at gatherings of friends.

Being a newsperson, to me, is very much a profession rather than a lifestyle, although I have friends who would disagree. You might keep some of the habits, and (at least among the people I know) you keep a lot of the cynicism, but you don’t keep the label. I know I was more than happy to give up the hours and the relentless fire hose of New Information.

I suspect that most people aren’t too keen on hugging anyone in the media these days—nobody knows what to believe or where to turn for reliable information. The company I work for did a whole thing about the concept of Truth Decay and how it is accelerating in these modern times. You can check it out if you’re so inclined.

I guess there are people who yearn for the days of Walter Cronkite or William F. Buckley or H. L. Mencken. I dunno. I think I yearn for the days (long before I was born) of two local newspapers when people read both and found the truth in between them. Can you hug a printing press?

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Fish Fingers and Custard Day

Posted on April 3, 2025 by arwenbicknell

This post is for nerds in the know, obviously. 

Matt Smith, of fish fingers and custard notoriety, was not my favorite doctor. Tom Baker is probably still my favorite doctor because he was my first, reminds me of being a kid, and gets the nostalgia points, but David Tennant probably ties him for sheer enjoyment.

My husband is agnostic on doctors—if pressed, he will say Tennant, but mostly for reasons that are tangential to the reasons that I list Baker—the enjoyment of watching our kid watch the show at that time. He is unequivocal on his favorite companion, however. He would stare at Amy Pond for days if left to it. Thus, he credits Matt Smith episodes as among his favorites.

The kid is the outlier here. His favorite? Paul McGann. Right. The guy who got one movie and one short film.

And a bunch of audio dramas, the kid will quickly correct you. At one point, the kid was tasked with walking a couple miles home from high school a couple times a week, and apparently those are what kept him company.  (I always wondered what took him so long.)

But really, the kid should know who the best Doctor is. He is the resident expert, and has been for years. One of my favorite stories about him finding his tribe happened in 2013, right as Matt Smith was wrapping up his tenure on the show.

That was the summer I took him from our home in Virginia to DragonCon in Atlanta. I had never been to a con before and had no idea what to expect or how to function. And this thing was pretty huge—spanning something like four hotels downtown. I think it took me most of a day to get that map figured out, and figuring out the hotel interiors was another layer of befuddlement. But it all went fairly well. 

The kid sucked it all in like a sponge.  And once we hit the first Doctor Who panel, he was in heaven.  We were sitting in the way-back of a ballroom, against the wall, on the floor, when he asked if he could scoot up and find a chair.  I was busy looking at the map, so I said fine, but be good and don’t bug anyone. Next thing I knew, this familiar voice pipes up with, “So, in The Brain of Morbius, who are we supposed to believe all those other faces are?” 

Oh, he triggered an outpouring of positive reinforcement like you would not believe.  And he engaged and challenged and even knew when to shut up and hand over the microphone. A total pro, at age 10. We then did pretty much the entire Doctor Who track for the next two days. Another high point was a panel with Sylvester McCoy and with Peter Davison — at which the kid asked equally intelligent and impressive questions. It was quite nice. And Sylvester McCoy, who had a busted leg, took the kid for a ride around the ballroom on his scooter. We have a lovely photo.

The funniest part was when we went back the next year, and the kid piped up in another panel, and the moderator went, “Hey, aren’t you that kid from last year? Where ya been?!” The kid is now 22 and has one more year of his creative writing major ahead of him. Will he end up writing for the show? It is still going, after all. I can think of worse outcomes!

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Fact Check Day

Posted on April 2, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Another day that is Every Day for me and others in my profession. But this day is taking on more significance in the modern era, where people post things like that meme of the Abraham Lincoln quote about how you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet.

It’s extremely frustrating when people read an article, misunderstand it and spread that misinformation.

