"Close enough for government work"

The other day I was in the grocery store and the young butcher was weighing out the salmon that I was buying. I had asked for three-quarters of a pound and the salmon filet on the scale was a bit higher.

"Close enough for government work," I said. He looked at me with a blank expression. Another butcher heard my comment and came over. Neither of them had ever heard the phrase. I explained that while the weight wasn't perfect, it would do. I added that I had been hearing and using the expression for years.

When I got home, I googled the phrase. Wikipedia gave me the most information. I hadn't known that the phase "good enough for government work" originated in WWII and meant the work met rigorous standards. By the 1960s the expression had degenerated to the meaning I had always known -- not quite perfect. Wiki noted that the phrase was mainly used in the South.

This is not the first time that I've used expressions and get asked to explain what I'm saying. My, how the generations do change.

A cat story

The cat we didn't own died this week. I can't remember how Tonic sneaked his way into our affections four years ago. His owner joked that we were Tonic's god parents. We joked that we provided the cat with adult day care.

For his part, Tonic found a bit of cat-heaven on earth. We fed him expensive cat food, treats, shrimp, coho salmon and tuna. He slept on our slaps or snuggled beside us during the day. At night we let him outdoors. He went home to royal treatment from his owner who paid the vet bills and had the joy of cramming pills down a cat's throat.

When I hosted meetings of various groups in the living room, Tonic greeted each guest and persuaded at least one of them to invite him up onto the sofa. I usually didn't allow Tonic to sit on the living room furniture so he took advantage of the situation when he could.

Tonic never met a stranger. Another neighbor occasionally provided him with treets. And I heard a rumor that Tonic almost conned a cat sitter into thinking he was the cat that needed food and care.

We'll miss Tonic. He left a legacy of happy memories.

Housing shortage for Ghosts

Everyday you pass these modest forty- and fifty-year-old houses that blend in with their surrounding shrubbery and huge trees. A week later, there is a gaping swarth of land and you wonder what happened to the house and its landscaping. The only thing that's left is the asphalt or concrete driveway. The fabric of the manicured street now has a hole in it. In a few weeks, stacks of lumber and cement blocks line one side of the property. You know that a house twice the size of the old one will soon dwarf the remaining modest homes in the neighborhood.

It's a scene that is replayed too often in the city's modest neighborhoods. There may be a housing downturn in other parts of the country, but not here.

It's sad that no one apparently wants to take an older home and remodel it. I know a house is just mortar, brick and clapboard. But there is an ambiance to old homes that speaks to those of us who love history.

I remember going into a house, built in the 1850s, that had been remodeled into a shop on the ground floor with living quarters on the second floor. Pieces of history still lived in that house, including a ghost. The owner told me that two rooms on the second floor were always dust free and neat, no matter how messy the rooms had been left the previous evening.

Houses have to live long enough to collect ambiance or friendly spirits. And I still want to borrow that ghost.

word adventure

I am not a good speller but I thought the word I wanted to use was "embullient." It was not in my dictionary. So I googled "embullient" and came up with a couple of hits that made me suspicious. One post said "embullient clemency" could not be used as a Googlewhack.

A Googlewhack?

www.dictionary.com comfirmed that "embullient" was not a word and gave me a list of possible words. My word, of course, was "ebullient."

Next step -- finding out what a Googlewhack was.

It's game where two words (both must be listed at www.dictionary.com ) produce only one Google hit.


The game has been around for about five years. The home page is
http://www.googlewhack.com/ And there are thousands of word pairs listed.

I wish all misspelled words produced such a moment of fun.

memories

I am taking a class about writing creative non-fiction. All of my classmates are 55+, and all are struggling with fleshing out the whiffs of memory that are buried in their lives.

"How do you find the detail?" asks one woman who wanted to write about an event in her childhood.

"Look at old Life magazines," someone replies.

So is memory just an outline in our minds like the pictures in a coloring book? Do we supply the colors later as we massage the memory and flesh out how it probably happened?

For childhood memories, do we use the colors of our adult life?

I guess the answer to those questions is "yes" with a few qualifiers thrown in. We can't stay within the lines of our memories. We must branch out a little -- letting the reds and yellows of the details we provide bleed across the boundaries.

And that is where the fun begins.