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Hubbie here again.
Today’s lesson from Lewy is about spatial relationships. Special spatial relationships. First some background info. Pauline and I are both architects. We also have a grand sense of irony because we live in a double wide mobile home. We have made significant improvements but in the end it is still a certified, down home, white trash double wide.
This is fine with Lewy because he used to sell trailers for a living. When no customers were around the business was known as Wobbly Box Sales Incorporated. So Lewy knows trailers.This weekend Lewy and I were watching the Food Network. I was being educated. He was trying to understand exactly why Alton Brown wanted him to make crepes. Lewy didn’t grasp the purpose of the crepes but he did like the fact that there was jelly involved in the filling.
Suddenly Lewy decided he had to get up so I came over to help him out of his recliner. Now like most elderly people our Lewy has a decreased sense of smell and therefore feels less inclined to bathe than you or I might. After all, they are probably not going out. They don’t smell anything. And getting yourself in an out of the shower when you are in your eighties is no small task. In this case, well………………let us say that Lewy had not had that particular urge in a few days. And he smelled like…………..well, like old people smell.
Why is that? What evolutionary purpose does that smell serve? Is that why the Native Americans left those unable to travel beside the trail? Do you suppose that when they left the old folks there that they made sure to turn upwind when they moved on?
There is a concept called “intellectual osmosis”. It was, as far as I know, developed by the great Gord. He wrote of it in The Book of Annoyances (www.actsofgord.com). When one finds one’s self involved in a conversation with an idiot one must explain to them that “I subscribe to the theory of intellectual osmosis. As such I must now cease our conversation and move away from you before my intelligence begins to drop.”
I am beginning to fear that there exists olfactory osmosis. How many times am I allowed to grasp Lewy under his arm before I begin to smell like my Aunt Ida’s house? The aunt that lived alone and had not opened a window in three years. We have plenty of that antiseptic hand cleaner but that smell has a much longer evolutionary history than those cleansers. But I digress…………Lewy decided it was time to get up. I grasped the arm and, as he rose, asked where we were headed. Lewy said that he had to get up and …………………………………get up and …………………get up and……………go down stairs. This was going to be an interesting proposition.
I , of course, reminded him that since we lived in a trailer going down stairs would put us under the house and suggested that it would be quite cold down there. Lewy agreed and suggested we go down stairs. (We have similar conversations a lot around here.) I explained that we had only the one floor and asked where he wanted to go.“Downstairs.”
“But Lewy there is no downstairs. We live in a double wide.”Lewy points toward the door to the toilet. “That the bathroom?”
“Yeah. That’s your bathroom.”
“Then we can climb down the pipes.”