It is irritating when actual news outlets post stories based on single sources and good faith (or lack of time). A reporter sees a press release from a legitimate organization and runs it as a fact-based article. Technically, there is nothing wrong with this: The news story is that “organization X said Y.” But I have noticed a significant downtick in stories where someone has taken that press release and dug into whether Organization X is justified in saying Y—and whether Y is actually correct.

It is even harder when the people making the news don’t know what they’re talking about, or say things they don’t actually mean, or play to an audience and say one thing to Audience A and something entirely different to Audience B.

Maybe it’s my inherent inferiority complex, or maybe it’s the nature of my job, but I find myself increasingly irritated by the social media arbiters of truth. I spend my days looking at things other people have written and wondering what on earth they are trying to say and then taking even more time figuring out how to phrase my question so that they understand why I am confused. So when I then go on Threads and read posts from people who are arrogant enough to tell me they have the inside track on EXACTLY what any public figure thinks and EXACTLY what they meant by what they said, it takes a lot of effort not to engage. I know it is pointless. I know these outlets are filling some need these people have for approbation from like-minded thinkers, or control of their environment, or simple accumulation of clicks. I suppose it can be construed as resistance, although I don’t see how this is a particularly effective method.

When my kid was in school, he would routinely come home infuriated by the kids in his class who just parroted some nonsense they had picked up somewhere that he knew was incorrect, but he got in trouble because he would tell them they were wrong. We explained to him that there are ways to do that and then there are WAYS to do that. Here is the advice we gave him: When someone says something that sounds like garbage, instead of calling them stupid, you can engage them in other ways, generally starting with two questions:

1: How do you know that? You can ask them to explain how they know this alleged fact. (Who told you? How many sources verified it?)

2: Can you please explain that to me? You can ask them questions about their assertion that will be enough to confirm that you do, in fact, have more information and thus can stop paying attention to them—or you will find out something you didn’t know. “Oh. you say X is the worst thing on earth? What makes it worse than Y? OK, what makes it worse than Z?” At the very least, you will have a little window into their logic processes, and that can also be valuable.

The problem with social media is when you ask someone, “how do you know that,” half of them snot back with, “I don’t need to do your research for you.” And when you say “Please explain that to me,” you’re likely to hear “It’s not that complicated.” Here’s the thing. I have read rough drafts of material for all kinds of material, from sandwich shop ads to politicians’ speeches, and honestly, a lot of the time I wondered if the writers themselves even knew what they thought or understood what they were saying. I know from experience that it is really hard to parse the thoughts of a disordered mind and try to make them make sense. I have spent hours of my life trying (and sometimes failing) to do this. So it chaps my hide when people spend 30 seconds and assume they have it all down pat and spew it for others to see. I wish they would try harder or stop trying—or, short of that, add a caveat that they don’t actually know anything more than the average bear. I’m trying to keep that in mind when I feel my blood pressure rise. It’s only helping a little.

I’ve made a game of blocking people on Threads who act like jerks when engaged. At this rate, I’ll have blocked all but maybe 10 people by Christmas. It’s depressing.

This is why I’m generally trying to keep it light here in my corner of the world. Today was not that day, though—obviously!

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Sourdough Day

Posted on April 1, 2025 by arwenbicknell

From the ages of two through seven, I pretty much lived on sourdough bread. We ate loaves and loaves of Pioneer. (I remember thinking the guy on the label was Pa Ingalls, which makes a certain amount of sense I guess.) I had sourdough peanut butter sandwiches that made my jaw ache from chewing. I had sourdough toast with orange juice. And we ate tons of parmesan bread—sourdough bread that was liberally buttered and sprinkled with that Kraft parmesan cheese in the green container then run under the broiler for about five minutes. That stuff was heaven. But like all loaves of bread, this bread had heels, which were generally the least popular slices and I usually got stuck with them as the party with the least power in the household. Again, chewing made my mouth really tired—the heels doubly so. 

But you could only get this bread in California. My grandparents had moved to Chicago around the same time my parents moved to California, and my grandmother lamented the loss. So every time someone visited someone, sourdough trafficking was involved—at least three loaves, two for the freezer and one for busting open that night.

