Under the Cherry Tomatos

Sarasota, Florida

I get a call in the afternoon. Mrs. Phred has lost her glasses again and also locked the keys in the car. She gives me directions and offers to stand in the road. I emphatically tell her to stay out of the road and stay by the car. I cruise the parking lot and locate her car full of groceries, but she is nowhere in sight. I wander the perimeter of the shopping center and finally find her by the eight-lane road. She searched the stores and found her glasses under the cherry tomato section.


I ask how she loses her glasses in a department store since this is about the 10th time I can remember. Turns out she only needs the glasses for distance and takes them off and hooks them on her blouse to read labels. I get a mental image of her loading the groceries in the car, looking for her glasses and then locking the door with the keys in the ignition to go back to find her glasses.


Biologists up in Iceland dredged up a 405 year old clam. It was the oldest known living animal. Unfortunately, they killed it while counting its rings.


In 1953 they gave us a publication called the Weekly Reader in elementary school. I remember reading the article about Edmund Hillary climbing Mt. Everest. As many as 118 climbers have since reached the peak on a single day.


Mrs. Phred has packed a suitcase with things her sister has requested that are hard to find (zip lock plastic bags, mushroom brushes, tasers, snore guards, salted nuts, cotton balls, etc.) or very expensive in Italy. I find her and a friend trying to weigh the suitcase on our bathroom scales. They want to avoid the $100 weight penalty. They find it impossible to position the suitcase in a way that allows them to read the weight dial. I pick up the suitcase and stand on the scales then subtract my own weight. They are both bemused.


The stitches on both sides of my head come out on Tuesday. I already have new skin cancers to see the dermatologist about. The swelling has gone down enough to allow me to see out of both eyes so I played some tennis yesterday.



A man has his RV parked close to the tennis court. The ball goes over the fence and bonks his RV (probably not the first time). He comes out with a knife and stabs the ball repeatedly, murdering it before throwing it back. Security makes him move out immediately. His spot is empty. I'd like to have it. I think I would have used a potato cannon to return the ball, rather than just disfiguring it with a knife...bad form, old bean...