My funniest memory of these transactions was when I was about six. My uncle found a Mustang for sale in Los Angeles and my grandfather (again, in Chicago) decided he wanted it. My uncle and his best friend drove that car with me in it across the country with three suitcases and six loaves of bread in the trunk.*

So we get to Chicago and my grandmother is delighted to see all of us, gives us all big hugs and bustles us into the apartment, offers us big frosty glasses of tea and milk, and then gushes over her payload of bread. Then my uncle says something about “And Arwen is staying for a long visit, so you can give her the heels and none of it will go to waste.”

At this, clear as a bell, she announces to the entire room, “I mean, I love my granddaughter but she’s not getting MY heels of sourdough bread!”

All the adults laughed, but I remember staring at her like she had grown another head. “But Grandma,” I said. “I don’t want them! I like the big middle pieces! Mommy makes me eat the heels.”

(It was the same with chicken drumsticks. I never got to eat those, either, because my mother swiped them before the platter even got to the table.)

My grandmother burst out laughing. “No wonder you like it at Gramma’s house!”** she said. “It’s a deal. You’ll get a middle piece and I’ll eat the ends.”

Eventually we all left California and sourdough bread became a fond memory. Until Panera came along. And there was much rejoicing.

*That was quite a trip. First, there was an APB out for two guys who had kidnapped a little blonde girl that had them feeling extremely conspicuous. Then there was the gas station that we stopped at where I was strong enough to push the ladies’ room door open to get in, but not strong enough to pull it open and get back out. My sadistic uncle sent his poor sweet friend to rescue me, and you never saw a man turn redder about his circumstances. “I’m just grateful to this day that nobody saw me hanging around that ladies’ room door waiting for a pigtailed girl to come out—and that nobody saw me finally open the door and have you blast out like you’d been fired from a cannon.”

**This was not the only reason I liked it at Gramma’s house. I was also a big fan of getting fed Frosted Flakes drenched in honey for breakfast. I don’t know how she put up with me for the rest of the day with a jumpstart like that.

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Bunsen Burner Day

Posted on March 31, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Do high school chem labs still allow these? Or are they too easy to weaponize? Have we moved on to chemistry via YouTube?

When I was in high school, we got to play with fire a lot. Chemistry was a blast. Our teacher was this vaguely insane guy from the private sector, though I can’t remember what he’d done in that former life. He had longish hair and bushy eyebrows and looked a little like a B-movie zealot. My ret-con memory of him is that he looked a bit like the SouthPark version of Charlie Manson in bifocals. He came in one day and sang chemistry-modified lyrics to O Sole Mio, under the title O Mole Mio. (I only remember the title. I only got a B in the class.)

But the most memorable day was the one he set our chem lab station on fire.

It was a typical class of 20 or so high school brats—some hyper and spazzy boys, some too cool for school gals, and then the rest of us along the bell curve ranging from motivated by grades to motivated by flying under the radar. My BFF Judi and I were lab partners, but there were only so many burners to go around, and that meant our lab teams were bumped up to four.  Rounding out our team was Willie Hooks, the high school quarterback who was a wiry little slowish learner with a quick mouth, and Grace Washington, who had the longest and most beautiful nails I had ever seen in my life up to that point (and maybe even since). She had a job outside school as a cashier and I asked her once how the hell she rang anything up (in the days before scanner beds). She told me she did it all with her nail tips; no fingerprints ever left on anything.

So on this day, we are all in the chem lab sitting on tall stools at those fireproof black resin countertops. The Bunsen burners are all set up and we all have our little collections of glassware. We split up the assigned tasks of the experiment: Judi will collect the chemicals we need, I will measure stuff, Willie will observe outcomes, Grace will take notes.

Except Judi and I are both sitting there waiting to get the go-ahead and looking at each other because we smell gas.

“Is that ours?” I asked her. She sort of squinted her eyes and craned her neck in a “I hope not but probably” way. I decided I wasn’t going to light that damn thing, and everyone else on the team followed suit. Willie went and told Mr. Clarke, who came over, extremely exasperated with us all and muttering about how we were hapless and helpless.

Judi tells this story way better than I do, but suffice to say that we all learned super fast what a gas leak can do. Even though we told him we smelled gas and that we had the burner set to the on position, he didn’t believe us, grabbed the thing and lit it up.

In retrospect, I was most surprised to learn that gas explosions actually do go “foom.” (Not kaboom or crack or blammo. Just like a big exhalation.)

I was less surprised that Willie might have set a personal best sprinting from the scene, and not surprised at all that Grace was hot on his heels squeaking at the top of her lungs.

Mr. Clarke suffered the worst of it, which was only fair. He burned off his eyebrows and the hair on one hand before tossing it into the sink and smothering it. He caught Judi’s notebook along the way and she lost half a page or so of notes before she slammed the book shut and handled that crisis.

I don’t remember what happened after that. I know Mr. Clarke did not apologize for doubting us. My recollection is that he bustled us off to some other station to do the assignment, Willie came back and helped out, and Grace watched from the door. Judi did confirm for me that Grace never sat with us in lab again. I guess she figured we were jinxed at best.

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Laundry Folding Day

Posted on March 30, 2025 by arwenbicknell

When I think of laundry now, I think of my friend Duryan.

I actually think of my friend Duryan in relation to a lot of things. She was my BFF in college, and she was one of those magnetic people who was probably everyone’s BFF all the time. She died in 2021, and I miss her a lot.

But I think of her in relation to laundry now because when she died, it was the height of COVID. So instead of a regular shiva, it was via Zoom and everyone sort of went around talking about all the lovely and hilarious things she did, and one story that got a lot of echoes was how she taught myriad people to fold a fitted sheet.

I laughed, because she most assuredly did not teach me that. When we were roommates, we didn’t fold sheets at all. We washed them and put them right back on the bed. And when we moved out, we rolled them up into the tightest balls we possibly could so they took up as little space as possible in the moving box/trunk/suitcase. I have a polaroid of her sitting next to a steamer trunk with fabric spilling out trying to make it all fit. Not a stitch is folded. Somewhere between USC and Brooklyn, she picked up the skill, though.

I learned how to fold fitted sheets from Martha Stewart’s magazine, and I suspect that’s where she learned, too, but I can’t swear to it. I’m pretty sure her mother, like mine, graduated from the school of “those things can’t be folded, don’t waste my time.” I can’t speak for Duryan’s grandmother, but I know mine used to iron bedsheets and was always faintly horrified when she would watch my mom pull a sheet down from the clothesline in something vaguely resembling straight lines, then wad it up the rest of the way and toss it in the basket. I know my grandmother expressed genuine surprise when she watched me fold a fitted sheet the “right” way, demanding to know who taught me.

To this day, I fold the sheets in our house. My husband puts away literally everything else, but those sit on the guest room bed for eons, waiting for me to get around to them.

How do you feel about fitted sheets? Fluff or fold?

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Piano Day

Posted on March 29, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I had a couple frightening run-ins with pianos when I was four or five—not frightening to me, mind you. I was the scary one!  

The first time, my mom and I were dispatched to go pick up my Aunt Mettie, who was probably 80 at the time, at her house and bring her to a family dinner. When we got to her house, my mom could hear her banging away on the piano. We knocked and knocked at the door, but she clearly couldn’t hear us, and she never stopped long enough for us to get a knock in edgewise.

Anxious that we were missing dinner, my mom creaked open the door and told me to go in and get her, figuring that (1) I was small, and thus noisy, and (2) a small human would give the poor old lady less of a heart attack by suddenly materializing amid the music. 

Except I didn’t really understand the assignment. What I should have done was made a racket going the long way around and approach her from the front, so she’d see me coming. But I was under the impression that time was of the essence. So I made a beeline for her, moving silently across thick pile carpets and coming up behind her. She literally never heard me coming, and she screamed and jumped about jumped a mile when I tapped her on the shoulder. I screamed and jumped about a mile because her reaction had frightened me. My mom came on the run—ready to call an ambulance or drive us both to a hospital, I suppose.

It says a lot about Aunt Mettie that she was one of maybe three adults in my life at that time who generated zero fear in me of getting yelled at. And she didn’t yell at me for that stunt, either, although anyone else would have and she probably should have. After she started breathing again, she laughed and said it was her own fault for losing track of time, and we all got in the car and went merrily off to dinner, where Aunt Mettie got a lot of mileage out of her “ghost” story. 

The second time I got in trouble might have been the same trip, or it might have been a little later.  My great-grandparents had a farm house where they lived in summer and a house in town where they lived in winter and where my grandma indulged her society side and threw lunches and so on. The town house had a beautiful baby grand piano. I don’t think I ever heard my grandmother play it, but I had watched my dad run his fingers gently over the keyboard a couple times, and I knew the basics of how the keys made noise and the papers on in the piano bench told you which keys to push. Because he never actually sat down and played, I sort of absorbed that I wasn’t supposed to touch it either, even though nobody ever directly instructed me to keep my paws to myself. So I would walk by that big, gleaming piece of furniture and just wonder about it.

For reasons I can’t recall now, my mom and I were spending the night at the town house by ourselves. My mom had sent me to bed, but I wasn’t sleepy. So when I heard her go into the bathroom and start the shower, I hopped out of bed, slipped downstairs, and helped myself to the piano. I put a piece of sheet music that I didn’t know how to read up on the music desk, plopped my little butt on the bench, and played the hell out of that song, whatever it was. Sweet and Low, maybe.

In the words of Ferris Bueller: Never had one lesson!

I thought I was doing the same thing as my father and barely touching the keys, so that my mom wouldn’t hear me and I wouldn’t get in trouble. Except I was young and had no idea how long showers took—I’m not even sure I comprehended that they were shorter than baths. So the next thing I know, my mom pops up out of nowhere and sort of growls in a scary, low voice, “What do you think you are doing?”

It was Aunt Mettie all over again. I shot straight up in the air like a cat and shrieked. My mom took a half step back at my reaction but then laughed and sent me off to bed with a swat and a fairly laid-back warning to leave that thing alone.

What I didn’t know until years later was that I had scared the bejeebers out of her first. From her view, she was done for the night: I was asleep, we were alone in the house, all was snug and cozy, and she was freshly showered and ready to pass out. So when she turned off the water in the shower and heard weird noises from downstairs, in this house that wasn’t hers, with nobody else around and no idea where Grandpa kept any weapons … she had a bit of jolt. So she’s standing there, naked and dripping … and listening. She cracks open the bathroom door and realizes it’s the piano—who would break into a house and play the damn piano? Although the Manson family had broken into houses and just crawled around on the floor before they actually killed anyone, so who could say? She was on her way to a right tizzy as she toweled off and looked for a bat or a toilet plunger or anything that would get her to the kitchen and a knife, when she realized that the music … was … not exactly music. It was just banging on the keys. By that time, she was in her bathrobe, and she poked her head in my room and saw my bed was empty.  Ah hah, thinks my mom. I’ll show her.

And she did.

Years later, that piano moved into our house. I took two years of lessons and never got very good. My dad taught himself a bunch of blues and jazz riffs and was an absolutely joy to listen to for years. He also wrote snarky songs about his job and friends in the vein of Tom Lehrer and was popular at parties after a few scotch-and-waters. Not exactly Sweet and Low, but that piano had a good life. It’s in my mom’s house now, waiting for someone to pick it up again. Never say never. I’ll retire soon and maybe that will be my hobby. But I’ll never be as lyrically funny as my dad.

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